Finally, a game to take the crown from FFXV as the worst game I've ever played.
It takes all the things I liked from Part 1, which I already wasn't that keen on and ruins those things. At the same time it takes all the things that were bad in Part 1 and makes them worse.
The combat is cluttered and messy and feels even less deliberate. The music is bad, the remixes were for the most part forgettable and bad in Part 1 but they're worse here. The visual style is even worse, so many Unreal store assets that do NOT mesh with anything hand made by SE themselves. Entire character backstories ruined either by bad pacing or rewrites. The main story has been made completely nonsensical due to the multiverse BS they've conjured up and then don't really do anything meaningful with other than to occasionally do REMEMBER THIS callbacks.
The port is bad, a good hour or two was spent trying to get it not to stutter with ini tweaks and various mods and really in the end nothing was a surefire fix, I still got stutters no matter what I did.
The padding issue that was already a MASSIVE problem even in concept for a 3 game remake of a single game is WORSE here somehow. In the original game Midgar is maybe a about a 4 hour segment and if you take your time the base game is about 40 hours. Here they take a stretch of game that is about 6-8 hours tops and bloat it to 80+ if you plan on wanting to see a majority of the "content."
Well what is most of this content you may ask? Ubisoft towers, bubble wrap popping open world checklists, walk and talk segments, ducking under rubble and sidling along walls AGAIN. Bad mini games, there's a bad mini game around every corner in every section of the map and in every town and in every sidequest there's a bad mini game to be found.
Even something as simple as the buggy that you use for maybe 30 minutes, is turned into both a figurative and literal vehicle to waste your time. They force you to ride around in this thing for a few hours while getting in and out of it repeatedly, playing a 30 second long animation that's unskippable every time you do.
And really that's the games mission, its thesis, to waste your time and steal your money. This remake project is a wash, it neither pleases fans of the original and clearly by the sales numbers it's not attracting new fans. This game stinks so bad, that after 10 years to wash the taste of fecal matter from this game out, I went back and played the original and you know what. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, it never needed remade. Its story is succinct and 95% well told. The music is great, there's no padding, the side content is for the most part enjoyable, it's paced immaculately, IT ACTUALLY MADE ME FEEL SOMETHING OTHER THAN BURNING RAGE.
If you meet anyone that says they like these remake games, they are not people, it's that simple. Terrible, DO NOT PLAY.
