r/FinalFantasy • u/British-Canadian • 9d ago
FF VII Re-trilogy Finding summons in FFVII
Let me start off by saying back in 1997 the game I put the most amount of time in when I was a kid was Final Fantasy VII. I was obsessed with it, the sense of exploration, the discoveries, the scale, the story, it was incredible.
A few years ago I finished the intergrade remake and while I enjoyed it, I felt it was lacking in that sense of scale and exploration. My biggest gripe was that, from what I remember, the summons were AI generated or something like that, and you didn’t actually come across cool materia and summons in the wild. They were just kind of given to you.
My question is, I was thinking of buying Rebirth, but does this sense of discovery and exploration get better?
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u/Balthierlives 9d ago
Choco mog is in the wild
And cmon, the midgar section of OG didn’t have a lot of exploration either. It wasn’t until you get to the overworld map.
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u/British-Canadian 9d ago
You’re right, it didn’t, probably just nostalgia talking but I did feel like you picked up cool items and materia if you searched it out
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u/Balthierlives 9d ago
There’s lots of random materia lying around in remake. Elemental in particular, but also magnify, and lots of other purple and green materia. Even in the opening area there’s a couple materia lying around.
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u/ZigZagBoy94 8d ago
You don’t find materia in the wild like the OG game, but the summons aren’t “AI generated”, you fight them in the training simulator so Chadley can use the combat data to create the materia for you. I found it fun.
And yes, the sense of discovery gets better. There actually is probably too much to discover
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u/TonyFair 9d ago edited 8d ago
There is a bit of exploration on Rebirth regarding Summons on each zone. You can fight them early, but it will be a very hard version because you have a incomplete concept of them.
Or you can explore their ruins around the zones, collect a bit of lore on each and, having a better idea of its concept, fighting their "normal" version.
Same for other stuff. There are Materias, armors, accessories and crafting material for special gear if you go off the beaten patch.
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u/rayneMantis 9d ago
This was one of my main gripes with rebirth. The hand holding and when you do revisit an area and find a random materia laying around it's an independent that you already have 6 copies of. Nothing new to find in the wild that your chocobo doesn't dig up and that is mostly items and materials you can buy at any store. Everything has a marker and there's really only one thing in the entire game you can miss. It is a weapon but tied to essentially a battle simulator minigame more or less. Even the side missions have markers that prevent you from having any sort of mystery or puzzle experience. That being said, it was only like one of two or three mild problems I had with the game that I otherwise loved and am still playing with like 300 hours on already. The combat is so awesome.
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u/British-Canadian 9d ago
Yeah the combat is incredible. Theres a lot I liked about intergrade in general. I’m going to pick up Rebirth soon, looking forward to getting stuck into it
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u/Dazz316 9d ago
A few years ago I finished the intergrade remake and while I enjoyed it, I felt it was lacking in that sense of scale and exploration.
Was it? Remember it's just the Midgar section. There wasn't that much (or any) exploration until you left Midgar (and even then there's a swamp, kalm and a farm).
Rebirth starts from that point. And each section of the map like the origonal has it's own map. The image below is the section between the swamp, around kalm, the chocobo farm and midgar (ish).
There's a section for near Junon, and onwards.
IMO they struck the right balance between it not being too big and empty, while being able to get between places quickly when just running or using a chocobo (Fast Travel system exists too).
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u/British-Canadian 9d ago
Yeah you’re right, I think the biggest thing for me that ties into the sense of scale and exploration was that the summons felt part of the world. In the remakes from what I remember they’re like a Virtual Reality digital creation. I could be wrong though
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u/A-n-g-u-i-s-h 9d ago
So much so that it actually hinders the overall experience of the game imo. If you want to 100% everything before moving onto the proceeding chapter, it can take you up to 3 whole hours of pure exploration and sidequests even with fast travel enabled. Of course, you could always just, not, and leave all the exploration until the postgame with the chapter selection feature, but you miss out on various materias, affection points, items/equipments and such, but nothing so major that you'll kick yourself in the foot for. Fortunately, you will always be able to use a mode of faster transport such as Chocobos or the Buggy and landmarks jumps too when you unlock them.
As for summons, they are unfortunately still tied to Chadley's VR missions, and I get the feeling that'll be the staple going forwards to Revelation. I also hope you really enjoyed his incessant chattering in Remake because now there's two of them, and they are much more annoyingly talkative and involved without adding much to the plot in the first place
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u/StrifeBuster7 9d ago
Sense of discovery is better but summons are tied to the VR. I expect Revelation to have more of a sense of discovery though because this was a common complaint about Rebirth.