I'm not about to properly dissect the games so this post may get messy and have some repetition.
I had expected I would also have easily given Cyberpunk the win when it comes to main story but no, Delivery really is everything, and Cyberpunk's delivery often feels as stilted and lifeless as it's world, the weak pacing, animation and cinematography also took me out of it from early on. It feels stapled together during key moments. To throw out some very random examples from early game to avoid big spoilers. -The way they transition to the intro montage at the start feels sudden and disconnected from the scene, The scenes in that montage don't flow well and the music doesn't work, it felt like it was meant to be a key element in selling me on V and Jacky becoming friends and really becoming part of Night CIty, so it was a really miss that it didn't acheive that. -The scene where Johnny first encounters Adam Smasher and it cuts doesn't feels like you are faster forwarding it feels like something went wrong and you skipped the scene. The chase scenes also feel extremely scripted and unexciting. They often don't even let you pretend like you are really a part of them. They tried to have a cool scene of the guy with first guy with mantis bladed jumping to your hood and you shooting him of but you never really feel like any of it matters, it always just feels like inconsequential filler. At least the Bike sequences in FF7 felt like real gameplay. The moment to moment dialogue does feel natural I'll give it that, but what the actual content of the conversations often doesn't feel like it actually matters, doesn't feel interesting or entertaining. The jokes don't land. I just feel like I'm trying to get info on my next objective while dealing with the characters attempts at being funny or being longwinded in an attempt to establish their character. I will hold off on going more in-depth on why the characters seems bad to me for brevity and just incase it gets too subjective. Overall FF7 story just mostly felt more well put together and I definitely enjoyed seeing the characters onscreen far more. I was hungry to hear every line the characters had to say in VII where in 2077 I felt like I was just selecting dialogue hoping that I find something that actually gets me to care about the people or plot more.
I should note I played 7 totally in Japanese (voice and subs) and thought the voicework and acting was mostly fantastic. Since it was such a smaller scale game I'd say it ends up being more consistently good than what's in 2077. Bearing in mind it does get a bit more exaggerated. For every line in FF7 that felt rough to me there are 10 example of something feeling off in cyberpunk.
I will say Cyberpunk easily wins when it comes to the writing on the side quests but I find that doing side quests in FF7 does still end up being more fun than 2077. The delamain side quest for example, It truly hooked me with the intro and I was surprised and excited. but In the end it's driving to some location and going towards a car to get a piece of fun dialogue. It is technically more of an "adventure" than much of the stuff in FF7 but it simply doesn't feel good to do and honestly the writing is better than FF7 but it still isn't anything spectacular to me the more story focused ones just have me in a constant state of mild curiosity and wanting to see it to the end. To be clear, I find the driving, combat, stealth and hacking of CP2077 to all feel mediocre. If you were to take the shooting or stealth of 2077 and create a game where that was the main focus then it would be a 4/10 to me vs FF7's combat which ended up being one of my favorite combat system in years. So yeah Cyberpunk may have better set up for it's sidequests and they feels more like real adventures. but I do have way more fun simply doing a quest to clear out colosseum in FF7 due to it's top tier battle system. I don't see myself getting tired of fighting even once part 2 or 3 come out so I don't really think 2077 wins just because it has more variety in gameplay. There is literally a quest in FF7 that is about you clearing out a rat in some backyard. But the rat boss actually ends up being a fun fight so it ends up being a very enjoyable quest.
Of course Cyberpunk has the win when it comes to the amount of content. But I just don't find the content to be very good. For me the best thing about Cyberpunk was by far the absolutely fantastic visuals of the environment, the city is stunning. I am totally jealous that I can't ride around a Midgard that looks as good as night city. But in the end the minor lines you get while walking around the Hubs of FF7, having guys hit on cloud as he walks past in a dress or hearing the whole town talking about the bombing in the background pulled me in, felt very immersive to me, they are clearly just fake npcs with a generous amount of dialogue based on where you are in the story, But having something simple that actually works as intended was way better than than the constant jank of Night city. A thousand people walking around who all fall apart if you blow on their AI too hard but the game give you every tool it can to break the flimsy illusion.
I'm starting to see your point of view on this now, you have raised legit issues, like the prologue in Cyberpunk being rushed, I do agree with that. By delivery i assume you are talking about execution of the story. I dont agree with it all though, the pacing is inconsistent true especially at the prologue the lifepaths were cut to shorten the story (assumption) but after that part i think it got better, starting with act 1. I have not yet finished Cyberpunk so i think its better for me to not discuss the main story in detailed way as this may spoil it for me, perhaps i will discuss this later when i finish the game. But so far based on what i played (im in act 2) the story stakes seem much higher to me, you actually know what you are fighting for and what you are trying to do, as with open world games the sense of urgency is not there because you can go mess around with side quests and gigs all the time you want but i think that was to be expected. What i mean by higher stakes is that the story in act 1 starts with a chill premise as a merc working for fixers and then takes a lot of twists and turns to reach places that are much more complex. In remake its somehow similar as Cloud starts as a merc only to be sucked into the fight against Shinra, but its done in a more superficial way, Cyberpunk isnt much better in that regard though but i still think its more serious and more complicated. I also dont understand what you mean by Cinematography, i dont think this is a word i would use to describe a video game.
As far as pacing goes, with all its flaws Cyberpunk pacing imo is better than FF7 Remake, the game suffers from many pacing problems, they wanted to remake the OG game and tried to expand on 1/5 of it by adding a lot of padded chapters, a lot of unnecessary side quests that adds little depth and feels shallow and waste of time, the pacing issues even extend to main chapters like chapter 17 where they split them for no good reason that extend the playthorugh of the chapter by a lot making it a boring slog. There is more examples i can give to show the inconsistent pacing of the game, mind you its also linear so its even worse, even the good part of the extended game is Avalanche development still looks generic. I liked that they gave Jesse more time to develop but thinking back at her role in the game its just barely impactful. Moving on to Animation, i think you mean the first person, actually i would say the facial animation in Cyberpunk are good, what was the problem with it? Did you see how they made the animation fit for each language? thats massive imo.
i also disagree FF7 Remake story is not well put together at all, there are a lot of unexplained issues like those Fate and Whisper beings, newly added content, the change at the ending i did not like at all, the parts with Don, If you played the OG then yes you may get to like this remake more as you are familiar with it or maybe hate it for what they changed but when we talk about these two stand alone games FF7 Remake does bad job at explaining its story, its convoluted in a similar way to Kingdom Hearts. Also to add Cloud the crew start out similar to many characters in CP, barely introduced and rushed in a way that its hard to care about them, just like you said and i agree with that, but the problem is that also applies to FF. People may seem to forgive it because they are familiar with those characters whereas CP characters are new. Side Quest it seems we agree, i want to point out that i also enjoyed Delamain quest, the purpose of that quest is to meet all his personalities and then at the end you get to make a moral choice about A.I and identity, an interesting subject, that alone is better than anything in FF side quests, not to mention the other quest that makes the side characters more human and more fleshed out, like Panam quest or River quest and his investigation, it was really good and few games do side quests as good as they did here.
Voice acting i like both, i played FF7 in Japanese at first but then swtiched to English, I just wanted to hear the talking and focus on the visuals, becuase i thought they were cool.
Yea Open world in CP is full of issues currently, i hope it will be fixed, with its issues right now i totally understand someone saying FF7 is better but when those issues are fixed its gonna different. I dont know what will happen to CDPR now but i believe their DLCs are really good so Cyberpunk may even get better, i'll wait and see. and ofcoruse im still not finished with the game it may end in a bad note and disappoints me so i will not officially declare a verdict until then.
One last thing is for the gameplay, i know CP does not excel in any of them but having the options to tackle different situations in different ways is good advantage imo, i like the variety of options to tackle missions and how different builds can effect it, i would say though its not as deep as i wanted it to be, it now like New Vegas where you feel the big change in gameplay based on build, in CP the rpg elements are light. It comes similar to Skyrim in that regard. I liked FF7 combat, the party characters are cool and progression is there, but i dont think it was very interesting, in the end every encounter ended up me fighting a group of enemies with my skills that i get regardless of how i play, just by progressing i got those skills. Mateira system offered some variety at least. Not saying its bad because i had fun with it and music kicks ass. Just that its not that excellence in combat, my party A.I also was awful i had to constantly change to do what is logical and best to do, but i guess that was part of the fun because i had to play the game not the game play itself for me. Haha.
I think you make your case much better now, when you said its 4/10 without all the issues i thought you are just being blind fan but now i see you are giving good points, in the end we are all biased for genres we like, i like CDPR games so its natural for me to enjoy this one i also love FF7 OG 1997 and i liked Remake but few things annoyed me. Im interested to see where this Remake will go from now.
Expectations has alot to do with Cyberpunk 2077 core issues, I really wanted to like Cyberpunk 2077 but, Cyberpunk tried to be a little bit of everything, and by doing so I felt it lost its identity, like it doesn't know what it wanted to be, does it want to be Deus Ex or GTA? In the end it falls flat at both imo, the world was convoluted buggy mess, the npcs felt lifeless, it was too ambitious for it's own good, the hype was overblown, the expectations were shattered when the game didn't deliver in the same way it was presented, it's FFXV all over again. At least the narrative in FF7R was an immersive story driven game, roller-coaster ride from start to finish, linear games tend to succeed in this. I had to role my eyes at every gay/lesbian sex scene to appease the woke crowds, shit like this really breaks the immersion for me, and those were intentional not glitches, I really thought we had more choices with interaction with npcs and the world around them, but it all feels very limited and scripted. GTA did it better as far as open world freedom, and Deus Ex did the cyberpunk and rpg better. So I guess my point is FF7R knew exactly what game it wanted to be and executed it flawlessly, while Cyberpunk was a bit too ambitious and didn't know what it trying to be, thus a "disaster" imo. However I do hope they address these issues with patches, but even then I doubt the can fix everything I wanted, so it will never be a perfect game, at least for me. If all goes according to plan FF7R part 2 could be open world, hopefully they learned their mistake with FFXV and deliver something that could possibly even humble Night City, just the prospect of getting more is something to look forward, this ride is not over yet!
Indeed the hype made by CDPR is to blame because they did not ive up to it, and the hype by the fans also was not reasonable at all, they expect GOTY game in all its fronts and all its aspects, that just doesnt happen at all, never happened, never will. The game was overhyped to heavens so that is part of the backlash, many things were changed or cut and lied about like customization and lifepaths and gameplay and open world features. I stll think beyond the bugs and performance issues there is a very good game to be played here, and i was talking about that, ofcoruse with bugs and performance issues included one would score this game as bad. Im playing on my high end PC and my issues are minimal. I have glitches but i can live up with that. Im used to eurojank games so i can appreciate their good parts.
I just disagree with FF7 Remake knew what exactly it wants to be and i explained that above, it has a lot of forced padding to make up for content, the side quests came out of nowhere to give the player a sense of playing in an open world and to give a sense of freedom, as i said the game has a lot of issues too.
I have no problem with games not being masterful at an aspect, for me CP does not need to be best at RPG or best at open world, it can be decent in both and i will like that, having a mix like that comes off at a cost and i expected that, i still like it. This is like a type of glasses you do at your 40s, you dont see well to far and you dont see well to near, so you make one glasses that serves both far and near but its not the best at near or the best at far, its just good at both, i dont know what word to use in this but im sure there is a word to describe it. I'm giving the game a fair chance and my expectations were reasonable, i cant lie im having fun with it, perhaps it just my type of a game, i enjoyed Skyrim too. So i dont know. But i honestly think there is a very good game beneath the issues.
Sorry for the long post.