i love this fucking game

having only spent a few minutes with this remaster, here are my very preliminary thoughts

• not a huge fan of some of the re-orchestrations (they're a little showy) but the fact that you can switch on the fly, not missing a note with the selected track fading in as the other fades out, blows my mind. great stuff

• they really did a lot to clean this game up visually. i streamed a bit of IZJS (on which zodiac age is based) via pcsx2 on twitch in 2015 and i thought it looked really good just being rendered at a proper HD resolution. it looked a bit like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo0gDRvAeRQ (hot nihopalaoa strats @ 0:54!)

shoutout/fuck youtube compression

it looks fine emulated. the character models look ok but the textures are muddy. there's no real lighting model. it's rendering in 16:9 but the menus are still 4:3

but this remaster looks very impressive. everything is so clean. they even did work on the area transition sprites that were basically bad looking skyboxes placed close to zone exits. that's how deep they went on this thing

• there's still pop in. a little annoying. probably an engine limitation

• controls border on unresponsive. having just finished persona 5, going to this game and its massive input lag is not pleasant. but you get used to it. and it's not like you need to fly through menu options to pull out a victory

• having a doom style area map overlay at the click of the button is massively helpful

• digital foundry reports that there's no more "everyone stands around while the the spell animation finishes" weirdness. chaining spells is now a reality!

• i've already experienced a bout of optimization paralysis when choosing vaan's first (of two) license boards. rpgsite has a nice series of write-ups if you want to read up a bit on which characters and classes have synergy: http://www.rpgsite.net/feature/5788-final-fantasy-xii-the-zodiac-age-the-best-party-builds-and-other-party-composition-advice

i'm very much looking forward to diving back into this world. hopefully ashe as black mage/bushi (samurai) will let me do some nasty and game-breaking things with katanas