Strongly agree with most of this. The writing demonstrates such a deep understanding of what makes these characters compelling: the dialogue and the cinematography of their most emotional moments is absolutely stellar. But then the game also seems addicted to making the plot more contrived for absolutely no reason except for tasteless fanservice (it's absolutely crazy how Zack's presence meant absolutely nothing. You can remove him from the story and nothing changes. He's just there to make braindead fans smile.) or complexity's sake (I was genuinely interested to see where the Lodbrok-Wutai subplot was going, but apparently it's going nowhere since Lodbrok just wants to "distract Rufus from Sephiroth" meaning that it's all just an empty addendum to the original plot and we're not going in any narratively or thematically new direction. Riveting.).
Hard disagree on blaming Nomura for everything wrong with the writing, it's an old trend that needs to stop because the writing team is made up of more than one person, and many interviews have proven how the worst storytelling decisions were not even made by him.

You're right ZangBang about the Nomura blame. I was being too glib. Using names like his as a placeholder is lazy. As such, I've mildly edited my review.