Only thing that really irks me about the combat in this is just how easy to interrupt your actions are. Taking a bit of a pummeling in a battle and need to heal? Hold it together long enough to build your ATB so you can cast a spell or use an item ... but then as you're doing it you get hit with an attack that interrupts your action so you waste the ATB point, lose MP for casting the spell but don't actually get the benefit from it!
yeah that's some shitty design.
Think I'm on about chapter 14 now, I'm still having fun but it's not really as good as I'd hoped it would be. Pacing is the main issue, someone really needs to explain to these writers and designers how to maintain dramatic tension and basic plausibility within a scenario. The sluggishness of some of the gameplay and general padding don't help either. The whole stretch from
the reactor 5 job to the dropping of the plate is just terribly structured so as to remove all drive and tension from the plot. Characters constantly stopping to have pointless conversations during a time pressured crisis is basically this games motif at the moment!
The original also manages to achieve that special something of doing more with less in many situations where this remake tries to hard. Despite being so much cruder and more basic it is often actually much more filmic and clever in the way it builds scenes. Going back to
the plate drop the way this plays out in the original FMV has much more impact and care in it - the sweep of the camera up as Tseng's helicopter escapes to show the start of the pillar exploding, the swing around as we go from the game field screen to follow behind Cloud, Barrett and Tifa as they escape, the way the music drops away to allow the devestation of the plate falling to tell the story just with the visuals and sound effects, the harrowing angle showing the plate dropping directly down on the helpless residents of sector 7 with one person simply looking up aware there is nothing they can do, the wide angle of Midgar which pulls back to reveal President Shinra watching with apparent disregard whilst listening to his classical music ... The remake is all bombast and no subtly or care by comparison.