Jesus christ are Japanese designers behind. They have a loooot of catching up to do.
Edit: I’m really fucking annoyed at the missions. They never end and they’re all really easy and totally imbalanced. And the heavy use of recycling is disgusting.
Or you could just say the game is a half assed attempt to cash in on FF7 fanatics…
I haven’t played the game, but from a story summary I read, it seems to rip off the ideas of its “sequel” to an absurd degree, even to the point of having two proto-Sephiroths, complete with the one-winged theme, which sort of reduces the later one’s uniqueness. Is that true?
On the other hand, “Before Crisis” -starring The Turks, of all people- sounds more original and likeable. How about that?
The story is pretty interesting; Zack and Aerith make for quite a likeable couple, oddly enough. But the missions… GAK. 300 of them, and maybe 8 or 9 maps, and they all play exactly the same way. Completely pointless. My recommendation is to only do them if you’re having real trouble with the story battles.
Missions get boring after a while. They just repeat and only a select few stand out. They only help you gain levels, imo.
Just play through the story if it bothers you that much 
Wil: It’s a prequel that came out 10 years after the original was released. Of course it’s going to use ideas and concepts that stem from the original. I found it to be rather nostalgic in all honesty
I’m enjoying the non-missions part of the game. The music could be better though. The original tracks stand out a lot in terms of quality.
“The Price of Freedom” and “Under the Apple Tree” are my favorite tracks as far as its original music. Love those guitars 
I never did any of the missions myself, just went for the story. Didn’t finish it though, got right to the end and then just couldn’t get into it.
I liked the story a lot at first, but I thought it got too confusing later on. I felt like they didn’t properly explain things like the scene after the final Genesis fight and this:
(spoilers)
What part after that fight confused you? Maybe I can help.
I don’t think its confusing. Its shallow meant to look deep.
I think that was my exact reaction to the Architect in Matrix 2.
I pretty much stand by my earlier impression. SE needs to learn how to design games. Badly. Their pacing, dungeon design, encounter design, music composing, storytelling all need serious work. How they designed CC is very simple: they took scenes from FF7 and concepts about FF7 like Zack. They then tried to connect the dots but it went the same way FFXII went after Yasuno Matsuno left SE. The end result is that your game is totally imbalanced because the people in charge didn’t pay as much attention to the different components of the game.
Edit: I’m thinking about this and I’m remembering discussions I’ve seen by people from companies like Valve and Blizzard. This is something EA has recognized and allegedly started doing, or at least Bioware has. They make a prototype of their game , a rough draft and they work through concepts at an early stage and if its good, then they move forward. The feeling I get from SE is that they are still at the stage where think that designing the world is sufficient and that they can plop in anything they want afterwards. A bit like what 2K did with Bioshock, except the people who made Bioshock were lucky. Despite their luck, the guys who made bioshock hit a wall after the big shocking spoiler moment and the rest of the game had pacing issues. The pacing in SE’s recent games, at least FF7CC and FFXII, essentially hits wall after wall after wall because they don’t have a concrete idea of where they want to go from day 1 and they try very hard to make the generic ideas they’ve had fit the mold they’ve worked so hard to create. They can’t think outside of their mold. I suspect FFXIII partly took a really long time as they tried to address this. This is not only a design problem, but a management problem.
Where does The World Ends With You fit in your theory? Or are you talking about FFs?
TWEWY was a stroke of luck. Ironically, SE wasn’t pleased with TWEWY and Wada said they weren’t going to make another one.
? I’m pretty sure I saw interviews with the development team where they talked about a possible sequel.
I quote Wada.