Simon Says wrote on Sep 4, 2019, 00:06:
Looks just like the original and worse than some mods... What am I missing?

Censoring of Siren, possibly Riona(either bad model rework or deliberate raising of top from original), translation is more politically correct. 4:3 ratio locked even on 16:9. FMV's are 15FPS, 30FPS in gameplay, no 8-direction control, lower quality skyboxes and worldmap, some battle scene maps are lower quality then the PC release from 2000. No chocobo world.

Verno wrote on Sep 4, 2019, 09:32:
Yeah no way I'm going to sit around drawing magic again for 10 hours haha.

The PC version of FF8 (so I'm assuming this remaster will have it as well) has a simple "Fill Magic" cheat, which gives you like 60% of all the spells at 100 each for every party member. It's a very nice timesaver.

Also, since you can set the cursor to memory and run it at x4 speed, even the big spells you want only take a few minutes each to load up.

It's aggravating because I just replayed FF8 like four months ago, and they announced this a few weeks after I'd finished. Heh. On the flipside, I don't really see what's remastered about it, other than that they made high res character models, which causes them to stand out horribly from the backgrounds. And the PC version of FF8 already had upscaled character models in it anyway (not to this level, but still substantially better than the originals.)

LOC wrote on Sep 4, 2019, 01:26:

Simon Says wrote on Sep 4, 2019, 00:06:
Looks just like the original and worse than some mods... What am I missing?

I'm not sure why they bothered with this to be honest. As I understand things, the code for the game was lost right after the original PC release back in 99 or whenever it was. So any improvements made to the game since then aka this version, is just upscaled or uprezzed models and some tweaks here and there to the visuals. They have no access to the backgrounds, lighting and shadow systems and whatever else might be under the hood. Unless they found someone to actually unpack the code or backwards engineer it (or hired someone good with the current codebase) its just another version of the near 20 year old PC version as it is.

This always gets brought up when discussions of "Why no FF8 remaster?" would crop up and nobody ever seems to be able to properly source the claim. It certainly would make sense, but I don't understand how remasters of every other title in the series have been made available, when the same practice of getting rid of all the original art masters and source code was also commonplace for them.

Oh well, in my head canon, the reason for it is that Square Enix was just trying to delete FF8 from existence and the collective memories of everyone. Joke's on them though: I'm one of the 17 people that liked it.

Yeah no way I'm going to sit around drawing magic again for 10 hours haha.

Actually going to get this. Big fan of Final Fantasy games and VIII is the only one from IV onward that I never beat. Sure there are PC mods of the original but this is a nicely packaged remaster so why not. Back when Square made RPGs I really wanted to play instead of hack-and-slash.

I'm hoping some of the fan-created mods (i.e. upscaled backgrounds) from the original PC port can be migrated to this version. It would be nice to play with a speed boost to mitigate the rather grindy magic draw system, and the revised character models do look nice. But yeah, this offering is slightly underwhelming.

FFVIII's score has a few of the best tracks in the entire franchise but the gameplay was below-average IMO. Not terrible, but not great, either. The Kid will probably make me play it eventually, though, as we've been going through the entire series (not in order).

Simon Says wrote on Sep 4, 2019, 00:06:
Looks just like the original and worse than some mods... What am I missing?

I'm not sure why they bothered with this to be honest. As I understand things, the code for the game was lost right after the original PC release back in 99 or whenever it was. So any improvements made to the game since then aka this version, is just upscaled or uprezzed models and some tweaks here and there to the visuals. They have no access to the backgrounds, lighting and shadow systems and whatever else might be under the hood. Unless they found someone to actually unpack the code or backwards engineer it (or hired someone good with the current codebase) its just another version of the near 20 year old PC version as it is.

Looks just like the original and worse than some mods... What am I missing?