u/Groosin1

After playing the demo, I love just about everything about this game. Seems like a mix between Zelda and Secret of Mana, attack feedback is great, and Very Hard seems actually balanced so far for a higher difficulty mode. Also was taken by surprise and love the magicite system, with actual meaningful effects that directly affect your gameplay.

There's just one big problem that I can't get over: the characters talking all the time. I think Elliot saying the same line over and over for charged attacks is kinda dumb, but I'm used to it for anime games. The REAL problem is your companion.

Both she and Elliot will say something LITERALLY every single time you do ANYTHING. I actually started laughing in the tutorial dungeon, because they both would say something practically over each other like "hey I think that switch did something" when the thing the switch did is right in front of your face. This is every single time anything happens.

I started laughing because it reminded me of that silly Youtube series about what OoT would be like as a "Modern Game," except it was real and right in front of me

Overall loved New Threat more than I ever thought I would. It was the closest I've felt like I was playing FF7 for the first time again.

Positives:

Really enjoyed the better Materia placement and balancing, giving you actual customization early on while also removing the ability to break the game super early by just buying 5 HP+ materia. Also really liked the revamped weapons system so that many weapons can be viable for a while depending on the build you want.

Really loved the revamped encounters. The most obvious issue with OG is how nothing hurts you until you hit a difficulty spike I think around Mt. Nibel. I think the peak of my excitement for the whole game was when the 1st reactor guards were shooting you for damage in the 20s-30s 🤣

Definitely need to give a shoutout to the extra endgame content. I think my favorite fight in the whole mod was the genius reskins to make the Shinyru-Omega pincer fight guarding KotR.

Negatives:

I feel like "Mr. Smile" is kind of unnecessary and his screen takes way too long to finish.

Definitely didn't like some of the jokes that were added even in the Type A version (haven't played Type B.) Luckily they were very few but one specific that really took me out of the experience for a bit: At the beach when I specifically chose the serious option for Cloud cause I was really feeling just playing through the story again, Tifa makes a 4th wall joke. Would have been fine if she said that when you DID pick the silly option.

I think my biggest disappointment of all, which is still not the biggest deal, is that Bizarro Sephiroth seems like he hasn't really changed at all. With all the great new fights, I was really hoping going for the full squad battle would be 3 cool battles using each party, even if they were very similar. Instead he still just sits there and sluggishly regenerates himself with 5+ second long animations and after one or two attacks a body part still has a 5+ second long death animation 😭