This sure was a story? It's weird, the pitch to sell me on the game was seeing the events that lead to FF7 from Zack's point of view but i guess the Nibelheim section wasn't enough on its own and they needed to invent more thing. A lot of the new stuff they wrote is just... really dumb and clumsy though. Angeal and Genesis' whole "are we devil or angel" thing is just, so overwrought. It feels like they saw how popular Sephiroth and his one wing design was and they decided let's have TWO MORE one winged angel dudes. I'm trying to not be harsh about the very clunky cutscene direction because this is originally a PSP game with a limited scope, but every single scene is them speaking in cryptic nonsense and Zack going "what". It's that weird writing style some square games fall into where it doesn't feel like lines of dialogue logically follow each other. I don't understand why they write like this sometimes. They spend so much time on Genesis being the antagonist that when you finally get to the events at Nibelheim it almost feels like a non-sequitur.
The way Zack meets Aerith feels really dumb but other than that I did enjoy seeing them hang out. Building the flower wagon for her was cute. I'm a little mad at the game for trying to make me feel sympathy for Tsung though. In Crisis Core he's kind of presented like he's watching over Aerith and somewhat protecting her, but I call bullshit. Literally the first time you meet him in original FF7 is when he kidnaps her and then when she tries to say something he hits her. He is not a good guy and he does not care about Aerith's well being other than she's an "asset" his boss really wants!
I wish they spent more time developing Zack's relationships with Sephiroth and Cloud instead. They know those are the characters we're here to see!!! Zack and Cloud barely get to spend any time together and to me it makes the ending feel a little unearned despite being the thing the game is building up to. I guess when you probably spend a lot of money to get Gackt for your video game you probably have an incentive to make him show up as much as possible.
It's neat to see how they recreated places from FF7 though. A lot of the iconic areas are basically done 1:1. It's an interesting contrast to FF7R where they took a lot more liberties and it makes me appreciate the remake more. It's cool to see a bunch of classic weird FF7 random encounter enemies and summons that you know are going to show up in Rebirth because well, the models exist now so might as well re-use them.
In the end I don't regret playing it but boy am I glad FF7R wasn't written like this.