A mediocre game and even worse Final Fantasy. Where do I even start? I played the praised original FF7 years ago and while having its own flaws and problems, it was a good game with a decent story and an outstanding soundtrack (fortunatelly it's still present in remake which is one of the very few bright sides of the game). The reimagination of Midgar with modern graphics it really cool but that's about it.
The remake was butchered to be sold as three installments so the original Midgar part was dragged to infinity and beyond by repetitive and boring side quests, cheesy dialogue and annoying characters (just to mention Johnny or Roche). The writing and pacing are atrocious. If I hadn't known the original story, I probably wouldn't have really understood or cared for motivations and goals of the party - aside from kicking some Shinra guys which brings us to my next objection, combat system.
Combat is an odd hybrid of slasher and allegedly turn-based system, ultimately not being either. Most of the times it's a flashy mess with enemies jumping all over the place, unblockable and unavoidable enemy attacks (but your abilities, spells and limits can miss so you lose ATB) and your companions doing nothing unless you constantly switch characters making each fight even more chaotic. What's the idea behind it? Why do I have to make regular attacks to load my ATB gauge and why doesn't it load when the character is not used at the moment? Such design makes absolutely no sense to me.
Another questionable aspect is weapon upgrade system. In theory it's fine - you get some points to spend on upgrades as you level up your characters and can customize your builds to some extent. The problem is, you don't know ahead what possible upgrades are until you unlock further weapon 'cores' (however, the upgrades can be reset and points reallocated at some points of the game). Additionally, animated upgrade menu is at peak of user unfriendliness and at first glance it's hard to tell what upgrades you already have.
Funnily enough, the game is boring and annoying at the same time. The last 2 or 3 hours of the game is a constant boss grind-fest which I could hardly bring myself to finish (yo dawg, heard you like boss fights so we put boss fights in your boss fights so you can fight bosses while fighting bosses). I did mostly out of respect for the money I paid for the game (or maybe disrespect for my time...)
My final fantasy was to be delivered from this chaos.
