Final Fantasy 7 Remake: 8 Things NOBODY Wants To Admit
4. The Side-Quests Are Banal And Tedious
Plundering a crashed aircraft thousands of leagues under the sea. Convincing a sneaky materia thief to join your band, before helping her win the approval of her father. Breeding a champion race-chocobo that lets you travel to a secluded islet containing the world's most powerful summon materia.
These are the sort of side-quests which infuse the world with mystery, making it seem more expansive than it really is. They stoke the imagination, and ask the player to engage with the world, or otherwise have them saying, "Wow! I didn't know about that!"
In Final Fantasy VII Remake's side-quests, you round up some cats.
OK, so there is more to them than that, but the degree of banality rarely rises above an episode of BBC's The One Show.
Instead of being incredible secrets you discover under your own steam, all of the Remake's side-quests are prescribed to the player; a set of chores to tick off a list.
Go to point A, kill enemy B, return, all with some fluffy inane dialogue in between. Though the material rewards might be handy, the quests themselves so blatantly exist to extend the life of the game, with all the content in an upfront catalogue lest anyone miss out on the tedium.
There's never a true sense of exploring Midgar - it's not like any of it can be interacted with outside these quest NPCs, and in some cases, whole areas only become relevant once your journal dictates.
It's symptomatic of the laundry-list approach to modern AAA game design, which copies and pastes content to fill space.
It is very, very uninspiring.