I finished the first game for the first time a few weeks ago. I more so meant, the quite numerous and somewhat funny differences between this game and the original. 

Not to say they're bad, and I was spoiled on a few of them, but seeing them in action they are definitely wackadoo!

So about halfway through I think.

Aside from some crappy textures lying around the game looks lovely and the music is amazing. The voice acting is mostly good too.

Battle system is decent enough. Animation is good and makes the combat feel satisfying. All of the characters play different which adds much needed variety to the combat. There's more strategy to the combat than something like Kingdom hearts, but not as much as most full blown RPGs. The ATB system makes combat feel a little choppy. Would be better if you can have settings for the AI so you didn't have to manually go into the menu.

The problem with the game is pacing which is what happens when you stretch 6 hours into 30. There's a lot of added content to pad things out. The content falls into one of three categories. A) Content that helps you get to know the characters better and fleshes out the world, B) silly additions that go against the original story, and C) NPCs you don't give a shit about doing boring shit. Unfortunately a huge chunk of the content falls into that third category. Between the parts I want to play, the parts where they're actually remaking parts of FF7, there's a bunch of really uninteresting stuff to slog through.

A score in the 8 range seems about right. The fundamentals of the game are really solid, but the pacing problems are too significant to overlook. I'd personally put it on the lower half of the 8 range.

Bolded: that annoyed the hell out of me at first but i have gotten over myself as i play on an old ps4 model and i can't call it lazy but i'm curious how it will look on the PS5.

About the pacing problem:Will that be as obvious for new players of the franchise as it is for us?Because we constantly expect the original story to continue but a new player might not feel the things in between as being filler that much as we do.

I think the missions attached to the Chapters you spend in the slums would be identified as filler even by new players. They're self-contained, involve low-stakes situations, mundane tasks and don't affect the plot much.

It's hard to say how I'd feel about the pacing if I hadn't played the original.  I kind of wish I could experience the game that way, but sadly I can't wipe my memory.  There are some segments, like the side mission to Jessie's house, which probably wouldn't have stood out too much.  But, there are other elements that I think would've still felt really off.  Like the last hour or so of sector 5 before you fight the boss.

Also, I think the side quests are just uninteresting.  And because of the way the game is structured, you have to do them all at once between chapters, or not at all and forego a lot of key items.  Compare that to Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 which had sidequests that were also mostly kind of boring.  But, in those games, you could access them whenever you want, so you got to decide if and when you wanted some downtime from the main story 

You don’t need to do the side-quests if you don’t feel like it. To me, they serve as a way to grind without simply running in circle in-between random encounters. If you do all the side quests as they become available, you will have everything needed to mostly breeze through the rest of the content. 

And if you don’t you will have a harder time, but there are other means later down the line that will allow you to build your characters up level wise. 

And then there’s something waiting for you once you complete the game...

I personally had no problem with the pacing or the side content. I thought everything flowed quite well. But I can understand why others who played the original would prefer if the game sticked to the original pacing a bit more closely. It’s hard at times to refrain from thinking about the original. Almost impossible in fact. And for some, it can get in the way and prevent them from appreciating what this remake does differently. And that’s fair enough.

I’m just glad it didn’t do that for me. I enjoyed pretty much every minutes of it. And by the time the game ended, it left a [still]?lasting impression on me and I keep thinking about what everything it brought really means for things to come. I suspect it isn’t at all what most people seem to think it is. But we have to wait for part 2 to know for sure.

I have no idea why I'm having such a hard time finding the FFVIIR minor-spoiler thread made by the guy with the Sonic the Hedgehog avatar, so I'm just gonna post this here: 

I'm glad it's getting good reviews and selling well. I only played the demo and it was good gameplay. Just you know, not FF7, which is why I passed on buying this now. I'll get it one day, maybe as the collection when it's actually the full game or when this one is £5 on PS5. Favourite game of all time 'remade' and I'm not buying it, sad times. I feel if they did this gameplay with FF7 actual story and in one game, I'd happily buy it straight away, full price.

I don't understand how many are annoyed at narrative changes in it however, like what did they expect? It's 4-5 hours of story fleshed out to a 40 hour game, it's going to have new crap, side missions and what not everywhere. It's not a remake, it's a different game with same characters claiming to be the same game.

The abilities you get from the weapons are pretty important so I feel like I have to do the sidequests.  It would be much better if I didn't have to do them all in a row.  Or if they were actually somewhat interesting.

The pacing problems are beyond that though.  For example, sector 5's reactor.  *minor spoilers ahead*.  When you get caught by Heidegger and he confronts you with his drones, it feels like that should be the time for the boss fight, and I'm pretty sure I'd feel that way even if I'd never played the original.  But instead, you wander around for another half hour to an hour sabotaging shit.  It feels off from a pacing perspective. They built to the climax of the situation (OH NO WE'RE CAUGHT) then there's just a bunch of other shit to do. It also makes no sense from a storytelling perspective.   Shinra has them on tape as they go along just wrecking their shit making them look like chumps.  Meanwhile Barrett Cloud and Tifa think their bomb is going to go off as planned and act shocked when Shinra alters it, like that wasn't obviously going to happen.  

Edit:  And to be fair, there are parts where they definitely do expand in the right way.  I'm at Wall Market right now, and I'm loving how they built on this area which was already my favorite part of the original. 

I don't feel like Cloud was actually going to give information on Avalanche.  Seems more like he was playing along to see what the people knew and why they were looking for them.  

I kind of got that sense too but at this point it's such a common trope in games that x character is jaded with y faction so they might do z bad thing because really they're a "neutral" party, so it's hard to know if it was supposed to be a set up by Cloud or just really on the nose. But honestly I would guess the latter more than the former, especially when this game (and even the original) goes out of it's way to make it clear Cloud is very jaded. But honestly even if it was a little bit of both I still find that contradiction so funny, even just using the motorcycle example. Very cringe.