I enjoy the game but still bother me is divide for parts

Nomura is only good at character designing, why they thought they should have him as a writer is beyond me. I still like the game, but even I will call bs when it's called for it.

Yeah. First, the game was at least ten hours too long. Some of the puzzles and extra bosses should've been exclusive to NewGame+ mode.

Second. Sephiroth works best when he's largely a mysteries looming figure. He should've only barely been alluded to in the first game so he could be built up for later.

Third. This game gets caught up in pomp a bit too often. Sometimes you don't need a speech, just make things happen.

Fourth. The ending is horrible. I won't elaborate on that anymore because I've probably spoiled things enough already.

Yeah I know, just wanted to agree on Nomura.

I've been meaning to write a journal about this, myself XD I *loved* the first 98% of the game, even if there were a few issues, but that last 2%... ugh.

In short, Nomura can direct. He's great at it. But he CAN NOT write.

That he's good at character design too (FF13-2 and Lightning Returns aside).

Well it could've used some trimming, the Whispers subplot was pointless at every point it popped up, and Seph showing up constantly to taunt Cloud like a Bishie-Boogieman made him seem more silly than anything else. For the most part though, yes the game up until that point was pretty good. The issue is that Nomura is a terrible writer and he should always be paired with some other person that has a better track-record of proven compotence.

Despite being project Director, Nomura didn't make any story decisions (as his role is for the most part management). the story decisions were entirely made by Kazushige Nojima who wrote the original FF7 and all of it's sequels.

Here's the thing. Nojima was not the primary creative force behind the original Final Fantasy VII. The original story was co-written by Nojima with the primary being Yoshinori Kitase with others on the creative team making their own creative contributions here and there as well. You can rather tell because if you look at all the projects where Kitase handled the story they tended to have a certain feel to them. Specifically, he had a major hand in FF5, FF6, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy FF7, FF8, and FFX. After that Kitase stepped back and took a more hands-off producer role as he was promoted to a level that prevented him from really getting into the nitty-gritty of game development.

Conversely, while Kazushige Nojima is credited as a scenario writer for FFVII, he was mostly involved with smaller projects up until that point and wasn't really given primary creative roles until a few years later. Most notably, if you look at the projects where he was more of the sole story designer you get titles like, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XIII and XV. All of which have a certain feel to them and have, if I'm being honest, terrible stories.

So yes, I'm perfectly willing to attribute FFVII-R's story decisions to Kazushige Nojima. However, Nomura was the one to direct and oversee the project. Both the decision to sign off on these decisions and the decision to use Kazushige Nojima in the first place fall firmly on his shoulders. Meaning, no Nomura has no idea what a good story should look like.

While you could in theory pin that last bit on Nomura, even then the decision to use Nojima as scenario & story writer actually came from higher up. Specifically Shinji Hashimoto who was the one to select both of them for the project, and even approached Kitase on it as well. Couple this with the fact that Kitase himself oversees the entire project as game producer and Nomura is only one of three developers on the project, a lot of other people would have had to view and okay the storyline themselves.

If anything story decisions good or bad would fall to blame on Hashimoto (as he has final approval on the whole project) and Motomu Toriyama, the latter of whom is not only one of FF7R's primary directors, but also one of the scenario writers alongside Nojima while Nomura's directing means he's in charge of art design not writing due to the credits associated with the project.

Being a producer doesn't necessarily mean much on the creative side of things. You are right that the higher-ups have to okay these things too and therefore share some of the blame for poor storytelling decisions. At the same time though, the director is the one most closely involved with the creative side of the process and therefore is the one who shoulders the bulk of the blame if these sorts of things don't work well.

While that is fair, FF7R has three directors not one. I suspect that each is for a different aspect of development as they're not credited just for single roles, as such any story decisions can be blamed on Motomu Toriyama as he is not only one of the directors but also the only director with a writing credit (and thus likely in charge in that department), not Nomura who is only credited with art and battle system (as much of the storyline seemed to be already laid down without him).

Alright, lets see what Motomu Toriyama worked on.

....FFX-2, FFXIII.

Yep, we have our culprit. Others have pointed out that the plot elements highlighted in the last few hours touch on themes and ideas that almost one-to-one take center stage in FFXIII. So he is indeed probably the one to blame for those attrocious additions.

Sephiroth didn't even give a shit about Cloud until he could be manipulated to help his goals.

I've looked up KH3 and FF7R boss fights on YouTube and was confused to see the videos were HOURS long.

Assuming no deaths I don't think any of the FFVII-R bosses would take hours to beat. But yeah, starting around halfway through the bosses start feeling a bit like HP sponges. You can bypass that to an extent by spamming attacks that bosses have a vulnerability to, but it's not always obvious how to pull that off.

I'm glad to hear that other people aren't happy with it. I watched my roommate play through the game and the combat looked really frustrating by the 50% mark. And then the plot twist ending was a bit out there. It's nice to hear other people actually stating it wasn't good when all of the main review sites are all like 85-100% on how great this game is and how faithful it is to the original.

In isolation the combat is fine, but the enemies have too much HP for the number of distinct phases they have. At least some of them do. Others are about right. I could forgive that if it was the only issue, but the ending was just, ugh. **head desks**

Yeah the ending was out there....