Guessed by @TruckOSaurus
We finally caught up! Entering the top 20 and directly following my Game of the Year for 2025, we have my Game of the Year for 2024! Both highly ambitious JRPGs and both amazing games that I have some decently sized complaints about. I could fill a whole article with how I feel about Rebirth and probably would have if it hadn't been a bit too early for 'A Late Look', but I'm gonna try my best to keep it short here. My number 1 complain that I rarely see anybody talk about is that they dumbed down Cloud's gameplay. From the on-point sword slinging Merc gameplay of Remake to instead making him fly around the battlefield like post-Peter-Pan Sora and giving him the ability to dance around and shoot beams at enemies from a (usually) safe distance. I don't get it and I don't get why they didn't get more flack for it. There's a few other issues like bloat in the otherwise mostly great open-world and two games in I can't say I'm completely onboard with the story changes.
But... somehow the positives still outweight all that: The remakes bring these already amazing characters so much more to life, both games look and sound incredible, for some reason I'm an absolute sucker for card game mini-games in RPGs (seriously always), the combat is still great despite their attempts to change that and the ending is so epic that it's hard to feel too miffed about any of the story changes that led to it. So yeah, a flawed masterpiece and I'm both excited and terrified to see where Part III goes from here (Cloud is gonna be wearing clown shoes isn't he?).
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