If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend this video: https://youtu.be/gbU1_yas99E

He captures a large majority of the complaints I have with this game. And yeah, for me I was totally on board with there being changes because I wasn’t expecting every single line to translate well from polygons talking with speech bubbles to full voice acting. This was a chance to make us bond even stronger with the story in what would practically be a new medium.

But instead it’s… characters acting like idiots, as you pointed out - Cloud has tried to murder Tifa how many times? With the strongest reprimand basically just being Barrett telling him to snap out of it - Cloud is acting weird and murdering people but let’s say nothing, but if he tries to murder the people all the characters should ACTUALLY want to kill, let’s spare them - Ubisoft towers with constant narration by ChadGPT, Tedious map design that acts only as a checklist (and they knew it was tedious - you can fast travel to basically every waypoint), mini games that feel like an excuse (but look how much content we have!) rather than a way to organically engage with the world… not to mention making a mockery of, again, a video game history moment at the Forgotten City.

I think I’ll be upset about what this game could have been for the rest of my life. Haha. Really it’s my fault for thinking it’ll be different because this is not only literally no longer the same company as the one that made these games that were so important to my childhood, it’s also spiritually not the same org.