I didn't think I would dislike anything more than Persona 4 but here we are.

Gameplay: Based on the demo, the combat was a bit better than the first part of the Remake, but it was still pretty dogshit. It feels too slow and the mechanics are not fun to play with at all imo. However, playable Sephiroth made this unbearably horrible combat fun for at least a little while. I'm genuinely unsure how anyone can sit down, play this game, and think "yeah, this is good". Final Fantasy XVI's combat (or Square Enix's best action combat system: Kingdom Hearts II) should be the standard going forward for future FF titles since VIIR's combat is so unbearable I refuse to play this game beyond the demo, and just decided to watch cutscenes on YouTube instead. They also added more unnecessary, long walks basically Sony-fying this game just like the first part which is ironic since some of the weebs who praise this Remake trilogy complain about said Sony games.

Story: Some things were done better than Remake, some done worse. I would say the filler for the most part wasn't as bad as Remake's. There were some nice additions such as how they included Yuffie into the story. However, the filler still holds this game back a lot by making the story much slower paced than the original. I find it ironic that the complaints for FFXVI being slow paced aren't applied to this trilogy when this is objectively A LOT slower. They are taking a roughly 30 hour story and padding it out to ~120 hours, assuming Part 3 is also ~40 hours which is also uncertain currently since the first two parts only cover the first disc of the game, and there are still two discs remaining. The third part might be a lot longer than Part 1 and 2 in order to cover the rest of the story. Anyways, I would say the story is better than Remake's story overall until the ending. The ending really ruined the whole game I feel. Not sure why they decided to add timeline shenanigans which really brought down the story a lot. This trilogy's story is worse than even KH Re:Coded.

It's hard to say if I like Remake or Rebirth more, but they are both garbage anyway so i guess it doesn't really matter. This trilogy is a horrible remake and these two games (and probably the third one) are my least favorite games ever. I'm fully convinced the praise for this trilogy is just due to the good graphics and FFVII bias since I genuinely don't see any positive qualities. It feels like a complete disrespect to the original FFVII (which I'm not even a huge fan of so don't go saying "YoU jUsT cAn'T aCcEpT cHaNgE" or any other bs).

I hope the rumored FFIX Remake gets canceled because I don't want to see my favorite FF get butchered so badly. I'd rather play a shoddy remake like Pokémon BDSP or Let's Go.