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FFVII was the first RPG I ever played. As an immigrant from a poor Balkan country, I never had access to computers and the only console I had ever played until 1997 was Atari 2600, which was a clone with built-in games (although it did have a slot for cartridges as well). I did buy an SNES after much convincing my father, against the advice of my friend. It was basically EOL at that point, but the price was right for our family's budget. I borrowed the same friend's PS1 and had a blast with Resident Evil 2. Then he lent it again for FFVII. When I started it,it seemed so stupid. Short, polygonal characters, lots of text and no context. Still, I kept on going. I discovered a whole new world of video games I hadn't encountered before. Began slowly immersing myself into it, and reading up on it at the middle school library's PCs. (486 running win 3.11 and slooow thrashing pagefile due to what was probably 4mb or less of RAM). Once I got started, there was no stopping me. I bought the official strategy guide, learned how much fun the materia system was, got emotionally involved when Aeris (Aerith) died, and spent more than 100 hours in that first game, and with some internet sleuthing, used the mega potions glitch to help me fight the mega bosses. At that point, the final boss was a cakewalk, with the most powerful summon a few times. Lest one thinks it's nostalgia talking, I ended up playing it again twice more all the way to the end throughout the years. The remake held my interest for a bit, but didnt like the new combat system, so lost interest . I'll try and pick it back up when the 2nd part, Afterbirth, is released. |
1. It's a remake which completely diverges story wise and gameplay wise from the original. So not a great thing off the bat, because it's a "remake" which is really a new game with an FF7R coat of paint on.
2. The game was needlessly padded out to try to justify why they split the game into multiple installments. That might've been fine if the new content was good, but instead there is so, so much boring filler content which exists just to pad the length of the game. It's a 40ish hour game iirc, and at least half of that could have been cut (and the game would've been better for it).
3. The story goes way off the rails and ends up with some fourth wall breaking stuff that is just plain amateurish in its writing quality. And to add insult to injury, the fans of the original who wanted a faithful remake are not so subtly implied to be the villains.
4. The combat is... ok for what it is. I don't like action combat. But it's very poorly tuned. For example, take Air Buster, a boss fight that takes a few minutes in the original. In FF7R, it's a 10 minute fight. It's the same basic strategy - it's weak to thunder, so use that a lot (and your abilities that add stagger, which is obviously not a thing in the original). Then the boss will be staggered, and you can unleash limit breaks to do big damage. The problem is, it's 10 minutes of just doing that. Nothing new or interesting happens, just hit the boss with chip damage until it's staggered, then do real damage for a few seconds, repeat for 10 minutes. It's not horrible as a system but it's really badly tuned.
So yeah, you're not missing anything with FF7R. It's just a really bad game, which isn't worth your time or money.