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.
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.