i have forever considered myself "not an RPG person". at the beginning of this year i set out on a playthrough of the original final fantasy 7. i quit somewhere shortly after the first visit to the golden saucer. needless to say, this did not improve my disposition towards the genre. this game makes a similarly valiant effort (and nearly had me fully in during the wall market stretch, a feat no other game with "RPG" in the primary genre tags can really claim quite similarly) but at some point i couldn't blind myself with the good time hat any longer. Alas, THE PROBLEMS arrived.
1. Stun-based status effects suck. They've always sucked. If I wanted to have my ability to play the game removed i'd just turn off my keyboard. I don't wanna be a frog, I wanna be Cloud Strife.
2. Materia Management sucks. Not knowing what characters you're bringing into the fight at any given moment needs you need to be particularly finnicky with who you hand the keys to the kingdom to. Put your sole revival materia on Aerith and she's not with the group for the majority of the fight? Too bad! Equipped every element except wind and that's the one weakness the enemies have? Outta luck, chump!
3. Listen, I really liked the story of what I did play through in original FF7 a lot. It was what kept me trudging through the gameplay I didn't enjoy very much because, as everyone on The Planet will tell you, it's got a pretty great story. This game, as with everything else it does, starts off in a valiant effort to really thrill the newcomers with something showier, more well-rounded, exciting. I think the parts of the Midgar portion of FF7 that are shown here are mostly an improvement upon their original source material, with folks like Wedge and Hojo going from lego-limbed "okay who is this"-types to genuinely compelling characters to watch. However, the game at some point just screams "okay new folks get out of here!" and starts throwing in the exact peripheral material I was trying to avoid having to digest. I love the idea of "Aerith and Sephiroth read the script to Final Fantasy 7 and certainly don't wanna be in it" as a story prompt, but if you just show vague flashes of Cait Sith (character who isn't playable at all here!) and then hammer in on Zack in a scene from Crisis Core, a game that I had to ask a friend "hey what's going on here" to get the gist of, the idea of "newcomer friendly" is promptly abandoned.

Again, very nice foundation here but the problems I have with most RPGs resoundingly came running back in the moment I let my guard down. This genre is simply Not For Me, dude