I'm now past the halfway mark or so - up to the Train Graveyard, and... although Wall Market IS in the game, like everything else, it has been greatly expanded upon. Like, really, reallly expanded, it really does seem like a very seedy, glitzy red-light district where turning down the wrong alley is likely to get a knife in your gut now rather than just another 'slum' area with a better night-life. And although the cross-dressing part is in the game, it's handled completely differently (you don't get the individual items from various npcs, but participate in a dance-off on stage and how you go determines your outfit, and thus, Corneo's 'date' for the evening), although the result is still the same.

And, although the "this guy are sick" line isn't sadly in the game anymore (as far as I saw), some other famously bad dialogue did make it in (when Cloud, Tifa and Aeris have Corneo um.. cornered, when they threaten to "smash 'em", "rip them off" etc, returns intact here :)).

And, ironically enough, something someone mentioned in this thread earlier about some of the more bizarre enemies found in the original game not making the jump here, one particular mentioned example... is back: the Hell House, although it's not a generic random enemy this time, but a (rather challenging) arena boss fight! And yes, the game hangs a big lamp over the "Just WTF is this thing?!" response to it's very existence. ;)

As far as the story goes, there are some tweaks here and there but they're more just adding further info that fleshes out the Planet and it's people a lot more than the original did, in surprising ways (like, did you know Cloud's mother's name was Claudia? Or that Jessie's surname is Raspberry? Or that Jessie was originally an actress at Event Square in Gold Saucer before she joined AVALANCHE? Or that even Shinra employees often have to live in Midgar's slums simply because their meagre salaries cannot meet the steep price of rent of houses and apartments on the Plate? It's these little things that make this game so interesting for me, but that's because it's stuff I always wanted the original game to have, but of course it didn't).

And there is a lot of very unsubtle foreshadowing going on - Jessie's father is revealed to be in a coma from mako poisoning, setting up what happens to Cloud after Meteor is summoned, Cloud keeps having brief Jenova-powered visions of Aeris's demise, and of course, Cloud's disasociated personality blocking out anything related to Zack - but then, this is SE who are hardly known for subtlety, so I should have expected no less. :p

there is only now one brickbat I have for this, and it concerns a new story addition added: the wraith like entities that keep swarming around throughout the Remake's story, are revealed at the end to be 'ghosts from the future' who arbitrate destiny and keep it on it's pre-ordained course. I mean, WTF? This, is the best you could come up with SE?

These things have never appeared in any Compilation title or the original game, and yet here it's treated as something massively important. It just seemed to be a way of creating an ominious backdrop (with them swarming around the Shinra Building) to rehash Advent Children's climatic battle for players against 'you-know-who' as the episode's final boss, as well as making an easy way of shoehorning in flashforwards of things like Meteor and Aeris's death (as when they pass through someone that person gets a brief flash of a future event).

It was completely unnecessary and added nothing to the story (hell, the ending pretty much insinuaites that having defeated it they will no longer be a problem as you've 'overcome destiny' or something, so it was just superflorous story filler to give an impressive boss fight to a point that in the original game had none. The irony is, none of the other new story additions have this problem, they all work perfectly and fit the narrative and setting.

That is the only negative I have to say about this game though, everything else just adds up as delicious layers on an already amazing cake.

Also, SE officially sunk Cloud/Aeris shippers forever (well, AC already all but said that, but here Aeris literally tells Cloud "Do not fall in love with me".), but blam.... :p

I'm not sure you've fully disgested the implication behind that ending.  This is essentially a sequel to the original FF7 and we're now on an AU course a la JJ Abrams Star Trek.  It's ballsy and ridiculously stupid in equal measure and I think the fandom is gonna shit when it becomes more common knowledge

MIND BLOWN.... and yet... that does make a twisted kind of sense - as a way of explaining the inconsistancies about some details in the Remake compared to the Compilation and the original (the different outfits Tifa and Aeris wear, the fact that no one is using the circa 2000s' clamshell flip-phones seen in the Compilation instead they're using smartphones), that the original AVALANCHE from Before Crisis has come back from the dead and is now in open competition with Barret's group, hell, the fact that both Biggs and Wedge survive the destruction of Sector 7 (which although heavily destructive, was not the complete obliteration of that area that it originally was), I hate to admit it but that all does now fit when explained that this is now an alternate timeline from the original and AC/DoC (yes I hate that trope just as much as you because SE have overused it too many times in their games).

And it also does now give a lot more weight to a rumour I heard that Nomura apparently let slip that he was considering not having Aeris die (lets face it, Sakaguchi had tons of hate mail back in the late 90s from irate players angry that she died and demanded he bring her back, so Nomura would be giving the fans what they wanted), but to do so would completely destroy the whole point Sakaguchi back then tried to make with her death in the first place, so I doubted it even before I finished Ep I. But now.... I'm not so sure (I still think Nomura wouldn't have the guts to actually do that, but then, these are very strange times we live in so nothing is certain anymore....).

Also, I didn't think they could make Hojo any more disgustingly evil and monstrous than he already was, but they succeeded - taunting Aeris with "showing her mother to her" in the form of tissue samples he forcibly extracted from Ifalna while she was alive is pretty nasty no matter how you look at it (cackling maniacally while he does so), but his glee at wanting to effectively mind rape her with psychoactive drugs pretty much goes beyond usual mad scientist tropes into cartoonish supervillany (luckily though Cloud and AVALANCHE manage to bust her out before he could do that of course).

But yeah, I notice online the fandom is already getting very polarized over this. I suppose though, one good thing about it, is it leaves the original story canon and intact, that the Remake really is an AU, so those that disliked the whole idea of the Remake in the first place still have the original game still as canon and sacred. Once again, SE are taking a leaf out of FFXIV's book, and giving the fans what they want while respecting the source material and making comprimises.

This is amazing. So FF7R is not a Remake but arguable a reboot and sequel in one. I'm stunned at S-E.
So it's a clear slate going forward? Who knows what Part 2 will be.
Also Enki, it helps if you think of the Arbiters of Fate being the fans forcing S-E to stick to the script. S-E said no lol.

Zack living is one of the only parts of this I enjoyed. Sakaguchi Final Fantasy is 110% dead now. I enjoy the element of wonder being reintroduced but if this ends up being an excuse to not have airship travel open world map in modern graphics... I will stick to YouTube play throughs. This game had a ton of problems that I've had with post-sakaguchi FF: mega ultra bland npcs, fetch questing fillers, ugly sets, weird remix poppy and shit techno sounding music, no real life, gameplay that is a chore, more battles than necessary.... they'll never make the type of game I want from them again, they can't even remake a recipe for greatness. The whole thing feels like a fuck you to fans and to the corporate machine they have become. SE is Shinra to me.

There's three suggestions in the original that Shinra was blowing the reactors on purpose:

1) Jessie's "what the hell was that" reaction to the size of the first explosion;
2) President Shinra's "a waste of good fireworks just to get rid of vermin like you" line at Reactor 5; and
3) Shinra kinda overtly destroys an eighth of their city on purpose

It was always an entirely valid reading and frankly I'm surprised the idea never got enough traction to be even a fringe theory. Shit, we got R=U, after all.

I guess I should've played Crisis Core because I've just never been that interested in Zack.

So a lot of the ideas and mechanics seem half-baked as fuck. Remember in the sun lamp dungeon you get these little discoveries appear on the map? Shit for you to check out? Never happens again, not in a single dungeon. I think the only time I saw a similar marker on my map was something about Johnny's wallet in Chapter 14, but that was part of another sidequest.

The whole "here's a hub, do some sidequests" shit doesn't really work past leaving Sector 7 for the first time. I totally get it as a means to move the plot along at the start and keep Cloud in town -- he's a merc, he wants jobs -- but in Sectors 5 and 6 there's more pressing plot matters than a handful of little side jobs? Things like that and the "discoveries" made me feel as if they were features getting teased in a demo for the full game.

The Drum was a fucking slog of an end-game dungeon (within a dungeon). Such a weird choice to suddenly have this boring ass party-swapping labyrinth (60-something floors up) when five minutes earlier there was an urgency to get to the rooftop and get to the helicopter. Sector 6 Expressway was also a bit of a downer. Somewhere between the slow as fuck robot arms and the music, it sure did feel like a FFXIII corridor dungeon.

Most of the graphical issues were minor, but my god that skybox during the climb up to the topside. It's a low resolution .jpg, for fuck's sake.

A couple of gripes, but was it a bad game? Nah. Combat's fun (seems there's a bit more depth to hard mode so I might get some use out of half the materia I never fucking touched), and there's a lot of things I really liked about the characters -- Rude still has a crush on Tifa, Cloud is still a total goon, Roche ain't too bad, Rufus' fight was the best boss in the game. There's a hell of a lot to like in it. Whatever's going to happen next, who the fuck knows, but I'm still interested. I just hope every game doesn't end with some form of Sephiroth battle.

Hopefully we've left Hojo's twink cyborg behind in Midgar though.

Roche, I felt he was tacked on like Genesis was in Crisis Core, but at least Genesis had story connection to the plot - Roche had zero connection whatsoever, he was just extra muscle the Shinra troops roped in when they couldn't stop AVALANCHE heading to the Plate (and ended up regretting it when Roche started attacking them as well indiscriminately - according to the Battle Intel he's a complete pariah in SOLDIER because of his recklessness). And once you beat him he disappears, never to be seen again (unless SE are keeping him in reserve for later episodes, but I doubt it). Not entirelly ironic though for a guy whose name phonetically is similar to a large vermin insect that likes to scurry away into dark spaces if spotted ;)

Either way, given how the episode ends, it remains to be seen how SE are going to take the story now but yeah, I too hope they don't end the other episodes with yet another fanservice Advent Children finale battle against 'Mummy's Boy'.. but something tells me otherwise...

(maybe further hinting at Aeris's fate not being quite so set in stone? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it. :P).