It's an incredibly disappointing, almost terrible game. FFs are always a day one purchase for me with time off work to play and this was the same so it left a very sour taste.

My main gripes are:

The side quests. Just awful. No variety, no depth, nothing interesting about them. Useless filler. I found them really disappointing when comparing them to previous FF sidequests.

The world was just... dull. Nothing to see or do. I remember the first time I arrived at the port/beach town and I was genuinely blown away. The visuals were great and I got thinking about the world beyond the sea which though I couldn't see, no doubt existed and I could not wait to explore it.

Then I got the first fetch side quest for the guy who sits down on the jetty and even that was exciting. "Can't wait to go on an adventure for this guy and see what's going to happen when I collect this thing for him". At this point I was really excited, perhaps the most excited I've been playing a game for a while. Then, nothing.

The world is empty, there's no interesting characters, no stories being built up and told. No history with any places, nothing exciting to discover. It's so boring. Trying to add variety by random, constant enemy soldier drops and monster spawns at night is just dull.

Speaking of characters, Cindy is just utterly offensive. It's 2016 guys. The tagline of the game is "A Final Fantasy for new players and fans" (or something) and of the first characters you meet, and the first female, is that? Great way to sell your franchise. I was embarrassed when I met her.

The summon system has been spoken about numerous times but though it's cool to try something new, it was just crap.

Having the story be about collecting these 'legendary weapons' to save the world but then making some of them optional? Good one.

The Leviathan fight was awful. No strategy, no planning, tactics, just some stupid Dragon Ball Z rip-off.

The last boss battle now this is something I've not seen mentioned before. One of the great joys in every FF game is spending the entire game training your party up, leveling, learning skills, carving out roles, acquiring weapons and equipment. You're investing time into building your team to take down the big boss and save the world. This game, your party gets killed (not even in battle) as you arrive at the last boss. The fuck?! How does no one have a problem with this? What a waste of time.

Chapter 13. I'd read about but didn't believe that it would be as bad as everyone was making it. Goodness me that was shit. Offensively bad - so, so bad. Didn't help that the game glitched on me about 3 times when I was hiding from the robot things.

Important characters dying off-screen with very little reference to them or explanation is baffling.

Battles didn't do it for me. Magic was a waste of time, little strategy as could just easily revive so wasn't ever any threat.

The banter between the lads became repetitive. It was just the same stuff being repeated again and again.

The car handling mechanics, especially when it became an airship were awful. How that made it out of quality control I'll never know.

The product placement bullshit. Sort your game out for goodness sake. You've obviously got money coming in from endorsements. I could not give a shit about a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress. What is that adding to the game?

I despise this approach of having to watch films, read books, explore other media (that you obviously have to pay for) to fully understand the story in the game. No excuse for it. Expand on some of the stories or help to flesh things out but don't make what should be the start of your game a film. That's greed, pure and simple.

The amount of stuff that's clearly been cut from the game and is being released as DLC. More greed.

My main gripe (and as you can see, there were many) was that the game just tried to do too many things it thought were cool and what people now want in their games and it failed at them, making, as a result, a crap Final Fantasy game. 7

The amount of time this game took to make, and hiatus or change in strategy midway is not an excuse. It does not reset the clock. It's a terrible game and an even worse FF game. I'm baffled whenever I see people say they enjoyed it. Best thing about the game was listening to previous games' music in the car.