@Tomiply thanks for the alternative insight/perspective. It definitely does sound like at least some of my combat issues were due to me "playing wrong", but I'm not a particularly patient gamer to be honest so while having a super vast arsenal is cool to some, I didn't really allow the game the opportunity to impress me with it. I did make a point of trying out everything I had on my active party, but fell into just using the same few things anyway because they proved more effective.

To clarify as well, that 4000 damage was with Zidane's standard attack, I was able to do much higher when I used abilities, but was comparing his weakest attack to the far weaker summons (which in my mind should've been doing far more damage than him, especially seen as it's Garnet's whole thing). I see your points about 7 being too easy and don't necessarily disagree, but personally I prefer being able to experiment without feeling like I'm risking losing progress. I only played FF7 for the first time a few years ago, so it's not like I'm speaking from a lifetime of bias and age-old rose tinted glasses or anything, I think I must've just not noticed some of the similar shorfalls as much because I was enjoying other things more perhaps. FF7 was also my first "older" FF title, so there was probably more leniency there too... and the benefit that I'd just played Remake, so I also had the added context of characters from that, where it may have been lacking in the original game.

To be clearer on the battle speeds as well I'm not saying they would take a lot of rounds to finish, just that the turns themselves were inherently really slow. This was made even worse when playing with the battle assistance cheat enabled, because the whole party starts with trance, which meant every encounter would begin with a delay > "trance" title > delay > P1 trancing > delay > "trance"... etc. I did find it much faster to disable this, but even then I had the same problem with delays for no apparent reason. The characters all bob in place when they're idling in combat, and if for example a boss did a sweep attack and hit all 4 while everyone had auto-potion on, there'd be a solid 3-4 bobs of animation between every action. So the attack would be fine, but then it'd go bob-bob-bob > P1 "auto-potion" > bob-bob-bob > P2 "auto-potion".. and it was taking a good 15-30 seconds just to watch everyone recover in between turns😅 Of course that's not really a long time, but when that's before the round even starts and half the actions have similar delays and/or take 5-10 seconds to play out each, even just 2-rounds of combat felt way longer than it needed to. (This was naturally enhanced by me not enjoying the combat too much and wanting it over with )

I'm glad you love it though, I never want to take away from anyone else's love for a game. I value things in my own way and that's part of why I like sharing and hearing contrasting thoughts like your own. If it ever does get a remake or remaster of any kind I'll definitely be there keeping in mind your praise and hoping to feel more similarly to the way you do🙏