This is a great game. There are things I strongly dislike, and if you've been reading my chapter by chapter logs you probably know what they are. But that aside.
The music is great, the battle system is great (you can see the influence and lessons learned from FFXIII and XV) and a lot of the expanded worldbuilding is great. I had a lot of fun exploring the slums in building a name for myself, and it makes sense that Cloud would do so. The expansions are largely good, up until the Shinra building.
A lot of people seem to dislike the Whispers, I mostly thought they were funny, insofar as the devs felt the need to include the angry fanbase incarnate to protect themselves from backlash. In terms of whether it works or not, I think we'll have to wait and see. Speaking for myself, I'm hoping to see some downsides to the choice...certain people were saved, were other people killed as well? If everything is sunshine and rainbows in the new timeline, then I'll probably lose interest..
My favourite series ever is Legacy of Kain, which is built on a vaguely similar premise, trying to find the 'edge of the coin' between two dire fates by meddling with the timeline. But it was always a setting where meddling with the timeline carelessly came back to bite you, hard. Since they basically just blundered into this, I'm expecting the other shoe to drop, and draw blood when it does.
My issues with Shinra I will address elsewhere, my other main issue is that the story doesn't allow the leads to have any achievements without someone else allowing them to achieve them. The reactor bombings succeeded because they were allowed to, Jessie's raid on the factory succeeded because Roche allowed them to and AVALANCHE HQ sent in cavalry.
Resistance at the pillar? Allowed to happen. And Reno had Cloud pinned in a lower level except Rude sabotaged him to save Tifa.
Infiltrating the Shinra building? They would have failed except for Domino covering their tracks. Escaping? Domino again, and Hojo obviously allowing them through his dungeon without serious efforts to stop them.
Even during the bike chase, a bridge would have collapsed on them except for the Whispers intervening.
Even the final battle against the arbiters happens because Sephiroth allowed it to happen.
All the leads' OG achievements are systematically taken away. This may be a preference rather than a criticism, but right now it's bothering me, because much of the rest of the game as plotted is on Sephiroth's strings in the original game. A big thing is Cloud being/not being a puppet, but so far he's just been manipulated throughout.
Unless that drastically changes going forward, then Cloud just moves from Shinra's puppet to Sephiroth's puppet. Now, you might say this is a preference rather than a criticism, and you might be right. But if they don't shake things up hard going forward I will most likely lose a lot of my interest.
Will that happen? We shall see.
