Finally, after waiting for 7 years I finally finished Final Fantasy VII Remake and all I have to say is it was great. I don't know if anyone who didn't played the original would like it though, the game seems to be fan service, just a mean to tell you an updated story and it does a great job at it. I would say it's an 8 out of 10 with some 9s in between and a couple of 10s moments.
I don't get the hate for the game, those who didn't like it, what were you expecting? What I really loved is that it isn't just a boring copy of the original a la Demon's Souls, but the original reimagined. It still gives you the main point but you'll get it a little different which for me it was the best decision they could've be make because this way we get a new game, lets call it an alternate FFVII.
So for those who already finished the game what did you like or didn't like about it?
I think it does a pretty bad job at telling a story that's "updated" and really takes all the fangs and maturity out of the original while peddling weird extended universe stuff in no real meaningful/interesting way.
The Bombing Mission starts off on the wrong foot to begin with. You go to the mission, you drop the bomb, then the audience is shown Heideggar blowing the bomb up and reactor. Then they play the Shinra theme on the way out of the tunnel, which really changes the entire tone of the rest of the midgar chapters.
In the original you bombed the reactor and then the whole trip through the city has this playing in the background:
You see some posts for Avalanche and you see the chaos you've wrought. But that's okay right? Because it's for the planet. Shinra is the baddies. Right???
The nuance there is missing in the new entry entirely, which seems to be a trend with modern day writing in general. We can't have bad guys have depth, and we can't have good guys be morally apprehensive at times unless it's a gritty dad sim or something. By making the bombing mission basically "it's all Shinra's fault" there's really nothing to be said about Avalanche's methods and/or if they're doing the right thing, which is a HUGE part of Barret's arc throughout the entire game. Barret is an extremist and his story develops as he finds that he's not the only one with problems with Shinra and maybe there are "other ways" to handle it.
For new players I imagine things like this don't matter. As I imagine things like playing the WORLD MAP THEME in the opening exploration chapter in midgar won't matter to them. As I'm sure having you backtrack through the sewers with not noctis instead of getting new/interesting developments with Tifa/Barret/Cloud/etc won't matter either.
For me though, I'm just so fucking sick of Midgar that watching Square just jerk themselves off for it YET AGAIN just kinda left me tired. The worst part is they barely did anything with it. It's all junk hallways and garbage backgrounds, which we rightfully shit on FFXIII for, and that was only the FIRST half of that game. FFVII is all "walk down a hallway" for the most part.
Things like Time Ghosts, how the Drum exists in the Shinra building, Jessie and the rest of Avalanche being given really weird nonsense side plot lines, more of Nomura OCs that add nothing to the story, etc. I'm just baffled. At one point it looks like the new chapters they want to try something new, but then they didn't have the balls to REALLY lock down into it so they pretend like they don't exist in the parts where the game resembles the original more. Combine that with the fact that everyone goes "we're in uncharted territory now" and "the writers wanted to do something new" with the then quoted interviews of "The rest of the story will closely follow the original" and you have a Remake that's kind of playing cat and mouse with its audience.
I think they should have just said this is a new FF7 project and called it a day, but they called it a remake because it will make billions more money that way. There's tons to like about it, Aerith is great, some of the new interactions are great, etc, but with the weird changes of things like Wall Market and Shinra, and the gameplay mission areas not really "working" with the dissonance the plot line gives I just don't enjoy it as much as others.
And that's not even getting into things like the fight system which is basically a dumbed down Xenoblade/cooldown management fight system with lack of aggro/character/ai management, bloated overdesigned UI for weapon upgrades, the stupid "break" system for enemies, and just overall baffling narrative decisions several parts of the story.
I don't hate on people who "enjoy" the game because it's a "high budget" JRPG which I know we need more of, but when I compare it to the original I see nothing of value really gained by spending half the game supposedly "developing Midgar" which boils down to essentially the menu sidequests from Crisis Core.
Well, textures do take some time to load but it doesn't bother me that much. What I found really annoying is the backgrounds that you get to see in some missions when the environments are more open. For example, when in the upper plate you can see the slums in the background and it just looks horrible. Really breaks the immersion and messes up the presentation.
This is an example (not my pic, stolen from google):
Shit like this can be seen in several sections of the game but were particularly noticeable when looking at the slums from above.
STuff like this is funny because people talk about how "gorgeous" the game is but if you take out the skyboxes there's very little ACTUAL geometry in Midgar in the game, and textures STILL can't load properly.