FF7 is just as good people hype it up to be. It starts off in the iconic Midgar with what is probably the most action packed opening of any JRPG, and after a few hours it's already opening up its world. It gets even better the more mysteries are unconvered, the more materia and limit breaks you acquire. The forced minigames are really the only complaint I have with it. It's not hard to understand why this was such a massive deal in the early 3D era with how cinematic and spectacular it is. Even to this day the seamless transitions between gameplay and FMVs with uninterrupted music are mindblowing, and the pre rendered backgrounds have an untouchable aesthetic.

No matter how hard Square Enix try with countless spinoffs and retellings in the same universe with all the advanced technology of today, they aren't able to replicate the magic that was achieved on a PS1 and only make its story retroactively worse. It's not nostalgia talking - this is coming from a person who first played it 23 years after release. There is a great subtlety to the original and its characters that the remakes miss completely. Sephiroth, one of the coolest villains of all time, is basically an entirely different character in every media released after this and his cryptic terrifying aura is lost for the sake of fanservice. I choose to think of this game as existing in a vacuum and will always recommend it over anything else as the most complete consistent work.

It’s really bittersweet to me that this is easily the best sonic team game in over a decade, on the one hand it feels like they’re genuinely trying again which is awesome but on the other hand, this is really the best we can do now? It’s so painfully obvious that this is a mid budget game trying it’s hardest to mimic high budget games and as a result it feels incredibly unpolished and downright unfinished at points. Presentation is unapologetically cheap and you can’t go five minutes without feeling like something broke, this feels like a beta build of a game. Cyberspace is terrible, a bunch of reused level designs with the worst controls in the series, I skipped these whenever I could. But honestly the open zone was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, the speed here is fantastic and there’s something so enjoyable about just freestyling your way to a destination. It’s kinda like Mirror’s Edge but a lot faster and with less focused level design. The boss fights are as janky as the rest of the game but they make up for it with the awesome scale and intensity, these are new high points for the series. This is definitely one of the better Sonic stories as well, I think the characterization was pretty well done here (especially Eggman) and the general tone is such a departure from the previous titles in the best way. This is definitely a step in the right direction but this series still has a long way to go before it’s back on track.