It’s probably my favourite ever FF combat system. Just so exciting and interesting trying to work things out. Played it through on normal without too much trouble but apparently hard mode is where it really shines as you can’t just mash through it. One day maybe.
I still have the opinion hard mode is easier than normal, a few boss fights will be an exception as they get new abilities.
Take my current PC playthru as an example, I am so used to using parry to deal with enemy attacks, but because I still dont have it in my arsenal I am effectively having to be less lazy in the way I play to survive better, (The earliest you can get parry is chapter 9, but if you dont have the requirements by then you wont be able to get it until chapter 14 as it needs tifa in party), this is vs having it for your entire hard mode playthru.
I have seen so many streamers and non streamer players struggle through hard then put the game away, they just are too frit to try hard, or decide they dont like the game. I maintain the hardest thing in the game is shinra box buster mini game in yuffie DLC (which by the way I have still not beaten it in over 20 hours of trying), second hardest thing is probably peeress of pullups achievement. If you can do those you can deffo handle hard mode.
The enemies get more hp and hit harder on on hard, but at the same time, you hit harder as well, have maxed out materia (assuming you grinded it as soon as you unlocked triple AP), maxed out weapons, lvl 50, more materia slots from end game equipment, lvl2 limit breaks, also instant limit breaks start of every fight if you do the super boss before doing all the chapters.
Synergy breaks the game once you get it, its so powerful, put it on aerith linked to fire in chapter 10, then spam focused strike with tifa while controlling tifa (this recharges the ATB when it hits so can keep spamming it) and aerith will start machine gunning fire spells destroying everything.
Also if you want quad cast magic? no problem, dual cast a spell with say cloud in chapter 9, and synergy will kick in for both spells boosting to 4, synergy doesnt use ATB or MP, its insane and makes the game much easier.
This is why I prefer hard, you have much more tactical flexibility, normal first run feels too crippled. The loss of items is barely noticeable. Although what I detailed with synergy you can still do on normal run as you get it quite early in game.
Some very interesting gameplay mods have been released.
Equipment rebalance - buffs defense on armour and adds more slots, the basis behind this is that its felt slots are too restrictive, and also attack stat is counted four times for each defense, defense is so weak, that if you swap the end game highest def armour in the game for something with no defense, on vanilla it only makes you take about 3.5% more damage.
I made my own variant of this mod, I made each armour more unique, and the high def armours now give you way more defense and other unique benefits to encourage use of them over high slot armours. My mod is probably best used with one of the hard mode mods, but would be good for those who just want a bit of an easier time with the game, I also made the 3 DLC armours god mode armours, in case people want to mess around , equip any of them for 999 each stat 150 luck and 9999 hp.
There is a classic mode mod, which shows how much better classic mode could have been. Its not pure turn based but its a lot more tactical and less real time intensive.
There is a mod which makes magic materia reduce strength and boost magic like in the OG.
Graphical mods as well, I got aerith in her cheap dress with purple hair, cloud with seph eyes, zacks armour, barret and tifa with advent children outfits.
I had to heavily tune the hidden variables to change my stutters to micro stutters (Sadly this port is probably the worst PC port I have played for 5 years or so, its an absolute stutter fest on my rig without tweaks), ffvii console mode allowed this.
I also tuned to try and get graphical fidelity closer to PS5, as one of the of the people who played it on both consoles and now PC, the PC is inferior on AA, PS5 uses checkerboard, PC uses TAA, more jaggies, more shimmering, TAA cancels out 4k downsampling, the best balance I got was reducing TAA to 4x(turning it off is awful as is no MSAA) combined with 4k downsampling. Also buffing AF to 8x. All hidden settings due to the minimal graphics menu.
