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Final Fantasy 7: An oral history

If you're interested in the development of FF7, I'd really recommend reading this, it's an amazing article, I own the hardback copy of it: web.archive.org/web/20250112...

web.archive.org

An inside look at the creation and fallout of Square's industry-defining role-playing game, as told by those who were there.

To be clear: Nojima obviously wrote the actual scenario, but the stories of those games were constructed as a writer's room back in the day and Nomura was a super important part of it.

Crushed @silenttakedown.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Reposted by Sage

yeah sure whatever, let lara croft cook potato stew on her phone for 2m0s of damage resistance who gives a shit anymore

a screenshot from the upcoming remake of Tomb Raider 1. lara croft is looking at her phone in the middle of an ancient ruin, and it's showing her a generic crafting menu, and a png of saucepan of stew that apparently her phone lets her cook for "Damage resistance" if she has 6 potatoes

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Wilds is a great game, but it's a different experience than the old games. That said, people say that Rise was "like the old ones" and I feel like I'm going insane. Rise almost broke me, the base game had literally no sauce or friction. You could literally float across the map to the boss!

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 30/08/2026

I so, so desperately need Nomura to tell a new original story that isn't tied to 30 hours of Going Through The Paces. The last times he did that we got FF7 and FF8.

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fake contrarianism is boring, real contrarianism is the soul of posting

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 28/08/2026

He's still working on his metaverse project, Ryugu Nation, but it seems like actual unmitigated dogshit so I can understand if he's hedging his bets.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 15/08/2026

sometimes I think about XV's Origin release

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 15/08/2026

the crazy part is that the Kingdom Hearts panel hasn't even happened yet.

headfallsoff @headfallsoff.com · 15/08/2026

Reposted by Sage

2027 is THE year of nomura

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 15/08/2026

Maybe this is gonna be the Missing-Link story?

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 12/08/2026

It seems like DQ12 is using Luminous Engine, hope is alive.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 11/08/2026

On the other hand, this ViDoc really fails to pitch an actual game that someone would want to play. It sounds like you were mostly just wandering around maps that other people had already combed through looking for artifacts and the whole loot-hound, oppressive vibe the game runs on wasn't there.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 11/08/2026

The sweaty, PvP-focused game we got is a personal favorite of mine, and I really do love it, but I think it lacks the sort of screaming ambition that was at the heart of everything that Bungie made before it.

Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 11/08/2026

On one hand, I think it's kind of a bummer that the version of Marathon that we got was spearheaded by someone who hadn't worked on past Bungie titles. It would've been great to see what the people who made Halo had to say about the extraction shooter genre. Obviously, that's /sort of/ what we got.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 09/08/2026

nobody's gonna say that binary's two numbers are 1 and 10. it's 0 and 1. in this house we believe that 0 is a number

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 09/08/2026

naw like I've heard this argument before (I disagree with it because I think the idea of a century is primarily a social construct and arguing that 2000 wasn't the start of a new millennium is obstinate to the point of parody) but base ten is like definitionally 0-9 and starting over with 10

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 09/08/2026

but numbers go from 0 to 9, that's the premise of base 10

Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 08/08/2026

Thanks for the explainer. It being a function of marketing spend makes sense.

Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 08/08/2026

Genuine question: what's the gaming equivalent of a theatrical release? Even the worst-performing genre movie is still going to make a few million if it's in a theater. I'd imagine that used to be consoles, but now I think of the Switch eshop front page and can't imagine that's the case.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 08/08/2026

Upstream Color is one of the most touching and thoughtful portrayals of cycles of abuse ever and it's genuinely heartbreaking that the guy who made that (in more or less every conceivable way) never found out how to stop harming others.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 16/07/2026

One power supply only tells Truthberts. The other?

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 09/07/2026

I work at a movie theater and this ad was playing every few minutes on a loop for months on one of our lobby TVs, it was wild.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 03/07/2026

my friends and I have been slowly picking away at Cryo and learning it without outside sources, it's super fun, we're also probably never going to do a vault lmfao

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 03/07/2026

When I got Cyberpunk at launch I was so happy to just pore over all of the little details in that physical edition, the fact that the PC version included the soundtrack on the discs was so cool.

Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 22/06/2026

This is my first time hearing about this game and I'm already obsessed, the trailer is so incredible. Thanks for the heads-up.

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 11/06/2026

I don't know what Bungie is doing to empower its artists, but Marathon and Destiny are both just, like, the uncontested masters of their particular spheres of realistically-lit sci-fi art in games.

Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 01/05/2026

The whole "0451 games" label fell apart for me, personally, when I played Eidos-Montreal's GOTG game and it featured the code. It's definitely a marker of a chain of inspiration and (occasionally) developers, but not much beyond that!

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Sage @sage.volatilememories.com · 30/04/2026

I've heard the technical explanation before (codecs that rely on past frames can't easily be rewound in the same way as they can progress forward) but it's clearly a solvable problem (YouTube does it!) so I do wish it was a feature in VLC