#square please... release a better dissidia

[bluebudgie]

so after i got the information that in the console versions of the pixel remasters you can switch to the OG soundtrack i caved in and with the power of my amassed nintendo gold points got the ff2 pixel remaster yesterday evening. (context: i'm a pixel remaster hater) (but I'm also on my quest to having played every version of this game available)

i've played about an hour so far (just delivered the mithril) and here's my observations:

while i still think the character sprite work is only rivaled by the psp version in ugliness i have to admit overall it looks better than at least the psp version. the battle effects (like magic) look so much better as actual pixel art. environments look pretty. you can actually change the font to look slightly less horrible by choosing the alternative setting in the options. really not as ugly overall as screenshots online make it out to be. i have to admit defeat here. dont understand why they wont let us change the textbox colour tho.

absolutely stupid that they got rid of character portraits in dialogue boxes. "it's supposed to be close to the original release" - bullshit. this version is as close to the original as literally every other remake this game got. plus some optional quality of life so arguably actually further removed from the original than any other version of this game.

the music box in the extras menu won me over. there was minwu walking along a little road whistling little music notes and suddenly gordon stood in the way and got run over and they both fell to the ground. this is the content i'm here for.

in the german translation the king of fynn says he got shot in the butt and that is not what the english translation says at all and it kills the mood bc the man is dying but it amused me so thats a positive point as well

minimap in dungeons feels cheaty as hell but also who the fuck cares, the dungeons in this game aren't spectacular enough to warrant an actual exploration challenge. means i'm glad the stupid map is there.

overall decent version so far and actually playable with the OG soundtrack selected. i think i might end up prefering this version over the psp release. in which case the only thing the psp version has going for itself at this point are the character portraits. but at least it has the best character portraits of all available versions.

edit: wait i forgot something

minwu is white. i mean i knew this before, this wasnt a new shock but i still cannot believe they whitewashed the man to be as white as untoasted toast

so is firion but that transition already happened years ago with dissidia so its less of a shock. still. holy shit square enix leave your brown characters brown please i cant deal with this

[kennycrows]

“I never much cared for you.”

[niuniente]

“In June of 2015, they announced that they’re going to maintain the original story as much as possible while creating a unique XV story as well, but it doesn’t seem like that was possible to do so when they got rid of Stella Nox Fleuret, hence the original Romeo and Juliet tale disappearing. XV team also decided to change characters and stories to please the mainstream audience, so we don’t know how much of the original content actually stayed. But it was XV team’s decision to attempt at BOTH maintaining the original story AND changing things. I think this attempt might have muddled the story line a bit. Some wonder if Nojima had kept on with the script, the deliverance of the story might have been better. Tabata is not the lead scenario designer, it’s Itamuro Saori (Dissidia 012 writer) after Nojima left the team, and they have two more assistant writers. Itamuro is practically a newbie who was in charge of the Dissidia story and no one has a clue to why someone so inexperienced was in charge of this big number. Apparently, her only credentials of writing before being hired at Square Enix were fanfiction for Final Fantasy and Slam Dunk… (fyi, I’m not trying to bash all fanfiction writers) You can tell that there has been a lot of sudden, big changes, because even the voice actor of Noctis, Suzuki Tatsuhisa, mentioned during the release date live stream that he still has the Versus scripts at home that he read on his days off and he couldn’t figure out how to move from the Versus Noctis to XV Noctis and struggled to find the middle ground. He said he had a hard time getting into the character towards the end of the game, so he had to re-do his lines from the middle of the story again a few times to get it right. He himself wants to play FFXV just to see how and where they might have placed his Versus recordings from 6 years ago in the game. “ (x)