I started with my old XBox controller but kept getting the buttons confused. Mouse/Keyboard is working far better for me. No remapped keys.
Some folks on the Steam forums are saying the instability is a DirectStorage issue. Replace the DLLs the game uses with the ones from NuGet and you're good. That sounds like something Square/Enix can kick out pretty fast.
I'm spending far too much time poking around in the side quests and other open world things. Chadley hands out so many materia, I can't help myself!
I recently purchased Remake and Rebirth, so I booted up Remake today to give it a quick try.
I love that it automatically detected the Dualsense controller I recently purchased. You wouldn't think that's a big deal, but 90% of games on Steam don't detect Sony controllers without using third-party software, or when they do, they don't show the correct button icons.
Graphics options are pretty sparse, but the game looks really good. HDR mode looks like shit though. I tried that and immediately switched back to SDR.
You start at level 6 and level up after the very first fight? Weird, but ok.
Rebirth got a patch to fix up some crashing issues. It seems to have calmed the forums down a lot.
Rebirth really has a LOT of mini-games! The original had no shortage, but they're going nuts with them in Rebirth. A few are even required to finish the game, though never anything that's very hard. Queen's Blood is actually fairly good. The shooting gallery in Costa del la Sol is pretty trivial with mouse/keyboard but the piano mini-game is HARD!
(I wish I had saved my attempt at the Piano game. I don't think I've ever been so totally demolished!)
Making you level VII! They like dropping 7's here and there: the Seventh Heaven bar, infantry group #7, and so on. In the original game, if a character's HP was at 7777, they would get a big attack boost.
Rebirth really has a LOT of mini-games! The original had no shortage, but they're going nuts with them in Rebirth. A few are even required to finish the game, though never anything that's very hard. Queen's Blood is actually fairly good. The shooting gallery in Costa del la Sol is pretty trivial with mouse/keyboard but the piano mini-game is HARD!
Someone wrote an entire article complaining about the mini game where you have to throw crates on a conveyor belt with Cait Sith. I guess it's one of the mandatory ones, and it's really annoying?
In the brief time I've played Remake, the only thing I didn't like was the fact that item crates respawn when you load a save. It seems like an odd design decision to me. It's not like there's any shortage of health potions.
In the brief time I've played Remake, the only thing I didn't like was the fact that item crates respawn when you load a save. It seems like an odd design decision to me. It's not like there's any shortage of health potions.
Still there in Rebirth. Rebirth also adds clumps of flowers/ores you can pick up that can then be used to craft things like potions and armors, which also respawn after not all that long. I've used that system to make most of my items, which is making me pretty rich. No idea what I'm supposed to spend money on. I can buy weapons I missed in my travels, but I haven't missed any yet.
I ran into a buzzsaw in chapter 9. A boss with a slow but devastating attack. I didn't just lose; I was getting wiped out before I got through 20% of this thing's health, all mega-potions spent! It seems I need to use the dodging mechanic. I tried that at the very start of the game, had better luck with blocking, and forgot all about the dodge. Arg.
Edit: Dodging helped, but not that much. Concentrating on one arm at a time helped a lot more. Going back to an earlier save so I could get more appropriate materia helped a lot, too. End result:
Someone wrote an entire article complaining about the mini game where you have to throw crates on a conveyor belt with Cait Sith. I guess it's one of the mandatory ones, and it's really annoying?
Yeah, I ran into that one, too. It was the hardest required mini-game for me. At least it's something that can be figured out, but it requires a lot of trial & error. It reminds me of bowling mini-games where, once you figure out the timing/direction to throw, it's just a matter of hitting it a few times in a row. It wouldn't have been bad if they hadn't made it take 10 seconds or so to turn around and get another crate.
I finished the game up last night. That final boss battle was crazy!! Let me see if I can cover the whole deal.
Fight Jenova Lifeclinger with Yuffie, Cloud, and Red 13. There's a big, nasty barrier around making the area you can fight in kinda small. Red 13 gets thrown through the barrier, now it's just Cloud & Yuffie! Then Yuffie gets tossed!
At about 75% health, the barrier goes down. Yuffie and Red 13 re-join.
At about 25% health, Jenova falls apart along with the arena. Everything starts falling through the void. Jenova attacks Tifa and Cait Sith. It was at this point that I realized I had forgotten to give Cait Sith any materia. Frak. Luckily, Tifa is a goddess. When a Jenova body part falls off, Jenova breaks away...
...and attacks Barret and Red 13. They take down another body part...
...and it falls to Yuffie and Cloud. They get to attack the head. When they finish it off, there's a great cutscene and the body takes 9999 damage...
...but ain't dead. It starts throwing out much nastier attacks, but the music is excited. Finally, it's dead! Took 37 minutes, with a couple of minutes spent getting a screenshot. A weird cutscene plays, HP and mana are restored, and black feathers fall. Jenova wasn't the final boss, that was just the warm-up boss.
Fight Sephiroth with Cloud and somebody else, whom you've never used before. Learn fast or die young!
The boss turns into a big monster on a glowy... thorax thing? Fight with just Cloud. You can only hit the thorax thing.
Smash the weak point and it pops! Do a little climbing puzzle and then fight the now-only-50ft-tall boss. Eventually you hurt it enough to annoy it, so it leaves...
...and attacks Tifa, Red 13, and Cait Sith. Boss summons a mighty beast for the party to fight. If you kill the beast, the boss covers it with its wings. You can break through and stop the healing if you're prepared for it. I wasn't, but I managed to finish off the wings the second time. A much saddened boss moves away to attack...
...the special guest character Cloud paired up with earlier. More fighting. Eventually you beat on it enough to scare it off.
And now you're fighting with Tifa, Barret, and Yuffie. The main target is easy to hit but only takes tiny damage. You've got to attack the wings according to what color they are glowing. It doesn't give you any hint of that (I paused the game and looked it up on IGN), so it's a puzzle boss. Eventually you get the main target smashed.
The boss shrinks down still more, but it starts using much stronger attacks, including one that knocks everyone down to 1hp each. (No, there's no long animation, thank goodness.)
When finally killed again, he reverts to Sephiroth. You fight him once more, but I'm not talking about that even in a spoilers section. I barely one this phase on my third try.
Took a total of two hours, plus a little time for screenshots and looking up in the IGN guide. They were kind enough to give the option to restart the fight at the start of the last phase, thank goodness. Oh, and it should be noted that I've got a mod running to make it so that non-party members do more fighting plus a mod to increase enemy HP to balance the first mod.
I played most of the game on dynamic difficulty. The mods I use make fights hard when it's just one character vs enemies and I expected Cloud to do at least some fighting alone, so I switched to Normal difficulty for this fight. It was kinda funny when I would yell at the screen and then Barret would say pretty much the same thing.
Still, two hours with no save opportunity!? That's more than a bit much. I hope they don't think they need to top it for the final game.
Yep, the two that you aren't currently controlling. In the vanilla game, they have a tendency to not attack much, mostly dodging/blocking attacks until an enemy gets staggered. Then they cut loose on the staggered enemy. The mod makes them act like the enemies are already staggered. That increases the party effectiveness quite a bit, though, so you've got to balance it with some sort of mod to make the game harder. I used a mod to increase enemy hit points. I found the battles to be a lot more fun when everyone was more active, but I really should have removed the mods in the section where Cait Sith does a bunch of solo stuff.
The other people in your party DO help a little in battles if they're around. Mostly, they just use their weak default attacks, but you can sometimes pull them in for synchronized attacks if the other two main party members have fallen.
