Sooo, since i have no ps4 on my own (i would only play a really small amount of games on it anyways) i had to get my friends one for 4 days to finish the remake. I finished yesterday and gotta say... The disappointment is real.
First of all, i'm not a huge fan of linear gameplay. That's the reason that to this day i didn't manage to finish 13 just once. But since i knew it'll be linear i thought i can deal with it, especially since it's regards characters i loved for god knows how many years. Well, turns out i could infact deal with it, but i would lie if i say anything even remotely to "i like it". It's like they removed the "Final" from "Final Fantasy" and replaced it with "Fantasy, to a specific degree"
Then comes the voice acting. May god have mercy on me, but i started with the german dub and held out for like 25 seconds before felt a level of cringe i can hardly describe. Changed it to jap dubs with english subs and it became less cringeworthy, but still felt very childish (Especially Barett, a grown ass man trying his utter best to act like Tidus). I've come to realize how fun it was to actually just read and make up what that character must sound like instead of having voice acting telling you how reality looks. That one did sting alot, not gonna lie. Encountered numerous situations where i was sitting in my chair talking to myself "Man, please don't talk this way, just talk like an actual human pleaseeeee".
The combat. Well... lackluster. I realized pretty early that there really is no point to use "magic" materia whatsoever. The only reason to do so is simply because i felt like looking at some fancy animations, but apart from that, why would i use them? I can just beat the ever living crap out of mostly everything just by smashing my button without having to waste my time with "charging" animations for a spell that does nothing but look decent. On some rare occasion (flying stuff and so on) it did make sense, but in the grand scheme of things those situations didn't appear to often. I expected a tad more than mindlessly smashing that one button for pretty much 90% of the game.
I could still live with that stuff above, because it still was FF7 (to some degree) and i played with the characters i've known and loved for so long. Nostalgia played a big role as to why i even managed to finish it. I'm not even sure right now whether "big role" is an understatement.
But there's one thing that was the biggest no-go whatsoever. The story itself. Help me understand because i apprently can't. You want to "remake" a game that has been loved for decades, sold a fantastic amount of copies and left it's fans with nothing but admiration. And then you... make changes to what makes it so amazing? WHY? Help me out here for real, because once again, i don't get it. There's a reason as to why the "Mona Lisa" is jailed inside a high security museum 24/7. Because it's art that at one point in time was deemed as "almost perfect". And even if you are the DaVinci of our age, if you ever dared to say the words "Let me work on it, i'll make it better" you'd be red flagged right away and people would question your sanity. You know why? Because it's good. Yes, it probably can be even better, but it also can turn into a hot mess of garbage instead and taking the risk is quite franky stupid. So why did SE do that with the "almost perfect" art they provided the world with? Especially implement some - time travel paradox tricky treat whatever you wanna call it shenanigans - garbage that already failed before? Is it to make things "new"? Also makes no sense whatsoever because the people that buy the game because of nostalgia only do so because the liked the original, they would have enjoyed the story once again. To attract new customers? What does it matter, they don't know the original story anyways and most of them look at the remake just as "yet another ARPG". I'm apparently missing something here, so enlighten me.
I'd be highly surprised if this isn't just another game that'll be forgotten after a month, except for the die hard fans of course. Overall a major disappointment FOR ME PERSONALLY. If you managed to like it, good for you i guess. I wish i could like it aswell tbh.