Great review by Max here and I agree with all of his points after completing the game in 120 hours with mostly everything completed side quest wise.
I was really impressed with the sheer amount of content in FF7R. For the third game, I would focus more on content that people enjoyed the most and cut out a lot of the stuff many people didn't tend to complete. I'm sure they are able to look at the data and see what those mini-games were.
I really want to highlight how fantastic the side quests, mini-games, and especially the economy/rewards in this game are. In many open world games like BOTW or ToTK - the rewards seem completely pointless. A weapon or armor that isn't very useful, small amount of money, nothing to really meaningfully change your character. In FF7R they made sure that every activity you do gives significant rewards to your player and parties XP, gives you unique material that can drastically alter your build, gives you armor that can enhance the materia slots, and give you enhanced materials that feed into the wonderful transmutation system. Like, in this game, I actually regularly use a lot of ITEMS I gather, from either loot in crafting or in the actual battles themselves and I find that many games this is trivialized.
Kudos to the team for creating such a rich and rewarding system which complements the depth of play-style options and customization which is in stark contrast to what we got in FF16 in comparison.