Feels like a mixed bag. At the start, I was pretty gung-ho about taking on all the side content it offered, but that faded a few chapters in, and by the last few chapters, I kept telling myself to stick to the critical path.
The plot and all dialogue feel like they've been filtered through so many layers of translation, each line removed from the context of what's happening around it, but the themes have the subtlety of a hammer, so they come across okay anyway, but it's pretty grating along the way. The combat system is fine, I guess. It has the same "problem" as a lot of handheld Kingdom Hearts games (particularly Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance), where the real strategy comes from building out/synthesizing your commends/materia to be broken powerful, and the actual moment-to-moment execution on the battlefield is just a formality. Character growth being so dependent on the luck of the DMW slots feels like it should be frustrating, but my odds always felt pretty decent, such that I never felt underleveled or underpowered.
The overall game structure feels almost too meaty for its own good; there's a ton of side content (to the point of there being TOO many optional missions, especially given how similar they are to each other, and how inconsistent the difficulty ratings seem to be between mission sets), but without a chapter select, so much of it is incredibly easily missed, and the game has both highly-signposted and invisible points of no return (though the invisible one seems like it just locks you out of one questline). You would think a more functional NG+ would have been a priority in the remake/remaster, but apparently not. Still, with the amount of content on offer, I can see why the original makes an appearance on basically every must-play PSP games list.
Despite any negatives, I haven't written off the idea of a second playthrough sometime in the future, and that's got to be some kind of a good sign for it. Worthwhile if you want more of the world and characters of FF7, can appreciate action RPGs that prioritize coming up with a character build over tight execution, and are willing to tolerate some very eccentric and overly-dramatic characters.
The plot and all dialogue feel like they've been filtered through so many layers of translation, each line removed from the context of what's happening around it, but the themes have the subtlety of a hammer, so they come across okay anyway, but it's pretty grating along the way. The combat system is fine, I guess. It has the same "problem" as a lot of handheld Kingdom Hearts games (particularly Birth By Sleep and Dream Drop Distance), where the real strategy comes from building out/synthesizing your commends/materia to be broken powerful, and the actual moment-to-moment execution on the battlefield is just a formality. Character growth being so dependent on the luck of the DMW slots feels like it should be frustrating, but my odds always felt pretty decent, such that I never felt underleveled or underpowered.
The overall game structure feels almost too meaty for its own good; there's a ton of side content (to the point of there being TOO many optional missions, especially given how similar they are to each other, and how inconsistent the difficulty ratings seem to be between mission sets), but without a chapter select, so much of it is incredibly easily missed, and the game has both highly-signposted and invisible points of no return (though the invisible one seems like it just locks you out of one questline). You would think a more functional NG+ would have been a priority in the remake/remaster, but apparently not. Still, with the amount of content on offer, I can see why the original makes an appearance on basically every must-play PSP games list.
Despite any negatives, I haven't written off the idea of a second playthrough sometime in the future, and that's got to be some kind of a good sign for it. Worthwhile if you want more of the world and characters of FF7, can appreciate action RPGs that prioritize coming up with a character build over tight execution, and are willing to tolerate some very eccentric and overly-dramatic characters.