zephie's game journals
i have to kill Chaos i have to do it i want it so bad. when it first leaked that Team Ninja were making a "Final Fantasy 1 soulslike" i was very excited, then the trailer dropped and it was very funny and that made me more excited. i haven't played Nioh but i've played FF1 and Souls games so i should have no trouble killing him (Chaos (who i have to kill))
as i recall a large part of why it looked so goofy was the character designs, yet i pretty much immediately get to change out of Jack Notfromthisworld's Starter Pyjamas and it doesn't look so goofy anymore, so that was just weird marketing i guess. i know very little about how/if this game's story differs from FF1, so staring at Jack using his phone and playing rap music, and remembering Square clarifying that this game is not an isekai has me extremely curious
i mean usually that would be something i get to play through myself but that's fine. i had a lot of trouble getting this game to run and i'd heard there were a lot of problems with it on Linux so i actually started to worry it was just skipping the game parts of the game
the bonfires in this game are called Cubes, and they are a bunch of cubes that i must touch. "there are cubes!" say my partymates
immediately i'm kinda overwhelmed by the combat? i died a good few times in the first mission on normal difficulty. again i didn't play Nioh so i don't know how different it always was to FromSoft games, or if this is even similar to Nioh, but here there are so many different systems and resources and abilities to keep track of. it definitely seems like it would be cool once i get the hang of it but for now i'm suffering through every combat encounter being followed by my party members saying "ouf! not our best work"
it's like first fantasy :) but then the mission immediately after this is Pravoka Seagrot, which instead of just being the next town Pravoka from FF1, mixes it with Sastasha Seagrot from FF14. it mentioned something about things being pulled from "Dimension 14" in the level description which i guess is going to be a thing throughout this game. i was hoping it would be all FF1 locations but merging them with similar areas from other games is at least better than saying "in this next level we go to FF-whatever world" which i'm sure has been done in a dozen FF games at this point
this is a loot game, i am learning. difficulty settings are there to determine loot quality. and there's a lot of loot. this is after three missions i think. luckily there's a setting to automatically dismantle loot based on certain criteria but my god. there's a lot of loot
i've started to get a better feel for combat, to the point i feel i might be okay with upping the difficulty at certain points if it weren't for the added headache of managing all the higher-level loot. my biggest problem is attacks are just too flashy for me to know when to evade, and evading is still very important
i can't tell if i've really started to get a feel for it, or it's just become weirdly easy since unlocking the Thief job which lets me yoink enemies' attacks. the amount of jobs available was a big part of why combat was so overwhelming, since it incentivizes playing a whole lotta them to unlock the higher-tier jobs. except they max out so fast i don't feel incentivized to actually learn how to play them well before advancing
at first i was torn over whether to play in English or Japanese, because if i wasn't expecting to take this game seriously anyway i thought the bad English acting and dialogue might enhance the experience. but Japanese Jack asking every monster if they're Chaos is actually funnier
never mind i'm undecided again
i'm all in on Final Strangler's Paradise this game rules. i was expecting to mostly enjoy it ironically but it's just a really good action game? i don't know how far i am, i've played around ten hours and the story is still nonsense to me. i'm intrigued still, though i doubt i'd care if there wasn't the mystery of how it relates to FF1. but i also still can't tell if that mystery is the whole point. like i said it's all nonsense so far. but it's very enjoyable nonsense
sometimes i feel like the combat is too well-made for the game it's in. i especially feel this when spending several minutes running around in circles because the levels look the same throughout. i hate having to figure out which way is the bonus-way and which way is the way-way in games, but here it's enough trouble figuring out which is the haven't-been-here-yet-way. sucks because the bonus-ways often hide whole unlockable side missions in them, which unlock whole new jobs for party members
performance is getting roughhh too, the PC port is evidently not great, as i've heard. i don't play many biggraphic games so i don't have much to go on in terms of how many pores i am able to render but i know that this game on minimum graphics should not be as chugful or loudfanful as it is. have also heard Koei Tecmo and definitely Square have historically deemphasized PC ports so that's a cool combo to be dealing with
i think i'm approaching the Twist Point. i think. i still have no idea what the hell is going on, maybe they should've gone the Dark Souls route and not even tried to tell a story. also i've learned the Four Final Fantasy Fiends are called the "chaoses" in Japanese which explains things, so now that's not as funny booo! what is still funny though is being able to talk to townspeople between story missions and getting cutscenes like these
we restored the crystals but now the FF1 cartridge is getting all goofy and no one thinks we're the warriors of light anymore. wasn't this the deal with FF7 Remake as well actually, i never finished it but didn't it end up being like oh yeah it's a remake sure but then whooaa or is it even. whatever i gotta kill chaos