random battles, for some reason the president decides to show up in person and Barrett doesn't kidnap/kill him?
Aerith offers herself to cloud in exchange for bodyguard services.
This shit is goofy. I don't know if they're following the OG game beat for beat, but the story is definitely a more amateur one with alot of awkwardness.
At first I thought you needed to play through ff7 proper before the others, but I guess it's a curated back and forth, unless there's more content to be dropped
I'm not sure what the best way to look at my characters and their equipment is, in the 'enhance' screen, it will highlight your CURRENT party's equipment, but NOT the other items you have equipped on your various parties. It's a bit weird as I think you're just GIVEN all characters(as far as I can tell, Red XIII doesn't show up until wayyy late and I have him?), but in a f2p game, that could've easily been a paid item.
Menus are a bit of a mess, I can't tell WHO has what equipped, so I have to juggle menus
9/19 Update
To put a cap on this, I definitely don't think this is a good game. Squeenix has been in the news alot lately, and I think this is a good example why. This game, as is, should've came out 5 years, if not a decade or more ago. As is, it's a mess of menus, and how exactly you make yourself more powerful is confusing to the point I don't feel motivated to play anymore. Square Enix has placed the blame on many, many things, but here, this is squarely on them. There is a bit of irony in Honkai Star Rail, the game where I don't care about the characters has better gameplay so I feel compelled to play that, whereas this game, has worse gameplay yet I care about the characters.
It took me DAYS to hit a gameplay wall in HSR, and I had fun doing side activities and the gamplay loop in general. In this game, I got confused and ended up getting "game overs" way sooner than I would expect. Even the part I was interested in(the story), eventually got blocked off(one path says "coming soon", another raised the required power level hugely), leaving me with very little reason to return.
Final Fantasy(and especially 7) may curry favor with boomers, but I really hope Squeenix doesn't let this be the second FFVII mobile game to be shuttered - but I wouldn't be surprised.
Score 6/10(if i continue to play this maybe that'll change)