The only point in the numbered series where I’d say you should play a different one first is IX, which plays on nostalgia for the aesthetics and tropes of I, III, and V as a part of the cozy vibe it’s going for with its setting. And note that VII Remake is not actually a remake of VII and thus not a part of the numbered series, being best enjoyed by people already familiar with VII.
Beyond those stipulations, play whatever looks coolest.
I mean how bad is it really to use a little filler?
Because you have to have specific knowledge about how AI works to know this is a bad idea. If you don’t have specific knowledge about it, it just sounds futuristic because AI is like a Star Trek thing.
This current AI craze is largely as big a deal as it is because so few people, including the people using it, have any idea what it is. A cousin of mine works for a guy who asked an AI about a problem and it cited an article about how to fix whatever the problem was, I forgot. He asks my cousin to implement the solution proposed in that article. My cousin searches for it and discovers article doesn’t actually exist, so he says that. And after many rounds of back and forth, of the boss saying “this is the name of the article, this is who wrote it” and my cousin saying “that isn’t a real thing and that author did write about some related topics but there’s no actionable information there”, the boss becomes convinced that this is a John Henry situation where my cousin is trying to make himself look more capable than the AI that he feels threatened by and the argument ends with a shrug and an “Okay, then if it’s so important to you then we can do something else even though this totally would have worked.”
There really needs to be large-scale education on what language models are actually doing to prevent people from using them for the wrong purposes.
When I played Final Fantasy VII as a child and teenager, I gave zero thought at all to strategic character building and found the late game really unreasonably hard. Basically, I would equip everyone with the weapons and armor with the biggest numbers so long as they weren’t the ones with minimal or no materia slots and then I would distribute materia based purely on vibes. Cloud has spiky yellow hair so he gets Lightning and Ramuh, and his sword is big so he gets Deathblow. Barret is a big muscly rage man so he gets earth/fire magic/summons. Yuffie’s portrait reminds me of Lara Croft so she gets the sunglasses in her accessory slot. Why would I bother wasting anybody’s materia slot on something like Barrier when I could instead use it for something cool like exploding people? That kinda thing.
I spent my life trying the game again every year or two, starting from the beginning again and playing like an idiot and never being able to beat it and giving up. Thinking it was really cool and wanting to come back to it largely because I liked the aesthetics. And I kept on ignoring all the things I had previously ignored before because “I’ve played this game before, I know how it works.” I made little steps forward throughout those years as I became more familiar with the genre from other games, like reading the descriptions on accessories and keeping a rotating party of my lowest-level characters but it wasn’t until depressingly far into my twenties that I internalized the fact that assigning materia affects your character stats and that’s when all the systems fell fully into place: you’re supposed to use materia and equipment to form your party into a balanced trio of RPG character classes.
Some combinations will form a wizard, some will form a fighter, some will form a cleric. Any combat function you can think of, even a much more specific one than the cliches I listed, there’s a combination of equipment and materia that will make a character into that. A balanced trio of specialists will get you much better results than three idiots who suck at everything.
I’ve got a 1080p monitor and a 4k TV in my house and have used my computer plugged into each. The TV is also better for a lot of non-resolution reasons so sometimes I’ll want to move it there for those factors but in terms of displaying the 4k visuals, I honestly don’t think it makes a difference for me at all. Rendering the image at 4k internally has all sorts of benefits for the graphics but displaying that internally 4k image on the 1080 monitor retains all those benefits so I don’t see any point in buying a higher-definition monitor.
But the thing is, I never even wanted 4k on the TV at all. I didn’t want it to be smart, either. I just wanted good-looking colors and it became impossible to find a TV that put the effort into what I cared about that didn’t come with the other features. So I suspect that when I do ever replace my monitor, it’s probably also going to strong-arm me into having a higher resolution that I don’t actually want. And I can’t help but assume this is a big portion of what’s leading to these survey results.
This sounds like the sort of thing that’s probably apocryphal but it’s a thing I was taught in Spanish class that’s certainly been linting up my brain ever since:
The avocado got its name for an indigenous word for testicle, referring not only to its shape but also its texture; if you’ve got any testicles handy, their degree of softness is what a ripe avocado should feel like.
It’s a part of my most hated trend in the video game industry: video games that are ashamed to be video games so they try to fool you into thinking they’re a more “respectable” art form like TV shows or movies. The mainstream hype we’re seeing is probably that it’s popular with Naughty Dog fans rather than Final Fantasy fans.
I wish these types of games would at least consistently ape more interesting TV shows and movies. Alan Wake seems like the only one that didn’t aspire to be something forgettable. I don’t even like Twin Peaks but at least it’s an identity.
This game is okay enough that I’m probably going to eventually finish it but I don’t think I’d ever feel tempted to start it again even if somehow every other option available to me were objectively worse because at least some of what’s left would be memorable enough to care about.
The graphics are apparently deceptively good. Not immediately jaw-dropping for us lay people like the series is known for but more of a technical quality. I thought it was underwhelming on first glance but I admit I enjoy the things that video brings up now that I’ve started paying attention to them.