Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)

Finished this game up along with the DLC now that it's out on PC and it was... alright. I myself never played the original nor did I ever have any interest in doing so as this is a game where I already knew a general idea of everything by proxy of how popular it was(and with the remake ever looming in the distance for many years). As far as gameplay goes I think it's a good step up from XV's combat though it's still a bit too stiff at times and inconsistent with what attacks you're able to reliably dodge versus what you should be blocking. I don't want to go into too much detail but overall it was very solid and I hope they continue to improve upon it.

The story quite frankly was not very good in my opinion. Maybe it's not so much the story but rather how the story was told... more specifically the dialogue. The dialogue is just.. bad. Often times it feels like the characters are saying words and talking but they're not having conversations with each other, they're just... saying words. The dialogue feels so disconnected from what's happening in the moment or the gravity of the situation that's happening, had happened, or was about to happen. It feels so jarring that multiple times I was wondering if I had unknowingly blacked out and missed out on dialogue or a segment. The DLC is littered with moments like these and it's just bad writing. I don't know if this was in the original but I'm also unsure why they made the girls all so... infatuated with Cloud. The writing becomes quite uncomfortable during these times because again most of it doesn't feel like natural conversations, just words. As a side note, I'd like to point out that often times the Japanese dialogue simply does not match the subtitles and it's a little funny. This has no bearing on what I said before as both in english and japanese dialogue still feels awkward.

Anyway, it's an okay game. The music and it's 3d environments are by far the strongest point of the game. I'm sure fans of the original really appreciate how much life these beloved environments were given as I was certainly able to appreciate them. Really curious to see how they will carry out the rest of the story given the uhh changes being done. I myself am not very hopeful considering it's Nomura but I at least hope the gameplay continues to improve.

I finally got around to playing this game’s Intermission DLC—having recently played 3 entire FF games right before its release earlier this year, I chose to save it for later.

While I can’t recommend this DLC as strongly as the main game, due to some particularly bland, lower-effort content in its first half, it comes together to be a pretty solid addition by the end of its 4-hour-ish runtime. I guess they focused a lot more on the pretty great 2nd half, and didn’t really have enough to fill a $20 DLC, so some of the early characters and objectives are a bit phoned in. The positives largely come from the game’s take on Yuffie, a really fun character both to watch in cutscenes and to play as, as well as one returning antagonist from the main game. Boss fights in this are really fun, multi-phase affairs that go well with Yuffie’s toolkit and make me look forward to seeing how other characters will control in the sequel.

Definitely worth a play for those who really loved the base game, particularly if it goes on sale. Just be prepared to be patient with some weaker early parts.

Look. I'm loving this game. I really am. But why we excused so easily its absurd linearity?

There are extremely long sections when we only walk through boring hallways and passageways with few encounters and no room for exploration.

In that aspect, in that ultra-specific aspect, is even worst than FFXIII, but we didn't extend the same courtesy to that game. Why is that?

It's a good game with way too much filler. Most of the sidequests are uninteresting and doesn't seem to mesh with Clouds character at all. Why would this greedy, moody mercenary go hunt for a little girls lost cats without even getting paid?

Combat is awesome, loved that i had to switch between my characters so often to stay on top of the enemies and be able to pull off my special moves and magic.

Most of the stuff they added to the remake to make it longer fills unecessary.

And i feel sorry for the people who hasnt played the original, they must be so confused about so many things in this game.

Hello, here is me bashing FF7R in an incoherent manner. I’m not gonna talk about what I liked about the game because I’m too lazy to be quite honest.

The more I played, the less I liked it. I enjoyed the story much less even though there are parts I feel like they improved on from the original. The last 3 or so chapters was a real slog. I understand the need the go more in depth with each segment since this doesn’t even cover the first disc of the original game, but I feel like they took it to far at times. I don’t see myself playing this game a second time because they have cutscenes in the middle of fights which is honestly more annoying than watching the summon animations from the original game. And it also does that thing that modern games love to do where they make your characters walk and talk which basically just feels like an unskippable cutscene. Also I have no idea why they showed off certain characters. Ideally, a person can enjoy a remake without having played the original game (e.g. RE2), but this game shows off Cait Sith and Zack in a way that would only appeal to people who are already know about them. You can argue that it’s foreshadowing, but I don’t know any first time player that is going to remember seeing Cait Sith for 5 seconds when they play the sequel. And they definitely will not understand why seeing Zack is a big deal. This isn’t even all of the issues I had with the game, but I’ve already said so much I’m just gonna stop here.