Sure, why not start my account with this?

- The Zack prologue is an absolutely wild narrative gauntlet to throw down, fracturing the timeline much more than the last game's 'we don't have to be beholden to the original' ending implied.

- That would seem to undercut the drama of the original story beats being re-enacted, but so far (I'm about to get a chocobo) it's managed to continually surprise by accelerating certain elements of the original. Tifa confronts Cloud about their mutually exclusive memories the same night he tells his story, and Cloud goes on a date (with Aerith) in the first town outside Midgar.

- The flashback, and it being used as the game's demo, is very similar to the opening of FFXVI. That game was able to sell a lot of it thanks to Ben Starr's committed performance. I've not been as big a fan of how Cloud and Sephiroth have been directed in these games, as an extension of Advent Children, but hearing Cloud fully losing it with Sephiroth really justifies his aloof deliveries elsewhere.

- The 10:1 scale model of remake:original in both story and geography basically means there's no way they could remake the full original with only one more game to go, so I wonder if there will be more composite storytelling.

- Kalm's Renaissance European design feels like an FFIX remake we'll never get outside of dedicated fan projects.

- Ditto the innkeeper distracting the guards while you climb over and past them, an identical echo of a moment in FFVI.

- Love the context-sensitive overworld music, switching between exploration and battle on the fly.

- This might be the balance in map size that the series, at least in its single-player entries, has struggled with ever since they went more or less fully 3D with representative graphics. Big enough to feel like a world to explore (FFXVI felt like it took place on an island rather than a continent), but not so big that there isn't a ton of empty space and dead time spent traversing it (I bounced off XII twice on PS2 because its huge spaces are only tolerable at 4x speed).

I didn't think I would dislike anything more than Persona 4 but here we are.

Gameplay: Based on the demo, the combat was a bit better than the first part of the Remake, but it was still pretty dogshit. It feels too slow and the mechanics are not fun to play with at all imo. However, playable Sephiroth made this unbearably horrible combat fun for at least a little while. I'm genuinely unsure how anyone can sit down, play this game, and think "yeah, this is good". Final Fantasy XVI's combat (or Square Enix's best action combat system: Kingdom Hearts II) should be the standard going forward for future FF titles since VIIR's combat is so unbearable I refuse to play this game beyond the demo, and just decided to watch cutscenes on YouTube instead. They also added more unnecessary, long walks basically Sony-fying this game just like the first part which is ironic since some of the weebs who praise this Remake trilogy complain about said Sony games.

Story: Some things were done better than Remake, some done worse. I would say the filler for the most part wasn't as bad as Remake's. There were some nice additions such as how they included Yuffie into the story. However, the filler still holds this game back a lot by making the story much slower paced than the original. I find it ironic that the complaints for FFXVI being slow paced aren't applied to this trilogy when this is objectively A LOT slower. They are taking a roughly 30 hour story and padding it out to ~120 hours, assuming Part 3 is also ~40 hours which is also uncertain currently since the first two parts only cover the first disc of the game, and there are still two discs remaining. The third part might be a lot longer than Part 1 and 2 in order to cover the rest of the story. Anyways, I would say the story is better than Remake's story overall until the ending. The ending really ruined the whole game I feel. Not sure why they decided to add timeline shenanigans which really brought down the story a lot. This trilogy's story is worse than even KH Re:Coded.

It's hard to say if I like Remake or Rebirth more, but they are both garbage anyway so i guess it doesn't really matter. This trilogy is a horrible remake and these two games (and probably the third one) are my least favorite games ever. I'm fully convinced the praise for this trilogy is just due to the good graphics and FFVII bias since I genuinely don't see any positive qualities. It feels like a complete disrespect to the original FFVII (which I'm not even a huge fan of so don't go saying "YoU jUsT cAn'T aCcEpT cHaNgE" or any other bs).

I hope the rumored FFIX Remake gets canceled because I don't want to see my favorite FF get butchered so badly. I'd rather play a shoddy remake like Pokémon BDSP or Let's Go.

Mostly done with Chapter 4.

- Chadley sucks, and his entrance into the game makes the overworld actively less fun to explore. There's no discovery when this dip child is marking everything on your map, it's a list-making. And he interrupts constantly. Take the Sheikah slate from the past two Zelda games and give it Navi's patronizing attitude, and you've got Chadley.

- I'd forgotten what showstoppers the boss fights in these games are.

- It may be they're just condensing or remixing iconic moments from the original to keep it fresh, but the whole 'Sephiroth saves Cloud by spearing the Midgar Zolom,' in combination with how callous Coud is immediately after--not caring about the robed guy who falls--has some big time-space paradox vibes, like the Sephiroth we're following and the one from the original are the same entity acting across multiple timelines. Or else Cloud's got a bigger heel turn in the wing.

- The detour with Barrett and Red in the mines is so much padding. They couldn't have at least included some character-building dialogue to make it worthwhile? At least the boss rocks.