Been playing Chapter 1 for a couple of hours.
... I'm impressed. To get such a feel for these characters and their friendship so quickly - without it feeling too forced - that's actually quite a remarkable achievement. Combat is a hell of a lot more fluid and intuity than the demos, and I'm so glad that just hacking and slashing will simply get you killed. It certainly feels that you need to employ some strategy into your encounters, especially when you are underleveled. Performing techniques, Blindsides, and switching weapons on the fly is really gratifying. It actually feels me with so much hope and dreams that the system they are going to put in place for VII: Remake is going to be beautiful, current, and yet respectful to the original game.
I'm not too concerned with the story so far, since it's early days, but I will pick up on what Cloud mentioned. For me, the biggest disappointment so far is that the world is very jarring. It is really hard to immerse myself into it fully because the blend between reality and fiction is meshed together so weirdly. Again, it's early days, but the world just doesn't feel alive to me. I got a little excited when I found the ruin of some kind of house / fort between the wilderness and an outpost ... and yet there's nothing to bridge the transition, nothing to explain it, and the world is again left quite jarring. And this is just the physical world itself - if we look at the NPCs and their homes, the feeling gets even worse.
Hopefully this world feels better as I discover more locales, but it's a blemish on an otherwise really impressive first thoughts to this game.
