Honesty Hour:
I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game.
The remake of FF7 looks cool as hell though. (Kind of suspect that they’re releasing it in 3 [or more] installments, but maybe there is enough to build on from the original to justify that?)
I share your concerns about them stretching the game out over 3 or more installments, feels like a complete money grab. Midgar is a big city and could do well on it's own, but I don't know about the rest of the world. Midgar made up the first 4-8 hours of Disc 1 in a game with 70+ hours into it. There was a lot more they could have done with it, but one of the coolest parts of the game was leaving the city and seeing the world is so much bigger. My biggest fear is they're going to water down a story that was already pretty perfect...most fans have only asked Square Enix to just release the 20+ year old game with updated graphics and sound.
Final Fantasy 7 is definitely a treasure though, one of the best in the series and some do consider it the best. It did a lot to bring the series to the mainstream and help Sony get their feet on the ground with the release of their first console. It's worth playing through by itself even today, I think it could give you a greater appreciation for the remake once it's released. There's some other mediums in that universe too, like Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children, and Crisis Core, but for the most part they're all forgettable and mostly just serve to continue story lines or fill in some backstory.
It seems like they've spared no expense to get it right, which is good because they can't afford to screw this up with their fans. Honestly just walking around Midgar in this level of detail is going to be cathartic for a lot of people. For me, it's hearing a full orchestra playing some outrageously good music.
If you've never played one, you should give the original FFVII a try. It's cheaply available on nearly everything and most of the new ports have "cheats" built in where you can just play for the story/ environments/ music.
Cheats are for the weak! There's nothing like grinding low level mobs outside the Chocobo ranch for a dozen hours so you can kill the Midgar Zolom waaaaay before you're supposed to. Of course, learning Beta that early in the game is like a cheat itself though.
I had a friend that had both FF7 and FF8. So I remember playing bits and pieces of those games when they originally were released. Maybe a few years later, around 2002ish, I finally played through those games start to finish, and if I had to be honest, I feel like I remember enjoying FF8 better than FF7. Haven't played a final fantasy game since.
Final Fantasy VIII was kind of garbage. The graphics were better from a realism point of view, and the live song "Eyes on Me" was well done and an innovation for video games, but the story was awful and the characters were awful. That's a bad recipe for an RPG. The Draw system for magic was also time consuming, tedious, and frustrating if you're a min-maxing type of player. The only other redeeming quality I can say it had was the Card Game, I did enjoy it as a diversion...a bit of decent icing on a dry and tasteless cake. VII is almost always considered to be the superior game, and the subsequent movies/sequels they released for it should tell you all you need to know.
