Uruanna

I'm on the side that a remaster of a PS4 gen game dumb, but HZD was always the butt of the joke in regard to those awful generic bobblehead animations during every single dialog. It was laughably bad. With the reveal trailer, it does make a pretty big difference. Everything else? Not so much.

If this had been a PC game all along, these animation overhaul would have been a patch of the original game, but since the trailer insists that they re-recorded all motion captures for the dialogs of the whole game, they get to sell it full price again.

Not really, it's just a different story you get to know him through. The first time he appears in Remake, Cloud is having a massive PTSD flashback to a burning town, and then you see that Cloud has a raging hateboner against this ghost that he's obsessed with and sees everywhere, mistaking his sick neighbour for him and trying to murder him on sight. Until he shows up for real and he's involved with those weird shadows that few people can see and he acts ultra criptic and he makes no sense. It doesn't expect the player to know him, you just see Cloud's PTSD through his eyes, it's a madness and an obsession that's just hurting his head, it doesn't matter if you know him or not. Beyond that, it's part 1 of a trilogy, you're expected to wait for the next 2 parts to learn more about him and why Cloud hates him. Even at the beginning of Rebirth, he's the mysterious ghost whispering lies in Cloud's ears, making him doubt reality and go full "lalala you're not real" PTSD paranoia. People who know the OG, and people who don't, see his presence very differently.

It's not that you meet Sephiroth early and you're supposed to know who he is, it's that Cloud is crazy and you're supposed to doubt him. That gets stronger and stronger in Rebirth - you'll definitely start part 3 with Barret, Tifa, Yuffie convinced that Cloud is completely gone and lost, Barret's getting ready to take Old Yeller down, he's just waiting for Tifa to give up. I think that's a much stronger story today.

Most of the story beats are still there. Most of the emotions from the OG are still there - except one thing. I'll try to avoid spoilers but if you've played OG and remake, you should know.

The major change in the story itself is the continuation of something you saw at the very tail end of the first Remake, that probably made you go WTF, the meta-narrative you're suspicious about. It might be a concept you don't really like because it sounds like it'll break the story, but it actually doesn't concretely change anything until the end. The places, the events, the world, the mission are still the same. The most critical change that caused a lot of noise is a big cliffhanger that will only be resolved in the final game, when it was expected to be a big emotional hit now. It's very clear that this is a trilogy, and expecting this game to end the same way as the OG caused a lot of distress. People who loved the OG for one specific reason or another might feel robbed by the way this game is pretending to change things, but actually doesn't, but actually maybe yes - and you'll only get the resolution in the last game. If that means something to you, maybe you should wait for the trilogy to be completed and treat it as a single game, because this part 2 is only half of the game you liked back then, and it might not have what made you love it - yet.

One big change in storytelling is what it focuses on: it gets much more into the psychology of Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Barret, about mental health, trauma, and their relationships (in the same way they massively developped the Avalanche trio in Remake). Basically, they're making everyone real human beings with a history and interactions. Now you understand from the inside of their head why they do or don't do this or that. It also adds focus on some aspects and perspectives that only developed in the Crisis Core prequel and were not a thing in the OG. It's a massive improvement on storytelling and world building (the world now has a history of geopolitics scattered everywhere in every side quests), but it looks like a lot of fans of the OG who expected things to go a certain way get hung up and slowed down by all the new details, and it feels like fluff or a change they don't like. You clearly feel the stretch from one 50 hour long turn-based RPG into 3 action RPG that last 50 (remake) + 120 (rebirth) + 1?? (part 3) hours, and it's a lot, and you might not like it.

It absolutely has tons of gaming content to enjoy, both in the characters and the absolute shitload of things and side quests and mini-games to do absolutely everywhere for a 120 hours playthrough and you don't even see the time pass, but it might not be exactly what you felt in the OG. It's a new perspective. I've seen among various streamers that the people who were the most confused by the ending are often the harder fans of the OG, and new fans see the details and hidden explanations that OG fans miss because they think they know what's going on - and get blue-balled on what they came here for.

And then Sephiroth changes. We still don't know if they're whitewashing him by giving him a sad backstory and a big personal mission (the gacha game Ever Crisis that's still ongoing is developing his time as a young SOLDIER) or if they're making him an even worse guy, and so far it has the potential to ruin the character. We have to wait until it's all resolved.

You only fight Sephiroth at the end. But he does lurk around more often, harassing and taunting you.

Ultimate Nick Fury came first and was openly based on SLJ, so people actually liked it.

Of what ~~year~~ century?

Yeah we were all busy that weekend, please bring Concord to PC again

That was a little ambiguous, because he said that after London was the major city that voted against Brexit, he was saying it was more foreign (European) than English. Schroedinger's asshole type of comment.

Also he said that because he was pro Brexit (which is already not good), so it might not have been about skin color at all, just international European culture.

He did get caught in the Rowling shitshow, early on when he started saying "I just hope (trans people) are treated kindly" but slowly admitted that he only had surface knowledge and let it slip that he thought the whole trans thing was an act or a choice. I don't think he was malicious or aggressive about it, but he was called out on propagating transphobic messages.

And he spoke up against cancel culture.

It's possible that he doesn't understand that even if he doesn't mean bad things, he's letting bad propaganda slip out and repeating a language that hurts easily targeted people without understanding the scope. But he doesn't seem very willing to learn quickly about it.

I haven't heard anything recent if he changed his mind or double down about any of this.

Sales expectations here don't mean "we think this game is so good it will move x million units," that thinking doesn't exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce "we'll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want." There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.

It's the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually "investors expect an x% return by week y" where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it's a sequel.

At any rate, we all know it's true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).

LLMs work on neural networks that's not actually readable, so usually not even AI engineers who made it can tell what the LLM remembers, deduces, or infers when responding to a prompt, there's no code. You could feed it on nothing but Wikipedia and you still wouldn't know if it hallucinates an answer, because an ~~AI~~ LLM doesn't actually know what "facts" and "truth" mean, it's only a language machine that puts words together, not a ~~fax~~ fact machine.

The character is a nerd, but the humor is not simply "have you tried turning it off and on again." The jokes are generally not about anything technical but about micromanagement by a dumb boss, hierarchy and HR disasters, and terrible office relations with self-centered asses. It should be relatable by anyone slightly technical with diploma who works in an office, and that should be a lot of people not in manual labor in the 90s. Like, if you use Excel or PowerPoint, you're in the target for that humor.

Oh, the resolutions and the viewpoints and the nihilism are totally nerd-centric though.

No one has MvC2 on any playable system today, because it was removed at some point from all digital stores. Not counting the obvious piracy choice, the MvC2 community that's still going strong has been crying for a rerelease for literally two decades. So that collection has a decent chance of doing notable numbers.

But yes, they pulled that bait test a couple times before and never went anywhere with it and that was super shitty. I don't have any hope that this will revive MvC because it's not up to the players, it's up to Marvel to let Capcom make a good game. This collection is still very much appreciated either way.