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| Job Class
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Mystic Knight
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| Weapon
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Dual-head hammer
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| Skill
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Rollback
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| Race
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Human-Esper Hybrid
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| Limit Break
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Omnibop
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| Date of Birth
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1988
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| Likes
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Trancers, Ponies, Assassins, Pokemon, Starcraft
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| Disikes
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Posers, Creative Theft, Trumpets
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Greetings, kiddies! I am DrakeyC. My real name is Adam, but this is the internet, so I use the alias Drake. Here, I'm an admin, walkthrough writer, vandal fighter and all-around editor of many things. I'm also an expert on FF6 and Dissidia, and know a fair bit about other main series games, some more than others.
I've also made a My Little Pony romhack of Final Fantasy VI, Filly Fantasy VI, which you can read about here. The trailer can be viewed here.
Random Crap
The Sandbox
The other Sandbox
TCG Ability Database
Final Fantasy VI-2
My Reviews
My Dissidia picks
My FF Quizzes
Random musings archived from userpage posts
My Wiki Trope profile
TV Tropes pages for Shards of Memory and Mother's Legacy.
FF7 Remake review (mostly spoiler-free)
Though let's be honest, most of you have long decided if you want this or not.
This is a very good, very promising start to the remake saga and got me super invested and interested in a Final Fantasy I was mostly apathetic about before, enjoyed it but wasn't a superfan of it. But this does have kinks to work out in gameplay, and ho boy are people polarized about the ending and not unfairly so.
Gameplay is very good, it's like Final Fantasy XV but if Tech attacks charged quicker, thus it isn't just button mashing but opening the menu to give special commands and cast spells. This isn't even "button mashing will get you killed" (though obviously it will), it's "button mashing is a very dull and ineffective way to fight because you're ignoring all the tactial options available." You can change between party members instantly in battle and will do so very often as your current leader is incapacitated in some way and you change to someone else to keep the flow of battle up and probably heal the former leader.
The four party members avert being clones very nicely, they all have specific roles in battle and fill them well, giving you a variety of ways to fight and strategize. Barret focuses on tanking damage and blasting enemies from range, Aerith focuses on supporting abilities and magic damage, Tifa focuses on building up stagger chains and damage bonuses, and Cloud focuses on raw damage output. That Aerith has been made into a magical long-range fighter via shooting magic orbs from her staff as her normal attack, means that you have a mix of ranged and melee options for enemies and there are times you want these. This makes for a game where all four playable characters are viable combatants, but some are better than others in different kinds of battle.
The flaws to the gameplay system boil down to one word - Interruption. Enemies will CONSTANTLY attack you and interrupt your execution of a command, losing you the command but you also still lose the ATB segment you expended to input a command. Considering all actions, including using items and casting spells, cost an ATB segment, this can easily result in a party member being killed when you try to use a heal on them and the character is stopped from doing so. In the late game, when there are very aggressive enemies who can fill the screen with interrupting attacks, this shortcoming became unbearable and potentially game-ending.
Even more frustrating is that enemies can just move out of range of attacks and your character will not track them, even if locked on, nor will they move closer if the enemy is out of range of the attack before using it. I constantly missed attacks because I underestimated how far they hit or the enemy just moved a bit to the side and my character didn't turn ten degrees before attacking. I even missed a LIMIT BREAK by this, during the fight with Rufus I inputed Cloud's Limit Break on his dog while his dog was in melee range, but as the charging animation played Rufus called the mutt back to his side and Cloud whiffed every single blow, swinging his sword at empty air like a madman as Rufus watched him from five feet away, probably laughing his ass off.
Another shortcoming, not as jeopardizing to gameplay but still annoying, is that an enemy's phase changes are scripted to occur at certain points, usually at certain HP thresholds. This means a lot of bosses, once you stagger them and start to wail on them, they'll phase change and their stagger will end, making the effort put into staggering them seem wasted. It also means that trying to down a boss in one barrage of mighty blows is often impossible because the fight just pauses to let them recover when they phase change. All of these errors are easily fixible, perhaps even by patch, and I hope they are in Part 2. Beyond them the gameplay really is fantastic, a lot of fun and a lot of depth to it and the action keeps going at a fast pace but not so fast you can't keep up.
The characters are where this game really shines. The cast of Final Fantasy VII has never been so alive. These aren't your flanderized, dull, Compilation-era cast. Cloud is NOT emo, he has personality and depth to him, and his new VA, while sounding like Steve Burton, just a far better job than Burton ever did and not just because of writing. Barret was always "I'm not just the Angry Black Man" and he keeps true to that, you definitely see not only his heart for his friends and family, but really buy his convictions about wanting to stop Shinra and save the planet. Tifa is finally more than a pair of chesticles pining for Cloud. I'll be honest, I never disliked Tifa but she was always bland to me, in this game she has a clearly defined personality, arc, and depth to her, that really make her much more endearing.
And then... my girl. Aerith. You were always the best character in the original game, but this remake has elevated you to my second-favorite of the series (sorry but Terra still takes the top), She is a sweet, charming, snarky, honest, level-headed, determined, and just all-around great. She is not the sweet virginial flower child of the Compilation, she is the girl who thought getting Cloud into a dress was a great idea and was not afraid to tell Sephiroth off to his face. And as in the OG, she isn't just some Manic Pixie Dream Girl, though she absolutely is. She has real weight on her shoulders, not just the Cetra stuff but new, spoiler things, making it clear she's a Stepford Smile who is actually quite frightened of things, but is determined to keep going and not back down anyway. I love you Aerith, you are the best part of this remake, every single scene with you is a gift and I am so happy they preserve your spirit as I remember you.
The supporting cast is good, it's the people you remember from FF7, just more. Jessie is a great expansion, highlight of the new content, everyone else is good, Shinra is enjoyably diaboloical and evil, Hojo is even creepier and more depraved than before (he recounts to Aerith how he dissected Ifalna's corpse down to the bone cells, and almost seems aroused as he remembers it), and President Shinra is a good corporate villain. The new SOLDIER Roche is fun, but oddly he doesn't appear after Chapter 4. With how his whole thing is motorcycles and the climactic highway escape still being here, you'd think he'd return there, but he doesn't.
The only low point of the characters... is Sephiroth. I have never liked him, he was always lame and pretentious, showing up to do nothing but spout cryptic babble and then flying off. Sadly, this is the same here. And, unfortunately, this Sephiroth DID retain his Compilation characterization, where his sole reason for being here is to fuck with Cloud. So, as much as Sephiroth appears in this remake, and he does appear often, most of his lines can be abstracted down to "you suck, Cloud. Man you suck so hard. Have I mentioned you suck? Cloud? Because you do, very much." It's a shame that with everyone else so rich and developed, Sephiroth is still so boring and one-note.
The old story elements are good, it's the story of FF7 as you remember but with some stuff expanded, some stuff tweaked, and some stuff going down in new ways. It's mostly better than the original in terms of how the story is expanded, like seeing Aerith interact with the people of Sector 5, or Tifa showing Cloud around Sector 7. It's just taking what was already there and giving you more of it. The only change to old story elements I take issue with is the collapse of Sector 7's plate. Not only do some people survive in the rubble, but Aerith and Wedge evacuate many people, including most of the named NPCs you met earlier, and the ending shows them starting to rebuild the sector even. I don't know why they felt the need to marginalize the impact of something that is meant to be a horrifying genocide. Maybe they felt it would be TOO dark if the sector and everyone in it was just obliterated? I don't think so but maybe they did.
The new story elements... well, without getting into spoilers, the ending set the internet on fire, as you've probably seen already. I remain optimistic for the future and did not mind the ending, but I don't fault people who did. This is not what they expected or signed up for, and it can take people by surprise when the ending hits and all our expectations are, to use a loaded word in an apt context, "subverted". I do have the feeling they're going somewhere with these new story elements, SE knows how much value FF7 holds for their fanbase and I feel assured they would not take the remake in this direction unless they had a plan they believed in, but we'll see. With Nomura and Toriyama at the helm, this could be an epic masterpiece, or an epic disaster.
Another critique of the game is that it is definitely padded. Everything is bigger including the world. In some ways this makes sense, areas that were two or three screens big in the original game can now have their scale properly represented, like the streets of Midgar's plate or the Mako Reactors which are like huge power plants and factories. And in those cases, it is fine. But other times making these areas so big harms the game. Like, the Sector 5 reactor mission, instead of a quick trip through the train tunnels, the train tunnels are now an entire dungeon, and then we have a dungeon of the sector underplate maintenence areas, before getting to the reactor itself, which of course is also a dungeon. And at times it harms the story to have such padding. The sewers under Don Corneo's mansion are a dungeon and so is the Train Graveyard, so the urgency of what's happening in Sector 7 fate is diluted because it will be several hours between hearing about it and it happening. The climax of the game basically pauses to make the party run around Hojo's labs fightng monsters for an hour, and it killed the tension of the events unfolding in the Shinra building.
Also, as you'd expect, the game is super linear. If you hated FF13's linearity, you probably won't care for this game's linearity either. It isn't as bad, but still pretty bad. The Midgar sequence was entirely linear and story-driven already, and this game makes token efforts to make it more freestyle but not really. A few chapters have sidequests to do, which are clearly marked and even listed in the menu so you can know if you've done them all. The game very often warns you of a point of no return, most areas that aren't in Sector 5 or Sector 6 cannot be revisited and even within them as you do them you cannot go back. It also means these large areas become even longer as you take the time to explore every nook and cranny for treasure because you'll probably never come back. I missed a couple chests in one of the last areas, and even knowing I'd missed them, I couldn't go back for them, in one case I was looking right at it and had to accept I couldn't reach it anymore. The sidequests they add feels like they were added out of necessity, that they recognized there was not enough side content and added some just to appease people who complained.
Finally, this game is simply not worth its current price tag. $80 bucks for the base version is more than most games these days, and it has much less content than them. When you finish the game you unlock more side content, namely some VR missions and Chapter Select to replay parts of the game, but those are post-game optional things and not a lot of it, comparable to the Kingdom Hearts-type Coloseum matches. The game IS great, it really is, but it isn't worth $80, when it goes on sale for $50 bucks later this year (and I'm sure it will for some reason), that'd be much more reasonable. It works as a stand-alone game as intended, but barely.
Overall, part one of FF7's remake is a very, very promising start to the saga, bogged down by gameplay hiccups and a couple minor flaws in story and characters. But it's nothing beyond saving, and if future parts can preserve this quality of gameplay and writing and even improve them, we could see FF7 actually grow into its own exaggerated reputation as the greatest Final Fantasy of them all. This game has made a believer out of me.
Userboxes
For characters, ranked in top three favorites, from left to right.
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This user lives in Canada.
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| Special:Editcount/DrakeyC | This user has one of the highest edit counts on the Wiki, growing larger by the day! |
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MMO
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This user has completed the main series except for XI and XIV.
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Completed
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This user is a soldier, not some love-starved twit.
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Does this user need a reason to hurt someone?
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Damn, and this user was hopin' for someone interestin', too.
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This user has the greatest attack ever!
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This user has defeated Shinryu in FFI, TAY, V, IX.
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This user has defeated Omega in FFI, TAY, V, VI, VIII, X, XII.
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This user has defeated Ultima Weapon in FFII, TAY, VI, VII, VIII, X.
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This user has defeated Ozma.
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XIII-2 | This user considers XIII-2 the worst game in the series. |
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Other Sites I'm On
- I'm on other Fanfic websites too, but this is the main one. I host several Final Fantasy fics, including my greatest and largest fic to date, the Dissidia fanfic "Shards of Memory" featuring Cloud and Terra. Seriously, read it, most people I know here at the wiki that read it have enjoyed it.
- I currently host all ten Dissidia storylines with English subtitles, and a bunch of the character preview vids and review trailers. I also remix movie trailers with Advent Children footage, and take requests for Dissidia replays.
- Pony fans, swing by and have a read of my work.
- I'm not an arrtist, mostly just do image macros and crummy Gimp edits. And have way more fictional ladies in my favorites gallery than is healthy.
Walkthroughs
Final Fantasy IV Walkthrough - My third walkthrough. Work on it stalled partway through, but I finished it inside a year still. Currently the only walkthrough to cover the Advance port of the game.
The After Years Walkthrough - Supremely bored one day, decided "why not" and here we go.
Final Fantasy V Job FAQ - Not willing to replay the game for a full-fledged walkthrough, especially when I've just finished it. But I wanted to do something to cover the Job System, so here it is.
Final Fantasy VI Walkthrough - my first walkthrough, I started it on September 23 2007, and began Part 36 on October 5th. Oh yeah, I powered right through that puppy. Then my data got erased before I could beat Omega Weapon or Soul Shrine, so it didn't get "officially" finished until April 3rd 2008. Hey, I had just spent 2 weeks playing through the game and lost all my data, I wasn't up to doing it again right yet! It has since been spruced up with templates, links, pictures and so forth.
Final Fantasy VII Walkthrough - My second walkthrough. FF7 better than I thought, though not quite as good as you've heard. That's what I have to say on VII. But that's not to say it doesn't kick ass - it does.
Crisis Core Walkthrough - Was bored. Felt like replaying the game and decided "hey, if I'm gonna replay it, might as well walkthrough it." And so I will.
Final Fantasy VIII Walkthrough - This was Squallinoa's walkthrough for FF8, which he left to me upon leaving the Wiki. I had originally planned to just restructure the strategy and leave his commentary intact, but couldn't do it. So basically I hallowed it out and made it my own. I admit I would have never walkthroughed the game if Squallinoa hadn't left me his, so thanks for motivating me guy!
Final Fantasy IX Walkthrough - Yay for boredom.
Final Fantasy X Walkthrough - Dunno why I picked this game out of all the others. Maybe its the joke potential which is too good to pass up. Powered through the main story in less than a week, sidequests took longer of course.
Final Fantasy XII License Board FAQ - I do love FF12, but I'm not up to covering its vast stores of optional content. However, I like the License Board system, and have a multi-page FAQ to teach even total novices how to get the most out of their LP.
Dissidia 012 Walkthrough - You have three guesses why I decided to do this, and the first two don't count.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest Walkthrough - I'm ashamed to admit owning this piece of shit, but did a walkthrough for it just for the sake of completing the MQ database here. I'm never touching this crap game ever again, and you shouldn't either. But if you do, feel free to swing by and check out my walkthrough.
