This review contains spoilers
This game is a mess.
The combat is unfun.
The progession system is bad, you can just get Firaga or a similar materia super early and then win basically any fight with just that.
The DMW is mostly just very confusing and makes your success in combat very dependant on RNG.
The missions are all the same and they (almost) all suck and there are sooooo many of them and the rewards don't feel rewarding because it just means more inventory management/materia fusing. The ones with Yuffie are pretty good though.
The story is all over the place. It clearly suffers from trying to be a prequel to VII and its own thing at the same time.
I honestly couldn't tell you what Genesis' motivation was by the end of the game (I think he was just being a theatre kid) because the game kept swapping between "Prequel stuff" and "Genesis stuff" so it couldn't really focus on him anymore. And then there can't even be a real ending for his story because it has to fit in DoC somehow.
Also the game introduces Cissnei (unless you've seen her already in Before Crisis, which you haven't) as a pretty prominent Turk and her not being in VII raised all the death flags for me but then she doesn't die so like, what the fuck happened with her?
But the few good parts, especially the ending, are really great.
The ending might actually be my favourite moment in a Final Fantasy game I've played so far. Fighting this overwhelming number of Shinra troops while somber music plays and the DMW slowly falls apart managed to really make me feel like I was playing a dying man. And then there's that moment where Aerith resists being erased from the DMW the first time!
There are some other minor good moments too that I'm not going to list here but at the end, they're not enough to make me say that this is a "good" game.
The combat is unfun.
The progession system is bad, you can just get Firaga or a similar materia super early and then win basically any fight with just that.
The DMW is mostly just very confusing and makes your success in combat very dependant on RNG.
The missions are all the same and they (almost) all suck and there are sooooo many of them and the rewards don't feel rewarding because it just means more inventory management/materia fusing. The ones with Yuffie are pretty good though.
The story is all over the place. It clearly suffers from trying to be a prequel to VII and its own thing at the same time.
I honestly couldn't tell you what Genesis' motivation was by the end of the game (I think he was just being a theatre kid) because the game kept swapping between "Prequel stuff" and "Genesis stuff" so it couldn't really focus on him anymore. And then there can't even be a real ending for his story because it has to fit in DoC somehow.
Also the game introduces Cissnei (unless you've seen her already in Before Crisis, which you haven't) as a pretty prominent Turk and her not being in VII raised all the death flags for me but then she doesn't die so like, what the fuck happened with her?
But the few good parts, especially the ending, are really great.
The ending might actually be my favourite moment in a Final Fantasy game I've played so far. Fighting this overwhelming number of Shinra troops while somber music plays and the DMW slowly falls apart managed to really make me feel like I was playing a dying man. And then there's that moment where Aerith resists being erased from the DMW the first time!
There are some other minor good moments too that I'm not going to list here but at the end, they're not enough to make me say that this is a "good" game.