audioqueso
Newbie
So I just played the demo for about 30 minutes and DIED!
(FYI, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete blu-ray was released this past Thursday, April 16th, in Japan along with it is the FF13 demo.)
First Impression:
So far the game seems pretty good. Video scenes are gorgeous! It's looks like a movie. Tons of eye candy. Once the game starts, it's impressive to see just how good the characters looks.... not much difference from the videos.
First you play as Lightning, then as Snow (I died while playing as Snow cause I didn't pay attention to my health).
Characters:
I don't like Lightning. They made her like this bad ass Ultraviolet/Aeon Flux/Resident Evil type chick. She has some really cool movies though. The coolest thing is that she has this like anti-gravity suit, so if she needs to jump 50 feet up, she snaps her fingers, triggers the suit, and she can propel herself in that direction. It looks bad ass.
I don't like her weapon. It's like Squall's gunblade, but can transform (kinda like Cloud's swords in Advent Children)
I like Snow's character. He's like Zell from FF8 but with more balls. Cocky SOB. :B
He has some pretty cool moves too.
The enemies you fight also look really cool. Pretty much identical to what you see in the trailers.
Battle System:
The fighting system is really cool, catchy, and a PITA at the same time.
It's two stages. You press Fight, and as soon as you do that, the time gauges automatically start to fill up. There's 3 gauges. While that is happening, you can choose different types of attacks. You can press attack+attack+attack, or vertical attack+attack+attack (which creates a cool special move), or a combination of magic and physical attacks. Different combos create different things. Or some combos are just what they are, i.e., attack+fire+attack just cause a punch, a fire magic, and another punch. You then press the COMMAND button to execute. It's actually very easy. You also don't have to wait for all 3. You can choose 2 bars to fill up and use two attacks. This comes in handy with some enemies that are too weak that only require 2 hits to kill. So as soon as you press "Fight", the gauges start to fill up, you use two bars on one enemy, and by the time that's done, you have 1 bar left to use on another opponent. Pretty cool.
However, here is the part that's a pain in the ass. Healing. Say I want to heal all my characters. I can't wait for the gauge to fill up all 3 bars and then press heal once for each character, and execute it. I have to heal, fill up one bar for one character, execute, then cancel back, select the target as another character, select heal, and then execute. I would do the same for the 3rd character. Kinda annoying. There may be an easier way, but I haven't figured it out yet.
The battle system is more real-time than typical RPGs in that you have to keep fighting. If you don't, the enemy will just kill you.
Music:
I don't really like it. It's a bit like FFX-2.
Audio Processing.
This part is actually quite impressive. I played this game on my HT setup. I didn't expect this much involvement in surround processing from a Final Fantasy game. While you are running, you can hear your following character(s) footsteps follow you. As the camera pans and your angle changes, so does the speaker where the audio is coming from. During battles, if some character that is on your left fires his gun, it comes from your left speaker. If the enemy swings his arm and knocks him to the other side of the room, you hear him swoosh across the screen. Now the guy is on your rear back side. While he fires his gun, you hear bullets originating from the right rear speaker. As the camera turns angles, so does the origin points of the audio.
Voice-over Acting:
Acting is not bad at all! I actually liked it alot. Better than FFX and FFX-2 to me, but it's not a fair comparison because I played FFX and FFX-2 in English. This demo is in Japanese.
Enemy Encounters:
There are no random encounters yet. You can see your opponent ahead, you run up to them, they see you, and then the screen flashes into a fighting scene. Before the fight, when you first run up to a character, you can press X (O in my case, even though it's a US PS3), and your character swings at the enemy. It doesn't hurt the enemy because you are not in a fighting scene yet. However, I THINK doing this is actually give you the first start once the fight starts. It seems that way. I will need to test this more.
So far I like it. I'll post my final impressions once I beat the demo.
Please feel free to ask any questions.
(FYI, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete blu-ray was released this past Thursday, April 16th, in Japan along with it is the FF13 demo.)
First Impression:
So far the game seems pretty good. Video scenes are gorgeous! It's looks like a movie. Tons of eye candy. Once the game starts, it's impressive to see just how good the characters looks.... not much difference from the videos.
First you play as Lightning, then as Snow (I died while playing as Snow cause I didn't pay attention to my health).
Characters:
I don't like Lightning. They made her like this bad ass Ultraviolet/Aeon Flux/Resident Evil type chick. She has some really cool movies though. The coolest thing is that she has this like anti-gravity suit, so if she needs to jump 50 feet up, she snaps her fingers, triggers the suit, and she can propel herself in that direction. It looks bad ass.
I don't like her weapon. It's like Squall's gunblade, but can transform (kinda like Cloud's swords in Advent Children)
I like Snow's character. He's like Zell from FF8 but with more balls. Cocky SOB. :B
He has some pretty cool moves too.
The enemies you fight also look really cool. Pretty much identical to what you see in the trailers.
Battle System:
The fighting system is really cool, catchy, and a PITA at the same time.
It's two stages. You press Fight, and as soon as you do that, the time gauges automatically start to fill up. There's 3 gauges. While that is happening, you can choose different types of attacks. You can press attack+attack+attack, or vertical attack+attack+attack (which creates a cool special move), or a combination of magic and physical attacks. Different combos create different things. Or some combos are just what they are, i.e., attack+fire+attack just cause a punch, a fire magic, and another punch. You then press the COMMAND button to execute. It's actually very easy. You also don't have to wait for all 3. You can choose 2 bars to fill up and use two attacks. This comes in handy with some enemies that are too weak that only require 2 hits to kill. So as soon as you press "Fight", the gauges start to fill up, you use two bars on one enemy, and by the time that's done, you have 1 bar left to use on another opponent. Pretty cool.
However, here is the part that's a pain in the ass. Healing. Say I want to heal all my characters. I can't wait for the gauge to fill up all 3 bars and then press heal once for each character, and execute it. I have to heal, fill up one bar for one character, execute, then cancel back, select the target as another character, select heal, and then execute. I would do the same for the 3rd character. Kinda annoying. There may be an easier way, but I haven't figured it out yet.
The battle system is more real-time than typical RPGs in that you have to keep fighting. If you don't, the enemy will just kill you.
Music:
I don't really like it. It's a bit like FFX-2.
Audio Processing.
This part is actually quite impressive. I played this game on my HT setup. I didn't expect this much involvement in surround processing from a Final Fantasy game. While you are running, you can hear your following character(s) footsteps follow you. As the camera pans and your angle changes, so does the speaker where the audio is coming from. During battles, if some character that is on your left fires his gun, it comes from your left speaker. If the enemy swings his arm and knocks him to the other side of the room, you hear him swoosh across the screen. Now the guy is on your rear back side. While he fires his gun, you hear bullets originating from the right rear speaker. As the camera turns angles, so does the origin points of the audio.
Voice-over Acting:
Acting is not bad at all! I actually liked it alot. Better than FFX and FFX-2 to me, but it's not a fair comparison because I played FFX and FFX-2 in English. This demo is in Japanese.
Enemy Encounters:
There are no random encounters yet. You can see your opponent ahead, you run up to them, they see you, and then the screen flashes into a fighting scene. Before the fight, when you first run up to a character, you can press X (O in my case, even though it's a US PS3), and your character swings at the enemy. It doesn't hurt the enemy because you are not in a fighting scene yet. However, I THINK doing this is actually give you the first start once the fight starts. It seems that way. I will need to test this more.
So far I like it. I'll post my final impressions once I beat the demo.
Please feel free to ask any questions.
