Remaster wise its good but its still a PSP game at heart. Small areas, simple gameplay, and very cringe dialogue. I like it but i can't play it for too long. Its too simple, random and a tad boring for that. FFVIIR at least had, for me, excellent and more challenging combat. I also think FFVIIR had better writing and dialogue, despite not being quite good on itself. Everything thats spoken in CC is just worse and boring.
I got to this game late, but I thought I'd springboard off of your post to give my thoughts.
At original launch, wee little Kira jailbroke his first PSP just to play this game ahead of it's US release. You can definitely tell, as a remaster, that for all of the updates, it's framework is very much based on PSP design restrictions. I will say, having completed the original again recently (was actually halfway finished when the anniversary stream announcing the remaster happened, lulz) I WILL say that the number of tiny little QoL updates that have been made really do tick up the fun percentage. Silly things that I'd forgive someone for not even noticing, but they add up, personally. I've made special note of:
-obviously visuals. I expected an upgrade, but what I didn't exactly expect were straight up lifting models and assets from FF7R, which brings it so much closer to being consistent continuity wise. Complaint here would be that no work was put into modernizing idle animations. This will look like a lower end modern title, and then Zack will do something like his "surprised," animation from the original release, where he leaps back three feet and tenses his arms up, and this kind of shorthand that made things seem more realistic in 2006 or whatever is starting to have inverse returns.
-Treasure counter in the UI during missions. This is a small one, but holy fuck, is it nice to not have to run around a giant trash mob pit full of enemies who spam Stop/Poison/Death for 20 minutes To make sure you didn't miss a Soma or your eighteenth chocobo armless.
-Voice work. It's just more immersive having every line voiced, even if the acting chops of everyone who isn't a main character is....questionable. Main cast continues to nail it in my book, with the possible exception of Zack's new VA, granted I haven't finished the game yet, so my opinion is subject to change.
-The changes in combat make it much more frenetic, and it kind of throws CC vets for a loop, because it creates more autonomy in the AI, it seems. In the original, there were certain enemies (most of them, really) where if you learned their script, you could basically avoid damage and get a perfect victory with nothing but attack and the dodge roll. This shit is harder to do now, which makes it feel like less a weird version of Bop It!