Patient Gamers

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Replaying Final Fantasy VIII(man the battles are long) (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This game was my first jrpg as a kid. Well after Mario rpg and Pokémon. But I guess it always classified it different as it was a more serious game.

I was really young so it’s cool to play it now and better understand the story.

But I did not remember the battles being so long. It seems that every encounter so far has been a really long experience.

I just graduated seed training, so not to far into the remake. Im not worried about spoilers as I’ve played through this game when it was new, and watched a speed run of it a few years ago.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fully recommended playing emulated with a speed mode. None of the old jrpgs respect your time and I legit can't play them without that feature anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think it's fair to say that they didn't respect your time. They were designed with specific priorities in mind on the limited hardware that was available at the time.

3D graphics were still considered the hot new thing at the time, and leaning into the spectacle was a selling point of the FF games (you could even argue that's still the case). Now consider that all of that spectacle needs to load in real time from a very slow CD drive, and it starts to make more sense why the animations take so long to complete. The devs are hiding the loading process with long and (by today's standards) very slow animations. It makes the games feel very slow, but I prefer that design choice over showing a generic loading screen or progress bar every few seconds in the middle of a battle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I totally understand the limitations of the time and still love the games, but really that doesn't take away from the fact that these games require a ton of time to complete. Newer JRPGs take this into account and attempt to address it in various ways which I very much appreciate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh absolutely. I wasn't trying to argue that they don't require a massive time investment, because they absolutely do. I was only arguing against the assertion that they require a large time investment because the devs didn't respect the player's time, at least in the context of the battle speed of FF8 that was mentioned by OP.

Older games like FF6, Chrono Trigger, etc. don't feel nearly as slow to me as FF8, Chrono Cross, etc. The former are 2D cartridge based games while the latter are 3D CD based games. All of them required pretty big time investments to complete, but battles don't feel slow on the cartridge games.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah totally. I don't think they intentionally made decisions in that way. I just don't think those game design concessions aged well. Thankfully we can work with them now though. You're right though that the animations in the disc era really padded battle lengths. Jeez, just thinking of using summons in the FF series is giving me flashbacks lol.