Joseph Radoff

It looks beautiful, voice acting is good, and the music is wonderful. But that is all there really is to this game They might as well of just made it into a TV series. Much like FFXIII and XV, the battle system is more Kingdoms Hearts like. The issue with that is the battles drag on for way too long, and most attacks cannot be dodged/blocked, which defeats the purpose of programming it to be that way. This also results in most battles becoming: Attack, heal, attack, heal, attack, heal, etc. Another big issue is not being able to grind, the monster spawns are too infrequent. The other issue is the way the story is told. There is so much unnecessary world building, that it becomes boring, and bogs down the pacing of the story. Again, if it was a TV series, it might have worked, but I found my self constantly mashing skip during cut scenes, just to be able to play the game again. It doesn't help that we have all heard this story before, so there are no consequences to skipping it. The map design is sub par. Everything in Midgar looks the same. Everything is a corridor. Constant obstacles that make you slowly crouch walk, climb ladders, or shimmy in between objects. Another issue is characters. I do not remember every NPC thinking Cloud is the coolest person, to the point where it feels like I'm reading FanFiction. They also somehow made Aerith more obnoxious. This game suffers from the same issue that Kingdom Hearts 3 did: way too much hype and expectations. If you love the FF7 world and want to delve deeper into it, this game is for you. If you just want to play a fun, balanced jrpg, play the original FF7.