The story is good (hello Gilgamesh!), but the game has three rather large flaws:
* Classic Mode doesn't do what it says on the tin. It helps the characters automatically do some of the Street Fighter fighting whilst you're waiting to play the game, but, the way it's been implemented isn't great, and forces you to equip Auto-Unique Ability materia for the other party members to make them actually be somewhat useful. There's no way to opt out of Synergy Abilities or get your companions to use them, so, some of the sphere grid is also wasted. Also means that you're pigeonholed into playing a single character (Aeris for me), which Squaresoft thought would mean letting the enemies focus that character and cripple your ATB gauge generation. Which brings me to the next point:
* Game balance is all over the show even on Normal. It's bad that some of the fights are bugged (10x Tonberry fight where some of them are glitched through walls or under floors) or outright unfair; single-character fights are the absolute worst for this (Yuffie vs two demons that immediately double Gravija you before you even get a single ATB charge). This even extends to the non-character mini-games like the rock-em-sock-em simulator. When the in-game cheats are effectively mandatory to clear content even on Easy, you know there's elements of this game that hadn't really passed proper QA at the time and still hasn't had a proper balancing pass. It really feels like the game was designed to have all characters in all fights and then someone eight weeks before release reduced the standard battle character limit to 3. Don't want to download mods to get this game back to its former glory.
* Materia doesn't replicate on capping its AP as per the original game, so, even relevant materia that you do want more than a couple of (e.g. Auto-Unique Ability Materia) are completely unobtainable by design (which, is bad design). Also means that you don't want to hang onto capped materia in equipment slots if you have other materia to level which puts you in an awkward position of never really using any of the top-tier spells for the standard elemental materia until really, really-late game. Very strange decision.
FF7 Revolution / Retribution / Reflection will likely be my last Squaresoft purchase for the Final Fantasy series considering they're doubling down on GenAI usage for QA. If they used the slop here, it really shows.
