This game is loaded with welcome fanservice and tons of cool moments but its problems outweigh what it gets right. The combat is clunky, repetitive, and dysfunctional, in a way that makes some encounters boring and others downright frustrating. The story is bloated and aimless as a result of being stretched so thin, and this even hurts some of the scenes that were more or less left alone. Some of the filler content, mandatory filler content I might add, like rescuing cats etc., makes it painfully obvious that the game could not sustain the 30 hour runtime Square seems to think it needed. Somehow it takes 10 hours to destroy the second reactor when in the original game this barely took 1 hour. The pacing is horrible. None of these things are helped by the fact that the game has no real ending.

This could have and, in my opinion, should have been an actual remake of the original game with ATB combat. The fact that it's not that isn't why it's bad, though - all the changes just happen to suck.