12th July 2013, 10:35 PM
Amazing things happened.
Firstly, I won a DSi XL in some sort of contest. Very nice! Sure, no 3DS XL, but it does a great job at playing DS games, and Chrono Trigger DS in particular looks amazing on it. Also, those speakers are insane! Anyway, worked well, registered it on Nintendo Fun Club and got some coins, and already linked the store on it to my Nintendo Club account as well.
Secondly, Square-Enix re-released the PC version of Final Fantasy VII recently. Even at $10 I didn't think it worth it, but a few days ago a site was having a sale so I went ahead and got it for about $2. The game is slightly enhanced from the first PC release, in that it has bug fixes to work on modern operating systems and hardware. Also, they added achievements (nothing for raising a golden chocobo in there though) and cloud saving. Yes... Final Fantasy VII... has "Cloud saving". The puns just write themselves.
Anyway, those are the only things they changed. While the game supports controllers, without a custom driver you can't assign "trigger style" shoulder buttons or modern d-pads as buttons in it because it supports an older standard for how controllers are set up. Fortunately, custom drivers work just fine for exactly this purpose.
The music has gotten a LOT of complaints, and I understand why. The game still uses MIDI. Now, that's not too big a problem, as the Playstation version ALSO used MIDI. The problem is how MIDI is implemented on most modern PCs. Most people out there have their PC set up to use either a crappy Sound Blaster 16 clone of a sound card or have their OS to use software based MIDI instead of their sound card's MIDI. If they have both, there's no salvation. Here's the deal, while Sound Blaster 16 was the most sold sound card, it never implemented proper MIDI support. It's own midi sounded terrible, and was done as a cost saving measure, Creative simply trying to provide a sound card that was affordable, so quality was sacrificed for cost. When Microsoft decided to implement a software based MIDI rendering solution, they used a cheap one acquired from Roland sound with quality pretty much identical to the old Sound Blaster 16. Microsoft has not updated this software midi renderer since 1998. Yes, even Windows 8 uses this massively outdated code base for MIDI. It sounds awful. However, many modern dedicated sound cards do MUCH better midi than that. If you have Windows Vista or above though, this is not enough. The driver installer can't manually set the default midi device, and Microsoft removed the option to do so manually from the sound settings control panel. There ARE solutions available to change this setting with third party apps though. They only need to be run once and don't need to start up every time windows starts, they're just altering a windows setting one time, and they're done. However, someone needs to be aware these exist in the first place. So, MOST people playing FF7 are hearing the midi rendered with that crappy renderer, and yes, it sounds terrible. I myself didn't run into that problem and my FF7 is using my own sound card for midi instead of the software solution. Mine sounds almost identical to the original Playstation game. (Not the same, the Playstation uses a nonstandard implementation of MIDI, so a few things are different.)
Anyway, here's the real bonus to getting the PC version, the mods! The game is massively dated today, but a modding community has sprung up to give new life. There are mods to replace all the music with solid recordings of the original sound track, replace some of the FMVs with Square Enix's various updated renderings of FF7 scenes, update the character models to amazing quality like they just stepped out of one of the Dissidia games, completely update the textures in all the battle scenes, and even sharpen and update the prerendered backgrounds. There's also a handful of bug fixes and so on.
However, all of that aside, here's what really gets me excited. There's a massive project underway to retranslate the ENTIRE game. Simply put, the original translation of FF7, the one we all fell in love with at the time, was AWFUL. I'm sure we all remember reading some rather odd and out of place dialog, or being confused by dialog that seemed to be saying the opposite of what was going on. Play the game again today, and you'll see that it's far worse than you may remember. This translation is probably second only to the original translation of FFIV in terribleness. When Final Fantasy 8 came along a few years later, Square had finally gotten their translating act together and had a solid system in place. FF8 and onward's translations were extremely well done. FF7's however was rushed and ugly, not even as good as the first translation of Chrono Trigger or FF6. In fact, since then every single one of the early Final Fantasy games has seen far higher quality retranslations done, from FF1 -FF6 and including Tactics (Tactics, oddly enough, still had a better original translation than FF7 did). This leaves FF7, far and away the most popular of the Final Fantasy games (though not my personal favorite), as being the odd duck of having the worst translation in the series, if you are only counting the most current official translations. To be blunt, the game NEEDS to be translated again. This new release does NOT update the translation at all. Cloud still shouts at Barret to "Attack it while its tail is up, it will counter attack!" (obviously, if the enemy is going to counter attack, the correct advice is meant to be "DON'T attack it while its tail is up, OR it will counter attack!", and yes, there are many more examples of exactly this sort of backwards translation throughout the game, and for dialog more important to the plot besides).
There's also the standard "now the world map looks like a piece of tattered old parchment!" graphics mod that EVERY SINGLE GAME with a big modding community gets at some point. It looks great, but it is really out of place in the world of FF7. I would instead suggest a mass printed Shin-ra produced glossy world map, dirty with some tears, cigarette burns, and a coffee ring stain on it, that would fit the world better.
So the various graphics, audio, and gameplay updates are great and all, but all in all the retranslation ALONE makes replaying the game on the PC worth it. (Sadly, there are a few misguided "purists" out there who are actually offended at the idea of rewriting the script, so attached are they to the original that even the objectively poorly translated and written original script has become sacred, and the stuff saying exactly the opposite of what the Japanese script says? They actually suggest that was INTENTIONAL, and the story is OFFICIALLY supposed to have those changes in the US! I really have no idea how to respond to that.)
Firstly, I won a DSi XL in some sort of contest. Very nice! Sure, no 3DS XL, but it does a great job at playing DS games, and Chrono Trigger DS in particular looks amazing on it. Also, those speakers are insane! Anyway, worked well, registered it on Nintendo Fun Club and got some coins, and already linked the store on it to my Nintendo Club account as well.
Secondly, Square-Enix re-released the PC version of Final Fantasy VII recently. Even at $10 I didn't think it worth it, but a few days ago a site was having a sale so I went ahead and got it for about $2. The game is slightly enhanced from the first PC release, in that it has bug fixes to work on modern operating systems and hardware. Also, they added achievements (nothing for raising a golden chocobo in there though) and cloud saving. Yes... Final Fantasy VII... has "Cloud saving". The puns just write themselves.
Anyway, those are the only things they changed. While the game supports controllers, without a custom driver you can't assign "trigger style" shoulder buttons or modern d-pads as buttons in it because it supports an older standard for how controllers are set up. Fortunately, custom drivers work just fine for exactly this purpose.
The music has gotten a LOT of complaints, and I understand why. The game still uses MIDI. Now, that's not too big a problem, as the Playstation version ALSO used MIDI. The problem is how MIDI is implemented on most modern PCs. Most people out there have their PC set up to use either a crappy Sound Blaster 16 clone of a sound card or have their OS to use software based MIDI instead of their sound card's MIDI. If they have both, there's no salvation. Here's the deal, while Sound Blaster 16 was the most sold sound card, it never implemented proper MIDI support. It's own midi sounded terrible, and was done as a cost saving measure, Creative simply trying to provide a sound card that was affordable, so quality was sacrificed for cost. When Microsoft decided to implement a software based MIDI rendering solution, they used a cheap one acquired from Roland sound with quality pretty much identical to the old Sound Blaster 16. Microsoft has not updated this software midi renderer since 1998. Yes, even Windows 8 uses this massively outdated code base for MIDI. It sounds awful. However, many modern dedicated sound cards do MUCH better midi than that. If you have Windows Vista or above though, this is not enough. The driver installer can't manually set the default midi device, and Microsoft removed the option to do so manually from the sound settings control panel. There ARE solutions available to change this setting with third party apps though. They only need to be run once and don't need to start up every time windows starts, they're just altering a windows setting one time, and they're done. However, someone needs to be aware these exist in the first place. So, MOST people playing FF7 are hearing the midi rendered with that crappy renderer, and yes, it sounds terrible. I myself didn't run into that problem and my FF7 is using my own sound card for midi instead of the software solution. Mine sounds almost identical to the original Playstation game. (Not the same, the Playstation uses a nonstandard implementation of MIDI, so a few things are different.)
Anyway, here's the real bonus to getting the PC version, the mods! The game is massively dated today, but a modding community has sprung up to give new life. There are mods to replace all the music with solid recordings of the original sound track, replace some of the FMVs with Square Enix's various updated renderings of FF7 scenes, update the character models to amazing quality like they just stepped out of one of the Dissidia games, completely update the textures in all the battle scenes, and even sharpen and update the prerendered backgrounds. There's also a handful of bug fixes and so on.
However, all of that aside, here's what really gets me excited. There's a massive project underway to retranslate the ENTIRE game. Simply put, the original translation of FF7, the one we all fell in love with at the time, was AWFUL. I'm sure we all remember reading some rather odd and out of place dialog, or being confused by dialog that seemed to be saying the opposite of what was going on. Play the game again today, and you'll see that it's far worse than you may remember. This translation is probably second only to the original translation of FFIV in terribleness. When Final Fantasy 8 came along a few years later, Square had finally gotten their translating act together and had a solid system in place. FF8 and onward's translations were extremely well done. FF7's however was rushed and ugly, not even as good as the first translation of Chrono Trigger or FF6. In fact, since then every single one of the early Final Fantasy games has seen far higher quality retranslations done, from FF1 -FF6 and including Tactics (Tactics, oddly enough, still had a better original translation than FF7 did). This leaves FF7, far and away the most popular of the Final Fantasy games (though not my personal favorite), as being the odd duck of having the worst translation in the series, if you are only counting the most current official translations. To be blunt, the game NEEDS to be translated again. This new release does NOT update the translation at all. Cloud still shouts at Barret to "Attack it while its tail is up, it will counter attack!" (obviously, if the enemy is going to counter attack, the correct advice is meant to be "DON'T attack it while its tail is up, OR it will counter attack!", and yes, there are many more examples of exactly this sort of backwards translation throughout the game, and for dialog more important to the plot besides).
There's also the standard "now the world map looks like a piece of tattered old parchment!" graphics mod that EVERY SINGLE GAME with a big modding community gets at some point. It looks great, but it is really out of place in the world of FF7. I would instead suggest a mass printed Shin-ra produced glossy world map, dirty with some tears, cigarette burns, and a coffee ring stain on it, that would fit the world better.
So the various graphics, audio, and gameplay updates are great and all, but all in all the retranslation ALONE makes replaying the game on the PC worth it. (Sadly, there are a few misguided "purists" out there who are actually offended at the idea of rewriting the script, so attached are they to the original that even the objectively poorly translated and written original script has become sacred, and the stuff saying exactly the opposite of what the Japanese script says? They actually suggest that was INTENTIONAL, and the story is OFFICIALLY supposed to have those changes in the US! I really have no idea how to respond to that.)
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)