This is my favorite game of all time. I grew up with it, and have played it many times throughout my life. Farah Oersted was my first videogame crush. My username, Faris, is named after her. I cannot overstate how close this game is to my heart, and therefore how high my standards are for the remaster.

So, just to be clear, this is a review for the remaster itself, and the changes that they make to the base game. Regardless of this review, I absolutely recommend this game to anyone. It's an incredible journey, with a cast of richly nuanced characters, amazing music and a timeless, gorgeous pixel art style.

Okay, on to the review: 5/10. It's a really mixed bag for me. At this point my impression is generally negative. I think they had some good ideas, although the implementation feels

PROS:

• Upscaled resolution!
  
• They've added a system option for "Boost Functions," which are basically cheat settings to boost the amount of xp/gold you get, how many items you can hold, etc. I wasn't sure whether I liked that, but after a bit of thought it makes a lot of sense for new players, or players who have kids or otherwise don't have a lot of time to game, who can tweak the game to their lifestyle.
  
• A wealth of new skits that used to only be in the Japanese version!
  
• You can run in the overworld! Nice.
  
  BOTH PRO AND CON:
  
• They added destination icons, which are undeniably helpful for progressing through the game. However, the icons themselves really clash with the original art style, and so are rather annoying to have on screen.
  
• All new English VA cast. Obviously I would have biased feelings about that, as I carry immense nostalgia for the original voice cast. I begrudgingly admit that the casting was done well for most of the characters I've seen so far, including Reid and Farah. However, Quickie drives me nuts. And I was astounded that they somehow managed to find a worse VA for Hyades. That was hard to sit through.
  
  CONS:
  
• You used to be able to customize system window colors to whatever RGB value that you wanted, a fun little feature that's been entirely removed. Why?
  
• The upscaling that they did for cutscenes doesn't feel particularly well done. It's like they just put it through a smoothing filter and called it a day.
  
• The animated profile pictures for group skits seem very strange. It looks like some cheap work you'd find on an old Newgrounds animation rather than a professional studio.
  
• Who the hell decided to change the game's startup cutscene music into a generic anime op? It's bad, it's really really bad. It doesn't fit with the feeling of the animation at all.
  
  

This is a poor excuse for a remaster given the quality of remaster's these days. For this game they put in less work than emulators can do by changing one or two settings. The remastered graphics dont even extend to the spritework of the characters, it is just the backgrounds, and even that is minimal effort.
The amount of hand holding that is put in the game compared to the original is crazy, the battles are slightly slower, which is not a huge issue at first, however the fact that the character keeps running after every attack is an issue, finding the manual book helps as it finally stops this, but even the original semi mode did not do this.

I think the thing that really is giving me pause now on the game is the fact that in the DLC they are actually selling levels for your characters, 5 levels for 1.99? this version of the game has a 5x exp gain increase if you turn it on! I cannot in good faith suggest or recommend this game.

A beautiful remaster. It has graphics options, all of the camping scenes missing from the PSP version, and both an English and Japanese audio track to choose from.

My only criticism is with how the deluxe bonuses are handled (DLC instead of a proper Steam Soundtrack in your library) and the pay to win DLC is a bad idea. If Capcom can move away from that, so can Bandai Namco. It's not needed to enjoy the game so it can be ignored, but it's bad optics and likely to turn off people since it makes it seem like this is some kind of gacha game.