The Lorehounds Play - E05 - Final Fantasy VII Remake

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Lore Hounds Play, where the Lore Hounds, your guides to Pixel-based adventures.

[00:00:21] I'm John.

[00:00:22] I'm Brandon, and this is our fifth The Lore Hounds Play podcast, this time for Final Fantasy

[00:00:27] 7 Remake. Brand in before we get started on Final Fantasy 7, we've been talking about how to sort of make this show a little bit more timely and relevant to the gaming industry in general when we record them. And so we've been playing around with format a little bit. So I think we're going to do this from now on.

[00:01:41] We're going to have a what you've been playing segment where we just five, ten minutes, we

[00:01:46] talk about what we've been doing. a buddy just wanted like, they needed like essentially a new player to like get some quest done or whatever. And it happened to be me. And then I just, they had the fry skin in there. So I bought my first skin and now I run around as fry. And I just fell in love with it. It's so much fun. It doesn't help. I mean, it doesn't hurt the destinies and like kind of

[00:03:02] a dumpster fire right now. So I'm like, I'm. So you can bet your ass I'm going to have a little plastic guitar and I'm going to be shredding again just like it's 2005 or whatever. I love it. I have a vivid memory of being in Walmart. And you remember how you had to crane your neck up to play the demo games? This is going to date both of us, but you had to crane your neck up to play the demo

[00:04:22] games and I was playing through the fire and flames on expert.

[00:05:27] And it's definitely going to get a copyright lawsuit at some point because they all look like Pokemon

[00:05:33] And and not just in the style of Pokemon, but a lot of them look almost exactly like Pokemon

[00:05:36] And that's gonna be a problem

[00:05:42] Yeah, I've I've done like I've made a character and like just hopped into the game and walked around for a minute And being like wow, this is busy

[00:05:43] I can't do this with all my children are around because you know at least partially at rest for the first part because I guess there was some leaker who said, oh, it's probably AI. Like he was, I think he was a developer and then he later came out and said, oh, I actually don't have any information suggesting that. So disregard. It's wild. Like how that bit of speculation can kind of set everything on fire right now because everyone's so like tense about it for good reason.

[00:07:01] I mean, like we want AI to help us go into the Star Trek future.

[00:07:05] We don't want it to steal the only just run it back at this point or Like fully like yeah, like you said they need a kick in the ass at this point I'm never buying a Pokemon game again until I fix it Well, the other game I've been playing recently is

[00:08:21] Kind of the thing that replaced Pokemon for me in adult life, which is persona

[00:09:24] 5 Royal is the definitive version that has an extended timeline. Persona 4 Golden has the extended timeline.

[00:09:27] Persona 3 is a weird one because they did Persona 3 on PS2, then they released Persona

[00:09:33] 3 FPS, which had an extended gameplay on PS2 and had a female main character that you

[00:09:38] could choose.

[00:09:40] Then they released Persona 3 Portable, which was only on PSP, didn't have the female main I'm just going to call it Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wonder if it's more poetic in Japanese. I don't think so. I think it's just called remake. Yeah. Like they just use the word remake there. Well, we have a piece of feedback from Davy Mac who lives in Japan. So maybe Davy Mac can let us know if that's a thing. That would be great. Are you finished, by the way? I was just doing a joke.

[00:11:01] Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about

[00:11:02] as far as what you're playing?

[00:11:03] No, no, no.

[00:11:04] I'm good.

[00:11:05] I'm ready to talk about the thing we both did. We have three levels. I would not recommend. I would recommend or gotta try it. You know, it's either don't play it, play it if you're interested in this kind of thing, or if you have any passing interested in video games, play this. Yes. All right.

[00:12:20] Yeah. Also, like, yeah, if you want to contribute of people of my age. Um, you know, I didn't have a PC growing up. I was console kid. So like when we got the PlayStation and I didn't play it like right when it came out. I was probably a couple of years after that. This is of course the original game, not the remake that we are actually discussing, but

[00:13:42] uh, so that all informs my love of the.com if you want to be mad at me or hop on the discord his music And I'm sorry. I'm kind of all over the place here, but like I always hear it in my head as like full coral arrangements instead of you know

[00:15:00] The little the video game music that, all that, which was a whole lot. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. L H B. No, I don't apologize. Was this your first Final Fantasy game overall? Surprisingly, it is my only full Final Fantasy game overall. I've never played another one all't care. And I have a motorcycle or I have a car, right? He had a car. Oh, yeah. They were all all four of the bros were piled into the car together. All wearing like black clothes. Like one of the cool things about the, this like cast of characters, you're like main party is it's just such a, like a diverse crew.

[00:17:42] The silhouette on these people are just buck wild.

[00:17:46] Yeah.

[00:17:47] Yeah. Well, most of them have like, there's always like threads that go through and usually what like it is a pretty uncomplicated story made complicated by a bunch of just wild shit. Most of the earlier games are like more fantasy and then like later games are more fantasy. They kind of dial forward and backward as far as like the setting goes, but you are threads that tie all these games together, but they are all, all standalone until you get into like Final Fantasy 10, two or lightning revenge or I don't think it's revenge, but yeah, return, I think. Yes, you're right. Yeah. Well, lightning revenge is a cool sounding name.

[00:20:20] No, it's a good name for a show.

[00:20:22] You mentioned lightning. really played on my brother's PlayStation were like crash bandicoot and like this demo disc that had wipe out on a bunch of other random things on it. And other than that, I had the Nintendo 64 in my room. So that's mostly what I played if I was going to play a video game. But I also had a weird situation because I don't think my parents realized that you had to buy games to play with the thing. They thought that the thing just had

[00:21:40] the games, the consoles just have the games. So and I, and I was too polite to ask for

[00:21:45] any games. So unless I could get them to go to block us. Yeah, because every game after that they've kind of iterated out of purely turn based combat including this remake here Yeah, and so basically that was what I that was the game I probably put the most of other than I did play a Decent amount of Final Fantasy 14 the MMO at some point in

[00:23:04] COVID when I was just like I need to beat this by a certain time or you have accessibility issues, of course. But we, you know, I played it and I beat it in like 19 hours. I like ran through this thing, which is like an incredibly short amount of time original game. This covers like the first five hours and they blew it up into like a 40 hour experience. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. You know, I will say though, other than some bloating issues, amazing game. I would I I'm going to just give my rating here.

[00:25:41] I'm going to give it a must play as well. I don't think that was going to be that's not a, you know, a shocking revelation if you've listened to the first 25 minutes of this podcast. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, the score is amazing. The music like it's moving. I was listening to it just

[00:27:03] while doing random stuff the other day because it's just such a good soundtrack. the exact feeling like I can hear it in like the old chip toonie sort of synthesizer version of the soundtrack in my head He nailed it like it all of this is just so good. There's a track called beneath the rotting pizza and like I Remember walking around in the game and I heard the little drum beats kicking in and I was like oh

[00:28:22] It's the pizza song and then it you know it goes into it that they I've I've heard a lot of criticism that

[00:29:25] like a radio, but there's like a beach version of it.

[00:29:26] So like they just do fun things like that. Like they do a good job of like peppering in

[00:29:31] like silly little nostalgia bits like that.

[00:29:34] Just all throughout the game world.

[00:29:36] Yeah, and I think that's part of what makes this game

[00:29:40] so special, the music, the characterization.

[00:29:44] There are very few games that make me really feel

[00:29:48] something for the characters, of parts in this game that in the music probably could have done it alone, but I could see myself tearing up on my rewatch of my own gameplay. Like, yeah, these, it's just such strong. And like, you can feel it in the making of this game because that a lot of the people who were the nuts and bolts going through and making the remake are people who are our

[00:31:02] age, you know, we're the work, workforce age.

[00:31:05] And these are all people who because we have this now. Yeah. It's just and soon as we have the rebirth, we have part two of three, which to me, when I I thought that this was a two-parter, I thought this was

[00:32:22] going to be part one and part two. When I found out there were three, I was like,

[00:32:25] oh, that might be going too far.

[00:32:28] Yeah. the edging my way into the spoilers, the side quests in this game, if you wanna call them that are horse apples. They are really stupid, really dumb. They're fetch quest, right? They're fetch quest and they're kill ex monsters, come back to me. If that, like they are, it is almost like shameful.

[00:33:42] How bad the side quests are in this game.

[00:33:46] I say that absolutely loving the game. And like we just can't find the people we're looking for, but then they look completely different from everybody else. Yeah, and like some of the more populated areas, you'll see like the same character model like four or five times, like legit. Like 10 feet away from each other. Some of some, I took a screenshot that I was gonna send you of like two of them talking to each other and one in the background

[00:35:00] drinking some milk or something.

[00:35:02] And it's literally the same exact character model.

[00:35:04] It does feel like there are things

[00:35:05] that they just like completely cut, the, the, this crew of people called avalanche don't like that. So they're trying to put a stop to it to Shinra, the evil company. Pretty simple. Yeah. So let's do the full synopsis after the break. I know we definitely want to talk about spoilers now. So if you come back after the break, we're going to talk full spoilers for the game.

[00:36:21] If you've not played it, we'd recommend you play it first.

[00:36:24] But if you want to just come along for the ride, you're welcome to do that.

[00:36:27] Brandon, I'll see down two Mako reactors. Shinra retaliates by destroying sector 7, the home of Barrett's Avalanche team. Cloud and his team successfully prevent most of the civilians from

[00:37:42] dying, but two members of the group die in the process. which, you know, that being said, that's pretty much all that happens. Um, that's, it makes sense that you could fit that in a four or five hour playthrough if you want. Um, but yeah, they just fully just stacked this game full of stuff that happens. Um, let me see here. I'm going to pull up my actual playthrough because there are fun little bits along the

[00:39:03] way.

[00:39:04] Um, that I marked here. favorite opening to a video game ever. At this point, I'm a little over it. Like I usually skip that music whenever I'm listening to the soundtrack, just because it's, you know, you play that part so many times. It's sort of what we were saying with Skyrim, whereas like that's the part you get every time and it gets you hype, but you know,

[00:40:20] you can only like ride on the cart up to Helgen

[00:40:24] so many times before you get bored of it.

[00:40:26] Yeah, it's just that the teenager sort of that we all it's it's yet like a 12 year old boys version of like what a badass guy is. Right. Right. And as a as a fully adult person at this point, you can kind of see that like, Oh, look at

[00:41:41] the face he's putting on.

[00:41:43] Right.

[00:41:44] But the best part about that is, and I think this felt like it. Yeah, with Eligore and that's all right. Yeah, yeah. I can never remember the name. It's a weird name. Yeah, it's a, I don't even think that was in the original. Like one cool thing they did, we're not gonna get into like everything they changed from the original game to this game

[00:43:00] we're talking about today.

[00:43:01] But there are some things like that fight

[00:43:03] and the Hell House fight that were like

[00:43:06] random encounters in the original game did that as well. And I was so curious. You know, times have changed. There's some stuff in the old game that does not hold up as far as like standards

[00:44:24] on how we treat each other and talk to each other, the language we use.

[00:45:24] Now I do most expensive one same. Okay, good because I got a

[00:45:29] Yeah, and that is so good. She's like cloud

[00:45:38] So so much and it's just a ham massage. It's totally armless. Yeah, it is but they definitely didn't play it like it was harmless No, they did not that was some shit. So just a general question here. You didn't really play the first one you said

[00:46:44] him other than his name is Zack and he wears a similar outfit to cloud. Right.

[00:46:46] His sort of fate is different in this game than it is in the original.

[00:46:51] Oh, that's cool.

[00:46:53] There's a whole aspect of this game with the addition of things called the whispers.

[00:47:00] So those are the Wraith looking dudes who like.

[00:47:04] I think in this game they just called them whispers.

[00:47:07] Not even whispers.

[00:47:08] Whisperers. to be doing is sort of holding the game together in its original form. So there are things that change in the game from the original, but it seems like what these characters are doing, these whispers, are trying to keep things in order. but it's like, it's a huge change. And we'll be learning more shortly. The new game comes out at the end of the month. So, yeah.

[00:49:41] Let me see here.

[00:49:43] Oh, it's sort of also like, Sephiroth and ripped. He's very pretty. 11. He is very all the main cast are just so beautiful. Yes. Yeah. Great looking people. Except what can we just leave wedge out of that? You know, wedge is pretty good looking for a Husky guy.

[00:51:00] But yeah, he's probably.

[00:51:01] And he's also the guy who voices him

[00:51:04] is the guy who did the voice for I think rabbit.

[00:51:07] Is his name in Breaking Bad? in the game. So I got the original Aeroth dress whenever they dress her up. You probably just got this weird little short white dress, right? Yes, I got the basic one. Yep. Yeah, I got this like, resplendent, beautiful, like flowing dress and like fireworks were going off. Like,

[00:53:41] every time I've tried to change up and what it is about swearingics, but they know how to do hair. They've been trying for years. There are definitely some of the hair pioneers. They've always been ahead. I feel like this is a thought I had when I played Final Fantasy 13. You know, like they've just always been a little bit ahead

[00:53:43] of the game with hair design.

[00:53:45] Lightning's got great hair. But I think they struck a really nice balance here with, you know, you can also there is sort of a turn based mode you can do. Is that what the classic mode does? Yes, it makes it mostly the game plays itself essentially and you just pick the like limit breaks and magic commands and stuff like that for the characters.

[00:55:00] But the I will say the combat feels pretty good.

[00:55:03] It's now like God of War, but I had one in the middle of those. Yeah, because normal is really challenging at times. I played through half of the first playthrough on normal, and then I switched it to easy, and I was like, man, this sucks now. Like it doesn't teach you how to play the game because it really does trivialize

[00:56:21] the combat. And then all subsequent playthroughs have been on still, you know, I walked around the whole game using the Buster sword and it made me really happy that I could do that. And they made that like a viable choice that you could do. I don't think I did. I think I switched right away to that new sword that you get with Tifa and then I got that, you know, cool looking sword towards the end. Yeah.

[00:57:40] Yeah. The other one that's good at magic.

[00:57:42] And that's one.

[00:57:42] Another thing I liked about all the weapons is that you can pull a special

[00:57:46] ability off of the weapon and then use it wherever you want.

[00:58:42] bit opaque sometime. I will say the design of it is a little frustrating.

[00:58:45] I want to level up my sword,

[00:58:46] but I can't equip material on the same page

[00:58:48] or something like that.

[00:58:49] There was something weird where I was like,

[00:58:51] why do I have to go out of this menu

[00:58:53] and to go into a different menu to do this?

[00:58:55] Yeah, and I'm hoping that a lot of the game,

[00:58:57] but I'm hoping that this is basically

[00:59:01] their beta testing the future of this game.

[00:59:04] With the next one, hopefully more of the systems

[00:59:07] will be pretty smoothed out. for getting games built for it. And I will say in the, the, the, the intergrade section with UFI, it did feel a little bit smoother. Didn't feel as clunky slowed down grinding to a halt because it was for, is built for the PS5. So that's, I think that's good news for the future.

[01:00:20] But less about the future, more about this one.

[01:00:23] What do you think about all the mini games?

[01:00:25] Did you like those?

[01:00:26] The mini, like a very lazy rhythm game, but it was a lot of fun. Yes. Yeah. And that doesn't really change either. So like, even if you're playing on hard or whatever, that's not going to change. It's just, it's, it's fun color for the game.

[01:01:40] Can I give one more complaint before I'm pretty much positive for the rest of us?

[01:01:44] For sure.

[01:01:45] The PC port is 50, 60. And yeah, I think people were really disappointed and they did epic exclusive for six months too. Oh yeah, it's on Steam now, right? It is on Steam now. Anyway, my point is if you have no other way to play this, play it on PC.

[01:03:02] If you have a PlayStation and a PC, play it on PlayStation.

[01:03:06] It is built for that.

[01:03:07] It's way better on there. I'm not scared. They're not going to. I mean, it's Microsoft. They're not going to go bankrupt. I have one fear. Not for Xbox, but for consumers, I think not having a serious competitor to PlayStation is a scary idea. Yeah. Because console price could go whoop and even game price could go up.

[01:04:20] They set the price for next gen games.

[01:04:22] Right.

[01:04:23] They are the ones who jumped them up to 70 bucks instead of what had been for 20 years

[01:04:28] or whatever. console-ish products for a long time in handhelds. But I will say the Xbox controller is definitely my preferred gaming controller. I have three elite controllers. They're what I use. Well, I don't know three elites, but I mean, it's my preferred controller. It's the most ergonomically sound to me. And I'm never giving it up. So, and that's the reason why I choose Xbox

[01:05:44] most of the time now for multi-platform games.

[01:06:46] And so I had a I had a ps4 and I didn't have an Xbox one for years until a friend was getting the 1x And he sold me his original one for like a hundred bucks

[01:06:49] And even then I only bought a couple games on them

[01:06:52] I was sold on the Xbox Series X generation first because of game pass

[01:06:57] I knew about the Bethesda purchase and I was like alright

[01:07:00] I think I think this is the way to go this least two giant you know competitors there. Nintendo's its own thing. They're not worried about shit. They've got their people that are die hard Nintendo people so. Right. And they're the majority, honestly the majority of gamers are Nintendo people so.

[01:08:22] Yeah. And that's great. That's great. Do't make sense if you don't already know what it is. Yeah, for sure. I think it was called that because at the time it was a big deal that you could download new content for a game because before that,

[01:09:41] whatever was on the disc was what you had.

[01:09:43] Yes, you telling me I can download this horse armor

[01:09:46] for like 99 cents?

[01:09:48] The horse armor that ruined the world. DLC as well. But it mostly feels just like a fun way to tie in and to see how the game runs on a PlayStation 5, honestly. The story is pretty cool. Yuffie is Final Fantasy 7 shape and started fighting again. I think it's worth playing if you love it. If not, if you're not like super into Final Fantasy 7 games as of right now, just wait because you're about to get like a whole bunch of shit unless you already own it and you want to build yourself up.

[01:13:22] especially at the end of the game, the main game, it does sort of drag on a little bit.

[01:13:25] Yeah, that's kind of all I got.

[01:13:27] Like I said, I could talk about this forever

[01:13:29] and I would love to.

[01:13:30] So hit me up on the Discord.

[01:13:32] Be sure to ping me, I'm bad at paying attention to Discord.

[01:13:36] But yeah, if you wanna talk about this,

[01:13:38] if you got feedback that you'd love to share,

[01:13:41] experiences that you'd like to share,

[01:13:42] we got a piece of feedback we can talk about or talk today.

[01:13:47] But yeah, do you got anything else you wanna say about? pretty goofy with some broad ecological commentary. You can't do much better than this. Very broad, hugely broad. Technology with broad characters. Fascism bad. Yeah. Well, we did get some feedback, Brandon,

[01:15:01] which is very exciting.

[01:15:02] As a reminder, you can send feedback I just had to give it a try. Plus it was on three discs. The game hooked me immediately, even if I wasn't a huge fan of turn based combat. had, I had really committed to seeing everything. A buddy of mine had two different guides that he lent me and I made sure to get everyone's limit breaks up even Aras.

[01:17:42] Aras in the North American copy of the game. Is that a thing?

[01:17:43] Um, yeah, it's a translation issue.

[01:17:45] Um, Aras sounds a lot more.

[01:18:44] skeptical when I saw they were splitting it into multiple releases. But then it came out and it looked good, so I picked it up and ended up loving it, especially

[01:18:48] in how they fleshed out minor characters and changed up the way things played out.

[01:18:53] I find that it's in conversation with the original in interesting ways, and I'm so glad

[01:18:59] they decided not to do a straight remake.

[01:19:02] It makes me all the more excited for Rebirth and the possibilities of where they can take

[01:19:06] the story.

[01:19:07] I can't wait to see what surprises they have in store. But they really characterized in a big way. Wedge Bigs and Jesse. Especially Jesse with that backstory with that. Especially. Yes. That was heartbreaking. Yeah, it was really affecting. And that just didn't exist in the main game. It's one of the best things about at least it's like subtle.

[01:20:23] Parts of it are subtle and nice, which is the game.

[01:20:26] They could have pizza with the mom, right?

[01:20:27] And you just find out the tragic backstory. You go in metal revenge. Yeah, okay. I could see revenge. I could not revenge in this. I could see revenge. Why don't we just do a riddity-dity-doo? That could be the, if I'm gonna do something serious, repent.

[01:21:44] Maybe restore. Restore, revive.

[01:21:45] Revive?

[01:21:46] That's a good one.

[01:22:45] in for show and it's an incredible thing where he puts all the characters and all the clues together and you can go peruse it. That's exclusive for our patrons. You can get into

[01:22:49] it for as little as three bucks a month, even cheaper if you do an annual membership. So

[01:22:54] it's very exciting stuff. You get early and add free access to all our podcasts. You're

[01:22:58] going to show tracker where David's also putting together some, you know, a way to track when

[01:23:04] shows are coming out, which is something that's asked us to always read his name as a question? You guys always read the names, but every time I'm on the podcast with you guys now, I will also repeat Narl's as a question. So don't worry. Fair enough, fair enough. Well, thanks everyone for supporting really quick show notes.

[01:24:22] We'll shift dust and properly Howard movie review

[01:24:24] are both on a break right now.

[01:24:26] David's got something cooking with Alicia Well, it's been fun next month, Brandon. What are we going to talk about? Speaking of Halo, yeah, we're going to dig into it. We're probably going to discuss Halo as a franchise, which is something we haven't really done before on Lourhounds Plays. But they're, you know, it's a shooter game. So each game has its own story, but it's, you

[01:25:45] know, it's a shooter. Most of the time high hopes for season two. So we'll have to see. Cool. Brandon, it's been a great time exploring Midgar with you. I'm sure we'll be back doing

[01:27:00] this soon. Talking about Halo soon, talking about the nice rings.