Strange game tbh, a lot of weird feelings about this one. In terms of story it’s easily some of the best in Final Fantasy’s history, Nojima hit it out of the park and it really does a great job fleshing out Zack as a character, while leaving some breadcrumbs for fans in terms of character interactions and development, covering plot points not seen in Final Fantasy 7, and leaving breadcrumbs for the future as well. This all culminates in an emotionally turbulent conclusion which I got to say absolutely broke me and left me in pieces. Where this game faulters however is in terms of gameplay and design. The combat is very unintuitive and leaves a lot to be desired. Most of it is designed around spamming the attack button with very little variety, you can customize your materia to use different spells and physical attacks but it’s more limited (and not very useful) than it sounds, you’re better off really just using the standard attack most of the time. There’s also a dodge roll and a block button, but they both aren’t very useful, are slow, and have a lot of delay, making them hard to use in difficult situations. You are aided by something called the DMW, which is like a slot machine roulette that grants you a special attack, but the odds of you getting something worthwhile are completely randomized. The enemies and bosses can range in terms of design from okay to BS, with pretty fast attacks with a lot of damage and unskippable overpowered attacks that sometimes result in instant death. The areas themselves are also not very well-designed. Mostly being empty, long-spanning hallways with very few things to find or NPCs. The encounter rate is also really high, which results in you needing to fight and wipe out enemies which can get monotonous. Also added are random minigame sections. These are pretty unintuitive, and are often just a hinderance towards the overall experience as they don’t really add anything of value. All in all while the story and characters are amazing and I cannot stress that enough, the actual game itself is a really mixed bag, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Very mixed feelings as a whole.