Really don't know where to start with this one, besides just mentioning that I was kind of excited and wanting to play this after going through Remake and Intermission shortly before this came out, having enjoyed those a lot and specially Intermission particularly because of how fun the combat was and the cute interactions between Yuffie and Sonon, but yeah, this game didn't really hit it off well with me after a while.

At first I was pretty excited about how the story would pan out, the beginning was exciting and the open world made me really look forward to it, but as the game progresses and more areas open, you start to notice the repetitiveness and dullness of the world itself, how boring it gets despite being beautiful. The Ubisoft Towers at first I didn't mind too much but after a while, all of the things involving the open-world sections themselves just felt really boring and dull, it felt more like checking out chores on a checklist and doing a job rather than just having fun, the exploration is just generic run-of-the-mill open world exploration with a coat of Final Fantasy at the end of the day, it doesn't change at it's core.

The story at times had a really weird and odd pacing, like it was rushing for some reason, despite having these huge open world areas, the pacing was really off at times, specially during THAT one Barret sequence that happens after the Dustbowl, just kind of felt in poor taste how they handled it. The ending was kind of disappointing, lackluster and it almost felt in bad taste how they handled it, at times it felt like they were trying to pull on my feelings but it didn't work at all because at that point I really just wanted to be done with the game because of how bloated it felt after trying to do every little single thing on it, I probably would've enjoyed it more if I just bombrushed the main story but I wanted to enjoy it fully, but oh well.

But to not drag this on further, I really tried to like this more and have more fun with it, but the overwhelming amount of unnecessary minigames felt insanely boring and bloated to hell and back and how they try to tack them into the main story as well, it's overwhelming and gets boring real fast. On some more positives, the presentation of the game is incredibly nice; it's a beautiful game and the music is also really well made, a lot of arrangements and original songs coming back felt nice, the way they handled some characters felt decent enough besides some of them here and there and the gameplay, despite not changing much from Remake, was still somewhat decent, the additions really don't do much for me and it somehow felt weirder than how it was on both Remake and Intermission, but it isn't bad, definitely one of the strong points of the game.

6/10 feels like a good enough rating to me, it was a decent game, not good but also not bad.