Gaming The Final Fantasy Thread

What's your favourite single-player FF?

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Interesting then, because I'm sure that's PS3 footage. The demo for FFXIII will be released in Japan with the release of the Blu-Ray movie for FFVII Advent Children in April. They said that they wouldn't even start the XB360 port until they started on localising the PS3 game. Maybe they are more advanced than we thought, because I cannot see Microsoft allowing PS3 footage on XBox Live.
 
Do any of the newer ones after 7/8 compare to these two games?

I played 9 and thought it was a bit cack so didn't bother with any of the others.

I like games were you can do shit for ages (like sub games) that doesn't affect the main story. Like in 7 the fun land place (golden something?) with chocobos & in 8 the card game.
 
X is the best once since VII IMO. Could never really get with IX but I may give it another go soon.

There is also a great side quest in X, which will take up hours of your time. In fact there a quite a few. It's a brilliant game, really is.

Get it!
 
This is the first I've heard of Advent Children complete!
 
Am I right in assuming the FFXIII demo will be out in the Japanese PS store only? So everything will be in Japanese.

Any news on a worldwide demo?
 
From IGN:

Two Famitsu editors were given a chance to sample the demo in advance. Their play time lasted one hour and twenty minutes or so. They praised the speediness of the game and the near zero load times. The background music is "cool," said one editor, who also made note of the detail in the backgrounds which allows you to see characters fighting enemies far in the distance as you move about the fields of play. It would be a loss to not experience the demo, said another editor.
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WeasteDevil said:
It's the movie on Blu-ray mate.
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Sounds good. It's got its fair share of new scenes apparently, so I've got to take a look at that. Advent Children was fantastic, to be fair.

I only wish that they'd stop teasing us and re-release FF7!
 
KingEric7 said:
Sounds good. It's got its fair share of new scenes apparently, so I've got to take a look at that. Advent Children was fantastic, to be fair.

I only wish that they'd stop teasing us and re-release FF7!
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ditto
 
KingEric7 said:
Sounds good. It's got its fair share of new scenes apparently, so I've got to take a look at that. Advent Children was fantastic, to be fair.

I only wish that they'd stop teasing us and re-release FF7!
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The fact they have released FFVII on the Japanese PS Store shows that they are currently working on the game;)

Or perhaps I'm clutching at straws, but FFVII does need a re release. And the way I look at it, FFI, II, III, IV, V and VI have all been re-released, so it makes no sense not to re-release, arguably (In my view definitely) the greatest of them all.

Just imagine fighting the Weapons in HD:drool:
 
BlahRules said:
Has anyone played final fantasy crisis core?
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I have, its a good game but very, very repetitive. You can basically get through every fight in the game just mashing X. The cutscenes are awesome though, especially the ending, and Zack is a great character.

Speaking of a FFVII remake, there are mods out there for the PC version that make the game look like this:



Basically uses the models from the battles through-out the entire game so you don't get the little blocky characters. I'd pay stupid money to be able to play that on my PS3 or PSP. In fact I'd rather they released something like that than FFXIII.
 
esmufc09 said:
Or re-playing this in HD

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The things I would do to see that scene, amongst others, in HD....
Just imagine how good the Diamond Weapon-Midgar scene would be!

Ixion said:
I have, its a good game but very, very repetitive. You can basically get through every fight in the game just mashing X. The cutscenes are awesome though, especially the ending, and Zack is a great character.

Speaking of a FFVII remake, there are mods out there for the PC version that make the game look like this:



Basically uses the models from the battles through-out the entire game so you don't get the little blocky characters. I'd pay stupid money to be able to play that on my PS3 or PSP. In fact I'd rather they released something like that than FFXIII.
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That's a fantastic mod! Is that the Ultima edition that they've edited?
 
Cheers Weaste! I'll have to watch these immediately.
 
Apparently, that demo shows how the game was in December, and 50% of the battle system isn't there, and they are after a December 2009 release in Japan, with the US and EU versions up to 6-7 months later.
 
Can someone bring me up to speed. I used to play FF when I was a kid and now that I have an xbox I'm looking to get back into it. I'm not all that into online gaming - is there a good offline FF to play for xbox yet?
 
Apparently the demo takes up 5GB of space on the PS3 HDD, wonder how much the final install will be?

And also, just how many discs are going to be required for the 360 version?
 
That depends on what they are doing here, it's difficult to tell. They could for example use 1080p FMV for the cutscenes on PS3 and try to do them realtime on the 360. Takes a lot less space, but there will be a notable decrease in the quality. As I said, we just don't know yet. It's an early build, maybe it will not take any install on the PS3 in the final version. It's quite possible that they haven't even started with the 360 version yet.

They keep bragging that they are using 100% of the PS3s power, but I haven't seen it yet.
 
Interesting article....

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/final-fantasy-xiii-how-will-it-work-on-360-article

Final Fantasy XIII: How Will It Work on 360?

We’ve had the Final Fantasy XIII demo for quite some time now, and our detailed analysis of the code (and by extension our first look at Square-Enix’s Crystal Tools engine) is now complete. First impressions? While the engine itself doesn’t particularly excel from a technical standpoint, it’s still a great-looking game, with much of the credit reserved for the development team's many artists.

First things first. Despite some rumbling from certain quarters of the internet, the game engine is most definitely running at 720p resolution, with clean visuals brought out thanks to the inclusion of 2x multisampling anti-aliasing. The inclusion of MSAA is somewhat rare on PS3, but very common indeed on Xbox 360. What is clear, however, is that Square-Enix is facing key technical challenges, with variable and sometimes disappointing performance in the demo code. Translated interviews suggest these issues have already been overcome, but in the here and now, the apparently outdated demo is all we have to work with.

Square-Enix is clearly targeting 30FPS for the game, but it is falling some way short in certain scenes and that’s generally down to the bewildering range of transparent alpha effects employed in the combat. This generally doesn’t tend to be so much of an issue for 360 (thanks to the daughter module of 10MB eDRAM connected directly to the GPU), but it can hit PS3 hard. The solution is generally to employ a lower resolution buffer for these effects (as seen in Killzone 2 and Red Faction Guerilla to name two examples), but right now, Square-Enix is adopting a zero compromise approach to the visuals in terms of visual effects and that’s what’s causing the lag. Where the company is compromising is with certain effects such as the characters’ hair. You’ll see an almost interlacing-style effect – it’s called ‘alpha to coverage’ and it’s an immense fill-rate saver, albeit at the cost of visual quality.

But any way, onto the technical analysis. We have two videos for you to digest, available in both embedded article format and streaming HD. Let’s get going.

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The first video deals with a lot of what we’ve covered, along with further technical notes on how Square-Enix has achieved what they have with the demo.

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A second video, with more action from the demo. Towards the tail-end of the vid, we try to put the engine under as much stress as possible to see much the frame rate can be impacted. You’ll also note that some scenes with multiple characters on-screen can also make a real dent in performance. What is interesting about the characters themselves is that while their heads are very highly detailed, the bodies have far fewer polygons in comparison. What is also curious is just how much Square-Enix relies on 2D artwork for the backgrounds, with token 3D objects overlaid to give a greater idea of depth. Again, the fact that it works as well as it does is entirely down to the quality of the art.

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This final video is analysis-free and simply collates a range of the game’s pre-rendered video scenes. Final Fantasy XIII actually employs different types of cut-scene. There are the showpiece CGI scenes, which are rendered at full 1080p. Next up, there are what you might call engine replacement scenes. There’s nothing here that the engine itself couldn’t render, but it appears that Square-Enix has decided instead to off-load more complex scenes to pre-rendered video, allowing them to break out more crazy effects, higher detailed models and even 4x multisampling AA.

The way we see it, there’s both good news and bad news for owners of the Microsoft console. The good news is that from a purely technical perspective, looking at the game engine as it stands in the demo, there is literally nothing there that couldn’t be achieved on the Xbox 360, with perhaps one exception that we’ll get to later. To tell the truth, we’re not looking at an exceptionally advanced engine here – this is no Uncharted or Killzone. Instead, it’s all about the quality of the art assets, and we see nothing here to suggest that those assets won’t be identical on the Xbox 360 version.

In fact, the main cause of the frame drops in the PS3 demo (which Square has pledged to fix) shouldn’t cause many problems for the 360 at all. Square has clearly had issues handling transparent alpha textures – it’s the single biggest contributor to frame loss in the demo. And it’s the reason there’s a bizarre dithering around the characters’ hair. Due to the 10Mb of onboard eDRAM directly connected to the Xenos GPU, alpha blending has far less of an impact on performance with the 360. In some scenes we expect the 360 version to have the edge over the 'native' PS3 code.

While the eDRAM gives the 360 tangible advantages over the PS3 (it’s the reason why so many cross-format titles have anti-aliasing on 360 while it is omitted on the PS3 versions), 10Mb isn’t really enough for a full 720p framebuffer with the added overhead of anti-aliasing. Instead, developers switch memory in and out of the eDRAM in a process called ‘tiling’. This incurs an increased geometry cost for polygons that span more than one tile. In plain English? Realistically we expect the 360 version to match the 720p and 2x multisampling anti-aliasing of the PS3 game, but at a cost – the HDR lighting in the PS3 game will most likely be pared down from high range to medium range dynamic rendering.

Few games on 360 run with ‘proper’ HDR. Halo 3 is one of them, but this comes at a cost of a sub-HD resolution and no anti-aliasing. In the case of Final Fantasy XIII, the drop down to MDR simply makes more sense as opposed to savagely cutting down resolution or anti-aliasing. So aside from small changes to lighting, we expect the games to be totally like for like in the real time 3D sections, and due to that lightning fast eDRAM, there’s a strong chance that performance may actually be smoother. How small will the changes to lighting be? Considering we spent the best part of the day firing off 'is it proper HDR/isn’t it' emails to one-another, let’s just say that it’s highly unlikely any one will notice. A useful by-product of moving away from proper HDR on 360 will be that the alpha transparency issues the PS3 version has with the way it handles characters’ hair will most likely vanish.

As it happens, 3D performance is the least of our concerns. The one thing that surprised us about the demo more than anything else was its incredible reliance on streaming HD video from the optical disc. Even in a demo you can finish in 30 minutes, there’s a ton of it. Assuming the final PS3 game is on a single layer 25GB BD, conceivably the game would work as is across four DVDs on 360. But all bets are off should the game migrate onto a dual layer 50GB BD as has been suggested.

Lower quality video is of course an option, but the real question has to be why the FFXIII team is using video at all for most of this stuff. There’s really nothing here that couldn’t be done in real-time. The pre-rendered sequences are more effects heavy than in-game, with higher levels of detail, but Resident Evil 5 is a supreme example of how the carefully stage-managed cut-scenes allow for more expansive LODs and more ambitious effects – exactly what’s going on here. Our guess? Such scenes will indeed be real-time on Xbox 360, saving gigabytes of data over the PS3 version with only minimal amounts of difference in the quality of the visuals. Streaming in new game assets may well require additional loading time, however. Of course, it may well be the case that these videos are only there to supplement an incomplete engine, and that they will be replaced with real-time engine-generated scenes in the final PS3 game too. However, our bet is that Square-Enix will make use of the storage on offer and keep them as excellent quality video sequences.

The official line from Square-Enix is that work on the Xbox 360 game will only begin when the Japanese PS3 version of the game is complete later in the year. Our gut feeling is that this is not the case. While work on converting FFXIII itself may not be happening now, porting Crystal Tools engine that powers the game is another matter entirely (indeed, certain reports online confirm our thinking). If the core engine that runs FFXIII is being coded on 360 as we speak, as we suspect it is, you can bet that the team already have the methodology in place to convert the game, and will be addressing exactly the issues we’ve covered here.
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Hello Elvis. What's all this I hear about FFXIV?! :eek:
 
PS3 exclusive, looks like it is an MMORPG though, so not a main title in the series as such. Released in 2010. Trailer looked sexy though:D
 
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