A game that goes nowhere and has nothing to say. Squanders the conceptual setup of the prior game in favor of retreading the same path and filling it with constant fan service. There isn't a story for most of the game and when it does show up, it's not impressive. The handling of Dyne is pretty terrible, turning him from a haunted man on a revenge suicide mission who kills himself because of the blood on his hands, to a cackling maniac who turns into a Resident Evil baddie in his boss fight and dies a heroic-ish death in a hail of gunfire. Pretty well squashed any message of showing how Barret and Dyne's paths diverged due to Barret having friends and Dyne being alone. This and any other serious moment are sullied by Square having no restraint and never letting these moments breathe, handling most of the story worse than the original. They whitewashed so much.

Combat is "improved" by giving you more options but also generally making you too powerful for any encounter, so combat is generally trivial particularly with any open world encounter even on the "Dynamic" difficulty. Most enemies still have the classic elemental weaknesses to exploit to pressure them, but now every character has MP-free built in elemental abilities so there is no uncertainty on materia loadouts and elemental coverage. Bosses are largely just thrown out randomly and with little story relevance (ha).

The open world is full of tedium and pointless filler. You can't fully avoid it and focus on just the side quests (which are largely okay at best) because some will require you to do open world filler to progress. Chadley is terrible and so much of the side content is funneled through him, where summons fights are just context-free VR simulations he gives you (and open world filler makes them easier and levels up their summoning materia). One of my favorite Chadley things is that they force you to look at a video feed of his face but its just a still image with lips superimposed on top in a loop, made even more obvious by female-Chadley being a gif that doesn't cleanly loop.

Musics generally great, outside of the terrible Cosmo Canyon theme. Visuals are quite often very poor, absurdly short draw distance, awful texture work in very common place and sometimes jarringly popping in and out of place during cutscenes, all tied together with the general blurriness of the presentation. It does quite often look less consistent and less flattering than the FF7 Remake Intergrade.

Barret is the most worthwhile character here, Red13 is fine though his teenager voice sounds like Insomniac Miles Morales, and Cait Sith won me over finally (though his betrayal twist is unsurprisingly handled terribly). Tifa and Aerith are largely just shipping fuel and dote over Cloud in a "teehee do you like me? uwu" manner. Yuffie is given 2 too many instances of sexualization, most egregiously being her intro to the crew where Cloud goes to give her CPR and it turns into Yuffie thinking he's feeling her up. Did we mention the world is on the verge of destruction? You might forget that.

Skip.