Some quotes:
“When we look at the specs for the Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam Deck,” Hamaguchi said. “It’s really getting comparable to the PS5 and Xbox consoles,” they explained. “We do want to keep a focus on the consoles as well, but we also want to keep the handheld devices and their audiences in mind.”
…
“Nowadays there are many different ways to play available for us. For example, the Steam Deck, that many players use now,” he said. “We have more freedom now. Currently, even high-definition games aren’t played at home. Considering the diversity of ways one can play a game, we believe it’s important to think about it and to adapt to these new modes of play.”
Atmostphere and “looks” wise. It does a great job of evoking the original, sure.
And it’s far from a FF7 remake issue alone. FF12 kind of flirted with it, but starting basically at Crisis Core, combat went from something strategic to simply “mash a button until your ATB meter fills up and then perform a quick combo (usually the same one every time because you don’t have time to think about it so you rely mostly on muscle memory)”. There’s no thought involved in the combat. There’s no “what is going to work best against which enemy”. You might as well be playing Street Fighter.
When I go up against a tough enemy in the original, I don’t immediately start slashing. I’ll have one person immediately focused on casting barrier on everyone. The second person will throw out a summon. And one person will have transform/mini set up with the added-affect materia and will do a basic attack. If I’m lucky, that enemy will turn into a frog or immediately shrink, making the combat that much easier.
There is no thought process like that in new final fantasy. It’s just slash, slash, slash, combo. slash, slash, slash, item. over and over and over again until either the enemy is dead or you are.
I get it. That’s what modern audiences want. And I know I fall squarely into the “old man yells at Cloud” demographic (ba-dum-tiss). But I had at least hoped that the remake would try to retain the old mechanics rather than just copy-pasting the button mashing of the new games.
I will say this though… Until the remake, it never even occured to me that Jessie was a girl.
You can beat 90% of the fights in all of the final fantasy turn based games just by mashing x.
Like. In emulators if you speed the game up and just set the attack button to rapid fire on one key you can get through almost everything. Including a lot of bosses.
The remake is far more action oriented I agree. But I don’t think any of the games have been particularly strategic excepting a few specific boss fights that require specific things to be done.
I miss turn-based battles, too. I can‘t see shit in this flashy mess.
i think that’s more of a case of that’s where gamers are these days;