From there i played the entire collection - the ps1 version, crisis core, advent children, and then remake again.
Those months were fantastic - either playing, listening to the soundtrack, thinking about materia combinations. And it’s likely to consume another 3 months of my life when Rebirth releases.
It is easy to get lost the pretty graphics of modern games, but to me well written story and characters are the best part of JRPGs
The story is alright, but the characters are well-written and I enjoyed the tactical gameplay more than the typical turn-based RPG fare.
The thing that unlocked it for me was taking a save state at pretty much every "scene" or big story beat. A lot of these games lack a good way of tracking where you are in the story, and picking up/putting down a deep game in short increments can be hard to get reoriented, so I got in a habit of loading one or two saves back when I restart playing after a break. Replaying a minute or so is usually more than enough to remember what's going on and what I need to do next.
An alternative is install something like retroarch on your smartphone and use a telescopic controller.