The synergy skill that allows you to have another party member throw you into the air at an enemy, when controlling a melee fighter, (Tifa, Cloud, Red) is so satisfying and welcome in Rebirth when fighting flying enemies.

Rebirth does something with the open world mechanics I haven’t seen in other games. It interconnects everything.

The life springs give you a shitton of materials for the crafting system, they reveal the locations of crafting recipes, and eventually the area boss.

All of which interconnects with side-quests, not just at the start as a tutorial, but throughout each region.

It hence manages to make you want to do everything, almost on accident. If you do all the sidequests, you progress the collectathon a bunch. If you do the collectathon, you end up progressing quests a bunch just by “coincidence”.

Add to that the fast travel that lets you jump anywhere instantly, and nothing ends up feeling like a chore.

If you’re just watching, you won’t get the main appeal of the modern FF combat systems. That being the underlying turns and the strategy around what to do with them.

And unfortunately, at lower difficulties, you can get by with button mashing. It’s really disappointing that the difficulty that actually requires thinking is locked behind ng+, but at that level, the system really shines.

It’s all strategy, dressed up as a hack and slash, but if you just button mash, don’t min-max your builds, utilize the entire party, their abilities, spells and synergies, you are dead.

And it’s all made more intense by the combat happening in real-time (though you can slow time to a crawl at any time). I really love the panic of the way you are forced to control any last surviving party member, waiting for your turn to be available so you can use a phoenix down.

I absolutely adore the remake games. They both follow a type of game-design that makes me feel like I’m playing something from the PS2 era again. Both the good and the bad. Makes me feel like a kid in the best kind of way.

The games do have some trouble with time-wasters. It’s both improved and made worse in Rebirth. Luckily, in open world fashion, a lot of it can actually be ignored in Rebirth. And if you don’t ignore it, you get rewarded with actually good side-content. And Rebirths fast travel is good to the point you basically never have to travel anywhere “the long way” twice.

I have the same problem with the combat being too easy. It wasn’t too bad with Intergrade as I was new to the combat system, but with Rebirth I am absolutely crushing enemies. I’m deliberately sabotaging my character builds to make it more challenging, but I really wish they didn’t lock “hard” behind ng+. Coming from the first game, you should be able to jump into the second at that higher skill level from the start. But no.

Don’t worry too much about your stuff not carrying over. The characters do not get reset to level zero, and no abilities. They start with a little less than what you have at the end of Intergrade, but a lot of the stuff you’ll have gotten by the end of Intergrade, is what you have at the start of Rebirth. And then over the course of the second game, you get a lot of NEW stuff, rather than just re-aquiring the stuff you had in the first.

There is.

You can add a taskbar icon for KDE night color. Clicking it opens a panel with a toggle, and quick acess to the full settings page. It should be in the config for the taskbar icon applet.

KDE also lets you set it to specific times if you want, maybe it didn’t use to?

KDE has similar functionality built-in. (Called night color, you can find it in display settings, and add a control icon in the taskbar).

Two people with no game, still means there’s no game.

Zero plus zero is still zero.