I wish the entire game had pacing and atmosphere on the same level as Midgar. Ok, the atmosphere is pretty great throughout the entire thing, all the locations and characters are very memorable, it's just that Midgar is on another level. But the pacing becomes pretty horrendous in the second half and the combat system really overstays its welcome, to the point where all the random encounters start to feel like very unnecessary filler (feels like the whole thing could have been like 10 hours shorter).

Also, the localization can be pretty damn terrible way too often. This combined with the surprisingly ambitious story, with various twists and a fairly heavy use of an unreliable narrator structure, can make the game feel like an almost incomprehensible fever dream on a fairly regular basis. I mean to be fair this seems to partly also be caused just by how it was written, and I kinda like that about it, it's very different in this sense to most RPGs I've played, but the further you get in the story, the more difficult it becomes to really understand the character motivations, backstories, stakes etc.

And I like open endings, but this one is pretty bad.

All that being said, it's still a very impressive, memorable and heartfelt RPG of groundbreaking scale.