After you beat (the first part of - as in, what is currently out) Final Fantasy VII Remake, you unlock the ability to do Chapter Selection, which allows you to jump around to different parts of the game. Likewise, you also unlock Hard Mode.
Playing in Hard Mode will allow you to unlock additional Manuals so that your characters can further upgrade their weapons, and thus gain better stats and abilities beyond the level cap.
The game is certainly challenging in Hard Mode, but you'll have presumably unlocked some excellent Materia by that point that can sometimes make things easier. For example, I have an Elemental Materia that is at its second tier, which, when put in a piece of armor and linked with a green elemental materia orb grants you immunity to that damage type. Fighting Reno the second time with both immunity to lightning damage as well as the Counterstance ability made it, shall we say, a lot easier, even when boosted by the hard mode difficulty.
The oddity about Hard Mode is that you cannot use items - at all, neither in nor out of combat.
This makes exploring every nook and cranny a bit less rewarding - you can't use the items you find.
Given that I spent much of the game buying up every Ether and Turbo Ether I could find, the vast stockpile I gathered over the course of my first run is now just sitting there, no more useful than the Score you earn in Super Mario World.
It does mean you need to rely on the natural recharge of your MP - you don't even get it back from resting on benches. As such, I highly recommend giving one of your characters the Prayer ability materia, as this can be a hefty party-wide heal that costs nothing but a filled ETB bar (actually, you might need two.)
Coming back to the game after a few months, I am again struck by how solid it is - the way that it blends a more modern action-focused gameplay with the old menu-strategy style of the older FF games. Also, the writing and characterization is really excellent (I love the way they write Aerith as innocent but not naive, and even subtly imply that she knows her eventual fate, even as the game teases the possibility that this time we might be able to spare her... and whether or not that's a good idea.)
(OK, here's where I'll remind readers that I haven't actually played the original game, at least past the part where you go through the collapsed tunnels with Aerith, which of course comes way earlier in the original game given how stretched out Remake's version of Midgar is.
Anyway, I'm given to understand that the original game - and spoilers for a 23-year-old game, I guess - ends with Sephiroth casting the Meteor spell to destroy the world, but it's stopped when Aerith's spirit, which has become one with the Lifestream, casts Holy. It seems in this Remake that Sephiroth is trying to change the course of events, and perhaps what is presented as a good thing - Aerith's survival - is actually his way of preventing her from stopping him in this iteration. Naturally, I'm sure we'll find some way around it by the end of the story, but I am curious to see how it goes.)
Given how beefy one can get by the end of what is just part one of a multi-part game, I suspect that Part Two or whatever it winds up being called will have some sort of reset. In fact, I won't be surprised if there's no carry-over of save data. Frankly, I'm just hoping that the next part will be for the PS4, though if it's not, that's going to be a bit of an incentive to get myself a PS5.
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