Spent four hours with Final Fantasy VII Remake this evening and it's confirmed several things I suspected about it.
Firstly, that although it is rooted in love and respect for the source material, it is best to treat it as a whole new game. After all, we're talking about something that is expanding what was five hours of the original game at most into a 35+ hour game. That means there's a lot of new stuff. New areas to visit, new characters to interact with, new storylines, new setups for various situations, new contexts for events you might be familiar with.
Secondly, the mechanics represent a blend of all the best bits of more recent Final Fantasy games — specifically, XII, XIII and XV in particular. It works really well, and it sidesteps a lot of the commonly cited issues people tend to bring up when talking about those particular installments. The combination of XV's rhythmic basic attacks with XIII's Active Time Bar management and XII's somewhat more "open" structure is pretty great; combat is pacy and interesting, and it's especially enjoyable when you're managing multiple characters. The first boss battle in the Mako Reactor remains a great showcase of this.
Thus far I'm coming towards the end of chapter 3, which is where Cloud and company arrive home in the Sector 7 slums. This is expanded considerably over some fairly brief, exposition-centric scenes in the original; there are six sidequests to take on, for example, and accomplishing all these gives you the opportunity to pursue a "discovery" — in this case, spending a bit of time with Tifa "off the clock", as it were.
Rather nicely, rather than expecting you to wander all over the map looking for people who might have quests for you, starting a chapter immediately unlocks the sidequests (except for those with prerequisites), so you always know exactly where to go. And the game does a great job of making the random NPC chatter as you wander around react to what you've been doing. They've really done a great job here.
I'm going to spend some more time with it over the long weekend — but I haven't forgotten about Atelier, don't you worry yourself!
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