90% of this game shares similar pros and cons to the first part of the Remake trilogy. The story is extremely dragged out via a much larger map, an entire chapter of filler, and unnecessary changes. For what it's worth though they did make some good changes like making Yuffie and Vincent main story characters instead of optional like they used to be. Unfortunately though Vincent and Cid are both not playable. They really should have been. The dev time was all put into developing unnecessarily long roads, mountains, and caves, along with filler beach scenes, instead of fleshing out the combat with characters that walk by your side and were playable in the original. I still wish they just made a real remake of FF7 with just minor changes at most like the previously mentioned inclusion of Yuffie and Vincent in the main narrative, but instead they decided to shove brand new timeline shenanigans into the plot. The worst part is it's usually just for shock value. Characters dying or not dying often leads to nothing significant in the long run. Why are multiple timelines being included out of nowhere? It genuinely comes off as pure shock value without any substance at times. There are some hype moments to be had via these and I am intrigued by some. Heck I do actually think one character's timeline shenanigans is actually modestly used well (compared to the others at least), but a lot of these additions do nothing for me. At the end of the day though this is still Final Fantasy 7 for the most part. It's filled with moments I love like Barret's backstory, Red XIII's backstory, and more. I loved seeing iconic moments like Sephiroth walking through fire in HD, but I wish they actually kept all the iconic moments instead of replacing them with what can only be described as completely nonsensical narratives. Now we have to wait years to know what any of these scenes even mean.