[DJ]

Kotaku sure does hate the way it looks and is urging people to not buy it because Pixels. Also apparently there's spelling errors in the script and a hint system.

Meanwhile I'm all

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[DJ]

Eeeeew shitty iPhone resolution with black bars. I know Japan has a deep cultural boner for homogeneity and doesn't believe Android exists (just like they don't believe PC gaming is a thing people do or that peanut butter doesn't need to be composed almost entirely of sugar) but come on Square. :(



espier




Why is Terra's head a different shape in the battle screens than in the field.






huh.

It looks even more bizarre when you see the full-size resolution.

Man was Kotaku actually right about something? Shit.
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[DJ]

They've got a new engine they use for these remakes that only vaguely resembles the tile-based setups for the previous games, so resolutions look blurry sometimes, less blurry other times, and you get stuff like the Floating Magitek Pilots. It also makes a lot of the characters look very similar to each other (not that this hasn't always been the case).

I've played this a bit more and the one thing I will give it is that the in-game character sprites are far more consistent with what they're "supposed" to look like as evidenced by the character portraits. Which are also rather nice, coincidentally. You get a high-res closeup of all the characters when they're speaking. I actually like it quite a bit.

Also to be semi-fair, the game looks WAY worse in screenshots than it does in motion. When it's holding still and there's no music or SFX playing you have time to take in all the weird inconsistencies in the visual layout, but actually playing the thing tends to smudge those to the point where it isn't terribly bothersome unless you're the type of person who's really anal about minor graphical things (which is going to be like 99.9999% of the playerbase who buys this but whateverrrrrr) Also, the controls and battle menus have been entirely redone for mobile in a reasonably intelligent way, i.e. they don't just ape Gamepad controls. It makes the active time battle system a touch more engaging, which is nice.

Also Terra's hair is back to green, instead of blonde. Thank fucking god.
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[DJ]

[DJ]

Would it help if I just tl;dr it into "shut up benren"? That's what it started out as but I've had a long day. >:(

Eh nevermind I'll just slap him on ignore forever and save myself and everyone else the headache.
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[DJ]

So I played this a bit more today and it's actually growing on me quite a bit.

Worth noting that I'm playing on a Nexus 5, so it's not tablet-sized and the art looks a lot better when it's not blown up and has its warts staring you in the face. The touch interface actually works semi-decently (I like being able to tap on enemies to select them for attacks) and now that I've adjusted to how the thing looks it was pretty easy to slip back into the grove.

I have the original on my phone as well and actually had them both open simultaneously; I wasn't able to tell much of a difference between the audio. If anything the Android port sounded better.
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[DJ]

The did a pretty major patch for this that cleans it up graphically somewhat but it is not even close to a full overhaul. They realigned some of the UI elements so they make a little more sense now, at least, and took out some of the gummi-looking gradient.

Still waiting for them to just admit defeat and allow a full reversion to the SNES version, but I guess if I really want that I have an emulator on my phone so meh.
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