I grew up playing Final Fantasy VII. I probably played it around 10-12 years old and again on ios a few years ago.
WOW! What a classic.
I decided to play the remake on my Steam Deck just ot revisit the game and see areas of the game reimagined.
They did a great job in this aspect, but overall I feel that the game has not been fun.
So far, it is just walking from place to place while having the occasional battle. 99% of the time you can mindlessly mash a button to find the battle.
The few boss battles that come up can be interesting and this is where you start to learn the mechanics as they are not needed up until this point.
But, there are many sections that are long for the sake of being long. Like making you walk slowly in certain situations, like walking up to 7th Heaven, or making you hold a button to interact with something when 99% of things just require you to press the button once.
My biggest disappointment in the game is that the gear I unlocked and leveled up, do not carry over to the next game. Once I learned this, I stopped caring. They really should have let you bring over your characters.
Anyway, I am near the end game now and will probably finish it since there is not much left, but I will not be playing other iterations of this game. I might just watch a speed-run or a “let’s play” to see the different areas.
I absolutely adore the remake games. They both follow a type of game-design that makes me feel like I’m playing something from the PS2 era again. Both the good and the bad. Makes me feel like a kid in the best kind of way.
The games do have some trouble with time-wasters. It’s both improved and made worse in Rebirth. Luckily, in open world fashion, a lot of it can actually be ignored in Rebirth. And if you don’t ignore it, you get rewarded with actually good side-content. And Rebirths fast travel is good to the point you basically never have to travel anywhere “the long way” twice.
I have the same problem with the combat being too easy. It wasn’t too bad with Intergrade as I was new to the combat system, but with Rebirth I am absolutely crushing enemies. I’m deliberately sabotaging my character builds to make it more challenging, but I really wish they didn’t lock “hard” behind ng+. Coming from the first game, you should be able to jump into the second at that higher skill level from the start. But no.
Don’t worry too much about your stuff not carrying over. The characters do not get reset to level zero, and no abilities. They start with a little less than what you have at the end of Intergrade, but a lot of the stuff you’ll have gotten by the end of Intergrade, is what you have at the start of Rebirth. And then over the course of the second game, you get a lot of NEW stuff, rather than just re-aquiring the stuff you had in the first.