Before I start ranting, I want to answer the age-old question: Can you play Final Fantasy VII Remake (Part 1) without playing the original?
Prior to starting my Final Fantasy VII journey, I scoured the internet and found that most people don't recommend doing that as the developers apparently designed the game around the player's knowledge of the original. As such, before I experienced "good graphics", I played through Final Fantasy VII (1997), the remake of the prequel titled "CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION" and the movie sequel of the original game - "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete". I don't regret doing this.
What is my answer then?
If you had asked me this question during the first 90% of the game, I would probably answer "Yes" with an asterisk. Most of the story is the same with some changes and additions. The game likes to randomly throw in major spoilers of the original game, but I assume those would just go over the head of someone who has never played it. However, the last 2 chapters of the game go so off the rails, that I do not believe this to be a good idea anymore. It's still technically possible, but you would probably be very confused and dissatisfied.
What would be my recommendation? Play through the original and Crisis Core before moving on to this game. Advent Children is a great movie, but I don't see any reason to watch it if you just want to understand the story. If you don't want to play through the old games, the least you should do is watch some comprehensive story recaps, but I would highly recommend just playing through the games. If you are interested in learning more about those, I have also reviewed them :)
Or you can just not care about any of this and play through the Remake. Time is valuable after all.

Now, onto the actual review. I will keep it spoiler-free, but if you don't even want to know the character names or the basic premise of the story then don't read further.

As I said at the start, the story of the game is mostly the same as the original. Well, at least the first 1/3rd of the original, as this is Part 1 of the Remake trilogy, which only encapsulates the Midgar part of the story.
You play as Cloud, former first class SOLDIER turned mercenary who's helping a group of eco-terrorists trying to stop the Shinra Electric Company from sucking the earth dry. That is, has always been, and will always be the premise of Final Fantasy VII.
What this game does differently is expand on the world and its characters. The Midgar part of the story in the original is about 5 hours long. I have 55 hours as of writing this review and I still haven't technically seen all the content in this game. There are more locations, the locations themselves have been greatly expanded and filled with side content, the characters and their backstories have been fleshed out, they have introduced new characters and more stuff that I can't think of right now. Not all of the new and expanded content is a hit, but I enjoyed pretty much all of it with to varying degrees. As I have promised to keep this spoiler-free, I will stop at that.

As for the side content, it ranges from "Greatest thing I have witnessed in my entire life" to "This is clearly filler content".
While they didn't bore me to death, if I had to put them somewhere, unfortunately most of them feel like complete filler. They all technically add to the world-building of the game, but I would not classify stuff like "Find my cats" as essential. That said, most of the mini-games are a blast to play through, especially compared to the original.
Dancing as Cloud as if I was playing Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Mega Mix+? Hell yeah!
Fighting in a squat-off with gym bros? Love that.
An entirely original board game? Witcher 3.
Playing darts alone? Um, sure, I guess.

Aside from the story changes, what I think could be a bigger deal-breaker for people are the changes to the gameplay.
This doesn't play as the original at all. It tries to pretend that it does, but this is an action game on crack. By attempting to combine the ATB system from the original with the fast-paced action combat of Crisis Core, they have somehow made it way more strategic than the original and way faster than the prequel. This game expects you to think as if you were playing a turn-based title, but requires you to do it in seconds as if you were playing an action game while keeping up with real-time dodging and actual real-time combat.
Personally, I love it. Although these were not my feelings at the start.
To break it down: You control your character like in any other action game - you can run around, you can hit and combo the enemy with your weapon to a certain degree, block and dodge. However, if you want to use an item, any materia, a summon or your limit break, you have to interact with the ATB system. Each character can generate up to 3 bars of ATB charge, which you can do by either attacking or blocking. After doing so, you can spend a charge to do one of the aforementioned actions.
This is the basis of the system, but there is more to it that makes it so complex and amazing.
While you can just stick to one character during a battle, you will spend most of the game in a party of three. During combat, the other characters will be controlled by AI, which does not do an optimal job of fighting. Switching is something you will need to learn, as the AI doesn't spend any ATB charge and every character has its own unique moveset and systems attached to it making them play much differently. Each character can also equip new weapons which may be based around different playstyles and introduce new skills.
Take all of that and add a vulnerability and stagger system on top of it and you have an extremely deep combat, which will challenge both your mind and your mechanical skills at every step of the game. While it will feel overwhelming at first, once it clicks, you will feel unstoppable.
However, the combat isn't without flaws. There are flying enemies in the game and only two of your character's weapons can actually shoot ranged attacks. You can also spend your mana to hit them with magic, but as that is a limited resource (especially on hard mode), it is not something you can always do. The two other characters with no ranged weapons can also hit them, but this is where the problem shows its ugly head. The melee aerial combat is extremely finicky and limited. You are only capable of spamming the Square button, which will automatically make your character fly to the enemy and hit him. Worst of all, the enemies can fly away to places which you cannot him them from, but they can hit you. It's pretty awful, but it was apparently fixed in FF7 Rebirth.

Now, onto my biggest issue with the game: The technical state of the port.
The way this game runs is laughable. Without applying any fixes, this game stutters all. the. time. The resolution doesn't matter, my specs don't matter, the graphical settings don't matter - this game will stutter because it wants to stutter. The only fix to it is to run the game under DX11, which for some reason fixes most of the stutters and makes the game run much better. It won't eliminate them completely, but it will make it much more bearable.
Additionally, the intro of this game has severe audio issues, where the cutscenes are twice as loud as the actual game. Thankfully for me, this fixed itself after I finished the intro sequence.
On top of that, some textures in this game are extremely low quality - I am talking PS2 era. This would normally not be an issue to me, but when a high definition one is right next to a low definition one, it is VERY noticeable and takes me out completely.
Thanks for reading, Steam isn't letting me write more.