This is definitely the best way to play Crisis Core in 2022, but with some caveats, since the game was originally a PSP release, and this is a remaster and not a remake, the game skeleton might feel very dated, with level design which feels WAY too simple at times, side missions which are all the same thing but repeated for a few hundred times etc.
And on top of that (atleast imo) the new voices for Zack and Sephiroth don't hold a candle to the original cast, which is why I changed the game dialogue to japanese.

The combat got updated to be more snappy, responsive and have every action flow into the other better, the animation quality is amazing and it really makes you feel the weight of each attack, although the dodge roll still feels a bit stiff, the DMW went from being a very intrusive and dumb gimmick to being triggerable at your own discretion, even if the button prompt could overlap with other actions depending on the control scheme you choose to use, and I feel those were the main things I had gripes with in the original Crisis Core, but a combat system is split into two different parts which are equally important and complement each other in an action/ARPG, which are how good it feels to control your own character, and the enemy design, this is a point I felt true in FF7R aswell, the enemy design is not good, lots of unreactable frame 1 attacks, unclear telegraphs, AOEs which don't let you get out of the way in time or which track you for the entire animation (gladly these have a lesser effect in this game because the dodge actually has iframes), enemies that get stunlocked at random, big enemies which just don't stagger at all and just turn around and throw an attack every 2 years, and new to this game, dodgeable limit breaks, which in higher level missions means still undodgeable because your numbers are not big enough, I love the idea of being able to stop a Limit Break from happening, but I would've rather have had the option and agency to dodge it because of my skill and not because my numbers were big enough.
But all in all, the core gameplay is fun, even with all the aspects I didn't like about the enemy design.

On top of that I still feel that the DMW is pretty broken, and having level ups tied to it is just dumb game design.

One aspect that they didn't improve, and that they really couldn't do, since this is a remaster, was the writing and plot, while I think Zack, Sephiroth, Aerith, and Cloud (also with standout side characters like Cissnei) have great chemistry and play off each other really well, other characters like Angeal and Genesis are still badly written, and make the plot confusing and just dumb at times, sorry Gackt.

All in all, this is a really good remaster, the improvements to the gameplay greatly benefit the overall package, and I'm really happy I could go through this game with a smile because I was having fun, instead of speeding up the last section of the game on the PSP release because it was just getting frustrating.

Is it worth $60? No lmao, but it's a fun game to play in short bursts on something like the SteamDeck or the Switch.

Zack is still my favorite FF protagonist, and the ending is a masterclass in gaming narrative, just a shame that what sets it up is so inconsistent.

(Played with no items in battle and pressing B on the switch pokemon prompt after a kill)

I have very mixed feelings about this game, I am someone who has played pokemon for most of his life, specifically since i was 4 and well into my 20s, but this game really makes me sad in so many ways.

The Team Star bossfights, the characters, the final fights of each main quest and the entire final stretch are everything I love about this franchise, but all this is bogged down by a myriad of bad choices like the absence of level scaling for the bossfights, the barren open world where all you do is just fight pokemon and pick up items, lacking any meaningful content or dungeons whatsoever, so you're just left with the landmarks marked on your map to progress the story.
It feels like GameFreak is also scared of just having players face a little bit of challenge, I don't want these games to be insanely hard, but the fact that they can definitely make fights that will test your brain even a little without feeling frustrating, as demonstrated from the final stretch of this game, really shows that something really went wrong in the actual conceptualization for the systems used in the rest of the game, but also those fights are in the same game as a Gym Leader with a level 36 STARAPTOR, with 2 MOVES, as his ACE, and on top of that the removal of set mode makes me feel like I'm playing the game wrong every time i refuse to switch after knocking a pokemon out.
This game is also riddled with technical problems and in general looks horrid, no joke I felt like I had a headache after every play session because it was straining my eyes that hard.

And all this makes me very sad, because GameFreak DOES have that spark still, they DO have the talent, but they just don't have enough time to fully realize their vision because of corporation greed which forces this yearly release schedule on the devs.
This game really needed a few years more in development and it shows, but of course that could never happen under TPC.