This is a game i would enjoy, but i do think there's some magic gone by steering away from the fantastical world-building in favor of going for the more common medieval european stylings. Even if FF9 kinda went for that too, that game's colorful cast, whimsical knight outfits, fantastical creatures and airships do help to give a game it's own spin on what a medieval world can be.
This video could just as well be from Dragon's Dogma. Or The Witcher. Or Gothic. There's no world with flying school-buildings (FF8), submerging sand-castles (FF6) or a mystical hawaii setting (FF10). You know, worlds that are almost designed characters themselves and therefore were fascinating to discover because of it's otherworldliness.
I also worry that the 'we're in this together with our lil team against the world' vibe of most FF games is kinda lost without a party. Often Final Fantasies' stories are at their best when the characters in a party interact with eachother.
As for the combat, i think i would enjoy it. Kinda reminds me of Kingdom Hearts even. Or Stranger of Paradise naturally. But the weird mobile-game ish QTE's are a bit much for me in the same way that the slots in Crisis core don't add to the experience. Jan & Jeff seem to big them up as being as fantastical and rad as Asura's wrath did, but all i saw here were some dodges and a few basic slashes after freeze frames. Given they mentioned not having to played all that much further along, i wonder what these Asura Wrath-esque QTE's were. Is this Clive fella going to decapitate 10 heads with a single spin-move and then use those heads in mid-air as stepping stones to get enough air to do a plunging attack on a troll's eye or something? What are we talking about?
I'm not one of the 'FF should be 100% turn-based' guys, but i do think adding unnecessary QTE's fits in Square's everlasting evolution from selecting an option in a menu to 'we need to make FF combat be as cool as we portray it in the cutscenes' - obsession that has been in the media since Final Fantasy 7 became a hit back in te day. Focusing so fully on QTE's with freeze-frames is something that most devs have wisely turned away from, but FF seems to not be able to leave it on the table because pressing a button during a cutscene is more actiony than not pressing a button during a cutscene, and therefore fits in their journey to make Final Fantasy as action-y as the cutscenes ever were.
Hah, the way Dan read up on reviews for Seinfeld, reminds me of how i experienced adventure games like The Longest Journey & Grim Fandango through a walkthrough + a few screenshots. I think it was placed across a few editions of a gaming magazine.
I fucking loved Drakan back in the day. It probably was the first real action-rpg thingy i played. Being able to equip weapons enemies drop felt very new back then. And being able to fly around on the back of a dragon was cool.
Ah, thanks. I kinda expected that multiplayer experience already. If you're not breaking away from the pack, there's so much potential to get hit by power ups from other players in the vicinity that you have to be very lucky to not catch any strays. While the nr1 position doesn't have to deal with it all that much. Sonic All Stars Transformed at least had some power ups that created bee-swarms further up the road that would be most annoying for the nr 1 position. I wonder if this game has any power ups that specifically target the nr 1 position. Most of the power ups i've seen in this clip seem to mostly be meant to be used against the nearby players.
The boosting stuff looks nice and i like the multiple uses of the power ups. Also power ups being character-specific is a fun thing that makes this different from the competition.
That said, is it me or does the actual racing look quite slow? Same goes for the rail-grinds. And it just seems like the matches are too short to really start to get a gap going. If you're unlucky you'll just don't get out of the firing-range of all these power ups everyone fires around.
First 30 seconds: Ugh... the graphical capability of the switch gets harder and harder to ignore.
New abilities: Wow.. they combined Nuts & Bolts with some Dota 2 ( giving all those items more use-cases)
Very impressed by how creative they are by focusing on new gameplay solutions in this thing. People seemed to hate the stamina system for long climbs, so having a new way to circumvent that is neat. Durability annoyed some, so they found a way to mitigate that too.
I do hope that the game gives you enough reasons to keep you being creative and that it doesn't become a 'i'll make the raft for water, i'll make the long stick weapon if i need to fight and i ignore all the other stuff because it are worse options for the situation' You'll always have a group of players that don't need motivation from the game itself to keep experimenting, but there are also plenty of people that need to get that little push from the game to stop going for the obvious choices.
Once you name your game RedFall, it's going to have a real uphill battle.
Naturally survivor bias plays a part here and there are plenty of popular games with real headscratchers of names, but once a game goes ..Fall or ... Rise, i just lose all faith in the game having something worthwhile to say or show.
There was an entire studio that thought a game called Warface could be a hit.
What a neat lil thing. Cool look, easy to see what the beat is supposed to be and it seems to move well too. And 'what songs are in this game' is genuinely a hook that will keep me going.
I'm a bit wary that the combat is going to feel quite limited though, especially as i'm watching them hit that robot's fist with a similar combo over and over, and not being able to truly chain a bunch of different attacks together, but maybe that'll solve itself as you get more and more upgrades and the beat gets faster.
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