I'll try and keep the spoilers to a minimum.
Bearing in mind that the original is one of my favourite games of all time and also that I don't really play AAA single-player narrative-based action/adventure/rpg* console games of this length as I just find the systems and mechanics fairly mindless after a while. Which is fine for a tight 12-15 hours interwoven in an excellent narrative and constantly switching up environments and plot points, like The Last Of Us. But the last one I probably played that pushed 25 hours was Red Dead Redemption, which I was lukewarm on compared to the esteem it's held in. I think ultimately, no matter fun how the combat systems are initially, eventually they become repetitive with no extra layer of strategy on top of them or a high skill ceiling to climb. You might get a few new abilities every once in a while that you press a button to activate, but in the end - in RDR's case - you're just holding L2 to auto-aim and tapping R2 to shoot. Constantly. For hours. Through hundreds of bad guys. Eventually, I get to the point where I just wanna see the finish. I bounced off Horizon: Zero Dawn and one of the recent Far Crys. I even bounced off Mass Effect. The only game of anywhere near this type in the last ten years that hooked me for 50+ hours was Skyrim. Despite arguably having the worst combat mechanics of any game mentioned here, simply because I found the world so enjoyable to explore and it looked and sounded amazing at the time. I would never dream of playing a modern day Final Fantasy. But this is obviously something I feel like I have to play and admittedly was super excited for.
In the first couple hours I was pleased. The combat system is an interesting, modern take on the original. The early bosses and 1v1 duels I found especially challenging and thrilling. But again, eventually it becomes fairly repetitive and most fights (even most bosses) start to blend into one.
But the thing that really killed this for me and made me quit after TWENTY EIGHT HOURS, was the moment I was asked to traverse a section I had cleared a few hours previously that I had already thought went on for far too long (much like this post will). At the end of the first slog through that section, you escape it by the skin of your teeth as enemies start to fill the last area you have explored. And I thought "that's weird. Why would they show it filling up with enemies again?"... Yeah, well it's because you're coming back here to fight them again later, stupid. Something that wasn't that enjoyable an exercise the first time: Mindless puzzles where you go to one console and press a button to allow you to open a path to the other side. But wait, that walk way has now collapsed so you're going to have to go the long way round and press another button to allow you to double back to the original route. Oh, and you're going to have three cut scenes along the way where one character will save another character from death by grabbing their falling hand at the last second. Just. Fuck. Off. It all felt so pointless. The original had a few small sections like this, but they were resolved in a matter of seconds.
When I heard that they were stretching this initial Midgar part of the game into something eight to ten times it's length I thought it was a cool idea. Some back story for Jessie and Biggs and Wedge to greaten the emotional impact of what happens there. Filling out the political details of Midgar and Shinra. The unchecked corporatism, class and wealth disparity and environmentalism. Maybe some more back story and Cloud and Tifa's childhood together? And whilst a little of all that is in here, what fills out the rest of that is mostly bland side quests and sections of levels that just go on and on. I was getting so frustrated with some of them.
Yes, the original is a long game, but I kept thinking back to what I actually would've seen and done in 28 hours in it. How many different environments I would've seen. How many characters I would've met. How many different, more interesting, story points there would've been. The original uses it time so well.
I watched the rest on YouTube. Skipping through the battles and the puzzle solving parts which look like they continue into late game. The end game being totally different I don't really have that much of a problem with. I accepted this as something Square would think necessary to give the proper climactic ending to what is essentially a standalone game. But I do wish they had been braver and just gone "nah, that's it. Like the original, you get to the end of the road and the new chapter of the game begins... which you're going to have to wait another five years for, suckersss".
Also, one more moan about how they deal with Sephiroth. Part of the reason Sephiroth is such a good villain, is because they build the legend of him so well before you even see him on screen. They ease him in. Initially he's mentioned as a kind of throw away, then there's the trail of blood in Shinra HQ and then there's Sephiroth's sword in the back of President Shinra whilst his theme music creeps in. But still you don't even have a flash back of him until after you leave Midgar. He's not actually on screen until then. It's so effective at building this foreboding menace and power. (Then later down the line, after a few more flashbacks of him, there's the giant snake impaled in his trail that you're following. Again, so effective at building that sense of what you're dealing with.) Here he's introduced into Cloud's flashbacks within 45 minutes. And it really lessens the impact. In the original, he doesn't even seem concerned with Cloud until much, much later down the line.
I won't harp on too much about other things I don't like compared too much to the original, because I'll just sound like a fan boy and a lot of it is probably tainted with nostalgia.
Anyway, things I liked:
- Aeris - really great adaption of her. She is written so well. Genuinely quite funny and the walk and talks you have with her are some of my favourite parts of the game.
- It looks incredible. Yeah, there's some technical issues but seeing some of those environments re-worked was really cool. Aeris' house and Shinra HQ in particular. Looking up at the plate from the slums gave this really great sense of scale.
- Some of the extra content was good. The Shinra museum was pretty great. Fights with Reno and Rude. The Honey Bee Inn stuff was handled well and the Madam M stuff I found quite funny.
- Music. The orchestral versions are great but also the weird takes on the original tunes you find in the record collectibles. Like a jazz version of Barret's theme or a dubstep version of the fight music. I was into it.
- I think that's it
*Not an original point but it's interesting how all these games have borrowed mechanics from each other over the last two decades and started to almost blend into one. The triple A console action game. Especially in relation to the original game here. FF7's crossover appeal as the first J-RPG to make it big in the West was one of the catalysts for other types of games to start using more RPG-based progression systems... which this remake then continues from. The [uninteresting and, thankfully, optional] weapon upgrade system in this game, for example, is just something that you have to have in these kind of games nowadays, but wasn't in the original. It feels like a sort of Chinese whisper of what the original game helped start.