When I first touched down on the Sector 7 Slums, after getting off the train, I cried. It's difficult to really boil down those euphoric feelings floating in my brain, the complete wonder and majesty I was experiencing, or seeing something that I cherish captured in painstakingly incredible detail. This tipping point for me defines the whole game, and surprises me at every turn with how much it genuinely understands and soulfully carries the legacy it now seeks to work atop of and, in some cases, defy.

Simultaneously, it's difficult for me to know where to begin talking about the game from here. There's so much to talk about that is just going to come off as fangirling gushing. And while I'm not ashamed of that, I still don't want to say more than I really need to.

I think I'd like to describe another scene, a bit of small spoilers ahead. There's a point of falling action where the cast has to decide what the next option should be. In the middle of the night you walk out to see Barret in the garden, thinking about what keeps him going. He talks to you about his reverence for the people he's known, implying that he's lost them. He tells a history of the wonderful happiness each of them brought, that he continues marching forward with. It's such a powerful characterizing moment for Barret. It as well is a heartfelt honest telling of how these characters act, and respond to what's in front of them.

There's a moment where the game goes full on against its legacy, cutting the threads metacontextually to forge a path of its own. That path is laid in with a next-level orchestration that blissfully captures the energy, and a combat system that is absolutely excellent and is tested to its complete limits here. The final bosses, like ones before, offer incredible tactics and balancing acts between the ATB management and correct positioning. And I fucking loved every single minute of it.

There are a few niggles of course. The pacing is off-center and leads to a lot of parts that outstay their welcome. The combat system while I can heap praise and honestly analyze in a lot more detail than I'm putting here, has issues in terms of feedback both in learning the systems as well as enemy telegraphs. There's also full-on meme additions that really should've been left to the cutting board.

Either way, FF7R surpasses all my memories and feelings of the original. Despite barely taking up like 15-20% of the original game's plotline, it exceeds the entire game. I really can't wait for the unknown adventure ahead.

This is one of the most agonizing 100% completions I've ever tried to undertake. Asking the player to replay the game on Hard Mode is fine enough, but apparently the developers were not satisfied. Because you see, certain story options have 3 variations, those being the various dresses characters wear in Chapter 9, and a unique cutscene for each character in Chapter 14. Getting these requires making certain choices or completing a certain amount of side quests, mostly contained to Chapters 3, 8, and 9. To make this even more infuriating, those choices are not actually "saved" until you finish the chapter to completion. It's not a huge amount of extra effort, thankfully, but it still ends up eating up even more time. This means it will take, at the very least, an extra replay of Chapters 3, 8, and 9 outside of Hard Mode. But without proper planning, the player might be asked to play each of these chapters another one or two times. I lost count of the amount of times I played Chapter 8 in particular, which has a very large amount of unskippable story segments that eat up a ton of time.

Hard Mode itself, thankfully, is actually really interesting. Instead of being satisfied at just having enemies deal more damage and have bigger health bars (although they do also do that) there are some unique changes. Items are completely disabled, meaning that healing, reviving, and removing status effects are now exclusively the domain of various materia. To make that more limited, MP no longer gets restored at benches, only through random MP drops by breaking boxes or at the start of a new chapter. This means that you now have to consider MP management throughout the entirety of a chapter. A fully levelled Magnify materia paired with Cure thankfully makes group healing less of a concern (a fully leveled Prayer also does the job) as the 25% reduction is negligible compared to the benefits of healing 3 party members at once. But it still forces you to avoid playing recklessly to stay stocked up on MP, avoiding using offensive spells recklessly.

On top of all of this, some bosses now gain new attacks, though I wish it was more frequent. The only ones I noticed were the Hell House and Eligor. The Hell House now begins spitting out Tonberrys, forcing the player to divert their attention or else get taken out of the fight by the dreaded Chef's Knife. Eligor gets the most interesting change, casting Reflect on your party midway through the fight, making all support spells not just worthless, but a detriment, as they'll be reflected onto Eligor itself. My first attempt, I didn't realize this at first, and cast Regen on my party, only for Eligor to gain the Regen status itself. That fight is already hard enough on this difficulty, but the fact that it basically got back to full HP for free meant my defeat was all but guaranteed.

Genuinely recommend doing a Hard Mode playthrough if you had fun with the main game, I think it's a different enough gameplay experience to be worth it. I also used this as a chance to take a second pass on the story, but honestly, my thoughts aren't particularly different. Rebirth has the chance to take the new ideas presented in an interesting direction next week, but my hopes aren't high. Time will tell, I suppose.