This plays so much better than the main game. It leans more action. Yuffie has a small enough moveset, that I could map all my attacks to the face buttons significantly decreasing the number of times I have to pause the game during combat. Also, she is the only controllable character which removes the awkward character switching. Too bad this is a one-off. I would love for them to keep this for the next game.

This did expose how bad the lock-on system is in this game though. The game has fights that throw many small enemies at the player. Trying to target the right one was such a hassle. Then there are training missions where I had to destroy a bunch of boxes in limited amount of time, and this was a nightmare. I would have a box in front of me, sometimes it would target it, sometimes it would target a box way off in the background, sometimes it would target a box that was offscreen. It was so annoying.

The story is a wash sadly. I was happy to see the game return to the story of Avalanche, but it seems contradictory to the main game's story. Shinra said Avalanche was working with Wutai which wasn't true, and Barrett took offense to the lie. In this story, Yuffie is from Wutai and is working with Avalanche. And the game doesn't really dig into Wutai at all for me to understand what's going on there. Also, the character backstories were confusing. Yuffie reminds Sonon of his sister. The game shows a flashback of his sister who looks exactly like Yuffie. This confused the hell out of me. Is Yuffie actually his sister? I'm assuming not, but they should've used a more distinct character model for that. Also, Yuffie taking offense to the idea that she reminded him of his sister was weird. It was a bit hard for me to get a grasp on Yuffie as a character.