Final Fantasy 7 Remake Review - 6 Ups & 5 Downs

4. The New Levelling System

In most other RPGs, you level up and every stat increases. Strength, speed, magic attack and defence - it's something we've taken for granted.

In FF7R, that's totally upended. Now when you do so, you're awarded Skill Points (SP), that can be fed into each weapon's "cores". These come with a handful of abilities like "+200 HP", "Healing spells increase effect when on 20% or less HP", "Limit Breaks increase faster", "ATB increases faster" etc.

It lets you specialise each new weapon how you like, whilst also - brilliantly - meaning you can continually increase the starter weapons across the whole game. By the end switched back to Cloud's Buster Sword - now one of the best weapons in the game - and that just felt ace.

Lastly, each weapon comes with a signature attack you can learn if you pull it off multiple times. Once done the character will learn the ability, and it transfers over to every other weapon.

Combined with the core system, you're more than encouraged to try every character's full weapon set, benefitting from abilities and playstyles across the entire runtime.

All-round, it's the best new change in the game, and something I hope Square and other devs run with going forward.