tl:dr - It's definitely up there with my top RPGs in recent memory.
Are there things that could have been handled better in the game? Absolutely. I'm extremely critical of a lot of media, and I will take every opportunity I can to nitpick something if I can help it. I don't believe there's any such thing as a "perfect" RPG, and even some of my favorite RPGs of all time had noticeable problems, but the sum of its parts greatly elevated it.
There are certain games I still play through rose-coloured glasses. For instance, the original Deus Ex is my favourite game of all time. I religiously play it at least once, maybe two times, a year. Any style you can think of - completionist runs, pacifist, sadist, speedrun - I've tried it at one time or another. It's also laughably broken and showing its age, with character glitches galore, bugs, story beats that make me question what the devs were thinking (the random scientist held by MJ12 after they massacred everyone else in the missile base) and more. It's a game that's nearly unplayable in the modern age without mods, and it's only held together by the absolute strength of the writing and the setting.
Like FF7, Deus Ex is a game I hope would benefit from a remake, but I'm not so naive to presume that I'd have to absolute love every aspect of it or otherwise cast it aside. The prequel games (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided) are basically pseudo-remakes, and all have their own respective problems. The former can be broken in a half-dozen ways, with villains that come off as shallow or half-finished, and boss combat that completely at odds with its philosophy until a subsequent re-release overhauled it. The latter is basically half a game, chainsawed in half to meet a release date and plagued with glitchy characters, a presumptive goal to invest the player in the lives of characters who are barely fleshed out, and a plot that seems to tiptoe around any substantive plot development because it knows that 80% of the main cast has to survive for the next 30 years to make it to the original game.
I've also sat through some legendarily-bad final levels and endings. The original, pre-Extended Cut of Mass Effect 3 was a slap in the face to an entire fanbase, further muddled by a studio that insisted it was the fans who were wrong. The final two levels of the original Far Cry had me throwing my controller in frustration multiple times when the devs decided to pit me against hordes of enemies with no cover in the midst of a volcano, before sticking me in the middle of an area with a dozen enemies with rocket launchers. I spent several hours trying to get the Factory Zero achievement on the original version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "Missing Link" DLC, and nearly quit because the whole thing was so finicky and required such precise timing that I almost walked away due to stress. Nobody talks about the laughable final chapter of Baldur's Gate II where you spend most of your time on a scavenger hunt, followed by a laughbly-inept final boss and a cutscene that was so confusing and incongruent that it was completely ignored in the expansion pack.
FF7R's ending is nowhere near the worst I've ever played. Yes, it's completely unbalanced, and smacks of content being rushed through the final stages, but it's technically-proficient, has a few neat nods/callbacks to the Compilation and it made me much more excited to see what comes next, not less. There are certainly things I would fix, but perhaps owing to the fact that I only really finished the OG when I was older, and had the opportunity to examine the two more closely, the Remake is great at what it is. It hasn't superceded the OG for me, but exists in the same way that the Resident Evil 1 and 2 remakes do for their respective games - a modern take on a classic set of systems. (The less said about the RE3 remake, the better.)
Midgar was my favourite part of the OG, period. It was such a compelling setting for a story that I always wondered why the devs didn't do more with it. Yeah, there's the Return to Midgar in Disc 2 (which consists of a handful of different NPC lines/encounters and a couple of items you can get) and the Raid (which is limited to three locations), but I think I spent more time in that one location than any other in the game, just walking around, talking to NPCs and enjoying the setting. While I wouldn't presume to judge a single installment against the completed work from 25 years ago, I greatly enjoyed the Remake, pacing issues and all. It's up there with my favorite RPGs in recent memory, alongside The Witcher 3, New Vegas and (modded) Mass Effect 3.
There's a slavish devotion to continuity in this game, to an extent I haven't seen in a long time. It might even be too continuity-heavy for newer players, which is why I hope when there's a part 2, they'll set up a scenario that eases players in a little better, or at least sets up part of the world better (I keep hoping 2 opens with the Nibelheim flashback).
It will be interesting to see what they pull off going forward, but I'm confident that they'll make it. The characterization of the main party is some of the best I've seen in an RPG in a long time, and it's been the same amount of time since I played a mainline FF title that had me so invested in the safety of characters, not just of the leads, but of the supporting NPCs. Whoever decided to base Marle off the same character from Chrono Trigger, or base Biggs off Charlie Sheen in Platoon, deserves a raise.
That was my experience at least.
