Yes, that is absolutely correct.
I just don't enjoy old-school random encounter-based gameplay. Which is not the same thing as saying I don't enjoy
Final Fantasy gameplay; when the games are actually serving challenging encounters with interesting mechanics that force me to actually use my toolkit, I enjoy it a lot. But 99% of the game is instead spent deleting the same pointless random encounters, and that's a major reason why I spend most of my Final Fantasy playtime listening to podcasts. There's nothing there, it's just pushing buttons until it's over. The QoL features of the Pixel Remaster have been a huge boon to my experience of the game and I have been missing them since I started FF7. One of the reasons I was looking into emulating the game towards the start was because they have the option to accelerate the game, so dealing with all that stuff would have been a lot faster.
By contrast, while I never went very far into Persona 5, its combination of non-random encounters (enemies are entities on the map that you fight by running into) and complex gameplay where you want to actually care about which abilities you're using on which opponents because of elemental affinities and such made it a lot more fun to play through, as I remember it anyway.
Interestingly though, that's a change from where I was as a child/teenager. Younger me's standard approach to Pokémon gameplay, for instance, was to just grind forever until all my Pokémons were several levels above the next gym and then roll over the opposition with overwhelming power. I can't really do that anymore.
@foamy talked about grinding his way to having all LBs unlocked before Junon and one-shotting Bottomswell and, meaning no offense, the very idea makes me die inside. I am already kind of regretting doing some backtracking earlier in this playthrough and incidentally pushing my characters a few levels up in the process because at this stage even the bosses are too easy.
The random encounters are at least more spread out than in previous games, separated by large chunks of pure plot; our last update consisted for the most part of a couple of fights early on where I tested Neo Bahamut, then Jenova-DEATH, then it's nothing but cutscenes for half an hour. This makes the pacing of the gameplay weird. It also means that between these long stretches of plot and the random encounters, FF7 is much, much longer than previous games by a pretty fair margin and is a rather
chonky endeavour to play through. If the game's writing wasn't so compelling, I would maybe struggle with finishing this Let's Play! On the other hand, the sheer density of the writing is why every update is over 5,000 words individually and it's taking so much time and things would go faster if the game were less dense, so who knows.
Honestly I think this is an FF7 problem and not an 'old-school random-encounter-based' problem, stemming both from the context of coming off the Pixel Remasters and the consequences of the shift to ATB.
First, the Pixel Remasters have autobattle, as you've mentioned. That massively speeds up the process of random encounters weak enough for you to not try. It's also the fact that the Pixel Remasters are modern games on modern hardware that only have to load sprites. They can be in and out in a flash, whether you're loading a fight with nine dudes or a spell or a summon or whatever the hell, no need to call up 3D models and environments that strained the PS1's hardware so badly that the giant unremovable menu taking up a third of the screen was saving valuable resources to render the other two thirds. FF7 isn't snappy because it
can't be snappy, not while outputting what it did at the time it did on the hardware it did - except in the way that really counts, because on original hardware all the menus and UI run at 60fps because hey it turns out high framerates are very responsive and are important for making using menus feel good
crazy how that happens, modern devs where menus run at like 25 and still drop inputs if you go too fast.
Second, the ATB system. I do not like the ATB system. I didn't like it when the Pixel Remasters first switched at FF4 and almost beating FF5 still wasn't enough to make me more than Tolerate it. FF7
improves the system by letting you queue up actions before a character's bar fills, but at the end of the day the fundamental irony of ATB that always sticks in my craw is that the Active Time Battle system is a lot more
inactive. You gotta wait. For everything. In realtime. Every single fight you start, great or small, unless somebody gets a Pre-emptive Attack off, you just wait. Battle starts and everyone stands there jelking until somebody's bar fills first. And then after that turn happens, you wait a little more for the next bar to fill. And so on. Meanwhile in a pure turnbased RPG you can just... go. You hit buttons for actions, and if it's not your turn the other guy is doing things you probably have to pay attention to. I feel like I'm going insane every time I have to think or talk about this because it's so backwards but it's also so completely obvious that ATB
slows down a menu-battler RPG yet nobody really talks about it.
Third thing, random encounters vs overworld enemies. It depends on the specific style of game because they all have their tradeoffs, I simply refuse the notion that random encounters are inherently more primitive or worse design than having enemies roaming around the map you can dodge. Everyone likes to grouse about random encounters, and they would certainly be justified in the likes of FF2 where the devs go "uh choose one of sixteen doors one is progress the other 15 drop you in a box and a random encounter triggers as you try to leave the box, fuck you", but the fact of it is that when there are random encounters set at a certain rate and running from battles isn't guaranteed the devs can be
certain that your party will be within a certain range of power after travelling from point A to point B. Therefore they can design the mandatory encounters while assuming a certain minimum and median range of player power. They can also design the
environments differently - every single one of FF7's dungeons, with their lavish and memorable prerendered backdrops, would have to be wildly different in a timeline in which all encounters are lil polygonal guys roaming around on top that the devs always had to include enough room for you to rope-a-dope and slip past. Doing this badly, especially in concert with having fights take place on the same map instead of warping you to another dimension, easily leads to bland Anal Bead Level Design where it's nothing but wide combat rooms connected by a chain of small hallways.
Oftentimes RPGs with visible wandering mooks place the onus of grinding on the player in a way I don't like. While playing DQ11 I was often asking myself how much I was
supposed to be fighting, as the enemies were usually
so easy to slip past outside of particularly narrow dungeons that sneaking to a boss woefully underlevelled to get pasted would in fact be quite easy (which leads to absolute mouthbreathers like Dunkey going 'uh i avoided every fight and then couldn't beat da boss 0/10 bad game'), and if ever you approach the strategy of just killing all the enemies directly in your path then you've effectively returned to random encounters just with extra steps. The grinding is also a particular problem with the likes of Persona, where those games effectively revolve around 'we won't
force you to do these fights, we'll just look at you meaningfully from the corner like a sleep paralysis demon because the month's mandatory boss fight is coming and we won't tell you what the target number is, so how strong you get before then is between you and Jesus'.
There's also the concept of rationing resources, which is a valid layer of gameplay to make a player consider when presenting them with the challenge of going A to B in a dungeon. Omi has mentioned being able to simply erase encounters from existence with summons which also cost a whole lot of MP so he can't do it every time - that's a thing the devs
wanted him thinking about. Making constant small decisions about how many of your resources to expend over the course of a dungeon crawl with no idea how many fights you still have left over the course of your trip to a destination you also don't know traces right back to the core of the D&D games FF has been inspired by from the very begining. It's the original fighter/mage dichotomy, with martials being able to do good damage for free forever while casters do more varied and impressive things for resources! If all encounters are on the overworld and can all be dodged then that's... just not anything, any more. The question of 'do i have enough to make it' is gone because the answer is always 'yes' because you will never be pressured to expend those resources unless you severely fuck up kiting an enemy or something. You will never have to think about your resources except while constantly nuking everything in your sight, either while pushing mandatory encounters or while stopping to grind because avoiding everything left you underlevelled. Notably this is a strategy layer that Persona very much keeps at the fore because of how heavily the games' combat systems revolve around using MP and how sparse restorative items and refill stations are for how deep you have to push to hit progress, as well as regular door boss encounters on the way through discrete chunks of Tartarus/TV dungeons/Palaces as well as pre-P5 dungeons all being procgen so
God gets to decide if enemies are actually dodgeable or not.
Like, there can be a unique catharsis in choosing to expend a resource that is not so easily regained because everything aligns and you judge the situation worthy of it. It's not a turn-based RPG, but I can attest to a great deal of satisfaction in Samurai Remnant whenever I would come across an encounter with a particularly annoying kind of enemy, like a giant fox-demon or a yokai lantern, and just saying "no, die" as I hit the Noble Phantasm button.
