Lurker > LightningStrikes

I guess I will have to join Discord.

At best it is a late step on transphobia that will be completely overshadowed by this move. At worst its just covering for themselves.

The famously apolitical last act of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance.

Even Breath of the Wild is about drone warfare!

You know what was very based, when Big Boss went and fought alongside the Sandinistas in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

That is a spectacularly stupid decision. What even is politics?

This topic is unironically one of the least toxic places for discussing politics online.

Hilarious timing:

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/04/final-fantasy-16-successfully-expanded-the-series-to-new-younger-players-says-square-enix

foolm0r0n posted...

XVI marketing seemed really weak in general. I don't know anything about the characters, conflict, overall pathos. It's GoT-ish, but after season 8? They forgot that no one actually cares about the political parts of GoT, only about the boobs and violence, and most importantly, the somber dad main character.

Is this a take from May 2011

MacArrowny posted...

Why is FF more for millennials than any other series its age?

IMO:

-Not expanding onto other platforms besides Playstation enough, especially PC and Nintendo. Playstation is probably the platform with the oldest core audience.

-Having a decade of bad games when Gen Z were young and at the age to get into Final Fantasy.

-Doing generally a poor job of rereleasing games through the 2010s.

I mean before it was put on Playstation Plus Remake was the second most finished Playstation exclusive behind The Last of Us Part 2 at just 54% of players finishing it. A lot of people just dont finish games!

I mean the fact nobody ever talks about is that in Japan in particular, FF has been on a linear trend down since X and really since VII, the only exception being X outselling IX. Worldwide its been more uneven though the general direction of travel is obvious. When it has gone up outside of Japan (ie XV) its down to expanding onto new platforms. Now, even limiting it to Playstation Remake was still down on XV so its not everything. But it helps. When VII came out Playstation was two thirds of the market. Now its what, a fifth or a sixth? And thats not even counting mobile.

pjbasis posted...

Maybe they should have catered to newbies and just played the story straight hmm?

Like instead of worrying that all of gamefaqs knows the twist

I mean lets be real here, if they had played it totally the same over three games interest absolutely would have been lost. With the way it currently is they had coverage in places like the New York Times and the BBC about the game wondering if the big moment would change. You cant ask for better exposure than that.

I dont think the content of the games really matters at all to this, the trend has been far too linear and predictable. It really is just a matter of Final Fantasy only appealing to a shrinking demographic on a shrinking portion of the gaming audience.

foolm0r0n posted...

Nearly as well reviewed as FF12! We will certainly talk about Rebirth in the same breath as 12 in the future

Theyre tied but Rebirth has more than twice as many reviews so its fair to say did a little better. And they are both also tied with original FFVII lol. I mean, XII did get a pretty rapturous response for like a month after it came out then people turned on it. Now people love it again?

Maybe people just dont know what they like!

I dont see whats yikes about an opinion on a villain in a video game! Or what other yikes takes there might be!

Yeah theres no denying the importance and influence of Sephiroth at the time, Ive heard from casuals who only know FFVII as the one with Sephiroth in it. Yet he was very much a product of what was cool in the 90s and was built around a particular moment in time. And now there are a lot of people looking at him and not appreciating him the same way. This is absolutely possible to synthesise with his popularity at the time. I played FFVII in 2006 and Sephiroth came off as very of his time back then, let alone now.

As for XIV its more akin to playing a series of games with their own beginning, middles, and ends. If you played ARR, you would hit credits in about 40 hours. Thats a Final Fantasy game! You would just then do it eight more times to catch up lol. But youre getting a full game each time.

I do agree with you in general though, it is a lot to get current, and something XIV will have to deal with if it wants to stay relevant. This is actually something that I think WoW has had huge success with lately, actually getting people into the new content more easily (you can apparently get to new content from scratch in 10 hours), and as a result theyve seen their best subscriber numbers in nearly a decade and people are actually happy about WoW again. Not a sentence I ever thought Id write!

Yeah I think whats actually happening is people realising that Sephiroth was always one of FFVIIs weaker parts!

And yeah even just ARR is a good time. Its not like, an all time classic or anything but its a good Final Fantasy game. Especially since they have condensed it recently.

A bit surprised I was one of the lowest for Phenomena, but good. Despite its flaws it was a fun weird movie.

Sticking with Christine next.

XVI reviewed as well as Remake!

The games are good again and have been for a while. Its just too late.

I will say theres a lot of discussion about the content of the games in threads about this, but it truly does not matter to their sales. You could predict this all from the moment Remake launched below XV. How good tye games are is unimportant. Which is a shame because Rebirth is one of the best RPGs ever made.

Also the main story of Rebirth is like 45 hours, I did nearly everything significant at just under 100. Its much less stretched out than Remake.

MacArrowny posted...

Just a simple fact that FF would be selling better if it were still turn-based. The turn-based mobile FFs are bigger than 15 and 16 for a reason.

Because theyre on mobile, which I know you know!

Final Fantasy had been heading down the action route for about 25 years before XVI, even when it was still nominally turn-based it was getting more and more actionised. And it had been straight action RPGs for a decade. It is mind blowing to me that this is just now something people are vocal about online, its both not important and also like, what took you so long?

I do agree that XV was the big well poisoner despite getting a slightly better reception than the XIII garbo, because that was the game that got a HUGE marketing push to new players and failed to bring them in. It had a broader reach and turned more people off, as well as being as said basically the last chance. It would have been a great game if theyd finished it (unlike XIII which was just conceptually bad), but they didnt finish it.

XVI is a good game. Flawed but better than the last more than a decade of FF before it and about on a par with Remake. It just came too late.

Dang three big surprises in a row, two huge ones.

I will say, An American Werewolf in London shows its age. The depiction of the North also is laughable. Though it didnt stop my mum from loving it!

Poltergeist though, thats a shock! That movie is just fun.

Sticking with Christine for now.

I will say about the PS5 install base in Japan: I do suspect that a lot of those really were bought for sale elsewhere because the hardware/software sales disconnect is pretty big over there, even accounting for digital.

Also yeah Mac is right, the tail here is weaker than Remake but that was already unusually frontloaded in a very frontloaded series. These are games that sell half their lifetime units week one, possibly more this time. To be totally frank its not unreasonable to say that for Rebirth, five million sales long term would be a result.

I will say though, if they had done a straight remake I dont think that does nearly as well. All depends on how well IX Remake does I guess.

Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

-Multiple FMV cutscenes.
-Use of voice acting in battles.
-A full length vocal song.
-A whole second campaign after the full-length RPG.

It also looks very pretty and sounds great. I have a hard time seeing anything else.

Younger audiences are also predominantly on PC and Switch (and mobile of course). Playstation and Xbox have had very little success with the younger generations recently. Which I think is largely down to both pricing those things too high and basically abandoning family friendly games.

To which point Disney absolutely made the right decision by mandating that Kingdom Hearts III be on Xbox. It actually did really well there!

The historical comparison is pretty ugly when you factor in the amount of growth that has happened in gaming since. Software sales are much higher than they used to be but FF has actually declined and quite heavily at that. When VII was new it was the second highest selling game on the Playstation at ten million copies, only narrowly behind Gran Turismo. Third of the whole generation behind that and Super Mario 64. Now we have Rebirth looking like its going to have to crawl past the original SNES release of VI which didnt even have a proper worldwide release. All when some franchises are selling 3x what they used to.

This isnt even a rumourzone, you can work it out through sales stats compared to Dragons Dogma 2. Looks like sales are in the ~2.5 million area.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this. First of all the exclusivity deal was a huge mistake. This should have been on everything and day and date on PC. Even Xbox would have helped, as much as people go but these games only sell a small fraction on Xbox, FFXV sold about 20% of its copies on Xbox and it would definitely be nice to have that extra. These last few games also are the first major Final Fantasies to not release on the leading system at the time (when XIII Wii sold more than PS3 and 360 total but fewer after XIIIs release). In Japan software sales are higher on PC than PS5 and even the install base seems to be catching up. Playstation is a smaller fraction of the market than its almost ever been, you cant support a huge release exclusively on there.

Also to that point, Remake was Epic Game Store exclusive which probably significantly affected its PC sales. Its silly but put it on Steam.

Thats not all though, there are games that have sold better only on PS5. I do think the ties to VII make it a more limited appeal as its not bringing in as many new players as an original title, you can also see this reflected in Remake being down from XV.

Most importantly though the Final Fantasy brand is just in a dire place. XVIs sales werent great either though they were better than this. It has been a long decline really going back over a decade (XV was a spike upwards thanks to PC+Xbox but not in Japan) and in that time it was just poorly received game after poorly received game. Now theyre releasing good games again but not enough people are playing them. What can I say, the series never recovered from XIII!

Its a shame because I would really love a similar project for VI over two games but I dont think that is going to happen now.

Theres nothing naive at looking at the arc of events and going huh things were improving until people deliberately stopped trying. Whats naive is pretending that nothing could have been done.

This was mentioned earlier but isnt it super cool how the Iran issue was basically solved then one guy cane in and tore that all up because he didnt like that Obama made fun of him once.

Sticking with Christine.

Fright Night has an 83% RT score from 63 reviews which is not exceptional but solid and better than some remaining movies. I was also a bit surprised it was getting predicted so soon.

The way I see it of the films remaining we can divide them into three groups:

The classics (The Shining, An American Werewolf in London, Poltergeist, The Thing, The Dead Zone, Gremlins, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Fly, Evil Dead II, Predator, Beetlejuice)

The acclaimed but potentially divisive due to their nature (Possession, Videodrome, Phenomena, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer)

The well received but not huge critical hits (The Changeling, Christine, Re-Animator, Fright Night, Hellraiser)

Looking at those groups, the classics should be safe. In the second group, Phenomena is both not as well received as the other three and just as weird, so I would say it is the most likely to go next. For the rest it seems like Christine, Re-Animator or Fright Night and of those Christine probably has the coolest general reception. So to me it should be either Phenomena or Christine next and I think Christine sounds right.

On Creepshow, if it wasnt obvious from my writeup:

Something to Tide You Over>The Crate>Theyre Creeping Up On You>Fathers Day>The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill

Great Leslie Nielsen performance here and not surprised to see him get mentioned a lot. I had a lot of fun with this one and felt it used the pulp comic aesthetic well. The first two shorts werent great but it did win me over with the rest.

Mario>Crono
Knuckles>Magus
Starcraft>Halo
Zelda>Mario

Zelda run definitely deserves something!

Panzer Dragoon Saga

Going to go for another film not guessed yet and say Christine.

Thats shocking. This was another one that surprised me with how much I liked it.

Going to stay picking Creepshow, seems like it would get lots of middle rankings.

8.5/10.

Yes its long, precisely one section too long, but everything else here is great. It feels like one of the biggest cases in terms of scope and scale, and presages the grand political stories the series would go on to tackle. There are moments in here that are among the very best in the franchise. Alba is a villain who many dislike but frankly that just shows that hes working. Theres even a Lethal Weapon 2 reference!

Also it gave us this:

https://youtu.be/gfENnDvb4UA?si=mgZL-2O-8hS9mPhh

Cannibal Holocaust is an interesting one since its REALLY nasty but also is actually about something. I dont think it would have gotten the love that Tetsuo did but also probably doesnt get the hate either.

Well as my bottom 8 have all gone meaning that just from whats been revealed so far you can tell I ranked Creepshow above Killer Klowns, I disagree. Also, Creepshow has genuinely creepy Leslie Neilsen.

I dont want to get into it due to list spoilers but Im looking forward to talking about Creepshow!

On which note Inviso we actually agree on quite a few things about Videodrome there but lets hold off until it drops!

Sticking with Creepshow.

Of course the moment I stop guessing Tetsuo it makes the list.

Yeah this is a film that is not bad by any means, but it made me feel physically ill. I get if you like that sort of thing.

That is time travel! We are all time travelling right now at a rate of one second per second but also he does travel back at the end.

NFUN posted...

so is almost every other movie

Dang you got me (you know what I mean)

The big thing about Interstellar is that its quite unique in that its a time travel movie mainly concerned with travelling FORWARD in time. It has a very notable take on time travel.

Back to the Future
Primer
Avengers: Endgame
Interstellar

I dont see whats so confusing about Prince of Darkness, its just bananas.

At the end of the day its all art. It doesnt really make sense to call art artsy as positively or negatively it implies that some films are not art or are more art than others. I mean when you look at The Fly its basically concerned with the same issues Videodrome is and making the same artistic statements. Without getting into spoilers my list has a very avant garde film near the top and another one near the bottom!

Yes, thats absolutely right, but they werent always low budget. Slasher franchises had a huge wave in the 80s then slumped until the late 90s and Scream. Then they slumped again after the wave of mostly bad remakes in the 2000s until a few years ago. Of course there were many more non-slashers and franchise films, and Im glad were only doing one per franchise here to make more space.

Now theyre bringing back Scary Movie, so weve come full circle.

Vagrant Story

It looks like a PS2 game and the cinematic cutscenes are ridiculously impressive. Also, I dont think it wins but check out a game called Mizzurna Falls. A 3D open world game with driveable vehicles years before GTA3.

Alan Wake
Shulk
Missile

Im going to change to Creepshow.

I gotta say, I was a bit surprised to see people guessing Fright Night and not the lesser received Tom Holland film. I agree with this placement and am glad others seem to share my issues with it!

8.5/10.

AAI haters gonna AAI hate, apparently.

To be clear I was guessing Tetsuo lol.