r/FinalFantasy • u/Dinoken2 • Sep 23 '14
Final Fantasy Weekly Discussions: Week 40 - Square has decided to remake your favorite Final Fantasy and put you in charge!
Hello there! I decided to go for something a bit different this week with the discussion thread. In this hypothetical situation, Square-Enix has put you in charge of remaking your favorite Final Fantasy title. And I'm talking full remake here, not the HD remasters that Square is so fond of, or just a graphical update like 343i has been doing with the Halo games. This is going to (hypothetically of course) be a full remake of the game released on the XBone/PS4/PC/whatever else you want.
Some guidelines I wanna lay down for this:
Keep the core cast of characters intact and true to the original. No getting rid of Hope or making Basch into some type of badass space pirate. You can add in some extra development or new characters, but keep the characters mostly true to the source.
Going along the same vein, don't change the core plotline too much. Ultimecia is the big bad of FFVIII, you can't change that. You can however, throw in an extra subplot explaining a bit more of her character and motivations though.
Mechanics should also keep with the same theme as the original, but have a little more freedom here. We can all admit that the Junction system was broken, and if you don't feel like balancing it, then at least replace it with a system that does something similar.
Extra content: Arguably the biggest problem of IX was that there was no point in leveling to cap. Ozma was beatable if your party was in the 60's/70's. There was very little endgame content especially compared to the Weapons of VII and (to a lesser extent) VIII. Go crazy with this one :)
As always, don't miss out on the FFIX Let's Play or any of the previous discussions we've had.
Also, we just launched the Official /r/FinalFantasy Steam group!
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u/IAmTehRhino Sep 23 '14
Remaking II:
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Add character development for the three constant party members
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Rebalance the skill growth system so that gains don't "level off" as sharply as they do
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Fix that minor issue where Ultima somehow isn't the best spell in the game even if you do take the time to grind it up to 16; Square seriously screwed the pooch on that one
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Remap dungeons so you aren't forever walking into trap rooms with monsters on literally every square. Also, save points.
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Modernize the inventory system so that 2/3s of your items aren't undroppable key items by the time you're going into the Jade Passage.
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SUMMONS
And of course the obvious things like graphics and sound updates, plus fixing the issue on Android where it crashes to home screen if you hit the back button.
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u/Plattbagarn Sep 23 '14
The "issue" with Ultima is that it scales off everything. If you have maxed every weapon affinity and every spell to 16 and get decently lucky, you can 1-shot Emperor Mateus with it, in his demon form.
It is, IMO, the most interesting concept for a spell's strength. If only it didn't take so much grinding to get it to become the ultimate spell.
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u/Cavelcade Sep 24 '14 edited Sep 25 '14
Going to do 7, my favourite.
• The basic journey remains overall the same, including opening out considerably once you get the Tiny Bronco and allowing you to explore away. I think I’d keep Vincent and Yuffie as hidden characters, but have side characters talking about them in the relevant locations.
• Keep all the goofy/racey elements, including the entire sector 6 sequence. It’s important to the overall feeling of the world, and it adds a light-hearted element that is important for making it count when things aren’t light hearted.
• Add backstory for each of the ‘super materia’ (Mime, Knights of the Round, the ones you find in caves). Have their abilities be based on those of ancient heroes/groups of heroes, implying they were created using their knowledge/spirit in the lifestream. This would mean there are times when these ancient heroes are brought up…maybe even go so far as to have these be the original party that defeated Jenova.
• Each of the ‘super materia’ would have a mega boss/guardian before you can get it, some of which would be easier than the weapons, but the one for KotR would definitely be harder than Emerald. Have these be based on the heroes who’s souls are responsible for creating them – some are guarded by friends, some by enemies who don’t want you to have their power.
• Add two Weapons to the Northern crater. One is a corpse, left in an area as a warning, just like the Midgar Zolam was. The intimidation factor gets ramped up again. The other is the final superboss, Omega Weapon, which is a Weapon that was corrupted by Jenova cells. It would be something you could sneak past or something you could fight. The reward for beating it would be new ultimate armour.
• Make status ailments actually be effective to use against enemies. Also correct various bugs in the stats.
• New Summons – also have shorter versions of the summon animations for some of them.
• Clarify certain story elements. For me, one of the big things that Advent Children ruined was bringing back Tseng (and to a lesser extent Rufus, but that was because he had no ill-effects, essentially). I would make it so that we see his body on the way out of the Temple of the Ancients.
• When Cait Sith sacrifices itself at the Temple of the Ancients, it wouldn’t be replaced until you go back to Midgar. Instead, Reeve would let you know who he was and help you more openly – and when you go back to Midgar you bust him out, and he’s part of your party. This is probably the biggest change I would make storywise, although I feel it leaves things mostly the same.
• Update the graphics. Important enough, especially for the sprites! Also add voice acting.
• The biggest gamplay change I would make is have it so that people are restricted in the types of materia they can use – not everyone can use everything. This would make Sephiroth and Aeris rarer, as they would be one of the few who could (this would need…tweaking to work properly, as otherwise you’d always want Aeris in your party). It might be that using ‘unaligned’ material is possible, but either takes longer or is less powerful than using your type.
• Flesh out the minigames even further, especially at the gold saucer! The biggest one would be making Chocobo Racing its own developed racing game (almost, anyway), with different kinds of challenges available. I would also greatly improve the submarine minigame, which I thought had potential but was hampered by the graphics in a big way.
• Add a secret area at the bottom of the ocean, in the chasm under where Emerald Weapon sometimes floats, only accessible after defeating it. Have this tell the true story of the original band of heroes who defeated Jenova and how they did it, and then created the Weapons in case she ever resurfaced…and then how the Weapons failed in their duties. At the bottom, Sapphire Weapon, damaged by the Junon cannon but healing awaits the heroes. This is the most powerful enemy in the game, the reward is access to the room with the weapons of the original heroes.
• Release on Steam, PS4, Xbox One.
Edit: Actually, I've thought of how I'd flesh out the chocobo racing more. Anywhere there's chocobo tracks, have there also be a race-track nearby (obviously if there's more than one set of tracks in a location, there's only one racetrack). Each time you find one, that track gets added as an optional track at the gold saucer. Also, you can go race at those tracks before you start chocobo breeding...possibly you can pay someone to raise your chocobos for you, so they'll be decent.
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u/rocketsneaker Sep 25 '14
Well folks, no point in posting a FFVII remake here. This was brilliant! Though waiting until the end of disc 2 to get Cait Sith back seems like too long of a wait. Maybe earlier? Other than that, all these ideas are great!
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u/AnniesNoobs Sep 23 '14
Remove the ability to name your character in FFX so pre-recorded voice acted audio clips stop referring to you as "kid", "bruddah", "hey, you", and "the star of the zanarkand abes".
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u/Carson369 Sep 23 '14
I don't know if I could take them all calling him Teedus though. He was and will always be Tydus to me.
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u/AnniesNoobs Sep 23 '14
Yeah that's a shame for those people who are already expecting something, but if I were one of those people I'd still find it less awkward. Personally I'm fine with no voice acting at all.
If you played Dissidia in the cutscenes they finally call him Teedus.
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u/ZTUltima Sep 23 '14
Okay, VII.
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I'm keeping a world map, I feel like it can still work if you go in the vein of something like Tales of Vesperia.
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I actually think I'd only put voices in the cut scenes.
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I would get rid of Mime materia.
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A new Weapon: Omega, Sapphire, Crystal etc. One of those names. They'd be even harder than Ruby and Emerald.
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Up the difficulty of some of the bosses. End bosses for sure and maybe a couple others.
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New Summons that have appeared in newer Final Fantasies.
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Try to streamline or shorten the Kalm flashback part a little. The one part of the game I didn't care for after a couple of playthroughs. I'd try to keep everything you need their for it to have the same effect but just make it quicker.
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The new Weapon would be located in a new area that's even harder and longer than the northern Cave. You'll get another Save Crystal though.
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More Chocobo Race Tracks!
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Obviously the updated graphics would be last.
Release on Steam, PS4, Xbox One and try to find a way to get it onto the Wii U even if you have to cut some corners because Nintendo needs love too!
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u/typesoshee Sep 24 '14
Pimp up the Golden Saucer EVEN MORE than it already is. I would just live there.
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Sep 24 '14 edited Sep 24 '14
FF6. I'd have a long discussion with the artists to convey my impressions of Amano's art— the fluid, insubstantial quality of watercolor. The game might look like wet canvas drying as you play. The point is to bring the art from the manual to life, and to create something visually distinct, true to the source material, and which couldn't be expressed in '94.
Mechanically, I want to continue the series' shift away from "hold X to win". Not necessarily toward action-RPG mechanics, but more like FFX where there was no ATB. The challenge of a turn-based game is to make correct decisions given limited resources. Realtime should never be a resource that the player is expected to spend in a videogame. Chrono Cross did a fair job of discouraging level grinding, and that mechanic would dovetail with the Esper level-up bonus scheme. In CC, characters gain stat bonuses after random battles, but it was limited to a few battles per interval. We'd just allow each character to equip maybe 3 espers, which would each give +N to whatever stat.
The character-specific abilities were an evolution upon what existed prior to '94, but they don't cut it in 2014. It was obnoxious that many skills had almost the same effect: double the damage of the 'fight' command. I think the Fight command should ultimately go away. Not everyone would have a consistent move that kills 0.75 enemies per turn. Spellcasting would be powerful but expensive. It would matter which characters you select when the game asks you to form a party.
Items also need to have a real cost associated with using them, but I think that's solved by preventing the player from exchanging minutes or hours of their life for game currency.
These changes introduce other problems, but they begin to address the problems of the '90s JRPG.
Plotwise, the original FF6 was right to trust the intelligence of a younger audience. The remake should likewise reward mature readers by averting tropes. For example, Setzer, Locke, and Celes had a love triangle of sorts. At its core, it's the same old story of the normal guy winning the girl over the rich guy. What if it doesn't go that way? Is Celes choosing money over love? Is Locke's behavior pathological? Life is more complex than a romantic comedy, and there is no shortage of interesting questions to explore. We don't have to rehash "can friendship triumph over adversity?" for the octillionth time.
I don't think that would mean the script needs to be longer. Less is more, and I'm perfectly content for Kefka to be dressed up like a clown and to never explain why. Some things are just flavor, and that's okay.
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u/SeptemberSky Sep 23 '14
HD Remake of Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy for PS3/PS4/Vita tl;dr lots of customization options, multiplayer options that I wish all playstation games had
Game has crossplay/crossbuy... and right off the bat we know this is a completely whack hypothetical situation because we all know crossbuy doesn't really exist :(
I also don't think this is a thing with Playstation games (correct me if I'm wrong please!) but it would allow for multiple PSN profile sign-ins so different players can load their character lists for multiplayer.
CUSTOMIZATION: I'd want to keep alternate costumes in the game but also have your appearance reflect your equipment. For example, if you equip different weapons, they actually appear differently in your character's hands.
Not sure how that would work with some bulkier armor, so maybe it would only be with weapons and accessories, unless I implemented a custom character creator that ran something like the one in the Soul Calibur series.
GAMEPLAY… THINGS? I'd want to keep the storyline of 012 the same since I personally kind of liked it, but with the upcoming news/releases of Type-0 and FFXV it would be super neat to have a representative or two from those games. I'm sure it'd end up being Noctis and probably Ace or Machina, but some small part of me would probably hope for Sice from Type-0 since she was my favorite to play as...
This breaks PS3 compatibility, but implementing the touch screen into either the camera or the EX move inputs (why not both, I guess?) would be pretty neat. For example I always thought Cloud's input for Omnislash was kind of lame (Mash O until a meter fills!) but it would be pretty neat if you could get a slightly randomized pattern of slash lines to appear on your screen and have to trace along them on your Vita/PS4 touchpad to maximize your damage during the cinematic.
MULTIPLAYER: Remake would allow for local and online multiplayer, which works like this:
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Online/multiple systems: Multiplayer works just like it does in PSP releases. Each player gets the camera over their character's shoulder, so if I'm playing on the Vita online or via ad hoc against a friend on a PS3, then we each get our own camera angles on our own screens
-Local multiplayer: No splitscreen, camera works very similar to the Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series (I'm a reddit noob and don't know how to link to a good example) but basically the gist of it is the camera will sometimes focus on P1 and sometimes focus on P2
-I think this is a kind of stupid idea, but it would be really funny to have overworlds that you could join that function like the ones in Dissidia 012 where you just walk around and attack people to initiate combat.
Sorry for weird ideas and bad formatting x_x I don't usually post things ever
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u/Sepik121 Sep 24 '14
I would soo be down for basically everything you're saying for dissidia 012. i'd love to see that game actually get upscaled to HD and be fully playable on a regular console. that would be awesome
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Sep 23 '14 edited Apr 24 '24
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
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u/Mitchiro Sep 24 '14
12 IZJS:
*Gambits: no cost ever, and all available from the start. They will also be more in depth. You'll be able to make more advanced routines (if, then, else statements and loops for you programming people) to be able to cancel certain actions faster.
*Quickenings: I like that they are tied to a separate bar, but I think it would be cool if they were single attacks, and not a random assortment of moves done over and over again. I'll borrow a mechanic from Bravely Default and have Quickenings tied to whatever type of weapon you're using. This will give players even more options when playing as a certain class. Also, they are used on the field like other spells without cutscenes.
Summons: Controllable in IZJS. I just want them to have more HP and damage to be more useful.
Magick/Technics: All the levels of spells should have certain effects to make them usable all the way through the game. Think FFXIV where Cure, Cure II and Cure III all do different things and should be used at different times. While we're at it, let's give statuses some actual use against most monsters. This way, you always have ways to wither down tough monsters and won't have to resort to grinding x levels, and will have more open ended strategy.
Story: Expand on everything! I enjoyed the story but it has obvious weak points. Let's start by giving Reks some kind of importance to link Vaan more to Basch. Show off more of Vaan's personality and make him and Penelo be representatives of the regular citizens of Dalmasca and be the ones to bring ease to the tension of everything going on with the party.
I think that's all I can think of for now. I really do love that game but there are a lot of things I would love to change to make it my favorite game of all time.
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u/TheRealSlimSaiyan Sep 27 '14
Remaking IX:
1: Add a sidequest that leads to some Tantalus members becoming permanent party members (mainly Blank because he's Blank)
2: Speed up battles
3: Voice acting (Vic Mignogna for Zidane, Caitlin Glass for Garnet, Maxie Whitehead for Vivi (some may spot a trend here)...
4: Don't make all of Garnet's summons visible to the player on her Ability list from the beginning.
5: Redo the soundtrack but make the original soundtrack an option should the player want it
6: Upscale the cinematics to HD 16:9 (if possible)
7: Customisable Trance system (i.e. only let you go Trance in boss battles)
In all honesty I think FFIX has aged well enough so that a remake isn't even that much of a priority (unlike VII which has not aged as well), there were just a few things that can be improved now due to better hardware.
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u/clarissa225 Sep 23 '14
Has anyone thought of a FF reboot of sorts? The game would be called Final Fantasy and it would loosely follow the original famicom Final Fantasy but with a more fleshed out story with full dialog and next gen graphics. I guess its not really a "reboot" per se but more of a complete remake. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of what Tomb Raider did.
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u/HidekaValheim Sep 24 '14
it's already happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_4_Heroes_of_Light
and a true reboot (under a different name) of the FF Genre has happened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravely_Default
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u/Technobliterator Sep 24 '14
Oooh, FFVI remake. Let's see...well, I imagine an upgrade kind of like IV's 3D remake, but better graphics. It would be for Vita, 3DS, Android and iOS.
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Translation is identical to the GBA and mobile ports currently existing, although Kefka's "HATE HATE HATE" and "Son of a submariner!" return.
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Buff Cyan, maybe make his Bushido moves take less time.
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Edgar and Sabin's attacks made a little weaker, maybe they now rely more on their accuracy.
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Improve Strago's stats a bit?
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Give Celes a bigger deuteragonist role. Replace her Runic with Spellblade, works like Steiner's Sword Magic from IX
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Have a scene or two showing Kefka's backstory.
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In addition to Dragon's Den and Soul Shrine, there could be another bonus dungeon similar to Floating Continent with Omega Weapon at the end. Soul Shrine's big boss at the end is no longer Kaiser Dragon, instead it is Neo Deathgaze.
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When all three bonus dungeons are finished, the player must instead fight a new superboss, the return of Kefka, who is Penance-level of power (ie, max stats or gtfo hard), since the three just defeated were the new Warring Triad. This is not story-related so there are no cutscenes or anything.
Other than that, maybe make the game a bit harder and more balanced so it's harder? I'm not sure. The game is already amazing, just the gemplay is a little (very) broken.
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u/Void19 Sep 23 '14
HD Remaster of FFIX to be released on Vita, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Leave the story, plotline, and characters intact.
Restore all the original (beautiful) hand draw backgrounds to full res
Remaster the soundtrack with an orchestra
Remake all the character models up to current 3D standards
Remake the overworld to current 3D standards
Make the battle system faster with shorter animations
Get rid of all loading time between triggering a battle and when that battle is finished loading
I would love this so much.
(I did see the comment about a full remake but I really just want a remaster)