So, I'm a bit late to the party on this, but I am playing through it now. Currently in the sewers - forget which chapter it is. My notes so far are...
- Definitely linear, but as noted, it's Midgar. The problem is that it's even more linear than Midgar was. As in, if you try to leave an area to go back to a previous one and the story doesn't want you to, it'll just stop you and give a dialogue prompt or something. That's occasionally a little annoying.
- Combat is generally pretty fun for this type of thing, which admittedly isn't usually my cup of tea (mash square mash square ok do a spell now mash square). Much better than FFXV. Tifa is definitely the most fun to fight with at this point. Cloud's okay. Barret kind of sucks.
- The dialogue and voice acting is extremely cheesy in parts and I don't really blame the voice actors, who all are doing pretty well with what they have. It seems to have been a directorial decision to make it immature. The weird part is that a lot of it isn't even anachronisms from it being a 23 year old game... the whole part where Cloud has to do a dance-off with Andrea Rhodea or whatever the dude's name is is just cringey as ####. The bandits who show up a few times are even dumber. There's a lot of that to varying degrees and I wish they could have tried to make it a bit less kiddy. If this is supposed to be a kids' game, well, they sure do swear a lot.
- I recall there being a controversy about Tifa's boobs being made smaller and the characters being faithful to the original. Frankly, I think they could be a bit LESS faithful. Tifa's a bit distracting, they could have made her more like Advent Children and dropped her a cup size or two and ditched the miniskirt, and it would have been fine. Same goes for Barrett, who does not look like any human being I've ever seen. He appears to weigh 340 lbs. If you're going to remake the thing for 2020, you don't need 1997 design choices. Even the ability to change costumes would have been nice for the immersion factor. I will say, Aerith, from character model to voice, is utterly perfect.
- It's surprising how well the materia system works in this game. It just translates like it was made for a real time fighting game. I'm not as sure about the weapon upgrade system, but I don't hate it, and it was nice of them to implement the auto-upgrade feature.
- The biggest complaint I have is how much time wasting crap there is. Again, it's not 1997, I don't need to re-attempt sneaking out of Aerith's house a bunch of times just to bump into a bucket. The worst offender here so far is the crane arms on the way to wall market. Not even a remotely challenging puzzle. Just a waste of time. I assume this sort of stuff is to pad playtime. At least one some of the quests there's an instant travel option to go back to the person who gave it to you.
- The music is amazing, although I don't always love the jukebox versions of things. Tifa's theme is cool, but do we need a sort of jazzy version of it? Can't we just do straight orchestrated versions? Maybe that'll happen more as things go on outside of Midgar. Aerith's theme has gotten a bit of that treatment and those have been the best moments for the soundtrack. The midi versions of these tracks were really simple and straightforward and that's kind of what made them work as leitmotifs.
Overall, aside from the moments where I get annoyed at the game wasting my time (crane arms) and the moments where I want to skip dumb cutscenes (Beck and company), I'm enjoying my nostalgia trip. I have also heard complaints about changing the story and robbing it of some of its emotional impact. I have had no such complaints yet. Obviously there's a bigger focus on Sephiroth and Cloud's visions right off the bat, but I can live with that. Otherwise, the plot has been remarkably faithful - sometimes even too faithful, I think they could have done without the cross-dressing - and I'm the kind of person who is almost always going to want them to stick to the original story wherever possible (with a few polishes here and there to make it hang together more clearly and solidly, but those issues don't come up for a while).