A lot of people played the game just for the additional backstory surrounding Sephiroth, either in the event it would be relevant in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or just because they liked him and wanted to learn more.
For Western audiences, they finally get to play through the story of Before Crisis, which was never released outside of Japan.
Scrappy Mechanic: Story Mode automatically setting up your party and their equips based on a "recommendation". While most people won't notice it when going through the normal story stages, it becomes problematic when the high-difficulty stages come into play and people find their carefully set up build is completely ruined by the game automatically slotting in weapons that don't provide decent bonuses or even have the right sigils or elemental weaknesses. Made even more egregious when players unlock a Story Mode loadout option and even that gets overridden. As of this writing, there is no way to turn it off, meaning that every new stage players have to set their weapons and equips manually.
Spiritual Successor: To the Pocket Edition of Final Fantasy XV, as both has Super-Deformed character designs, Retraux graphical approach, and condensed way of telling the base game's story. That said, Pocket Edition used the old "games as a product" model where you just made an upfront purchase and got everything at once, whereas this title is a "games as a service" model, an Allegedly Free Game with a lot of microtransactions.
