[Ginkasa]

Beat VI. Moved on to VII. I did try on PC first. I installed the Reunion mod with another mod that most people refer to as "Satsuki's Fields" although I'm not sure if its technically called that. First impression was A+. The game looked great. The AI enhanced backgrounds looked amazing and the new character models outside of battles also looked good. These mods did really well at addressing some of the visual issues of the game while still keeping it feeling like a PSX game, if that makes sense. The new translation was alright although I didn't get to some of the more infamously muddled scenes.

Unfortunately, I experienced a crash after a battle in the train graveyard. No big, expected something like this to happen a little more often than usual, no big. Then again after fighting Hojo's monster in the Shinra building. That was frustrating as it was right after a boss battle, but it was a long while since the previous one and everything worked again after rebooting the game, so okay. But then again after fighting the robots in the elevator.

That was too high a frequency for me to ignore, so I looked it up and alas this is a known issue with the mod. There's a chance of a crash after every single battle. I researched a bit to try and see if there was some workaround. Maybe if I disabled the new character models that would do it, or something. But then I saw that there's another glitch that makes Cosmo Canyon impassable somehow due to the new translation. Well a better translation was 87% of why I wanted to mess with the mods in the first place, so I gave it up at that point. These issues would be fixed eventually, but I wasn't going to wait.

Still wanted to play through the game, though, so bought it on PS4. The 3x speed and power boost is really nice. Using that, I was able to speed through all of Midgar in just over 2 hours. Once I caught up I've tried not to abuse it, but it has made some of more menial tasks much more bearable (stealing items, walking through some of the longer passages, etc.)

I really wish we could get a Definitive version of the original FFVII at some point. Unfortunately the Remake seems to make that less likely anytime soon (not that it was ever very likely for some reason). Just a retranslation at least would make me happy but especially something like FFVIII Remastered (which I will be playing next) would be very nice.