Tbh the ending of the game is so bad and exhausting that i truly wanted to rate it 1/10 after beating the story (it is just a constant tiresome streak of bosses one after the other - terrible game design decision, imo. I was like "just end it already, its getting worst and more stupid with every next boss fight in a row").
But with all rage aside it is worth a 5/10, and 4/10 if it would be a fresh new title, not world famous game remake with tons of nostalgia involved.
Plot - it is ok while it sticks to the original, but all this new whispers nonsence is total garbage and shouldnt exist
Combat - it feels incomplete. It is better than in ff15, but still needs improvement. Sometimes camera doing stupid things, mobile enemies are pain cause AI is bad when it comes to measuring distance to land a hit with skills, so u can often miss unless you manually get to right distance.
Overall teammates AI is very poor, they are way too passive and u cant really change it unless you controll them manually. And u cant do this with 3 units at the same time when the combat is real time. So your main unit always gets his action gauge filled 3-4 times faster than 2 other units and it is annoying. Sometimes AI controlled teammates just stand and block or standing afk instead of doing something and it is strange that i could't find any settings to change their behavior. FF12 used to have 10 or 12 setting for each character (for example, use offensive magic if u face flying enemy for the characters with melee weapon, use healing item of magic if ally health drop below 40% etc). And in FF7 remake sometimes allies feels more like a burden than like useful help (example, boss use aoe attack and all your charactes got heavy damage, but only main character have enough action gauge to use heal cause other 2 are too passive, so you waste your turns to heal the other two and not doing damage while they are slowly accumutating their gauge). And the action gauge system itself have 1 problem - spamming enemies, like one guy at the end of the game that constatly throws powerfull attacks at you and you cant accumulate enough gauge to keep the pace.
But still the combat system have improved much since ff15 with no chance to abuse items finally (which is major problem to a most modern rpg's) and i hope square will polish it for FF16.
Graphics - main characters looking really good, Clouds greatsword on his back with materia is looking great, but overall indoors and outdoors are pretty mediocre, and i'm playing PS5 version.
Game design - game is just a gut and absolutelly linear, it has next to none exploration and many "you cant go there right now cause Hey cloud, my home is this way" moments are annoying and feels like just poor game design
Main problem is lenght. They literally stretched a good fast paced opening to a big adventure from original (it took about 7 hours to get through) to a boring and awfully slow 30 hours of cuscenes, filler content + commonplace sidequests and very slow mediocre gameplay. Everything in this game except for combat is painfully slow.
If this "game" would be twice shorter it would be only for the best. Same plot with more details and depth for 15 hours and it wouldn't fail the pace so much (but then it would be harder to sell it for AAA price ofc).
P. S. Funny to see all those 10/10 guys that obviously dont spend even 3 hours playing before making a reviev)
