Final Fantasy VII REMAKE Catch All

Dumb question. Have the PS4 disc of FF7 remake. I got the PS5 version installed. It's telling me I have to buy the DLC. Is that true? I thought it was included.

When should someone play the DLC? After you beat the main game?

The DLC is not included in the free upgrade to the PS5 version, so you will need to buy it. It's only included if you buy the full native PS5 version.

The DLC is totally separate from the main game. If you know the original FF7 story, any time is fine. If you don’t, it’s still probably fine, but I think it makes most sense to play after the halfway point of the remake.

I hear if you buy the DLC then Aerith doesn't die, so the late-90s GameFAQs fan theories are finally right! You can save her!

(I'm assuming a 25 year old spoiler for a PS1 game is ok to post - I've not read the whole thread. Also, there's no guarantee it'll happen in this game since, well, END OF GAME SPOILERS FOR FF7R.)

Thanks all!

After what must be a year since I last played the PS5 upgrade has brought me back to FF7R. The battle system is made even better by the 60fps mode, that's the one thing I've really missed about the game.

I was playing the train graveyard section late the other night, the music was so was relaxing it was literally acting like a lullaby & I felt my head dropping consistently as I fought off sleep.

I'm on chapter 11 & have got to the part

Spoiler:

where Shinra are about to bring the plate down on sector 7, Wedge is hurt & Biggs is up fighting along with Barrett against the soldiers & helicopter.

The dialogue still grates, Aerith & Tifa might as well be the same person at times but the main story is still good. Going to the reimagined classic locations is also another driving force to push on.

I'm still not sure about these paranormal black entities but I still don't know what their origin is or ultimately what goal they have.

Glad I'm back into this, I'm around the 24 hour mark now, it'll be nice to finish this & possibly get onto the Yuffie DLC.

Is there 20 odd chapters? How long did it take most of you to finish it?

I finished this a week ago. My final time was a bit over 30 hours, but I was playing on Easy. There are 18 chapters. Past chapter 11, there is one more chapter which has side quests, but the rest are very straightforward.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game, even though I have little memory or nostalgia for the original.

Thanks for the info Aristophan!

I've just passed the Sekiro challenge in FF7R, beating Jules at Pull Ups for the championship belt!

My goodness you need to process the face button combinations at lightning fast speed to beat him, my motor skills have just improved a massive amount after repeating that challenge for near 30 mins. I feel I could be a Just Dance world champion

I genuinely didn't think I would manage to finish that challenge. Not okay! Persistence and a random lucky streak won the day though.

Running up 59 floors of Shinra Tower must be the most coma inducing section ever put in a videogame. I thought for sure there would have been enemies on some of the floors, nope. The fact that they slow you down the further up you get makes this drag on forever. Barrett's quips didn't help either.

It's late at night & I was already tired but this section made me nod off, waking up multiple times with Cloud running into the stair railing

I saved it the game entering the door of the 59th floor, I think I need my bed.

Spikeout wrote:

Running up 59 floors of Shinra Tower must be the most coma inducing section ever put in a videogame. I thought for sure there would have been enemies on some of the floors, nope. The fact that they slow you down the further up you get makes this drag on forever. Barrett's quips didn't help either.

It's late at night & I was already tired but this section made me nod off, waking up multiple times with Cloud running into the stair railing

I saved it the game entering the door of the 59th floor, I think I need my bed.

Ha! I loved that part and thought the dialog was hilarious. I think they were just kinda poking fun at completionists and people who want to explore every nook and cranny.

That's also something you can do in the original, I love that they included it.

Well I forced myself to power through after stalling at the Shinra building. I am happy to actually have something finished but boy that ending sucked. Suddenly there are tons of nameless "whispers" that you find for reasons that make no sense. They throw in a motorcycle chase and fight scene that was just piss poor. I spend a game developing battle skills, materia, strategies to just smack attack a lot.

And generally the ending seems like a master class in how to destroy flow. You are running, fighting, to be forced to walk slowly for no reason over and over again. You constantly are hit with jumping sections where you have to walk a certain path and hop around automatically. So while the whole word is crashing around you it just kind of dinks along.

Then you are fighting tough bosses who you have never seen before so they have no story connection (Rufus for example) and see Zack for no reason in a flashback but no context so you don't know why he matters.

It quite honestly was just a mess.

You are running, fighting, to be forced to walk slowly for no reason over and over again.

So it's a modern award winning AAA video game treated as the best this medium has to offer and destined to sell millions.

farley3k wrote:

Well I forced myself to power through after stalling at the Shinra building. I am happy to actually have something finished but boy that ending sucked. Suddenly there are tons of nameless "whispers" that you find for reasons that make no sense. They throw in a motorcycle chase and fight scene that was just piss poor. I spend a game developing battle skills, materia, strategies to just smack attack a lot.

And generally the ending seems like a master class in how to destroy flow. You are running, fighting, to be forced to walk slowly for no reason over and over again. You constantly are hit with jumping sections where you have to walk a certain path and hop around automatically. So while the whole word is crashing around you it just kind of dinks along.

Then you are fighting tough bosses who you have never seen before so they have no story connection (Rufus for example) and see Zack for no reason in a flashback but no context so you don't know why he matters.

It quite honestly was just a mess.

You seem to be firmly in the camp of "altering the timeline of the game is dumb."

I can see that, but to me, it opens up a lot of good possibilities. Was the last Chapter a whiplash of information that you were not expecting? Sure. But I liked it since the Whispers are figuratively the game trying to keep the story on the same path as the original 1997 game.

It's the game developers' critique of fanboys complaining about if anything changes from what their picturesque nostalgic childhood memories tells them a remake should be, which I love.

Can Square mess up Part 2? Oh, 100%. I almost expect them too -- mainly because I liked FF7R so much more than I thought I would. However, hinting that Zach is alive in one of the timelines means that you now have no idea what the next part of the story will be. Will Aeris die? Who knows!

Will Cloud still break down into a puddle of existential crisis? Maybe not!

It's far from a perfect game, though.

It's the game developers' critique of fanboys complaining about if anything changes from what their picturesque nostalgic childhood memories tells them a remake should be, which I love.

That's the common reading. I also read the whole game as "Everyone keeps demanding this stupid remake, we just want to make something new, so screw it, we're making something new anyway." The irony about your reading is that stuff like the Wall Market dance is total pandering to fans, though maybe a different sort of fan. There's a ton of fan pandering in this remake, so to say the whispers are a critique of fanboys is to only have part of the picture.

Then again, as much as I enjoyed the game, it really is a total mess, as you note. Though perhaps for different reasons. After all, it's for all the changes and dumb misunderstandings of their own characters that I never wanted a remake, just a fresh new translation of the older game. I'd say part of Farley's big issue just comes down to:

I spend a game developing battle skills, materia, strategies to just smack attack a lot.

If that's how you're playing then no wonder you're having a bad time. If you're not swapping between characters or making the most of Tifa's abilities to crank up damage bonuses, then you're not actually using the battle system as it is designed and thrashing about with the bare minimum of the mechanics available. But, perhaps that's due to Square Enix's desperate attempts to mix action game with traditional turn-based RPG, which dates all the way back to Kingdom Hearts.

Also, to ccesarano's point, if all you did was Attack, then I don't know how you got through the game. It is not easy (especially the boss battles), and with magic being super powerful I honestly don't know how I would have survived without juggling combos and special moves.

Maybe I'm just bad at games, which would not be the first time I've thought as much.

This also reminds me that I want to replay the game on Hard with the PS5 patch.

ccesarano wrote:
I spend a game developing battle skills, materia, strategies to just smack attack a lot.

If that's how you're playing then no wonder you're having a bad time. If you're not swapping between characters or making the most of Tifa's abilities to crank up damage bonuses, then you're not actually using the battle system as it is designed and thrashing about with the bare minimum of the mechanics available. But, perhaps that's due to Square Enix's desperate attempts to mix action game with traditional turn-based RPG, which dates all the way back to Kingdom Hearts.

The previous sentence was needed - "They throw in a motorcycle chase and fight scene that was just piss poor. " That section there is no swapping, no use of materia, nothing. If it would have been quick and relatively easy it would have been a somewhat fun mini game but instead it was hard, long, and broke the flow of the rest of the game horribly.

Vrikk wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Well I forced myself to power through after stalling at the Shinra building. I am happy to actually have something finished but boy that ending sucked. Suddenly there are tons of nameless "whispers" that you find for reasons that make no sense. They throw in a motorcycle chase and fight scene that was just piss poor. I spend a game developing battle skills, materia, strategies to just smack attack a lot.

And generally the ending seems like a master class in how to destroy flow. You are running, fighting, to be forced to walk slowly for no reason over and over again. You constantly are hit with jumping sections where you have to walk a certain path and hop around automatically. So while the whole word is crashing around you it just kind of dinks along.

Then you are fighting tough bosses who you have never seen before so they have no story connection (Rufus for example) and see Zack for no reason in a flashback but no context so you don't know why he matters.

It quite honestly was just a mess.

You seem to be firmly in the camp of "altering the timeline of the game is dumb."

I can see that, but to me, it opens up a lot of good possibilities. Was the last Chapter a whiplash of information that you were not expecting? Sure. But I liked it since the Whispers are figuratively the game trying to keep the story on the same path as the original 1997 game.

I am not. I am find with altering the timeline, changing things up, etc. What annoys me is the peak of the game's fights being against creatures you have never met (or at least very little), have no story with, etc.

For me the end of a game - even a multiple part game - should be a battle with the enemy you have fought or be trying to beat up to then. If it is a "part one" then you might show the the real enemy, etc. but at least you should feel like you accomplished something.

FF7 sprang several nameless, faceless, personalty-less blobs for you to chuck spells and attacks at. Even the battle against Rufus was uninspiring because I had no connection to him, no reason I wanted to fight him - and most importantly no way that I was better by the end game so I could defeat him.

So it really wasn't altering the story, it was the hamfisted way the story was told.

farley3k wrote:

For me the end of a game - even a multiple part game - should be a battle with the enemy you have fought or be trying to beat up to then. If it is a "part one" then you might show the the real enemy, etc. but at least you should feel like you accomplished something.

As for endbosses, isnt that most FF games ever. You fight the story boss and then some weird “real” world destroyer boss shows up out of nowhere.

I mean, in the case of FF7 Remake there's a mixture of reasons for it, in part being that's when the character showed up in the original story, which turns out to just be the brief opening of the game. Of course you don't get much characterization of the guy, though perhaps instead of having MOAR SEPHIROTH everywhere because that's what fans are here for they could have littered Rufus throughout a bit more. For all of this game's padding of the narrative, you'd think maybe that could have been something they developed, right? In the original game I believe he was outside of Midgar at the time, but perhaps here you could have had him sit on some meetings or appear on monitors or something, developing who he is as a character. Even in the original, there was little more than "I WILL RULE WITH FEAR" and slicking his hair back like a proper anime hottie man type.

But really, a lot of this is what happens when you remove Sakaguchi and Kitase from the primary creative pool and give it all over to Nomura and Kazushige Nojima (who, yes, were involved, but weren't in full control, or had less authoritative control as they now have).

We're talking about the kind of men, now in their fifties, that I have zero doubts thought this was actually legit cool and not hilariously dumb.

That's the level of creativity we're dealing with here.

LTTP cos of the PC release, but MAN, this game is waaaay better than it has any right to be. I'm awed how much of a reinvention it is while stillbeing very very true to the original.

I was expecting a bit of a nostalgia hit, but this is gonna be on next year's GOTY list, fo sho.

The only three downsides are that the melodrama is still a bit strong, and the thrist-trappiness of Tifa's character design.

I loved it as well but they really, really, drug it out to make it longer.

You'll be able to thirst over Cloud soon enough

beanman101283 wrote:

You'll be able to thirst over Cloud soon enough

Already done that bit. It was great!

He was fine but the level or realism just made me wonder why he saved his pits.

Look at how Cloud is built. He was absolutely on the Nibelheim High swim team.

He was more of a rock climber.

I bought the Yuffie DLC back when it came out but dropped off after a few hours because it felt super repetitive and the environments were bland.

Do you ever get out of warehouse box hell?

Finished the main game last night. I meant to play it last year after I replayed the original but for some reason didn’t.

Anyway, I liked it a lot. I didn’t mind the linearity, almost feels kind of appropriate for the Midgar part of this story, but some of the backtracking and reuse of environments was a little disappointing. And as said elsewhere often, the side quests were kind of embarrassingly basic for a developer focused on RPGs.

After I got used to it, I liked the combat system more than I thought I would. The way each character was adapted and given certain abilities was fun. For the most part, I enjoyed the expansion of the story and getting more time with side characters like Jessie, Biggs and Wedge. And I think I felt the camaraderie and “team coming together” even more than I did in the original.

If they’d just made a straight adaptation, I’d have been okay with that, but I think I’m more excited for future games because they are playing around with the story.

Started the Yuffie DLC. The story isn’t anything special so far but I do like playing as Yuffie a lot. Her combo of long and short range attacks with the ninja abilities might be my favorite setup so far.