I’ve been doing a very delayed catch up of eps from about 495 onwards recently, up to 511 right now and Ben, brother, Sakaguchi *was not the director of FFVII in 1997*. Yoshinori Kitase was director for VI, VII, and VIII! Sakaguchi was a *producer* only. He didn’t co-direct anything since V until IX. The original FFVII’s end credits clearly state he wasn’t the director of it.
*Anyway*, FANTASIAN Neo Dimension (the console/PC release) really only happened because Naoki Yoshida and his Creative Unit III team (FFXIV & FFXVI) helped Mistwalker get it done.
Re: Pokémon Legends: Z-A in a later episode, there’s objectively only so much you can do, and you *absolutely* can’t please everyone. If they pushed the real-time battles mechanics and these things you both claimed would “improve” the series, it would actually *alienate* a heap of long-time fans that want pure turn-based battles, and *tradition*. There’s a reason, while I strongly do not agree with it, that a highly vocally toxic minority are obsessively vitriolic about Final Fantasy “not being turn-based anymore” or “exactly like the older games”. Because while change is inherent and inevitable, people *will* hate if it changes *anything*.
This constant maligning and critiquing of the mainline Pokémon games.. There’s a reason they’re typically the same formula; because people would crack a massive tantrum if it ever drastically changed the standard turn-based battles and formula, etc. Unless you’re in some sort of bubble, there has been a *major* pushback from “turn-based combat” purists who HATE “modern Final Fantasy” for having *any* amount of action combat (XV, XVI, VII Remake trilogy), that it HAS to be strictly turn-based, putting Clair Obscur on a revolving pedestal of “See!! Turn-based!!”. People are *very* particular with “if it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it” mentality. It’s kind of why mainline Dragon Quest (plus DQ Monsters) generally play it pretty safe with “classic” turn-based, and most Dragon Quest spin-off titles that are more action (DQ Heroes, DQ: Adventures of Dai, etc) tend to get “rejected”.
With Metroid Prime 4, similar thing can be said for FFVII Remake, if Bandai Namco were originally doing MP4 before Retro took over.. Originally VII Remake was being developed by CyberConnect2, but Squeenix weren’t happy with the quality so they reset it in-house (that’s why it took from 2016 to 2020 to release).
(Also Xbox Game Pass is nothing but a glorified rental service where you don’t own the games, and their old “everything is an Xbox” was blatantly false advertising considering Lost Odyssey is unplayable on anything BUT an Xbox console using backwards compatibility, and there’s zero PC port or playable form. I haven’t had an Xbox console since the Xbox 360, and have no intention of ever going back to them… And as for physical media/discs, there’s a reason most Nintendo Switch 2 third-party games are “game key cards”, because *they don’t natively FIT on a game card*, the file size is getting larger than physical storage media can actually manage holding, and we’re long past the PS1 era of multiple discs in one box. It’s just not viable!)
Oh and side note but hoo boy the Jason “Shrek” Schreier fellatio is a big no bueno, fellas… I remember his Kotaku era.
*Full* of blatantly false hyperbole and the pontifications of a massive self-entitled jerkwad, mostly baseless assumptions (constantly proven wrong) and excessively snarky rants.
“Why did Starfield just come and go?”
Because it was, quite literally, repetitive design. Luke Stephens review on YouTube from 2023 outright shows the blatant cookie cutter exact copy-paste of zones. It was literally repeated design.
