Wonder how much I'll be playing as Zack throughout the game, even got his own moveset (albeit limited).
Strange they had me replay the opening portion of Nibelheim before allowing the option to skip forward. Has me worried some of the choices in this section have weight no matter how small. I encountered a bug, unsure to if it's a result of the save data transfer or if I'm just unlucky, but the prompt to play Tifa's theme never came up so I ended being ridiculed by my party members.
This works well as tutorial into game, and it's real power trip being able to finally play as Sephiroth, although it does demystify him to a degree. In the original game you were never granted control over his actions, you simply weren't powerful enough to do that. Here Cloud's (Zack) at the same level which makes him feel like a significantly lesser deal.
My biggest complaint with the flashback sequence is iconic burning of Nibelheim scene. Cloud gets injured and has to slowly limp to his Mother's house, but oh no! fallen debris means I have to go around. When I first went through this scene in demo, I walked around dumbfounded for at least 15 seconds thinking I had to turn the valves to put out the fire. The abruptness of the original is lost, and I generally believe it would've been far better if cloud retained his normal movement speed, don't force the player to loop around, just block that way off from the start. Then once the water tower falls, maybe you could have cloud injure himself. Perhaps this was done so dialogue couldn't be missed, but to me whether or not the player hears the dialogue to irrelevant to highlighting the chaos of the situation.
The following scene with Sephiroth shouldn't have been bound to the player. I decided to not move and scene plays out by itself until only 1 villager and the mayor remain. But why? It really undercuts the tension when you know the events unfolding around you are within some form of control of the player. I also don't like how the villagers just... stand there. Not one of them fires a shot, just unnecessarily dragged out for no reason.
I enjoyed the interaction of the party in the inn. Interesting to see them integrate that proposed scene with Tifa discussing the inconsistencies with Cloud's narrative from early drafts of the original script. The developers said they wanted to give Sephiroth more presence, and I REALLY hope this first instance isn't a sign for what's to come. He appears briefly to sow some doubt into Cloud's mind, but having him ask Tifa (which his does) alone would have sufficed. Subtlety, every heard of it?
Narratively I liked the raid on Kalm, just wish it didn't play out as a tedious scripted "stealth" sequence. Seriously, does Square Enix honestly believe that people enjoy this fake tension?
As for my general first impressions; the open world feels uninspired in many regards. The typical tower format is less useful here than in other games, since most activities already have obvious indicators for finding them in world. They don't even clear out the ugly fog on the region map (and for crying out loud, when will Square learn to stop making these over-detailed maps and then use the blurry, zoomed-in, illegible image of it for the minimap?).
The rest of the activities quickly became monotonous, and I'm not even out the first area yet! Also, I absolutely abhor the fact that Chadley can now bother me where ever and whenever he wants. You know what could be worse than having one chadley? How about two!?. Yeah, just because you make them a cute gender-swapped version doesn't alleviate the annoyance. I just tune out her prattling during monster intel; the worse part about missing out on objectives is that retrying forces you to listen to the same lore dump again, and again, and again...
Though to offer some praise, I do genuinely think the side quests are better now. The protorelic one dragged on a bit, but otherwise each felt more substantial. I enjoy Queen's Blood, and look forward to when it opens up to five rows.
Combat is identical to Remake, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Aerial combat sees changes, instead of melee characters automatically jumping when they attack, you need to use an action that'll send you airborne. Folios take the place of the individual weapon core system, and subsequently the process of upgrading weapons has been streamlined. I think this is a good change and removes a lot of tedious menuing.