The story is predictably boring and shallow, any form of depth that could be perceived in it has no real basis whatsoever and is only through rigorous over-analyzation by fans who haven’t had a single good Silent Hill release in decades, all the characters with the exception of Mary are badly written, not to mention the dialogue feels as if it’s been jotted down by an emotionless robot, the intrigue is stale and you have no real reason to care for either Mary nor James.

The voice acting is as alive as a fish out of water, it’s completely monotonous, nobody talks like that unless they’re basement dwellers who haven’t had any form of social interaction in decades, no wonder gamers adore it.

The gameplay is awful, it’s existence is a disrespect to any videogame with well thought out and complex mechanics and controls. No. I don’t care for your made-up excuses such as “ B-But James is a civilian who can’t handle weapons!” Not only is that a stupid form of applying logic to video game mechanics where they shouldn’t be applied, like in-gameplay zombie bites in Resident Evil turning you into a zombie, that would be a disastrously boring game and basically what Silent Hill 2 ended up doing, but these design choices are not even intentional, there isn’t a single interview with any developer or director that says they are, you came up with these excuses to protect the game from any form of scrutiny and criticism because you’re manchildren who cannot handle any opposing opinion whatsoever.

Warning: Major Spoilers

Pros:
+Characters are all made to feel a lot more unique from one another. From different unique skills, to abilities that you can unlock via their weapons, and even how they battle. If there's one thing I can't wait to see from the sequels it's how the rest of the characters will play.
+The music is as good as ever. FF7's soundtrack is my favourite game OST ever, so it'd be hard to mess it up.
+The game looks visually stunning and has some great cutscenes
+Being able to fight the summons is a cool idea.

Cons:
-Ever since I found out this game would end at Midgar I knew it would be held back. They tried to turn 1/5th of a game into a full game and it really shows. There's so much filler content added to sections in the original that were paced correctly. Like the annoying sun lamps in the second reactor, or the moveable arm puzzles, or how chapter 17 just starts with the cast getting split up for no reason so you're forced to spend an hour wasting time in samey-looking corridors. The pacing has just been massively upset.
-Related to above, they seem to try to overcompensate for the lack of length by also adding in side-quests, but the problem is the section of the game they're remaking is mostly linear, so they just kinda shoved all 26 side-quests into 3 total chapters. It's so obvious that they wanted to add more open-worldy feeling sections in those few chapters where you do get some freedom, but it's just so out of place.
-I'm not a fan of the battle system. Your allies don't use their abilities by themself, so you have to manually select something for them to do every single time one of their ATB gauges fill up (which happens fast), and slow down the battle. Also the dodge and block options don't seem all that useful defensively. Dodge roll doesn't actually allow you to dodge most attacks, and block seems way too slow to be able to use in response to anything.
-This game does something I hate in a lot of story-focused games. Forced walking sections. Just random sections of the game where your character starts walking at horrendously slow speeds.
-Any enemy attack that can stun you (and there's way too many of them) lasts way too long.
-There's only 4 enemy skills to learn. I feel like they threw it in at the last second.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro or con:
~All the story additions. Some of them are nice, like the avalanche trio getting way more development, and focusing far more on the destruction of sector 7. But then we have all the "fate" and "whisper" crap. The entire ending feels like it was ripped right out of Kingdom Hearts and I don't like it. After looking it up and fully understanding everything, I get what they're going for and do find it kind of interesting, but I think they went about it all wrong. This game may only be "part 1", but it's still a full fledged game, and it'll now always look like an attempt at properly remaking the OG game, while every other game will, presumably based on the ending, be going in its own way, making it essentially NOT an FF7 remake. The lack of consistency and how they split it all up like this really spoiled what could have been an interesting idea.

Note:
•FF7 is my favourite game of all time, and this was so disappointing.
•The camera is zoomed in too much by default. Like you can change it to an acceptable position, but I don't get why they made the standard one that you start with so claustrophobic.