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Final Fantasy VII Remake PS+ (and future PC?) Newcomer Tips/Tutorials Thread
- Thread starter Kuro
- Start date
Nice. Thanks for the detailed response. I'm looking forward to playing this on hard.
I really want to give this a try as soon as it hits PC.
Feels like we've been waiting forever lol.
Feels like we've been waiting forever lol.
I thought you had to beat the game to unlock hard mode. Unless they changed it.
Honestly I thought it was pretty tough at times on normal. I love RTwP so that might be why I enjoyed the combat so much.
OP
OP
Its very stop and start. Now you can play it as more an action game akin to Kingdom Hearts by utilizing the shortcut buttons but there aren't enough buttons for every situation so you might have to pop into the command menu occasionally anyways.
There's also character switching that you might have to get used to but you won't have to pause and issue commands to them by doing so. Only issue is its harder to juggle cast time this way because when you cast a spell, an enemy might aggro you if you don't switch characters fast enough.
Yeah that's what I hate about RtWP. Worst of both worlds :P wonder if I should just put it on easy and breeze through for the story or w/e
Omfg I beat the game last month and never knew you could pull enemy info up with the TouchPad. I had to keep scanning lol
Gonna chime in with some tips of my own for Hard Mode:
- Don't waste your gil on HP / MP up materia in your first run. You'll get just enough goung through the game and you won't need them (if at all) until a Hard Mode playthrough and only if you wan't to give yourself some more breathing room.
- L E V E L T H E C H A K R A M A T E R I A. Seriously, HM doesn't allow using items, so this is a must.
- Also, level the elemental materia that adds elemental damage to your attacks. See the last bullet for more.
- Use your MP sparringly as recovering it proves a challenge in HM.
- Make use of enemy aggro in your favor. Enemies are going to target whoever you are controlling and will leave the other party members relatively in peace. For example, you can lure enemies away from Barret or Aerith far enough to swap comfortably back to them and attack from afar / cast your skills. As soon as they make their approach against your ranged party member, switch back to the furthest character away from them to lure them back away.
- If you switch Cloud's Operator to Punisher Mode right as an atack is about to land, you will get a stronger counterattack (sometimes with knockback). Learn to time this properly as it will come in really handy in HM.
- Learn your team's synergies.
- Cloud is great for dealing large ammounts of physical damage, counterattack and take some damage.
- Barret is capable of taking LARGE amounts of damage, deal good ranged damage and can be your backup / panic healer.
- Tifa can raise the stagger meter like nobody else and also kick some major ass if you learn all her combos.
- Aerith can set several area of effect abilities that will enhance the team's magical / skill prowess so long as they're within its confines, set magic shields to protect who stands behind from projectiles and is also a good multi-target ranged damage dealer.
- Finally, learn your boss battles on your first run to make your HM one much easier. Try to remember each boss' elemental weakness (if any) and set that materia the boss is weak to linked to the elemental materia mentioned in bullet #3.
Fantastic OP! So many great tips, well done.
The main thing that made FF7R's combat click for me was realizing you shouldn't throw out random abilities to do damage, like Cloud's Braver or Triple Slash, unless you're against super weak mobs or you enjoy beating enemies to death the slow way. Most of your damage dealing will happen on staggered enemies, because in that state they take at least 160% damage and they're stunned.
This right here is the key: Combat is all about building ATB and spending it to Pressure and Stagger enemies. Every attack and ability has one or more roles in this combat flow:
1) Build ATB with normal attacks, triangle button attacks, and abilities with "Focused" in their name.
2) Fill the enemy's stagger gauge, or push them toward Pressured status so they stagger faster, with command abilities.
3) The enemy is staggered! Now boost that damage multiplier and use damage dealing abilities.
Those are the damage dealing essentials. You can take the above and run, and you'll be miles ahead of people who mash mindlessly and wonder why the game's combat system sucks so bad.
I have some more tips that might have been covered elsewhere:
- Keep your L1 hotkeys up to date! Go into the Battle Settings menu and and set them up. Each character has at least four abilities that you should be using often, such a pressuring ability, a staggering ability, and a buff. In Cloud's case, it's very convenient to have Disorder and his command counter (from a later weapon) mapped to a shortcut, because you'll probably want to use those as part of your real-time combat flow.
Be advised that anything at the top of a character's ability menu can be accessed super fast by double tapping X, so don't waste a slot on Tifa's Unbridled Strength.
- Tifa's is the damage multiplier specialist, with her triangle attacks and True Strike giving huge increases on staggered enemies. One series I use all the time is Unbridled Strength x2 (lets Tifa use more powerful triangle attacks) -> STAGGER THE ENEMY -> build 1 ATB bar with a few normal attacks -> True Strike (+30% damage multiplier) -> triangle attack X3 (cycles through each triangle attack, building the multiplier and her ATB) -> True Strike.
From there the enemy's damage multiplier will be somewhere around 250%, and you can come in with other party members' damage dealing abilities to melt the enemy's health bar. If you're fast, you can can use the shoulder buttons to queue up teammates' abilities that a bit of startup time, before going nuts with Tifa so everything hits in rapid succession. Aerith's doublecast can be devastating in this situation.
- It's very important to read each ability's description (hover over it in the combat menu) because you'll usually learn about the ability's combat role and special effects, such as Tifa's Starshower strengthening her next ability, or Cloud's Disorder being an incredibly effective pressuring tool.
- I often start battles with Barrett's triangle attack when he's available, since he starts with a free charge. It does a good chunk of damage and builds the enemy's stagger bar.
- Don't let ATB charges go unused, unless you're about to stagger an enemy or you know that you'll need an item or spell soon. You might as well throw out a staggering/pressuring/support ability if you can, unless you have a specific strategy in mind.
The main thing that made FF7R's combat click for me was realizing you shouldn't throw out random abilities to do damage, like Cloud's Braver or Triple Slash, unless you're against super weak mobs or you enjoy beating enemies to death the slow way. Most of your damage dealing will happen on staggered enemies, because in that state they take at least 160% damage and they're stunned.
This right here is the key: Combat is all about building ATB and spending it to Pressure and Stagger enemies. Every attack and ability has one or more roles in this combat flow:
1) Build ATB with normal attacks, triangle button attacks, and abilities with "Focused" in their name.
2) Fill the enemy's stagger gauge, or push them toward Pressured status so they stagger faster, with command abilities.
3) The enemy is staggered! Now boost that damage multiplier and use damage dealing abilities.
Those are the damage dealing essentials. You can take the above and run, and you'll be miles ahead of people who mash mindlessly and wonder why the game's combat system sucks so bad.
I have some more tips that might have been covered elsewhere:
- Keep your L1 hotkeys up to date! Go into the Battle Settings menu and and set them up. Each character has at least four abilities that you should be using often, such a pressuring ability, a staggering ability, and a buff. In Cloud's case, it's very convenient to have Disorder and his command counter (from a later weapon) mapped to a shortcut, because you'll probably want to use those as part of your real-time combat flow.
Be advised that anything at the top of a character's ability menu can be accessed super fast by double tapping X, so don't waste a slot on Tifa's Unbridled Strength.
- Tifa's is the damage multiplier specialist, with her triangle attacks and True Strike giving huge increases on staggered enemies. One series I use all the time is Unbridled Strength x2 (lets Tifa use more powerful triangle attacks) -> STAGGER THE ENEMY -> build 1 ATB bar with a few normal attacks -> True Strike (+30% damage multiplier) -> triangle attack X3 (cycles through each triangle attack, building the multiplier and her ATB) -> True Strike.
From there the enemy's damage multiplier will be somewhere around 250%, and you can come in with other party members' damage dealing abilities to melt the enemy's health bar. If you're fast, you can can use the shoulder buttons to queue up teammates' abilities that a bit of startup time, before going nuts with Tifa so everything hits in rapid succession. Aerith's doublecast can be devastating in this situation.
- It's very important to read each ability's description (hover over it in the combat menu) because you'll usually learn about the ability's combat role and special effects, such as Tifa's Starshower strengthening her next ability, or Cloud's Disorder being an incredibly effective pressuring tool.
- I often start battles with Barrett's triangle attack when he's available, since he starts with a free charge. It does a good chunk of damage and builds the enemy's stagger bar.
- Don't let ATB charges go unused, unless you're about to stagger an enemy or you know that you'll need an item or spell soon. You might as well throw out a staggering/pressuring/support ability if you can, unless you have a specific strategy in mind.
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Hard mode is mandatory as new game +, as you need all of your equipment and materia.
Just go with normal.
Stop magic
(edit) already mentioned in OP
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Yeah, this is really cool. It's the key to absolutely clobbering (summon spoiler) Shiva with fire magic. RIP queen.
All you really need to know from the start is:
- Blocking works better than dodging.
- Enemies target whoever you're controlling. AI-controlled allies are awesome at defense. Switch away from party members that are taking lots of damage or using an ability with long windup.
- Normal attacks are for building your ATB bar, not doing damage. ATB charges let you perform actions like attacking with special abilities or using items.
- Stagger enemies with lots of "Focused" abilities before you worry about inflicting damage.
Relax and have fun! You can pick up on the finer points of combat as you play. This thread has too much info to absorb in one go, so it's probably best to return here once you've got a handle on the basic feel of the game and you'd like to know more about the gameplay.
This reminds me, MP Absorb + Elemental, and another Magnifiy + Same elemental = blow through trash mobs on any level without spending MP. Use on a Cloud magic build or Aerith. Pair the magnifiy with your highest leveled materia of that type, don't cast the most expensive. With a couple of Magic ups you'll just wipe groups without using the most expensive spell anyways.
Change it up at the boss of the chapter.
I would suggest jumping in and getting a feel for it yourself and when you are beginning to wrap your head around it, refer to the OP for tips
That's typically used with Tifa to build up the stagger multiplier to an insane number and unloading dolphin kicks and other team members multi hit attacks.
Thank you for this OP. I'm about to start soon and nothing you said makes a lick of sense lol (seems super complicated), but I know it will once I start playing!
you can always switch the language to jpn. I don't know why you'd play a jrpg and skip the story and cutscenes
The rest of the game is fun and the narrative and characters don't really interest me enough to endure the cutscenes.
I skip cutscenes in most games if the narrative doesn't hook me in the first few hours so it's NBD.
Because people care more about gameplay than story. Pretty simple, really.
Opinions and all, but I really don't understand this. The voice acting in VIIR is fantastic and gets better and better as the game goes on, especially in the genre of JRPG's. Final Fantasy XII is probably the only one I'd put above it.
But as already said, what's the point in even playing the game if you're going to skip the story and cutscenes? It's one of the major parts of Final Fantasy VII that makes it so loved. If the combat is enough for you on its own, that's cool I guess. Just very confusing to me.
I wouldn't be playing this if the combat wasn't fun. If the combat was turnbased like it was in the ps1 game, I wouldn't even have claimed it on PS+.
Even if I didn't find the voice acting and dialogue atrocious, if I was interested in the narrative but the gameplay sucked I'd just watch the cutscenes on youtube.
You're missing out on HALF of the game. The combat is VIIR is fantastic and I guess because it's free right now on Plus that can be enough for some. Just sad to me.
If I'm not enjoying that half of the game, I'm not missing out 🤷‍♂️
Not missing out on anything if I don't enjoy that part.
I didn't personally skip anything in FF7Re, but I'm playing BD2 and couldn't care less about the story and am skipping cutscenes when they go on too long (which is almost all of them). I'm loving the game because of the art, locales, and battle system, just like every other game in the franchise.
Ya'll really need to get over how other people enjoy games. I don't give a fuck about story in 99% of games and my favorite genre is JRPGs. I'm skipping cutscenes the second it gets boring or voice acting annoys me. Not missing out on anything because games are meant to be enjoyable and I'm skipping the parts that aren't.
I didn't say I give a fuck about how you or anyone else plays game. If you're having fun playing it, awesome. Do you. I simply said I found it confusing and I still do.
If you find that the voices or dialogues are very "anime" then I remind you that it is a JRPG (Japanese role-playing game) and its base of the characters and / or story has a lot of those elements.
... And it is. TO ME, the story/narrative is essential to a JRPG. AGAIN, I'm not telling you how to enjoy your games. I'm saying what is important to me in a JRPG and it makes me sad to imagine someone just skipping over all of that. Feels like a big waste. There's no point in continuing this any further. /shrug
I played through FF7R and while it was my first FF, there's really nothing I can remember from the narrative. I don't think you're missing anything if you end up skipping straight to the gameplay. Which was fun. Graphics looked great, too.
OP
OP
Oooh. Thanks. I thought that was just for switching between locked on enemies and not the lock on button.
The only advice I'll give is that the combat is truly hybrid. It's definitely not action and it shouldn't be played like that.
Actually I started to have more fun when I began to play as a turn based rpg where you move freely but pause to take actions.
Actually I started to have more fun when I began to play as a turn based rpg where you move freely but pause to take actions.
OP
OP
I might have misread your post. The purpose of locking on is to lock the camera so there is no option except to just use the soft lock if you want to control camera movement
Ah shame. I was hoping the lock on switch would by a r3 push so that I could control the cam while locked to an enemy.
Probably just have to get used to the soft lock