Atmostphere and “looks” wise. It does a great job of evoking the original, sure.

And it’s far from a FF7 remake issue alone. FF12 kind of flirted with it, but starting basically at Crisis Core, combat went from something strategic to simply “mash a button until your ATB meter fills up and then perform a quick combo (usually the same one every time because you don’t have time to think about it so you rely mostly on muscle memory)”. There’s no thought involved in the combat. There’s no “what is going to work best against which enemy”. You might as well be playing Street Fighter.

When I go up against a tough enemy in the original, I don’t immediately start slashing. I’ll have one person immediately focused on casting barrier on everyone. The second person will throw out a summon. And one person will have transform/mini set up with the added-affect materia and will do a basic attack. If I’m lucky, that enemy will turn into a frog or immediately shrink, making the combat that much easier.

There is no thought process like that in new final fantasy. It’s just slash, slash, slash, combo. slash, slash, slash, item. over and over and over again until either the enemy is dead or you are.

I get it. That’s what modern audiences want. And I know I fall squarely into the “old man yells at Cloud” demographic (ba-dum-tiss). But I had at least hoped that the remake would try to retain the old mechanics rather than just copy-pasting the button mashing of the new games.