Like drinking a Mountain Dew Baja Blast, except it takes 80 hours and for the middle 50 you have to stop drinking and eat a shitload of dry crackers. Far too experiential to distill so I'll just give some qualia.

Good: Yuffie is still insanely fun to play, just like in Intergrade, and the combat stays interesting throughout. Queen's Blood (the card game minigame) is good enough that it almost single-handedly carried my interest through a lot of the game. Barret's voice acting, characterization, and story are deft, and by far the best narrative element in the game when they're not being undermined by unrestrained tonal shifts. Lots of other interesting little tidbits, and the overall narrative of the Remakes continues to be really fascinating.

Bad: A Mario Party-esque number of minigames and constant narrative asides and segments that should have been cut. An overwhelming number of unimaginative environments fill out the open world – have you ever seen a desert canyon? A rural plain? A jungle? A scrapyard city? Disneyland? Then you already know exactly what those environments will look like in FF7R2. I don't complain about technical issues like this from a place of "it should meet my standards for polish", but in a game where the devs clearly had very high standards for everything, the frequently jank-as-hell movement animations and straight-up bad lighting in many areas really stick out as casualties of a project whose chief concern is breadth over depth.

IMO, watch an LP of this game so you can skip frequently and passionately. Even beelining through the story there's just so much nothing I think it might genuinely not be worth it.

Really excellent boss battles. Most powers felt great. Platforming feels amazing, and there are many challenge rooms for Xerxes coins to put you to the test there. Character designs and modeling was good as well as attack VFX, and VO was generally good. Some cute puzzles. A lot of good, enough so that I feel too harsh giving it a 3.5, but it's close. Now for the complaints!

The world art is disappointingly AAA. Sand looks like sand, terrain looks like terrain. Saturated, beautiful, lush colors are not common in this game. So much of the map, especially early areas, is just made out of straight X or Y dimension platform segments in plenty of areas that don't amount to any notable sense of visual storytelling. Eventually, you get to some areas with impressive color use and visual design, including one particularly imaginative water area, but they feel a bit like outliers. (Also, funnily enough, you undo the imaginative premise of that water area midway through it so it kind of just becomes less cool.)

The game's screen-to-screen level design is generally pretty fun especially when you get your double jump and can really string shit together. However, the macro level design of the map is often meandering and flavorless. There are a plethora of one-way gates, but they’re infrequently hidden and often act as dead ends in sections with no clear way to go because of lacking visual and geometric cues. Part of the magic in Dark Souls of a one-way is being confronted with an important one right on the main path, or having them hidden so that you stumble into a loopback and go "oh wow, i didn’t know this would connect here!" – this game just branches all the time with impassible walls (due to cardinality or due to lack of upgrades) always a room or two away from where you want. This resulted in a strong feeling of me playing the map screen and not the game itself sometimes, because rooms melt away from your thoughts pretty instantly after leaving them, especially when there's rarely any gimmick or iconic shapes to drag your virtual body against and feel.

Generally feels like it was lacking one more big pass of polish. Several unfinished looking VFX of platforms instantly disappearing beneath you, and a lacking sound mix that felt incomplete. Sound effects are inconsistent in volume and several boss battles seemed to have no music (in addition to two different bosses failing to play their cutscenes the first time i walked into their arenas which really messes up the functional storytelling they at least attempt to do). And the story flirts with being interesting at times cases but overall is just halfway-realized.

In conclusion, Mount Qaf is a land of contrasts

Credit where credit is due, they experimented with a lot here, but I think there was a lot to improve on in the experiments. It's a game where the BOTW sense of "what could be around this next hill" exploration-danger-excitement is paramount to maintaining its velocity and its flight. The fact that the majority of mons you find are ones you've already seen before as a Pokemon fan doesn't hurt this, really; in fact the uncanny recontextualization of "bunch of animals you make do moves" in all other Pokemon games into "wild animals that can hurt you" is quite effective. I really like the idea of literally building the Pokedex, playing the role of a researcher, but there are so many repeated, boring metrics for every entry ("number you've caught" etc). My suspended disbelief that I wasn't just filling in a premade spreadsheet was broken through pretty early, and the sense of discovery turned to a sense of chore.

As a 3D action game, there's again a number of interesting ideas and as many lackluster decisions. The pokeball throwing was interesting and I liked the sense of picking the right tool for the job, until I got a Great Ball which was flat out better than the interesting tradeoff ball. The aforementioned sense of spatial mystery really waned once I got the first mount pokemon, Wyrdeer, and was suddenly able to bolt across the map, jump significant heights up terrain, and look around with a zoomed-out camera that really hurts your sense of place and scale. (Ursaluna's riding behavior was much better than Wyrdeer's as a gameplay flavor, but it's a specialist, not your main mount.) The vibes of the game beg that pokemon are recognized as wild, unwieldy animals –under your control, they never are.

That extends to combat as well, which has some interesting alterations from the norm but has no sense of spatial play to it (despite your inexplicable ability to walk around the arena area during a fight). Multiple pokemon at once can challenge you, but your mons just stand in the middle doing whatever you tell them to. Agile/Strong move styles are quite a cool idea, and variable action orders are a cool idea. But in battle, it never plays and behaves as something recognizably new. It's just Pokemon. There is a little sense of space and analogue movement in the unfortunately shallow boss battles... but your pokemon aren't involved in that feeling at all.

This is not to say the game completely undercuts itself creatively, but the highs were not outweighing the lows for me. Also, the usual "opposing teams arguing about ideology" story content gave me a headache. It's literally just this tweet.