It's a bit preposterous to remake an entire game, and then ask the player to have played the original version of the game to understand the remake. A remake is supposed to be the definitive way for a new / modern audience to experience your title, no?

I'm a pretty big Final Fantasy fan, so I didn't really have any qualms with this. I played VII, liked it, jumped into Remake and got more than I could have asked for. VII itself is a pretty big title in gaming culture, however, so it makes sense that people would want to get acquainted with this title via its most recent release.

Only when I told my friend that to completely enjoy VIIR he had to play the original VII, to which he replied, "That's fucking stupid," did I realize that it is pretty fucking stupid.

While, I don't necessarily believe you can't do this conceptually, to advertise your game as a remake when it's really a rewrite is misleading. Granted, it's part of the marketing stunt / reveal that the story will end up being different, but this still could have been done without changing so much of the entry title.

On one hand, I can get behind a lot of the changes they made. Pushing Sephiroth into the narrative right off the bat works because he as a character already has an insane amount of cadence to it. Nearly everyone who likes games knows who Sephiroth is. We don't need to spend half the title building up his character because he's so engrained into the cultural mythos that his name holds its own weight.

On the other hand, introducing dementors during key narrative points doesn't work, because in order to recognize that the scenes are panning out differently you would have had to of played the original title. Maybe it would have worked if it was more subtle, or if the rewrite worked the same way as the Neon Genesis Evangelion rebuilds, creating subtle changes and then an entirely new story after everyone gets the gist, but instead it's just confusing to new players and jarring to old players. Even the climax rides off the idea that you have watched Advent Children, the biggest piece of shit movie only an avid Final Fantasy fan would consider watching let alone know about, and the ending requires you to have played Crisis Core to really understand its weight. (though Zack being dead is covered in the original, but that scene specifically is mirrored from Crisis Core. This is just semantics, it's not really an important distinction. Anyways,)

Now that we're post Integrade and Rebirth, these changes make sense given they clearly want to make a new story in the same world with the same characters (and conversely undo the shitshows that are Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus), but again, they could have done it so much better.

The point is, for a remake, FF7R is not exactly new player friendly.

That's my biggest gripe with this game. It's really just a marketing thing, but even some of the changes they made are just bad. If they really wanted to undo the future, or at least say the story will be different, they could have kept it at subtle changes like fighting Reno instead of running, or more Sephiroth appearances, rather than teasing us with this idea and stopping it with shadow people, then for us to kill said shadow people to "unbind" the narrative. At the very least, this title solves its biggest problem narratively.

The other narrative changes are simply extrapolations, giving Avalanche (as in Jessie, Biggs and Wedge) more character development instead of 5 lines of dialogue, new notable characters like Roach, and reusing other characters originally underutilized like Weiss (granted this is in Integrade, but I digress). It's all very good and breathes more life into a setting that was already pretty alive.

Outside of all of that, FF7R looks fantastic. From being the first game to have CGI cutscenes to now persevering clouds 3-polygon hair with realistic hair simulation, FF7 continues to be a testament to the current state of game tech. It's impressive how good this game looks and how well it runs.

The combat is an excellent mix of the modern FF realtime combat and the old turn based, being incredibly engaging despite being somewhat basic on the surface level. Attacks feel weighty, controlling and commanding characters is seamless, and overall the combat flows very well.

What plagues the gameplay is the dungeons. Most of them are increasingly boring, especially the last one. Given my playthrough took me over a year (because I forgot I had it in my Epic Games library rather than Steam), a lot of my final impressions ride on the final dungeon, which was tedious and annoying. A lot of the times I put this game down was due to playing through a dungeon that revolved around a really boring "move here pull lever" rhythm, but the combat and characters carry this game enough to make all that worth it.

Overall, Final Fantasy VII: Remake is pretty solid. It has pretty low lows, but the game overall is super engaging. So much so that I went out of my way to do every side quest, which is something I don't typically do. This titles biggest pitfall is that it claims to be a remake when it really isn't. This is a title made for fans of the series and only that. While you could get into the world of FFVII with Remake, you will be missing out on a lot.

It's one thing to remake a game and drop subtle nods to the original title for long time fans, but it's another to completely rewrite the story and tell people it's the same game. I doubt the Resident Evil remakes would be met to such acclaim if they did the same thing, no?