Much like 50% of the people who bought this remaster I played this game as a kid and I liked it a lot as a kid. As an adult I'm wiser and I've learned to notice wild and blatant flaws. I'm going to be ignoring ffx-2 for the sake of brevity and hone in on FFX since it's sort of the starting point and generally considered more culturally relevant.

I'm going to start by praising that the HD remaster has a few built in cheats and more importantly an option to speed up gameplay (sort of) and an option to automatically fight thru battles. These are good additions but poorly implemented. The speed up of the gameplay doesn't speed up animations during overdrives, which are the lengthiest animations in a battle and therefor what you'll spend half your time seeing as a result of having to wait thru them and the automatic fight in battle just has your characters use the regular attack function every turn. This remake was brought to us after FFXII provided players with a "gambit system" which allowed them to set up automatic actions for the characters to perform that weren't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ completely asinine. I don't expect the HD remaster to have a full gambit system but maybe making people with low strength and high magic cast spells would be like an obvious little inclusion or failing that, it could just auto confirm the last selected option in the battle menu so your characters perform the same action every battle. That would be really easy to implement and instead they chose an inferior option where they basically give your team the berserk status. Furthermore this game is sorely in need of a skip cutscene. People complained when this game was released about how you'd sit thru a 6 minute cutscene, maybe lose to a somewhat overpowered boss that you couldn't possibly be prepared for the first time around due to jenkiness and instant kills on the boss' part and then have to sit thru the 6 minute cutscene again. They didn't fix this (given how much this game drags anyway I didn't think was a notable issue but it is an issue so take it for what you will).

It comes with an arranged version of the soundtrack and I guess the graphics look nicer kind of sure whatever.
Too bad the animations still look like ♥♥♥♥ sometimes.
Which is amazing cause I mean damn the graphics are nice. But then you go thru the nightmare that is any of the cloister of trials where if you're lucky you can completely turn your brain off and then come to 5 minutes later with the trial complete. Realistically tho you probably shouldn't be able to ignore terrible things and you'll be stuck with very slow and very repetitive animations of you putting spheres into things wherein a confirmation window pops up and the only option is to do the thing or not do the thing but there is never a penalty for doing the thing so why is there a confirmation window? Cause FF games waste your idiot time and you're stupid for playing them. Then when you're watching these animations of you pushing a pillar into a slope you can't help but notice that the pillar clips thru the floor or the ice or the wall during its agonizingly slow journey and you wonder why the developers would shove that in your face. Like they really want to waste your time by making you watch the least impressive thing they could provide you with.

In battle gameplay is almost not worth talking about. Easier enemies you beat by hitting confirm until the battle is over and there's no thought involved but hey you have to fight them again and again and again anyway. Slightly stronger enemies might require you to heal once or twice in battle and you still go thru the same rinse repeat motions so that's terrible. Actually strong enemies are stupidly non interactive. I've wondered why poison, sleep, blind, etc etc etc status effects are in final fantasy games since I was a child because against weaker enemies you have no impetus to inflict these statuses on your opponents and against stronger enemies they're useless because your enemy is pointlessly immune to things. So boss fights and the like might occasionally contain one gimmick where the boss can actually be negatively effected by a status thing but much more often they can't be. The design of the superbosses is even worse. Dark Ixion's thunder spell isn't actually thunder aligned so you'll go into the fight with a lightning ward on or something thinking oh hey maybe this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ability is useful for the first time in the game but no you get killed because of this nonintuitive thing the designers added to waste your time that you shouldn't have had to anticipate because you shouldn't be playing a game wondering what idiot thing the developer is going to force you thru next.

Blitzball is like a faux sports/sports management type game but it's so overly simple and so poorly introduced (you go thru your first game without any introduction to having played the game and the first game is a tournament in story) that after the first time playing it you should be hoping it will never be forced upon you again.

Levelling up with the sphere grid is a horrible nightmare and nobody thinks it isn't. It's a poor system that's intentionally bogged down to give the illusion of complexity but for even the quickest level ups it takes you choosing to take an action moving, then confirming the move, then you watch an animation of your little sphere moving, then you click confirm, choose a sphere to use, confirm using it and then repeat that another 2 more times. If you've been deluded into thinking it is actually complex I highly recommend looking up "Straightening Out Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid".

As with all stupid JRPGs it's very convenient that our characters start off where they do. Just so happens that their route to the end of the game coincides with a route that provides us with enemies of scaling strength. because stats matter instead of skill which is always going to be the case with these dumb games.

If I really wanted to break down more of why and how this game is terrible it would take another 5 pages of writing about bits of nuance but I'm going to leave it at what I've written so far and hope that I can have saved at least a couple curious people from wasting 16 dollars. If you really want to play something turn based go play Banner Saga or Xcom or something. Or if you really really need the FFX experience just watch the 10 hour marathon video on youtube.

oh yeah also the writing is terrible. Don't get me wrong, it's very possible that (like myself) you'll learn to love the characters and their interactions (which there aren't enough of), but everything surrounding their circumstances is nonsense at best.