Great game.
I'm very fond of the general vibe, and I love the English writing of Ivalice games (that sort of half-Shakespearian tone, and an understated undercurrent of theatricality). The story is genuinely compelling, though a bit complex at first. Though it could be because I have a terrible memory for names, and the Ivalice games are very fond of referring to their characters and factions with various synonyms and titles that are actually all referring to the same thing.
Which is why it's amazing that they included a sort of in-game encyclopedia that dynamically updates after every single scene, that has a scrollable timeline that makes pivotal moments of the narrative far easier to parse, and a list of every single scene with a "replay" button.
I was afraid that they were going to retranslate the game and move away from the "War of the Lions" version script, but as it turns out, interviews were misleading; there are only some very, very minor changes to existing text, and there are tons of completely new dialogue that can trigger if specific named party members are present in most fights of the 2nd half of the story. And it all follows the WoTL style of writing. It's all an improvement as far as I'm concerned.
The voice acting is VERY good. However the direction does not always match the situation: sometimes, it really feels like characters ought to be raising their voice more, if not outright yell at each other. But the dialogue is acted as if they were talking quietly right next to each other. It's a bit jarring.
The combat is serviceable, but hasn't aged too well. They really smoothed over a lot of the worst jank, though. The new interface is a great improvement, and simply being able to move to a tile, realize you needed to be on the next tile over, undo your move and do that instead — that's a massive quality-of-life upgrade.
Unfortunately, I'd say the general pace of combat remains quite sluggish and it doesn't feel like the game is about skill expression, but more about knowing all the various ways you can get screwed over by spells heretofore unseen. Sometimes it can feel a bit like a FF trivia quiz. Here's an encounter with undead, you better know about using Phoenix Down on them!
And unless you want to spend a lot of tedious time grinding, you will probably end up doing Arithmetician cheese in order to close out the last third of the game. It does feel like that game that kind of expects you to break it rather than master it on its own terms, if that makes sense.
The visual upgrade is also wonderful, it's subtle but makes a huge difference. Exactly the kind of "it's as you remember it" kind of step forward, which is the right territory for a "remake" to land it. The added shadows and lighting almost feel vaguely impressionist from time to time, which is very fitting.
THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE:
• The PSP version's animated cutscenes are included and redubbed, BUT... the audio mixing on the redub is strange (almost as if they turned off literally all processing on the mics), the videos are cropped from their original ultrawide format, and... they simply are not shown to you by default... and there isn't even anything that tells you "hey, this scene you just watched has an animated version, go look for it here"
• The camera is "too low". Your focal point is always the very center of the screen, but this doesn't account for the new interface which takes up most of the bottom of the play area. You know how some FPS games don't have the crosshair in the center of the screen, but lower, so that you're more incentivised to look up? What I'm getting at is that the whole game should have been offset a bit higher in order to account for the fact that the new interface hides a lot of the play area.
• The voice direction in a few moments, as mentioned previously.
• The "fast forward" button is not very responsive: it takes a full second for fast forward to kick in, and a second for it to go away, so sometimes, if you're trying to simply fast forward through a fight, it might accidentally make you skip a line of all that new dialogue they added mid-fight.
• While a lot of things are now explained very clearly, others remain bafflingly cryptic. For example, I don't think it's explained anywhere that there's actually 3 types of shops, all with different inventory. I also don't believe the accuracy penalty/bonuses for flanking, height, etc. are explained clearly anywhere?
• Inventory and skills management kind of sucks. Switching back and forth between unlocking skills and equipping them is painful, especially when you're trying to make a hard decision about which new thing to commit JP to.
• I checked out the French version, and it does not feature the same kind of style & vibe to the writing. Unfortunate.
• The new visuals are great, but sometimes they commit sprite crimes (keeping them bilinearly filtered wherever they show up)
OVERALL: 100% recommend playing it if you like Final Fantasy games, especially if you loved the other Ivalice games.
