From my understanding however the ending means they're basically scrapping the whole rest of the story and remixing it however they want, which is a weird design decision after going through the first game like this. Feel like they could have done that from the start instead of pretending like there's a "reason" for it, it's just some weird ghosts. It also feels like it means Aerith won't die, which on one hand, I really like her as a character, but on the other hand it was a large part of what made FF7 memorable, one of the main character dying so early, and for real(unlike Shadow in FF6 for example).
Still as someone who doesn't care too much about the original I'm fine with changes as long as the story stays interesting.
In terms of gameplay, this is probably the best action FF they've done. It's however still not Tales, imo. Like Tifa plays well and is probably more fun than most Tales characters, but the rest is kinda meh. Part of it is the weird ATB restrictions, where you have to spend a bunch of time autoattacking to build ATB to use your proper stuff. Tales doesn't do that, you can attack but it's mostly meant to extend combos or regenerate TP(which is basically mp just it works on non magic stuff too) slowly when you're out. In return it means they can make casters fun by letting them combo spells, instead of casting one spell then attacking for a while before you can cast another spell and so on. The fact they also couldn't balance items at all so they removed them entirely from Hard Mode is weird, since in Normal I barely used any item at all(spending an ATB bar on an item is generally a waste of time, besides the first 15mins of the game).
Still it was pretty enjoyable to play, each character plays fairly uniquely and has a nice variation of skills and there's some interesting things you can do with materias and weapon skills, and again Tifa is just very fun, largely because she gets ATB so much faster you can actually use your skills unlike other characters, plus her skills are just really cool.
Difficulty was on the low side for the first playthrough imo, could use a higher difficulty inbetween NG+/Hard Mode and the current stuff. On hardmode though near the end of the game there were some pretty challenging fights, the VR stuff and the last boss were somewhat challenging for example and a bunch of bosses I just kinda finished with some people dead. Felt like Hard Mode was about right difficulty wise, sucks it was only for NG+.
