2015: A Year In Review

This is less a year and review for like my life, and more like a year in review for some cool things I got introduced to / experienced over the year!! Mainly video games. Of course it's mainly video games.

HERE WE GO!

• I made a twitter and started following some cool people!! Namely: drak, Gigi D. G., Toby Fox

All three of them are super cool people who make great things! Drak's working on a cool game called Item Haver and does a lot of neat video game streams! I love his humor - his streams are a lot of fun to watch while I'm doing something else in the background.

Gigi writes Cucumber Quest! A webcomic about bunny kids going on adventures, heavily inspired by RPGs like Paper Mario and Kirby. It's super good and I highly highly highly recommend it!

Toby Fox is the guy.... er, dog??? behind Undertale, which, I've already mentioned (twice!) on here. A really cool game that takes traditional RPG elements and flips them on their head. I, obviously, highly recommend this as well!

• Drak and Gigi play Sonic 06

This was how I first found Drak and his streams (I'd already been following Gigi for a while), and, through this, got introduced to the Sonic series! Well, outside the vague "Sonic exists, he was in Smash and the Mario and Sonic Olympic games" knowledge of Sonic I already had.

Anyway, I recommend these streams to basically anyone! Whether you're a longtime fan of Sonic or, like me, someone who only vaguely knows about them, they're a lot of fun!! Just two friends enjoying a broken game and all in all having a good time. I'm really glad they exist. They still make me smile when I watch them.

• Tied into that: I actually looked further into the Sonic series, and discovered I really really like it?????? It's kind of bad in a lot of ways but, it's still..... it's really good. I'm glad games like Sonic 06 and Sonic Adventure 2 exist.

• I played Earthbound and Earthbound Zero this year!!

What good games.... I'm so glad I actually looked into them instead of leaving my Mother / Earthbound experience at simply Mother 3. They were both really fun, and Earthbound has easily worked it's way onto the list of my favorite games.

• I also played FF8 this year!!!!!!

What another good game..... I already talked about it on this blog before, but, I'm glad to have played it because, I think it's my favorite Final Fantasy, now?? And it was a lot of fun to share the experience with my sister, who loves it, and a friend of mine, who also loves it!! 

FF8 has a lot of good characters and a really good story and, well, I'm glad to have finally gotten around to playing it this year.

• Splatoon!! Splatoon is a thing a I got into, and, it's a really good game!! I'm grateful for it, and, for getting a Wii U, finally.

• I also finally played Majora's Mask this year!!!!

I keep meaning to make a post about it here (it's next on the list, right after a Yoshi's Woolly World review, probably) but haven't gotten around to it yet! In short: I had a lot of low expectations for Majora's Mask, but when I finally sat down to play it on a whim, I was proven very wrong. It's a wonderful game, and is without a doubt one of my favorite Zeldas!

• I watched SGDQ for the first time and enjoyed it immensely. I can’t wait for AGDQ which starts!!! Sunday!!! WOWIE! - check out some deets about both, here!

And, finally, the crown on this big 'ol cake:

• Undertale

Undertale came out in September, after four months of waiting for it -- for me, anyway! 

It was better than the demo promised, and it wasn't just some short little game that I played once and really enjoyed. It ended up being much more than that. It totally took over my life for a few months, and, kind of still has a hold of it now??

I'm so glad we live in a world where Undertale exists, because it is such a good game, and it's really made an impact on the world and gaming and so much cool fanart and fanfic has come from it -- I haven't met anyone new from it, like other people, but I have had a lot of great experiences centered around it!

I never expected Undertale to get so big or to mean so much to me (and honestly, I don't think anyone expected this) but, here we are! Here it is!! And it's wonderful.

It would be silly for me to choose one thing out of this year that I am most thankful for, because I am very very thankful for all these things!! Buuuuuut, if I absolutely had to choose just one, it would be Undertale, without a doubt. GOOD THING I DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE, HUH?

Anyway, that's some of my fave 2015 experiences year in review. Here's for 2016, finding more fun games, and having an even better year! 

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Midgar Is Now Too Big To Fit On One Disc (FFVII Remake news)

The Final Fantasy 7 Remake got another trailer at PSX, back on December 5th! The game looks stellar so far and, I'm excited!!

Back when it was announced at E3, my opinions on the FF7 Remake were more like "holy crap? they're actually doing it???" than legitimate excitement for the game. But when I watched this trailer, my attitude shifted quite drastically. This trailer managed to remind me how much I cared about FF7, and how excited I was to see it retold in better graphics and in full voice acting. (No lie: I had to pause the trailer the first time I watched it when Jessie said her opening line because I was too overwhelmed.)


I'm excited for a lot of things shown in this trailer!! The graphics look gorgeous, and the gameplay looks like it's gonna be a lot of fun.

The trailer showed Cloud, while navigating what I assume is Sector 7's dilapidated Mako Reactor, ducking through a hole in the wall, and squeezing between a small gap, which, are little things, but seeing that sort of stuff on a more frequent scale could be pretty interesting, in my opinion! A Midgar that's fully capable of being interacted with? Awesome.

Not to mention, Midgar itself. It's HUGE. The streets are fully rendered, completely with city lights (that reflect off of Cloud's sword!?) and an atmosphere that feels really good. There were only a few sections shown in the trailer, and not for very long, either, but it feels really big. It feels like there's a lot to explore, and, that's one of the things that excites me the most about this trailer. I can't wait to walk around this Midgar. I can't wait to see the buildings around me, rather than looking down on them. I can't wait to move through these streets, especially now that there won't be any preset camera angles to deal with. I can't wait to explore Midgar as if I'm really there. It looks.... It looks wonderful. It looks fantastic. I really, really can't wait.


Another thing that caught my attention about the trailer was at roughly 1:10, when Cloud is surrounded by Shinra troops. This is an effect any fan who's watched the Advent Children movie will be familiar with. The image glitches, flashing, blurring, accompanied by a high-pitch whine and static.

In Advent Children, it was meant to portray the effects of geostigma. Or, basically, portray that something is wrong. 

Here, I figure it is meant to signify Cloud's not-quite-stable memories and mental state. This happens plenty of times within the original game itself, just with different effects. (The latest I saw: a red overlay, that high-pitched whine, while Cloud's model distorts for a second.)

I'm really excited to see this play out, to see how they carry out this plotline with the technology and graphical capabilities they have today. I have high hopes.

(Also, did anyone else find it interesting this happened when he was surrounded by Shinra troops? I mean, considering....)

Slightly on this subject, here's something a lot of people have pointed out, including tumblr user princessmatsuoka and Nomura himself:

Cloud looks sick.

He's thin, he's pale, he's got bags under his eyes---sure, he's got muscles, but his skin is still sticking to them, and he's hunched over most of the time. It's a good reflection of all the trauma he's been through before getting to Midgar: locked in a test tube for four years, Mako poisoning, on top of his emotional / mental state.

To quote tumblr user leonheartleon, Cloud doesn't look like pretty. He looks "like a young adult who suffers from multiple traumas and mental disorders". And that's real good.


(The thing I'm obviously most excited about when it comes to this remake? The things they can do to portray this story with the technology they have today.)

Anyway, I should probably talk about the battle system, too.

As shown in the trailer, the game is going to have an action-based battle system. Or, more action-based than the original, anyway.

Kitase says they're aiming for a "seamless active battle". 

Nomura adds: 

"There won’t be any actions that require a technique. By using the new system, we want to do action battles while also being able to fight while thinking strategically.”

A couple of people are mad about this decision, and would prefer it stuck to more traditional-RPG roots. While I agree revamping the original FF7's RPG battle system to make it more interactive might not have been a bad idea, I honestly couldn't care less. 

I started replaying the original FF7 a few nights ago, because I wasn't sure how else to vent my hype for the Remake, and found myself quitting within the hour because I kept getting really pissed off at random encounters. Sitting around and waiting for your attack bar to fill is boring, the encounters felt like they happened too frequently---you walk three steps, and then, oops! Another random encounter. It was really frustrating, and how slow they were paced played no small part in that.

Honestly, I'll be glad to see any battle system in the Remake, so long as it's not the exact same as the original's. Besides, it's reportedly going to be a little like Kingdom Hearts, and, I love Kingdom Hearts. So, I'm alright with that.

Finally: the FF7 Remake is going to be a multi-part series. Kitase says they knew it wouldn't fit into a single release from the beginning.

Here's the full section of that interview:

Final Fantasy VII Remake is a multi-part series. Please tell us more about this decision. 

Kitase: “The idea that a remake of Final Fantasy VII would not fit into a single release was there from the very beginning. We still can’t share more information about its multiple parts, but please look forward to future announcements.” 

Nomura: “If we dedicated our time to a single release, parts of it would become summarized. We’d have to cut some parts, and additional parts would come in few, so rather than remake the game as a full volume, we decided to do multiple parts. 

Kitase: “As you can see in the trailer, we showed Sector 1 and Sector 8, but in those areas alone, I think you can see a lot of density. When you’re remaking the entirety of the original version in that quality, it’s not possible to fit it all in one release.”

The world has been made so big that they can't fit it on a single disc.

But, hey, in my opinion? I'd rather have the giant world to explore. I'd rather have all the story there. I don't want anything to be unnecessarily cut from this, and if this is how they have to ensure nothing from the original is lost, then so be it.

This multi-part approach means that they can explore each episode, each section of the game more deeply, too. And, they can even expand on parts of the story. Nomura says this about it:

“In addition to delving into these episodes more deeply, we’re preparing a number of mechanisms and such. To those who played the original version will know the important parts and understand the story from the beginning to the end. Also for these people, I hope that they can be surprised once again.”

I'm looking forward to see where this is going.

All in all, I think it looks like the FF7 Remake is gonna be really great.