Jesse, Wedge and Biggs pretty much don't shut up. Overall, the dialogue is more polished, but at the same time, it seemed like everyone had to get a line in. It felt like they're verbally jousting in The West Wing as they walk and talk. You just bombed a power plant -- maybe the banter can wait? That aside, the scene-setting is good. It may be early days, but the dialogue seems less awkward than in FFXV.

Let's swing back to the battle system. If you want to hear how the game fuses an Active Time Battle (ATB) gauge with standard attacks, defense and evasion, may I suggest our E3 coverage? Since that first demo, Cloud feels more agile and the addition of two more characters gave me a better feel for how this game is likely to play.

Note: I didn't get a chance to test out the 'classic mode' during my playthrough, which lowers the difficulty and lets the AI dodge, attack and defend as you pick out your more powerful moves. Other writers at the preview event seemed to breeze through the preview— easy mode is likely to be very forgiving.

What I want to talk about -- what I loved -- is how differently each character plays. With Cloud, he's your close-combat heavy hitter, and feels like other Square Enix action RPG characters, from Kingdom Hearts' Sora to FFXV's Noctis. Like all the characters, his more complex skills and magic are all tied up in the menu and take ATB gauges to use, while your triangle skill, unique to each character, unleashes Cloud's Punisher mode. There are nuances between this and the standard Operator mode, but simply put, you will hit more often and harder as a Punisher. If you block melee attacks, Cloud will swing a free counter strike at the offender in question. Attacks that do hit, including any magic, will cancel you out of Punisher mode.

Tifa has long been one of my favorite characters in FFVII, and her skills in the remake seemed typically buff-based. One increased the pressure gauge (helping to stagger enemies), another would increase damage of subsequent attacks. She seemed to hit lighter than Cloud, but also faster.



Her attacks connect satisfyingly but unraveling her triangle attack, which floats between a mild uppercut and occasionally more powerful Omnistrike, took time. It turns out, a little like her Limit Break in the original, it's about stacking those aforementioned buffs to maximize damage and get out of there before a counter arrives.

Barret, the gun-arm guy, is still your ranged attacker for the first few chapters, while Aerith (that's the canon name now; I need to reconsider the life I've lead), meted out ranged magical attacks during the sewer boss battle I got to control her for. Yet again she's your go-to magic-user and seems to recover more health through her healing spells than other party members. I like the idea that my party dynamics will actually mean something, through their skills and abilities alone. For fans of the series, it feels more like Final Fantasy VI or X; each character has a role to fulfill in your battles. Sometimes in RPGs, the character is a blank canvas to deck out in the best equipment load-outs. That's not the case here.

In addition to characters' base skills and strengths, more depth comes from weapons (use them to master them, and be rewarded with a permanent new skill) and tiny materia which you can see slotted on weapons in the open world. Judging by how later weapons looked in later chapters, how many materia you can carry seems to correspond to the weapon, just like in the original game. Summon magic, however, is a one-per-person deal.