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JWeinCom on 06 April 2020
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Hiku said:

Around what I expected. I was thinking 89.
With the amount of people who always wanted it to be something else, even if it's unreasonable, some mixed reviews were unavoidable.
Others may be due to reasonable critique.

JWeinCom said:

Could it possibly be that they added this content to stretch the game into three parts?  And if the developer team was told that this was only going to be a single release, what would have happened to all of that content?

What do you think would have happened to a lot of the content from the original game we loved if they were told to make this into a singular release?
It would be cut from the game, because it's not possible to do in this kind of fidelity in one game.

"The other option was to include the entire scope of the original game in a single release. But in order to make that work as a modern game, we wouldn’t be able to go for the highest visual quality and we’d also have to cut back on areas and scenes from the original."

So this wasn't "unnecessarily splitting". It was necessary if they wanted to include everything important from the original.

The only question then was at what point they end each game. It has to be somewhere that feels appropriate for a full game experience. And not just as far as they can take it.
If they can't get to say the City of the Ancients on a one game budget, but only as far as Costa Del Sol, ending the first game there would not feel appropriate. So the decision to focus on Midgar and move some later events into the Midgar section, while expanding on that city and its people sounds reasonable.

People who think they could fit everything from the original into one single game in this kind of fidelity are unrealistic.

If they made it into one game, people would complain about all the things cut from it.
If they made it into multiple games, people would complain about the extra "unnecessary" stuff.

I've seen a lot of complaints about this over the years, but never accompanied by a constructive or realistic suggestion along with it.

I really don't have the technical or budgetary expertise to say if it was or was not strictly necessary on either of those grounds to split it.  So, if it pleases you, strike the word necessary from my initial comment.

Regardless, the fact that the game is split into three parts, for whatever reason, has apparently led to a lot of filler that has diminished the experience for at least a substantial portion of critics.  Whatever the reasoning may have been, it's a flaw that detracts from their enjoyment.

As for constructive criticism, I can't really say as I haven't played the game yet.  But based on the feedback the most constructive criticism would be to actually come up with 3 games full of worthwhile content. If it was truly necessary to have the game split into three parts, it was also necessary to have three parts worth of good stuff.   In the Witcher for instance (also haven't played) people praise all the side quests for being well written and engrossing.  So, it's possible to have a lot of side content and not have it detract from the experience.  Here, again according to some critics as I haven't played the game, they apparently missed the mark.