The most amazing Final Fantasy single player experience of this century, without question. It`s crazy to think how they take like 15-20 hours of the original game and expand in such a way that it becomes a game of it`s own; you have content, between main quests, side content, minigames, up to 80-100 hours of gameplay, depending on how much you wish to invest time on those secondary stuff.
Story-wise, you need to treat this as a whole different thing, even more so than the first part. You get a lot of memorable scenes and dialogues from the original back again, but there`s an "avalanche" (pun intended) of new scenes, new characters, new motivations to keep the story rolling and even apparations of characters that weren`t on the original game. The whole "alternate timelines" thing from the first part still plays a big role on the development of the story on this one, and it brings a lot of new stuff to the game, although it can be way more confusing to understand all the events and how they take place, even with the core events of the original game still intact.
Gameplay wise, it`s just as good to play as the Remake. The combat is still the same, and the new characters have interesting and refreshing gameplay mechanics, especially Yuffie and Cait. I just resent the fact that they removed the way upgrading weapons functioned in the first game; the way it works in this game is just not as interesting. Even so, that`s not really a big of an issue, cause with all the new stuff they added, especially the synergy abilities and the relationship mechanic, the weapon upgrades functions well. This game has a lot of stuff to do, and I do mean a lot: the amount of minigames they added is astounding, even to a point that maybe they tried to do too much, and it`s just becomes tiresome, especially if you`re a completionist kind of gamer that tries to do everything - believe me, you`ll be spending a lot of time doing it all.
The way the world and the game is built reminds me a little of Final Fantasy X; the game at it`s core is still linear - you go from area to area as you move on throughout the story. But the way this game introduces the free roaming and open world spaces from the original is very clever; as you move, you get little "pockets" of open world, areas where you can get sidequests, chocobo hunting, minibosses and much more. And actually that`s very clever, cause if this game used open world just as the original, with all the new things they added, it could had been very overwhelming, so this way works just fine - even though not all the areas where that fun to explore.
Graphic and music, it`s just phenomenal. The characters models are just gorgeous and just a sight to behold and the music is just up to Final Fantasy standards - I just can`t get enough of all these Aerith`s theme renditions, makes me cry everytime. The only thing bad about how the game looks it`s the fact that this one still has those blurry and not rendered well background objects that Remake had, and the textures are not just what we expected at this point, but it`s doesnt come to be such a nuisance.
As i said at the beginning, this is it; this is the Final Fantasy experience we all wanted, this is the franchise at it`s best. When we all dreamed of a remake of Final Fantasy VII, we didn`t expected we would get this; honestly, this is so much better than we could have imagined.
Story-wise, you need to treat this as a whole different thing, even more so than the first part. You get a lot of memorable scenes and dialogues from the original back again, but there`s an "avalanche" (pun intended) of new scenes, new characters, new motivations to keep the story rolling and even apparations of characters that weren`t on the original game. The whole "alternate timelines" thing from the first part still plays a big role on the development of the story on this one, and it brings a lot of new stuff to the game, although it can be way more confusing to understand all the events and how they take place, even with the core events of the original game still intact.
Gameplay wise, it`s just as good to play as the Remake. The combat is still the same, and the new characters have interesting and refreshing gameplay mechanics, especially Yuffie and Cait. I just resent the fact that they removed the way upgrading weapons functioned in the first game; the way it works in this game is just not as interesting. Even so, that`s not really a big of an issue, cause with all the new stuff they added, especially the synergy abilities and the relationship mechanic, the weapon upgrades functions well. This game has a lot of stuff to do, and I do mean a lot: the amount of minigames they added is astounding, even to a point that maybe they tried to do too much, and it`s just becomes tiresome, especially if you`re a completionist kind of gamer that tries to do everything - believe me, you`ll be spending a lot of time doing it all.
The way the world and the game is built reminds me a little of Final Fantasy X; the game at it`s core is still linear - you go from area to area as you move on throughout the story. But the way this game introduces the free roaming and open world spaces from the original is very clever; as you move, you get little "pockets" of open world, areas where you can get sidequests, chocobo hunting, minibosses and much more. And actually that`s very clever, cause if this game used open world just as the original, with all the new things they added, it could had been very overwhelming, so this way works just fine - even though not all the areas where that fun to explore.
Graphic and music, it`s just phenomenal. The characters models are just gorgeous and just a sight to behold and the music is just up to Final Fantasy standards - I just can`t get enough of all these Aerith`s theme renditions, makes me cry everytime. The only thing bad about how the game looks it`s the fact that this one still has those blurry and not rendered well background objects that Remake had, and the textures are not just what we expected at this point, but it`s doesnt come to be such a nuisance.
As i said at the beginning, this is it; this is the Final Fantasy experience we all wanted, this is the franchise at it`s best. When we all dreamed of a remake of Final Fantasy VII, we didn`t expected we would get this; honestly, this is so much better than we could have imagined.