I wouldn't consider myself the biggest XIV fan but this game definitely has its moments under all that tedium and monotony of a tab targeting MMO that being said I'm a little disappointed in endwalker, I don't think that endwalker is a bad expac mind you far from it I think what EW brings to the table is excellent but having said that this story really needed another comb over because it is rife with incredibly weak execution and the most monotonous filler I've seen in an MMO so far.

I'm not exactly against the pacing in XIV but it can absolutely murder interest if you're going from expansion to expansion with an ever unchanging pacing structure that seems designed to waste as much time as possible while forsaking giving plot elements actual time to breathe the fact garlemald and zodiark are handled in the actual story feels really weak and somewhat insulting if you were expecting these plot elements to take up more then two quest chains then the story has to take a huge detour to actually set up and tell you what its going to do in the next 5 or so hours and frankly I was really exhausted by the time I was approaching the last few quest chains.

Again this is not to say i despise or even dislike EW's story but man that second half really needed another look over the whole end of the world aspect doesn't feel as urgent as it should either the towers are completely forgotten about within like 2 hours of story and I never felt pressured to do anything which is a far cry from a game they released much later XVI which actually handled that aspect far better and grander then they did.

Good expansion, mediocre for a decent chunk story and really bad story I think people are possibly crazy for thinking this was better then shadowbringers lol.

Calling this a remake has to be one of the most bold tricks anyone has pulled in this industry.

I do think the original Final Fantasy VII is a much better game both mechanically and narratively but honestly this isn't as bad as I initially thought, I was there day one shitting on all the weird narrative decisions and wasn't too big on the gameplay, felt like it was a bad typical hack and slash ARPG. But upon sitting down and playing both the original Final Fantasy VII and the remake due to a somewhat impulsive buy of the 7R and rebirth twin pack on PSN what I ended up finding wasn't honestly that bad as I had initially thought and thought at the time.

There's plenty to rag on here this is a modern Square enix title there's plenty of modern game design moments™️ with slow walking and talking moments crawl spaces and ""platforming"" where you hold the stick forward and cloud does everything for you and honestly I could do without the mediocre repetitive side quests (also fuck the gym minigames lmao), But what I did end up liking was surprisingly the combat It took a bit of getting used to and frankly the first 5 or so hours can be absolutely miserable the first reactor segment does not give any good first impressions of the system and I blame the original PS4 demo for some of my apprehensions about this game.
But once you start getting more materia and weapons surprisingly I found the combat to be quite intuitive, of course this goes without saying that I think at the end of the day I much prefer the original game's systems there aren't that many games that can quite replicate the satisfaction of a w-summon mime knights of the round wombo combo that takes 30 minutes each and will more then likely kill the boss on your first summon. But I do think it goes without saying a little bit that while FF7R is very mechanically similar its attempting completely different things and due to the scope and ambition of this trilogy they obviously had to tone down cloud's power a bit so the materia and stuff you have access to aren't gamebustingly good, However this does mean I found myself using stuff I typically ignored in the original FF7 actually bothering to use the magic materia and obtaining for myself master magic materia without beating a superboss felt pretty rewarding and because of how the game is structured and balanced I found myself actually using these regular magic materia instead of benching them until disc 2 when you get contain materia, Though the balance isn't perfect Cloud's counterstance that he gets very late in the game (and i do mean late the game has like 3 chapters to go by that point) can trivialize a ton of fights the final boss ended up just being a race to get my ATB up and spamming counterstance until the boss was staggered.

As for the weird sequel meta narrative stuff honestly to me its probably the most interesting thing about this game, Typically I don't mesh well with overly self referential media but when you have a career like Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima Its a little bit earned, I do think that if this stuff wasn't in place FF7R would be a very safe skip for me I don't tend to agree with remakes on a fundamental level rarely ever are they warranted (consider for a moment we live in a console generation where the original Resident Evil 4 was remade as a filler game to pad out a fiscal year) but to me at the very least I think calling this game "Final Fantasy VII Remake" does it a bit of a disservice obviously if you get into semantics this game is a Final Fantasy VII remake and I completely understand this contradicts my point a little but suffice to say I don't agree with this game being a remake if anything its more like a strange sequel that has some meta stuff about being a remake its not quite a "point at the screen and clap like a seal with your mouth agape" game and while those moments exist because they know their audience, to me at least I found the newer stuff far more interesting then the base FF7 narrative that was sprinkled in feels more like a alternative take on FF7 rather then outright remaking it faithfully (and to be completely honest a straight edge FF7 remake sounds like the most boring thing imaginable).

Overall I'm glad I gave this a second shot I don't think this is the best thing ever nor do I think it supplants the original in any meaningful way if anything this game NEEDS the original to thrive none of the references or greater FF7 compilation stuff at play here would make any sense without it and to me at the very least co-existence is the best possible scenario for a game claiming to be a remake dismissing the original title because the remake exists is frankly really childish and honestly disturbs me how quickly the industry has adopted this POV dooming aside this is worth a shot if you have played the original FF7 and have at least played or know of the FF7 compilation stories.