This scene perfectly sums up my feelings about this game:
https://youtu.be/WgLr6qlpec4
You can never go home, but I guess you can shop there. You can never actually go back to FF7, but it'll still give you an avenue in which to spend your money.
The good: There are a lot of great design choices here. Visually, it's a mostly stunning game that takes all the great visual concepts from the original and hews very closely to them. The weapon leveling system is also quite good, even though I never felt like I had enough of a window to make a mistake and need to respec my stuff.
When the game sticks to the plot and area details of the original game, it's a lot of fun. That's about all I can say about what is good here.
Much of this game is a waste of time. Side stories are pale copies of Yakuza side stories, where you go to a place and fight a thing for someone, but all the characters are so devoid of charm and the objects you get as a reward are generally pointless.
The detours are frustratingly thin, like the one time you go topside. I was really looking forward to that conceptually, but it was just a drab suburban town, where you don't even get to go in and meet people.
And then there's the final five hours of boss rushes and plot dump, and it did nothing for me. The music would swell and I'd feel nice, but then I'd have to grapple with the frustrating battle system that was trying to do ATB, but in real time, where I can get juggled and trapped and then killed, but I can't do the same to my opponent, where enemies can just drive further up the road and stay away from me while I slowly wait for my bar to fill up so I can use my one long distance attack.
The whole thing took me 42 hours. That's 5 times longer than the original Midgar section took me back in 1997 and 10 hours longer than the entire original game took me. And for what?
And you know what? In five years I'll spend $15 on the sequel and I'll spend another 42 hours on it and I'll be just as incensed (more so, likely, given how the ending here implied major shifts in the narrative), because I guess Square is the only company that can still do this to me, me a goddamned adult man.
https://youtu.be/WgLr6qlpec4
You can never go home, but I guess you can shop there. You can never actually go back to FF7, but it'll still give you an avenue in which to spend your money.
The good: There are a lot of great design choices here. Visually, it's a mostly stunning game that takes all the great visual concepts from the original and hews very closely to them. The weapon leveling system is also quite good, even though I never felt like I had enough of a window to make a mistake and need to respec my stuff.
When the game sticks to the plot and area details of the original game, it's a lot of fun. That's about all I can say about what is good here.
Much of this game is a waste of time. Side stories are pale copies of Yakuza side stories, where you go to a place and fight a thing for someone, but all the characters are so devoid of charm and the objects you get as a reward are generally pointless.
The detours are frustratingly thin, like the one time you go topside. I was really looking forward to that conceptually, but it was just a drab suburban town, where you don't even get to go in and meet people.
And then there's the final five hours of boss rushes and plot dump, and it did nothing for me. The music would swell and I'd feel nice, but then I'd have to grapple with the frustrating battle system that was trying to do ATB, but in real time, where I can get juggled and trapped and then killed, but I can't do the same to my opponent, where enemies can just drive further up the road and stay away from me while I slowly wait for my bar to fill up so I can use my one long distance attack.
The whole thing took me 42 hours. That's 5 times longer than the original Midgar section took me back in 1997 and 10 hours longer than the entire original game took me. And for what?
And you know what? In five years I'll spend $15 on the sequel and I'll spend another 42 hours on it and I'll be just as incensed (more so, likely, given how the ending here implied major shifts in the narrative), because I guess Square is the only company that can still do this to me, me a goddamned adult man.