Month: April 2020

Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s complex battle system leads to a variety of exciting encounters against Shinra’s military and wild Fiends–which are demanding on occasion. But the game’s biggest challenges are its lengthy, involved boss fights, which put your understanding of its battle mechanics to the test. If you’re not the most experienced at fast-paced real-time combat, Final Fantasy VII Remake is bound to give you some trouble, regardless of which difficulty you choose. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered, as we’ve compiled a walkthrough detailing how to fight many of the game’s bosses.

Below you can find in-depth strategies for every boss we’ve beaten so far. Click from the Table of Contents to jump to where you want to go. Be careful, as this guide has some spoilers to boss identities, so proceed with caution. Check back often as we update this roundup with even more boss strategies.

For more guides, check out our feature highlighting some essential tips to know as you play the game, as well as our PSA on why you shouldn’t skip side missions. Otherwise, you can read our Final Fantasy VII Remake review.

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Final Fantasy VII Remake is quite a different beast from the original. Despite following similar beats, it changes up how the story progresses and how the game plays. Whether you’re the reigning squat champion of the Wall Market, or you’re dipping your toes into the lifestream for the first time, the remake is bound to disorient you with its strategic real-time combat system, and different take on world design. Thankfully, we’ve put together a brief visitor’s guide for everyone on board this train. Below you can find seven tips to help make the best use of your time in Midgar.

These are just a few tips to help you get started on the journey ahead of you. If you’re from European regions, what are some things you realized too late? Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments. Otherwise, be sure to check out our other guides, as well as our full Final Fantasy VII Remake review.

Let’s Talk Materia

Materia is an integral part of Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s combat system. Serving as spells, abilities, and summons that you can equip to your characters, these colored orbs beef up each character’s base attack skills. You should equip as many Materia orbs as you can early on, especially the spell and attack ability ones.

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So you’ve been waiting 15 years for the remake of Final Fantasy VII, and you can’t wait to speed through the whole thing to satisfy that insatiable nostalgia of yours, but take a deep breath because you’re going to want to experience everything the game has to offer. Yes, that means completing every side mission, which you can easily get locked from doing if you keep pushing the story forward.

For more guides, be sure to check out our feature highlighting essential tips to help you play Final Fantasy VII Remake, as well as our PSA about one it’s more convoluted early side missions. You can also read our Final Fantasy VII Remake review for our full thoughts about the game. Otherwise, read on about why you need to do side missions in Final Fantasy VII Remake!

When the original Final Fantasy VII was released 23 years ago, it spent a good chunk of time in Midgar, running you through an overview of the world, the story, and characters. Still, because it was such a big game, you had to spread your one-wing eventually and fly away to pursue other endeavors across the planet, relegating the city of Midgar to only some late-game shenanigans.

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When you jump into Final Fantasy VII Remake‘s first semi-open area, you’re likely to become confused by an early side mission called Just Flew In From The Graveyard. This relatively simple quest requires you to venture back into an abandoned factory you visited during a previous side mission. Your objective is to exterminate a single flying Drake, but the catch is you need a keycard to open a locked door leading to where it’s located.

The quest giver Gwen says that the keycard is hidden in one of the breakable Shinra boxes found in the abandoned factory. Unfortunately, the boxes in the area are pretty easy to miss, so if you’ve played normally up until this point, it’s likely you’ll have spent the past half-hour scouring every nook and cranny looking for that accursed keycard. It certainly took us a while.

To find the keycard, head back to the area where you grabbed the Fire Materia during your first run through this area completing the Nuisance in the Factory side mission. If you didn’t nab it, head to the location we’ve marked in the map screenshot below.

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In the opening of Final Fantasy VII, Cloud Strife, a mercenary and former member of an elite private military group called SOLDIER, takes on a job with an eco-terrorist cell named Avalanche. Their mission is to blow up a reactor that siphons Mako, the lifeblood of the planet, and uses it to power the sprawling industrial metropolis Midgar. The group infiltrates, braves resistance from Shinra Electric Company’s forces, and sets off an explosion that renders the reactor inoperable.

In the 1997 original, what followed was a hop, skip, and jump through a few sections of the city back to Sector 7, and the safety of Avalanche’s hideout. In Final Fantasy VII Remake, having carried out the mission, you’re asked to walk the streets in the aftermath and witness the harrowing consequences of your actions. The sector lies in ruin, fires rage, buildings are crumbling, and the heartbreaking human cost is laid bare.

A somber violin plays as you walk Midgar’s streets, with each pull of the bow across strings tugging at your conscience and stirring the heart, asking you to question whether you’re doing the right thing. The cries of confused children echo, people fall to their knees attempting to grapple with the magnitude of what has happened, and citizens decry this so-called group of freedom fighters you’ve joined just to make a quick buck.

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Ubisoft has confirmed that the Rocksmith team is no longer building new Rocksmith DLC, bringing an end to an epic 383 weeks of song releases for the respected guitar instruction game. The encore is over and the house lights are on.

“As of this week’s Opeth Song Pack, Rocksmith Remastered has concluded its scheduled DLC releases,” explains a statement published on Ubisoft.com. “After 383 weeks of DLC releases, this pack brings us to a total of 1570 songs in the Rocksmith library, spanning over seven decades (or three centuries, in the case of Bachsmith) and covering a multitude of genres for guitar and bass.”

While there will be no more new songs, the team has stressed weekly online content is still planned for Rocksmith fans.

The shift in focus is attributed to the fact the Rocksmith team is currently “hard at work on a new project”, which is a mystery for the time being.

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The original Rocksmith was first released in October 2011 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and arrived on PC a year later. The finger pickin’ good follow-up, Rocksmith 2014, was released in 2013 (and Rocksmith 2014 Remastered was released in 2016 for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4). Pitched as a guitar (and bass) teaching tool rather than a traditional game, Rocksmith differs from Guitar Hero and Rocksmith by allowing users to plug in their own electric guitars to play along and learn the tracks.

For those who chose to rock, we salute you.

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Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He doesn’t always listen to rock at home but when he does, so do his neighbours. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.

The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann has discussed the recent delay of Naughty Dog’s highly-anticipated PlayStation juggernaut, explaining the frustration of having the game on the “one-yard line” but held up due to reasons beyond their control.

“It’s a bit rough,” Druckmann told the Official PlayStation Blogcast. “You’re working on something for so long – some of us, for years – and there’s a built-in anticipation when you’re doing this thing. Like, you can’t wait for this thing that you’ve been crafting and honing and sometimes dreaming about; you can’t wait to get it in people’s hands and then see their reactions. See what they like or didn’t like, or where the story takes them. And now you gotta put all that on hold because the world is conspiring against us!”

“Internally we know we have a great game and it’s just we have to wait a little bit longer to get it out there to fans. I know fans are disappointed and believe me when I say this: we’re just as disappointed, if not more so, to not be able to get the game out on time.”

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On the question of why not release The Last of Us Part II digitally on the planned date, Druckmann explained there’s still no new plan yet but the key priority is getting the game to all fans – not just some.

“Well, there hasn’t been a final decision yet; right now we’re just reacting,” said Druckmann. “You know, it’s a different retail chain – whether we could get physical copies to people. What is the internet infrastructure there to support it in all countries? This is a worldwide game that people in every country are waiting for, and we want to make sure we’re fair.”

“If we just get it to a small fraction of people, what about all the people that don’t get it? Right now we’re looking at all sorts of different options: what’s the best way to get it to all of our fans as soon as possible? But that’s gonna take time for us to shift and figure things out, and also see where the world’s at. You know, things are changing from day to day.”

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Druckmann also stressed that turning the previous press demo into a standalone demo that could be downloaded by the public would be a “massive amount of work” and that the team would rather focus on finishing the game itself instead of rebuilding an outdated demo.

“We’re at the one-yard line, I would say,” said Druckmann. “There’s still some bugs that we’re finding that we’re squashing – we want to polish it as much as we can, taking our time to review each section and making sure it’s all Naughty Dog quality.”

“It’s there; that’s the frustrating part for us! The game is there. We just have to sit on it for a little bit and figure out what’s the best way to get it to our fans.”

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The Last of Us Part II was initially set to arrive on February 22, 2020. That initial release date was confirmed late last year alongside a story trailer and our first chance to go hands-on with The Last of Us’ long-awaited sequel.

Shortly after, Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us Part II would, in fact, be delayed until May 29 for additional polishing. In the wake of this delay reports emerged that the shift to May allegedly led to sustained crunch at Naughty Dog rather than alleviating it.

The Last of Us Part II was also supposed to have its first public hands-on at PAX East 2020 but, due to concerns over the spread of COVID-19, Sony pulled out of PAX East.

Sony and HBO also recently announced that a The Last of Us TV show adaptation is in the works, set to air on HBO with Druckmann and Chernobyl executive producer Craig Mazin behind the series (and the TV show will replace The Last of Us movie that was previously in the pipe). No casting has been announced, but we’ve offered plenty of suggestions for who should play Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us TV show.

For more on the upcoming sequel, we spoke to Druckmann about Joel’s role in The Last of Us Part II, why The Last of Us Part II isn’t an open world game, as well as how dogs affect stealth and combat.

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Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.

Crazy Rich Asians director John M. Chu’s adaptation of In The Heights has been indefinitely delayed from its scheduled June 26 release date due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. Chu has promised that the film adaptation of the Lin Manuel Miranda musical and book by Quiara Alegría Hudes will still definitely see the big screen, Variety reports.

The book, and subsequent musical, follows three days in the predominantly Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. Speaking to Variety’s After-Show, Chu has said that the community being depicted deserves to be seen on the big screen. “What we are committed to is, it’s going to be in a theater. It has to be in a theater. It demands to be in a theater,” Chu said. “This community lived a life that deserves to be on the big screen and celebrated in the biggest magical way, [and] we’re going to deliver that.”

With the coronavirus crisis causing cinema closures and drops in attendance across the globe, a number of films are being delayed, while others are prioritizing releases on streaming services and VOD. This is likely what Chu is referring to by promising a proper theatrical release.

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Sony recently delayed The Last of Us: Part II indefinitely due to the global COVID-19 crisis, and now director Neil Druckmann has commented on the delay and responded to a number of key questions.

Discussing the delay on the latest PlayStation Blogcast, Druckmann said it’s a big bummer to have The Last of Us: Part II delayed yet again.

“It’s a bit rough,” he said. “You’re working on something for so long; for some of us, for years. There is a built-in anticipation; you can’t wait for this thing that you’ve been crafting and honing and sometimes dreaming about. You can’t wait to get it into people’s hands, and see their reactions; what they like, what they didn’t like or where the story takes them. And now you gotta put all that on hold because the world is conspiring against us.”

Continue Reading at GameSpot