This is a game that for some reason is completely eluding me when I try writing up something more structured on it, but I will say that I really liked a lot about this and wanted to say SOMETHING in regards to it, so here:

This is the one kind of remake that I won't be an annoying hater about, it really sets itself apart from the original game in a ton of ways and feels like its own experience that just uses the same foundation as another game, rather than trying to just be a smoother rehash that removes a lot of the weirdness of said game.

Making Midgar an entire game was a choice that I feel didn't fully work out in all aspects because there is just a bit too much time in between the big story beats, slowing the pacing to an absolute crawl at times.

The "filler" chapters are cool for the way that they try expanding upon the insignificant aspects of the city to reinforce the player's connection with the location as a whole.

The sheer amount of gay energy exuded every time Cloud and Sephiroth exist on screen together is insane.

35 hours of Midgar unfortunately means around 30 hours of seeing very similar rundown urban environments or factories, and that gets super tiring.

I love how good basically every attack feels to use, and the ATB system here is a great way to try encouraging switching between characters constantly.

Unfortunately combat is also easy to the point where I never really felt the need to properly strategise outside of a couple specific encounters, which ended up being my favourite as a result of making me properly interact with the game's systems. It doesn't help that Cloud just feels by far the strongest in a lot of cases.

More of the game should've involved Cloud wearing a dress

I love the way NPC flavour text is handled here, it adds a ton of life to the world when you just hear snippets of these random conversations as you're running through a crowd.

The side quests suck for the most part, especially in chapter 14 where there's a downright egregious amount of backtracking to be done.

I adore the main cast and do think it's the one aspect of this game that I like considerably more than in the original, even though I liked them all a lot there too.

I wish Cloud was real and that I could make out with him.

I am so glad that they kept in the Shinra Building emergency stairs and made the ascent EVEN LONGER, all while letting you listen to Barret complain the entire time you ran up.

The last stretch of the game had so many batshit plot revelations one after the other and it makes me really interested to see the direction that Rebirth will take.

I've played a lot of FF7 related stuff in preparation for Rebirth and I think it's driven me a bit insane, almost feels like purgatory, still looking forward to it though!!!

If Y7 was the passing of the torch to the next generation then Y8 is the last spark of the old guard.
Feels kinda bad when Gaiden was made only after most of 8's development was done because it hurts seeing how Hanawa and Daidoji were handled.
Don't want to beat a dead horse but the story is kinda meh (the first part is pretty good and interesting but after the ending of chapter 9 iirc the story fluctuated too much in quality akin to a sinusoidal wave) but gotta appreciate the whole messianic theme they did with one of the villains and the MCs.
The beloved characters from Y7 are back in business (even though some were kinda shoehorned in there cough cough Zhao and Joongi Han cough cough) and the new characters are pretty good most of the time ("This hoodlum wanted money and he pointed a gun right at me!" Tomizawa, Cutiepie Chitose not Buster Holmes, Fangirl Suengee, Cold-blooded Yamai) but some of them like the villains or some minor characters are kinda shitty.
The gameplay received an overall improvement and it’s so enjoyable that I’ve grinded dungeons just to juggle enemies between the team members (don't even get me started how I creamed my pants when Dragon's Resurgence was introduced).
For the love of God just leave Kiryu alone so he can live his last days in peace and not bait us with another battle on the Millennium Tower in the future.
I wanted more Yamai but he was too good for this game and left too early (hope he'll become a playable character in Y9 somehow).
My first impression was a 6/10 but in retrospect I've enjoyed the game too much so yeah fuck it 7/10.

Remarkably more engaging than the first game. Kinda overstays its welcome after a certain point, but I anticipated that simply from it being a Ubisoft game. For how much I complained about "binary stealth" in my review of the previous game, I was elated to find that you can simply walk along with a crowd to blend in. It's so seamless, and it enabled one of the funnier moments of my playthrough: casually walking into the audience of my target and firing a bullet into him at close range. They never saw it coming.

The story actually left an impact on me this time, but probably for all the wrong reasons. Being a pseudo-historical recreation of sorts, there are murals hidden on major landmarks that serve as glitches in the Animus. Locating these prompts you with a puzzle to solve that unlocks a piece of "the truth". All these puzzles are a bunch of fictional nonsense, tying the conflict between templars and assassins to non-fictional figures and events throughout history. It's fuckin' silly, but it delivers on expanding the conflict that was merely alluded to in AC1: The conflict between the templars and assassins never ended, and it continues in present day.

I must be getting soft. Never would've imagined that I would be enjoying Ubislop, but here we are. That being said, I am not playing another one of these games for at least a couple of months, "Ezio Trilogy" be damned.