User reviews are suspect.
This is one of the reasons I’m glad that Steam started cracking down on reviews that were just some stupid ASCII art and reviews that were just one big joke – neither of them help people understand whether a game is good and there’s just so much of that trash in the reviews. It’s a small change but so far it’s been positive.
I think it’s stupid as hell for Square to have not released this on PC at the same time as they did on PS5, locking to a single console is a poor choice especially when that console is as expensive as the PS5 is and has as few exclusives as the PS5 does.
With that in mind though, “a single game” is somewhat of a misnomer. The original FF7 took about 40 hours to play from start to finish, and about 80 hours if you wanted to really 100% everything. FF7 Remake took about 40 hours to play from start to finish, and about 80 hours if you want to really 100% everything.
Is the root of your concern that you’re paying too much for too little gameplay? Considering rebirth takes about 50-60 hours to beat and ~80-100 hours to 100%, I don’t understand the criticism.
If the answer is that you expected over 100 hours of base gameplay for $70, the problem isn’t with Square-Enix, imo. That’s before taking however long the 3rd game takes to beat into account, as well (which according to the devs is going to be at minimum the same length as rebirth – bringing it to over 150 hours of base gameplay for the trilogy.) I think expecting 150 hours of base gameplay in a single purchase for a story-driven JRPG is unrealistic. The only JRPGs that come close would be Disgaea and Persona 5 Royal, and I’d argue that the production costs on both of those are significantly lower because of their art style and the way that story is presented in both.
That said, on flip side, the joy of these games eventually coming out on PC means if you wait long enough, you’ll be able to get all 3 and DLC for like $50 total, so there are options for everyone.
IANAL, but from what I read regarding Yuzu / the title and prod keys / etc., is Nintendo’s argument is three-fold – the only way to obtain those keys is to use a tool that itself is a violation of the DMCA, use of those keys by an emulator to decrypt Nintendo’s protected content in a method outside of Nintendo’s authorized use is a violation of DMCA even if the keys aren’t provided in the emulator, and there is no legitimate use of those keys except to circumvent controls intended to protect copyright.
Therefore, by their argument, any emulator that can use those keys would effectively be subject to DMCA even if you had to bring your own keys, because unless the emulator only ran homebrew or completely decrypted content and had absolutely no decryption capabilities, you’d still be using the prod keys and title keys to decrypt content in violation of the DMCA in order to execute it. So, the tool that dumps the keys is a DMCA violation and any emulator that uses those keys to decrypt protected content in order to execute it is a DMCA violation, and Nintendo has a strong case that the actual keys themselves are only useful for making unauthorized copies of content that bypass the encryption that exists to prevent it.
It stands to reason that a clean-room developed Switch emulator that required all content it ran to be decrypted prior to being able to run it may be able to exist without Nintendo shitting it into non-existance, since Nintendo couldn’t make any argument that the primary use was a DMCA violation as no encryption would be being bypassed by the emulator. They’d probably then go after whoever made the tool to dump the games, but they’d probably be less successful.
On the other hand, the pragmatist in me says that unless I was 500% sure of my online anonymity, I wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Nintendo – even if I thought I was right. They have enough money to lock someone up in legal battles for a very long time and most independent developers wouldn’t have anywhere near the finances required to bankroll appropriate defense counsel. Can’t say I’d blame people for not wanting to invite that hellscape into their lives.