If you're looking for an upgraded version of PS1 experience, then you've got another thing coming. It's closer to FF13, than it is to original FF7. To set the tone, I'll just say I hated FF13.
Good stuff, that you've probably expected:
- Graphics are ranging from ok to nice... depends on what you look at.
- Combat is fun, until it's get boring, due to lack of meaningful progression
- Progression is SOMEWHAT interesting.
- A portion of original FF7 was captured.
Bad stuff....
No exploration (open world, risk, rewards)
I expected to see a Final Fantasy title, like many others, where after few initial quests you can go out into the world, enter a cave and either get slaughtered by max level enemies or snatch a few goodies. Exploration, risk and rewards were a good portion of the game's appeal and sadly all of that was neutered.
Open world does not exist, enemies are NEVER overwhelmingly strong and loot is boring for the most part. Almost everything you get in game is either from vendors or generic fetch quests.
Remember how much of a big deal summons were in most previous games? They always seemed important, you had to find them, fight them and then get them... In this game they are treated like garbage, lying around near some sewage pipe.
Anyways, Rumors have next part should have the open world, so future might look brighter for next part.
Linear game
It's a FF13 all over again. You get to follow a linear story route, without an option to stray from that story path most of the time. Apart from few sections in the game where you are allowed to explore (cities), if you try to stray from the path you're supposed to take, you will hit an invisible wall and your party will scream at you.
Inconsistent graphics
All the story characters, their weapons and animations look amazing, but everything that is NOT one of those things, looks like high-end ps2 graphics or low grade ps3.
Loot is boring
What sets apart useful loot from useless? It's in the name, useless loot has no use.
Take any classic FF game and you'll notice that if you fight a new monster and get some loot it is normally either immediately useful (equipment upgrade), needed for quests later in game OR can be sold for Gil to buy something good from a future vendor that will have higher level equipment.
This game's loot is neither. You CAN sell loot for Gil, but there's barely anything worth buying and in my experience you get enough from drops, so Gil is mostly useless. You NEVER get anything that is immediately useful, even if it is immediately usable (consumables).
What's worse there are maybe 10 chests in the entire game that contain something besides consumables, so it's REALLY hard to get excited over a chest, that took you 15 minutes to reach.
Padded game time
There are 2 kind of "Bad" escort missions. Ones where you have to protect the NPC and ones where they walk so slowly, that traveling becomes vast majority of the mission. Guess which one, this game likes to do! The latter. There are multiple sections in the game where AI controls a character that you have to follow and, my god, the AI moves slowly.
This game has 18 chapters, but it feels like 5-7. You definitely don't have so many distinct objectives throughout the game to warrant 18 chapters. To give you one example, there's this one dungeon, that has clearly been padded in terms of gameplay time. You interact with 2 objectives throughout the entire dungeon AND there are no puzzles there. There are about 10 fights. Why do you think such dungeon takes 1-2 hours to complete? I suspect it has something to do with the game forcing me to run convoluted paths back and forth like 6 times.
Summary
It is not terrible, but after having expected a Final Fantasy and receiving this, I feel like I have wasted my time on this game. Due to the fact this game is lacking so much of what makes a Final Fantasy game, I would only recommend this one to fans of FF13.