Finished this last week - first time I had ever played a FF game- and really loved it, after waiting for the PS5 update from chapter 8.
My only recommendation would be for first timers, is to consider playing it at the easy difficulty, and pick Tifa when given a choice of Tifa or Aerith to check-on, as it altered the action in the game, and I hit a bad difficulty spike in the ending sections, and even when I checked where I was going wrong, the video was of easy mode and different characters arriving to help, so was no help.
I probably spent 5 goes on a 20min penultimate battle, and 10-15 goes on a 20min final battle - and because it won't let change difficulty at this mid battle, and it won't let you save setup at that point, so you need to reconfigure your party before every attempt.
Still loved the game, and hoping the next part will be as great.