xenoblade remaster thread, sort of maybe

damn I forgot how hard yoko shimomura went on the title screen

I already did a whole-ass xenoblade thread on the original version and this game is like 90 hours long so I'm prob not actually gonna play all of it

wanted to at least check out the remaster before 3 comes out next month though

getting paid to play videogames

gotta admit the bionicles look pretty kickass in Full HD

IMAGINE HAVING A SECOND JOYSTICK

this post brought to you by the the wii only had one stick and you had to move the camera with the dpad while also holding a shift key on the nunchuk gang

oh wow the jump has like momentum and air control and stuff instead of being a Punt Shulk Sideways Like He Got Hit With A Cricket Bat button

for comparison:

huh they actually did a great job keeping the overall visual character of the original jump animation, while making the controls feel normal. neat

also complaining about the jump and camera controls after playing all three xenosagas is pretty funny. Turns out this was actually the first monolith game with jumping and a controllable camera lol

fun fact: xenoblade engine has screenspace shadows

that shadow cast by the hand isn't coming from the main shadowmap; it's a screenspace march. The actual shadowmap is MUCH lower resolution

As far as I can tell, it's only used on characters and nowhere else. Mainly it's how they get nice sharp hair shadows on faces

It's so well executed I didn't even notice it until I started xenoblade 2 for a third time because I am a giant dork

if you're looking for it you can see it break down occasionally

this shot where mythra's head casts a weird shadow on nia's hair is the first place I noticed it. The edge of her forehead blocks the march, but further left it passes the "thickness" cutoff and stops shadowing

also I THINK this is why morag's visor always has a thin bright strip below it?

all this screenspace stuff is running at half or quarter res or possibly lower, so a few rays miss the really sharp+thin boundary on the visor

it's possible I'm wrong about this obviously, but it has all the right artifacts

honestly this engine is incredibly cool; I love that they sacrifice resolution for RIDICULOUSLY elaborate shading, instead of prioritizing detail. Really fun choice for limited hardware

REMASTERED IN HIGH DEFINITION

so when I played the original xenoblade chronicles, I had not yet played xenogears or the xenosagas

BUT NOW I REALIZE:
dunban is An Uzuki

the bionicle's Literal Swamp Ass

BORN IN A WORLD OF STRIFE
AGAINST THE ODDS
WE CHOOSE TO FIGHT
But we mustn't be careless

xenoblade 2 is a better game but xenoblade 1 is a weirder and funnier game

this scene was so much funnier in 4:3

REMASTERED IN HIGH DEFINITION

I forgot this game just turns into like 30 hours of Padme Amidala's Imperial Senate Negotiations after the main plot is established

Fun bug: Cutscene camera does a telephoto zoom-out, but motion vectors don't account for fov changes, so TAA makes weird zoom ghosting

(posting screenshots bc twitter video compression would almost certainly hide it)

I'm actually curious about this, bc afaik to render motion vectors you need the full viewproj matrix from the previous frame, so it *should* handle fov changes

never done a complete TAA implementation though; maybe some edge cases I'm not thinking of here

could be the vectors themselves are correct, but reprojection goes badly because zooming makes the field divergent

man now that I have played xenogears: the whole prison island scene where Zanza gets introduced is just pure xenogears huh

by which I mean: utterly incomprehensible loredump where like 20 new characters are introduced and/or killed and they're all talking about Mysterious Portent and Wheels being Set In Motion and Shackles being Released and won't be explained until 60 hours after you've forgotten it

i love when jrpgs have giant gaping holes in the UI for the exact number of Characters Who Will Join The Party Later

lmaoo I completely forgot about this

there's a big deal cutscene where shulk heroically stops his friends from killing the villain, because Killing is Wrong, but obviously this is incredibly unfulfilling so then a building just falls on the guy and kills him anyway

hilarious every time a jrpg tries to pivot to Killing Is Wrong at the last second

what are you gonna do, call the cops to arrest the villain? it's anime pastoralism planet, there's no Proper Authority here dude. the guy murdered like 200 people it's okay to hit him with a sword

top 10 robotgirl design tbh

what if aigis personathree was fuckin ripped as hell

melia fuckin died

cute robot

when u need a Piezoelectric Unit

finally

the human military is called the defense force and every single time they say it my brain goes "Defence forece"

hot take from the year 2010: giving every high-level enemy Spike damage is bullshit

I'm not the first person to make jokes conflating xenoblade and bionicle but it's wild how much these guys genuinely look like MOCs made out of rahkshi and bohrok parts

KANOHI BOY

xenoblade's plot is pretty cool/interesting but also I forgot literally every part of it since the last time I played this

it's like..... a series of very Cool Events that happen, but with no connecting theme or ideas to tie them together

in retrospect I think this is why I forgot all of it

every Cool Event just kind of replaces everything that came before it. Stuff that happened in the first 50 hours has no real bearing on stuff that happens in the last 10

also in fairness I barely remember the plot of xenoblade 2 either, despite playing it 2.5 times and it being one of my all-time favorite games

2's plot just kind of doesn't matter much though; the good/memorable stuff is the growing relationships between the major characters

haha I forgot the last chapter of this game is just 70 consecutive Evil Guys Reveal Evil Plans That They Have Been Planning All Along

having just played xenosaga I now recognize this as being Very Xenosaga

xenosaga of course had six games' worth of Evil Plans and then they had to cut it down to three games and ended up just dropping like 30 different Evil Guy Plot Threads on the floor in order to finish it

xenoblade is only one game so they just all land simultaneously at hour 60

it's pretty fun looking at xenogears -> saga -> blade in order, bc you get to basically watch a studio of really talented but overly-ambitious devs slowly figure out how to scope a project

it took 12 years but they finally got it

REMASTERED IN HIGH DEFINITION

save-scumming the gem crafting RNG is actually canon you just gotta yell WE CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE in a british accent every time you reload

anyway I wasn't actually planning to replay the entire game but tbh it was fun enough that I just kinda kept going

the remake's QoL changes smoothed out a lot of frustrations, and a lot of the earlier plot stuff (hilariously) works better when you already know where it's going

[SIGNIFICANT XENOBLADE SPOILER WARNING]

I will never stop being mad that they turned the robot girl back into a human. You transcended death itself and got a kickass immortal mecha body and then you're like "actually I would prefer having diseases and joint pain" ???

(I don't think it was an intentional theme but xenoblade 2 is way cooler about body stuff. ppl constantly doing weird soul surgeries and merging personalities and cohabiting bodies and upgrading robot girls, and it's all treated as Super Rad as long as it's done consensually)

anyway onwards to Xenoblade Chronicles International Zodiac Job System Final Mission+

no for real though how did Future Connected ever get translated

it's a weird side game released as part of a remaster that sort of ties into an unannounced sequel

PS2 JRPGs all have these and it's very important to the aesthetic that AMERICANS CANNOT PLAY THEM

this is like the Xenosaga Freaks VN or the FFX Eternal Calm DVD; you're supposed to have to like find an iso and a fan translation hack if you're lucky or more likely read some nerd's partially-complete plot summary from an archive dot org backup of a geocities page or something

remember when nier automata hadn't come out yet but people knew about emil fighting aliens because one guy who could read japanese didn't actually TRANSLATE the books but had sort of livetweeted a summary of the contents into a google doc

wait this is final fantasy vii

haha this rules

they took the prog + jazz influences from xenoblade 2 and torna and just went full japanese math rock

basically sounds like a mouse on the keys or jizue track

HOERS

the plot of Future Connected sure does assume you completed several extremely missable side quests that only become available like 20 minutes before the final boss of the main game huh

lol they removed the option to change party members before boss fights, for some reason

hope you had a healer in your party before you walked across the cutscene trigger

the problem with xenoblade 1's combat system is it's only fun if your party is 3 DPS and you control one of the interesting ones

but then boss fights REQUIRE the mmo-ass Tank Heal DPS triangle, and you can't play the fun characters and you take 4x longer to kill anything

if I were designing a combat system I would simply make the most optimal strategy also be the most fun one

finished Future Connected

it's... pretty bland tbh

works okay as a sort of epilogue for melia's character arc, but they had to like invent a new monster/villain to give you something to fight and none of it holds together in a way that makes any sense or feels compelling :/

also Torna maybe set expectations impossibly high lol

torna like, fully re-tuned 2's combat system to make it super fast and still have a JRPG-style power curve in like a 20-hour game

future connected is more like... basically some dlc quests with no real design changes