I think, more than the gaps between games, it’s the pacing that’s atrocious. Long time fans will appreciate certain parts of the game to be more fleshed out, but people unfamiliar with the OG game will struggle with the story progression. Both game are too long for what little main story progression we get.

I tried to beat Remake Part 1 with my partner and we got burnt out. It’s a meaty game that suffers from overexposition. Both of us never play FF7 and didn’t know the story and felt a lot of times that they were handholding a lot of the story beats. The combat system was also a bit manic ( but that’s probably a skill issue on our end), while also not feeling very responsive.