The fact that this game is put on a pedestal as not only one of gaming's flagship titles but was nominated for multiple game of the year awards and has a sequel on its way that is one of the most anticipated releases of 2022 is something that I feel sums up everything about modern gaming.

Let's start with the positive - Horizon is a stunning looking videogame. I've gone back to my old save file - one I bailed on back in 2017 - on PS5 and I can't quite believe this is a five year old game and not a native PS5 title. The smooth 60fps upgrade is likely doing a bit of heavy lifting but even in the many screenshots I have taken from my playthrough, it is an undeniably good looking game, right up there at the very top of the pile.

That's it. That's the positive.

Christ, where do we start with the negatives? What Horizon: Zero Dawn offers is little more than a visual treat. As an open world game, it is doing nothing more than the stuff we got bored of on the 360/PS3. As an action game, it feels awkward with all of the attacks feeling far too over-animated and taking far too long to give you a snappy sense of control. The stealth elements are basic, barebones, nothing special but certainly not bad. Most of the sidequests are fetch or kill quests. The characters are all generic tropes, from the father figure who dies to give you a motive to the villain you remember from your childhood - there's not a single original character arc in the entire thing. The overall lore of the world of Horizon comes dangerously close to being actually interesting but then spaffs that up the wall by only revealing itself to you via an insulting amount of audio logs or, in two hilariously bad sections, unskippable exposition dumps.

Open world games are extremely popular and everything about this feels so fucking cynical. Skill trees lock away basic abilities because heaven forbid you have too much freedom from the word go. Yellow fucking objects show where you can climb and you better not get any ideas about climbing on anything other than these obvious climbing markers! From the lead character, sub-Netflix "box set" show storyline and game mechanics that are so well-worn that you basically know exactly how this game plays and feels before you've even started it - and this is all entirely by design. You're supposed to know exactly what you're getting in to and that is one of the main reasons behind its success. It's a game for the lowest common denominator. It's a game that doesn't want any friction whatsoever. It's the gaming equivalent of wall painted in magnolia white with a Live, Laugh, Love framed poster on it.

It is the most basic of basic bitch stuff.

I think it speaks volumes that this - the absolute fucking DEATH of the old style of open world game that Ubisoft and their ilk have been milking since the first Assassin's Creed and has been begging for death for over a decade - came out only a few weeks before Breath of the Wild showed up and instantly made anything that treads the same boards as Horizon look like a relic almost immediately.

Looks great though so you know 10/10 GOTY please tune in to the Game Awards!!!!!!

Because this game has gathered some controversy now with more and more people talking about the flaws and criticizing it, I am rewriting this review to be more elaborate and to explain better what I dislike about this game. I will leave the original parts of the review commented out.

---- ART DIRECTION ----
>>>>>>>> The art direction is mediocre. Game looks awful on the Switch. They knew this was a Switch exclusive and they should have chosen a gameplay style and art style suitable for the system.<<<<<<<<<<

Art direction in SMT has always been a highlight and Atlus is pretty much one of the most "artistically" focused video game studios out there and always has been, SMT has initially stood out with Kaneko's fantastic demon designs that according to some revolutionized the perception of myth in Japanese otaku circles. Nocturne to this game is one of the best looking games of all time for me. But SMTV completely misses the mark in so many ways.
- The UI is very generic, people have pointed out right away that it looks like a mobile UI and that's because it is true. The theming of the UI has nothing to do with the game itself or its themes. SMTIV's UI looked like the interface of a cheap smartphone, with app-like icons, because it's the interface of your gauntlet, which LITERALLY is a cheap 2013 smartphone. SJ's UI is fantastic and looks like you're seeing the world through the demonica. What the fuck is this? They put a "circles" themeing everywhere but what exactly does it have to do with the game? Where are the circles OUTSIDE the UI? There's nothing circle-like anywhere at all. That sucks on top of the UI just being ugly in general with the same fonts and assets that were created for TMS.
- There is so much meaningless and confusing in the designs of the characters. The triangle/gold theme on Abdiel for example is unnecessary and overdesigned, the patterns on Aogami's body, Nahobino himself. Nahobino is supposed to be Susano-o's true form but he looks absolutely nothing like any depiction or description of Susano-o, there is nothing about him that would make you think he could commit the acts he commited, neither Aogami nor Nahobino himself. All you're left with is a lingering confusing and a feeling of a lack of coherence when it comes to the designs, which are a huge contrast with Nocturne, although was present in IV due to the absence of Kaneko as well
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Every area looks the same. The same cars. The same buildings. The same sand. The same guard rails all the way to the end. There are only very small things that are actually unique to each area. SMTIV, on the 3DS, managed to make areas look unique much better than this. If you go to Shinjuku you actually see buildings that the actual Shinjuku has in IV. Ginza just looks exactly like Tamachi except in a dark filter, when it was supposed to be this massive commercial district in the past, but you see literally nothing commercial there, no former shops, no malls, nothing. The only thing that makes Ginza or Akihabara feel like Ginza or Akihabara is a sidequest of a Mokoi asking you to collect otaku items, which are only glowing balls on the map. It's very ugly. For me, that kind of stuff is the very definition of soulless. It's the very opposite of attention to detail or care. I'd much rather have a map of 4 buildings that actually looked like Ginza rather than a massive map of recycled assets. In SMT1, if you get to Ginza, it's a massive underground area with TONS of NPCs to talk to and every shop imaginable. This is one of the worst, if not even the worst aspect of the game, and if only this was fixed, if the environments were interesting in any way or varied or rooted in the actual Tokyo, I could have enjoyed this game a lot. But the combination of godawful, zero story and godawful, uninteresting, bland, generic environments were a little too much. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

--- STORY ---

The story is utterly laughable and an insult to writing. Definitely some of the worst "story" and "writing" ever put out in the realm of JRPGs unfortunately. It's genuinely hilarious how Atlus West's twitter banner says that they release "story-driven role playing experiences" or something and then release a game whose story is so laughably bad, the only time people defend it is by saying "well at least it barely exists haha". But it does exist, and what exists is terrible.
Analyzing it would take too much space so I will just list 20 issues I have with the story in bullet points.
- Strictly tell and don't show. We are told Tao is charismatic (she never does something charismatic), we are told Ichiro live streams (that never comes up again) we are told Yuzuwho cares about his sister (never mentions her after the 2nd act of the game), we are told Koshimizu is a prime minister everyone loves and respects (we never see him do any politics), we are told Yakumo distributed demon summoning programs (nothing comes from it) etc.
- Ichiro has a cringe (and extremely funny) Vergil scene
- Yuzuru only has a single line ("we must save tokyo!" which he repeats a gazillion times throughout the game, he never explains why he cares so much about tokyo)
- Amanozako could have been a vehicle to explore aogami's protectiveness towards the MC, nothing comes of it
- Amanozako is curious about humans and asks questions, nothing comes of it
- Tao hangs out with you for 20 hours, in act 2 and act 4, never says a single word that could give her some character
- nahobino sacrifices himself to save tao even though tao never said a single word and didn't do anything to make you care for her, and all that when this is a game series that's all about self-inserting into the protagonist and seeing him as an extension to yourself, and yet he does something completely irrational from the player's point of view
- the bullying arc begins too suddenly without making you even care about any of the characters or the school in the first place, no set-up whatsoever
- the nahobino concept is trash because it devalues kaneko's demon designs as "not their true form" which makes everything confusing
- the dialogue, especially of the alignment reps, is cliched and terrible and beyond one or two lines neither point of view gets properly fleshed out or justified, which was the same in nocturne but that game made up for it with artistically impressive and intriguing cutscenes that invited you to make up the gaps in their ideology yourself
- you're bethel's lapdog for the entirety of the game and it doesn't make sense why the mc would just do whatever the PM is telling him to do, especially hwen he's sent to kill the demon king when he could've been a chaos-aligned mc
- tao becomes a goddess, no explaination
- amanozako changes her voice and personality, no explaination
- ichiro can suddenly teleport, no explaination
- "japan has had a long history with proto-fiends", no explaination
- proto-fiends are artificial demons, no explaination how that even works or makes sense at all, these are clearly spiritual beings made of magatsuhi, not fucking aliens like in evangelion that you can just clone
- yakumo has a cringe "demons killed my entire family" backstory
anyway you get the idea the story is absolute garbage if you don't think it's garbage you just haven't paid enough attention.

----- GAMEPLAY ----

The gameplay is good. It's not flawless. If the gameplay were truly perfect then I could have looked over the other issues but it is not. Bosses are fun. Encounters on the overworld are pointless and only there to recruit demons, you can run past everything otherwise. Hard mode is appropriately difficult - for a while only. Yakumo in Ginza is the last difficult boss. Customization got much improved, fusion got much improved and is more easy than ever, the affinity system got improved and magatsuhi from the player side is a pretty cool tech, albeit unbalanced.

The level-design is generally great, varied from area to area, with secrets to find. The problem with it is that every area looks the same, thus exploration isn't as rewarding, but I will not count gameplay to that for now. Traversal and movement is fun and sliding down sand dunes never gets old.

Now to the negatives
- dampeners turn Magatsuhi from a big scary threat you have to prepare for to a free-turn for you, which is honestly hilarious and sad.
- Some demons are clearly superior to the rest due to their unique moves and this is the first game in the series where it's recommended you keep a level 45 demon all the way to the end. yoshitsune and idun in particular are too overpowered, limiting creativity
- the map is the worst i have ever seen in any game ever, practically useless for navigation
- the lack of visual variety makes traversal a pain, since so much of it looks exactly the same
- bosses lack gimmicks or unique features you have to play around outside of like lahmu and hydra, which is very disappointing
- low number of demons for a 2021 game. they really only added 30 demons not from persona 5? really? nocturne had 190 demons most of which were done from scratch. this game reused almost the entire roster from persona 5 and only created 30 extra ones?
- the dungeons are UNGODLY bad. wow!!! i have never seen such shitty dungeons in a modern JRPG and I played tales of arise. the final dungeon is so bland and anti-climactic i genuinely couldn't believe that this was it. what the hell, etrian odyssey dev team?

The gameplay is good, but not flawless, it's simply not nearly good enough to outweight the GAZILLION of other issues the game has.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>The level design is pretty good. The level designer tried his best making each area feel unique when he was given the same 5 assets for each of them. Man, I don't envy that guy. He deserved to work on a better game. I can just imagine the level designers begging for more assets but whatever development problem they had that made this game end up such a mess must have denied them that.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Character designs are very good from a technical level. They look cool, they look handsome and pretty. Doi did a fantastic job there, too bad the writers and director let him down by not fleshing out any of the characters he designed, and making a certain heroine more obnoxious than even IVA characters
And as mentioned earlier making a story that is incoherent with the designs. (The designs came first, the story second, it was rewritten multiple times)

-----------TECHNICAL-------------
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>The game runs at, pretty much, 25FPS. It sometimes runs at 30FPS when you are lucky. The menus are laggy. Sometimes the game just stands still for 5 seconds in combat and you wonder if you softlocked your game.

The OST and the dub is compressed, and sounds awful on the Switch. I couldn't believe they would do that.

I was extremely hyped for this game. I spent ungodly amount of hours soaking up all information about this game that was available. I even ratio'd the IGN reviewer for unfairly comparing it to Persona 5 because I thought it was an unfair comparision. But in the end it's a very mediocre game and after playing it I don't give a rats ass about it anymore. The only thing this game has going for it is QoL features and streamlined gameplay. I thought I only cared about gameplay before I played this game, and this game really opened my eyes that this is not true. I'm still not a story-focused person, but I want an experience where everything fits together for a coherent, convincing vision. This game is the opposite of that. The sidequests are barren and repetitive, there are five quests which are just about "kill this guy or that guy" and they are THE BEST QUESTS IN THE GAME, because they have some flavor text at least. The Tokyo overworld is bland and there is nothing to do there, why even add that shit? Because everything looks the same, the more you play, the more you get tired of the visuals, and they turn from "wow this looks nice" to "wow, this is so ugly man". Small things like, why is all of the loot only to be found in vending machines when IVA had such an interesting system?

The game just overall comes off as cheap, passionless, like nobody who worked on this game actually cared, nobody sat down to write some additional dialogue for some quests or the main characters to flesh them out, nobody bothered to create more than 3 unique assets per area, nobody cared to make you actually find something interesting in the Tokyo overworld, nobody cared about the trillion of plot issues, nobody cared that you get hayataro at level 40 right before the end of the game, nobody cared the conditions for the "kill all demons" ending is "be the nicest person ever to demons, always help them and be on their side", just nobody cared about this game it seems.

The worst game I've had the displeasure of playing. I played about 15-20 hours and honestly hated every second of it. It felt bland, safe, unremarkable but more than anything I was either immensely bored by it or immensely annoyed. Dialogue was almost painful to read at times, specifically from Tifa, and gameplay was so horribly aged, functionally broken or clunky that there was no enjoyment to be had from it.
What I had problems with most however was the story. I'm fine with games that have very minimal or no story whatsoever but I can't take bad stories. This one I found be insufferable. The setting wasn't interesting and any attempt to expand upon it was lazy/shallow. The plot itself felt directionless. There was a goal but there was no way to actually get to the goal shown. It was more like just a few cobbled together scenes sometimes rather than an actual narrative. Extremely disappointing from one of the most iconic from my favourite genre of games.

“Really sorry about your ass.”

(some spoilers for OG FF7’s first ten hours, no spoilers for FF7R)

I started this review series by listing my absolute favorite games; both because being positive feels good, but also to provide a kind of baseline for what to expect here, I suppose. In that same vein, I feel it’s also important to show contrast: if my favorites are all about pure mechanical expression and smooth, organic interactions, then FF7R, conversely, represents everything that holds games back to me. This thing is so rigid and limited that it somehow manages to feel more outdated than the turn-based 90s RPG it’s remaking. While FF7’s original design-ethos was built on detailed one-off environments, contextual storytelling and intuitive yet flexible battle mechanics, FF7R completely tears down all of these pillars, leaving in their place the kind of nightmare-hyperbole-parody that weebs are describing when they talk about the latest Call of Duty or Uncharted.

Action-adjacent Square RPGs like Dissidia or Crisis Core can have this tendency to not ground your actions in the game world very much — it’s the difference between button presses triggering canned interactions between actors, or throwing out an actual hitbox that I need to connect with the enemy. FF7R feels like the final form of this in the worst possible way: for as gnarly as the impact of Cloud’s flashy sword combos on enemy grunts may look on the surface, there isn’t actually any real physicality to how your attacks throw them around, nor does the addition of square-mashing add anything meaningful mechanically when compared to FF7. You quickly realize that your standard attacks don’t actually do appreciable damage and solely exist to pad out the time between ATB moves, a process that previously moved along on its own. No amount of alibi-action disguises the fact that this is, at its heart, still a turn-based RPG, where enemies weak to fire need to be hit with the fire spell and damage can’t be reliably avoided. You get about five hundred different ways to “parry” attacks, none of which actually require any careful timing on your end, but interact with enemies in ways that are completely arbitrary. The final boss in particular is a hilarious display of just how bad this game wants to look like a Devil May Cry, while still working under NES JRPG rules and refusing to adopt things like consistent telegraphing or hit reactions. In those instances, it’s some of the most shallow and repetitive action-gameplay imaginable.

Countless FF7R skill videos do show how much this new combat system can pop off, since it gives you control over when and how to queue up party attacks and provides some unique states for active positioning on the battlefield. What those videos all have in common though is that they're exclusively shot in the game’s VR challenge missions with precise Materia setups; ideal conditions for the system to shine that flat-out don’t exist in the rest of the game. Campaign mob fights run the gamut from boring to soul-crushingly tedious (those goddamn sewer fish guys,) while any fun you could be having with bosses is knee-capped by absurd damage gating and forced cutscene transitions that will eat any excess damage you put out that moment. This aspect should’ve been a top priority with the boss design considering how much combat revolves around slowly building up this Stagger bar, where the majority of the fight is spent purely setting up the boss for when you can finally lay the smack down (which, just like for FFXIII, already does a lot to make individual actions feel linear and meaningless.) The way all that damage will regularly evaporate into nothing due to factors completely outside your control feels like having a bag of Tetsuya Nomura-shaped bricks dropped right on your nutsack just as you’re about to cum.

Under that light, the proposition of digging into the Materia system and trying to get the most out of it is absolutely laughable. I can’t even begin to tell you how many boss fights I went into only to realize halfway through (after some kind of form-change or mechanical switch-up) that my setup wasn’t optimal, forcing me to either slog and fumble through the rest of the battle, or back out and start from scratch with this new knowledge. All that’s on top of the godforsaken menus you’re forced to work with that hit this abominable sweetspot between clunky stone-age level interface design and the suffocating swathe of meaningless skill trees you’ve come to expect from modern AAA games. How is it possible that healing outside of battle literally takes longer in this game than it did in Final Fantasy (just Final Fantasy. 1. the first one.) on the NES?

FF7R’s final Shinra HQ invasion has to be one of the worst isolated parts of any game I’ve ever played and represents a microcosm for how little it respects your time. Every issue I’ve discussed so far is amplified now that your party is split in half, with no way to quickly transfer setups between the two teams. Fights are now sandwiched between “””platforming””” sections that have Tifa monkey bar-ing by transitioning from one excruciatingly slow canned animation into the next. To get back to what I was saying in that second paragraph: for as much as Uncharted’s climbing for example is brain-dead easy, it at least provides some vague sense that I’m in control of a character in a physical setting, instead of giving commands to a robot on the fucking moon. The least you could say about Uncharted, also, is that it gives you shit to look at. What is the point of remaking the most popular JRPG of all time as this PS4 mega-game when that entails turning all of its handcrafted backgrounds into featureless copy-paste tunnels and compressed-to-shit JPEG skyboxes, all of which now necessitate what feels like hours upon hours of squeeze-through loading?

All that begs the question: what exactly did I push through this trash heap for in the end? I categorically reject the notion that a game this mechanically regressive can still come together purely as a vehicle for cutscenes or something, but even entertaining that idea for a minute has me confused over what the big deal is. My impression is that FF7R managing, against all expectations, to not be some Advent Children-level train wreck sapping any and all life out of these characters, is enough for it to come across as this masterful reexamination of the original story to many players (also that the whole cast is hot.) The reality is that, while some of the dialogue and character interactions does hit, this game is 40 hours long and naturally a lot of that extra time is padded out by your party members giving each other directions to hopefully not get lost in this FFXIII-ass level design. It’s pure filler and adds little of value to the existing story.

FF7R’s most crucial mistake, and why I’ve now realized this remake-series was an awful idea to begin with, is to think that just knowing wider information about a character will automatically make us care about them more. I first played the original in 2015, and back then, the deaths of Biggs, Wedge and Jessie legitimately shocked me. And it’s not because I was particularly attached to those characters — instead, it was all in the execution: sudden, unceremonious, unfair and way too soon. That’s the whole reason it worked, and it was a way to make you hate the faceless corporation that was Shinra that actually felt earned. FF7R not only tries to endear us to Avalanche by giving us exponentially more time with them, it bone-headedly draws out their deaths in a way that’s so corny and obvious it borders on parody. You’d think giving the villains more screen-time would be a harmless at-worst change, but presenting them as these hot badasses only makes this feel even more like some generic Shounen anime and less like the systemic fight against capitalism that was the original.

I’d be lying if I said the way they contextualize this remake within FF7’s overall story wasn’t kind of clever, but my gut tells me this twist is only gonna feel more lame as time passes. It’s already at the point where it derails any and all discussion about the game; where somehow being a little bit meta means all the shit about it that makes me want to off myself is actually intentional and smart. The literal first numero uno side-quest I did in FF7R involved crawling into some back-alley, killing a pack of rats, going back to the quest giver to be told I “didn’t kill the right rats,” heading to the same spot again and finally killing the new rats that just spawned there. The starting area this quest takes place in has to be one of the ugliest sections I’ve seen in any AAA game, with hazy washed out lighting and NPC animation that hasn’t evolved a bit from FFX on the PS2.

The most poignant experience I had in my time playing FF7R was in Wall Market. It's easily the most gassed-up part of the game online, mostly to do with the fact that it’s a vehicle for wacky anime cutscene shenanigans and how the characters ramp up the horny to the max of what a Square Enix game is comfortable with (that Don Corneo confrontation is cringeworthy with all the awkward pauses between lines.) In Wall Market, you can enter this bar. The barkeeper will ask you to sit down and have a drink. You can’t do either of those things; you just stand there as the NPCs around you gaze into the void.

FF7R is not the fully-realized mega budget dream version of Midgar we've all been salivating at the thought of, and it’s not some clever meta commentary either. No, I’m pretty sure it just sucks.

Corridor Simulator VII is terribly inconsistent.

Where to start with this game? it's a hard one to review because while I don't completely hate it, I don't remotely like it either. It's a mix of things that don't really work together leaving a bit of a flat experience for me if you look past the Final Fantasy VII aesthetic and nostalgia involved in it's creation.

For those unaware Final Fantasy VII remake is, obviously a remake of Final Fantasy VII, originally a Playstation 1 game released in 1997. I say Remake, it only actually covers the part of the original game set in Midgar which was only a few hours but has been dragged out into a 30-40 hour experience. It is being sold episodic and while I don't have a problem with this as a principal. I do have a problem with it in execution because so much of the game is inconsistent.

The game is incredibly linear, I'm not talking about story, I have no problem with that, i'm talking about level design. It is awful. Awful! Past the first chapter which was the game highlight for me it's just incredibly narrow corridors leading from one place to the next with very little to explore or do. These corridors are also filled with slow forced walking sections or narrow gaps Cloud has to slowly shimmy through like he's in Uncharted or Tomb raider destroying the pacing completely. The few branching paths you meet you are often railroaded past "this way Cloud!" without being allowed to explore. These few side paths are often just corridors to arena rooms anyway for obvious later side quests.

Speaking of which, Side quests! Cool right? A chance to see more of Midgar and meet cool characters? wrong. These are terrible. There are 20 plus in the game and every. Single. One. is. boring. Meet a forgettable character, have mundane dialogue, backtrack through a narrow corridor to above mentioned obvious side quest area, kill monster variant, come back. Repeat. there is no soul to them at all, they feel thrown in to extend the game length, no more, no less. while I understand a lot of RPGs use this kind of formula they might at least be funny or have memorable characters, these all just feel bland like created by committee or for an mmo.

Fighting the above mentioned monsters is also a let down for me. I love action RPGS, I love turn based RPGs, I dislike whatever this is. It's a jack of both and master of none. You have three party members to swap between on the fly, each can attack, block, dodge, use a variety of skills and magic and you can pause the game to select abilities and order characters to use moves. Sounds great? wrong.

The dodge is useless. It has no invincibility frames so doing a last minute well timed dodge like most action games is a waste of time, you'll get hit anyway and can only use it for slow obvious attacks. Block lessens damage but you take a huge amount anyway and you can't cancel out of attacks to block so if you're committed you're taking huge damage. the game seems designed to make sure you're taking damage.
The AI is just intentionally bad. Your team mates can't do anything on their own but some basic attacking occasionally and sit like lemmings most of the time. Square Enix solved this themselves years ago with the gambit system on Playstation 2 yet have weirdly regressed. Enemy AI just swarms your controlled character forcing you to constantly swap characters for breathing room. All I want to do is play as Tifa but I can't do that to use the combat effectively. She is also the only fun character to use in combat (Barrett especially is so boring) Don't even get me started on the stagger system where enemies take almost no damage unless you assess them and use the right magic on them. Not got those equipped? a boss fight can take like 40 minutes unless you reload your game. It gives you options on what you want to use, then often forces you another way anyway. Throw in how useless and limited summons are, (they may as well not be in the game) and how terrible the camera often is keeping track, especially in narrow confines and flying enemies and the combat is just disappointing :(

I really dislike it and yet I can see where it could have been fantastically fun but it feels like they hamstrung themselves and the whole game feels like that. Expanded story could have been wonderful but it's often cringey or bland. Bigger Midgar would be great, but it's a linear corridor simulator. Action combat could be exciting but it's instead got shoe horned in mechanics that slow it all down and leave it in a genre limbo.

This brings me to the visuals. This game is gorgeous, the character models look amazing, better than the Advent Children CG movie and Chapter 1 is also stunning for detailed areas, brickwork and textures. So why do some other parts look so awful? there seems to be a texture issue especially in Chapters 3 and 8 but can happen any time where the walls, junk or posters are so blurry sections of it look like a Playstation 2 background. For a game that's so linear and small in level scope that shouldn't be happening. See what I mean? Inconsistent.

Lastly the ending is absolute garbage. A lot of the added content is appalling or cringe worthy but the ending just felt like they wanted to make Advent Children 2 rather than a FFVII remake and Barrett is just an awful stereotype the whole way through.

Overall I'm aware i'm probably in the minority but I just don't like it that much. By chapter 14 I dropped the difficulty down to easy, not because it was hard, it's not, it's just tedious. Easy at least allowed me to combo in as Tifa and made that more fun to see it through to the end. I'm glad I played it and saw it through to the end but it just wasn't the game I wanted I guess, it felt like Final Fantasy XIII crossed with Kingdom Hearts and that is not a sentence I ever want to write again. I have no interest in playing this again or the next part.

+ Expanded character development about Avalanche is a (mostly) welcome addition.
+ Tifa is at least semi fun in combat when you can use her.
+ The nostalgia of playing a new FFVII game is great, especially when some of the iconic music fires up.
+ The game is gorgeous...

- .....except when it isn't texture wise.
- Narrow corridor, forced walking, crevice crawling moments are horrendous.
- Side quests are laughably dull.
- Combat is no fun. Intentionally road blocks any fun you could have, camera is terrible, summons are useless, stagger is a chore.
- New content is just padding. Ending to the game is terrible.
- Roche.