I loved Remake, for me it was 10/10 and was everything in every regard I pictured in my wildest dreams...
Rebirth... I don't dislike it, I've spent 300 hours on it. But honestly? I thought it was a letdown coming from Remake, for a wide variety of reasons, most of which are nitpicky, but all add up to me feeling like they prioritized the wrong things.
First, the game, to me, feels overall less polished than Remake. Visuals are a huge downgrade overall, open world looks flat, linear sections look better, but the game's HDR looks worse than Remake, leading to a vasiline look. Remake had more fine tune adjustments for HDR. (Hoping PC version fixes this, either officially or mods) The menus are really ugly compared to the sleek 2D look that Remake had, and why the hell was the lifestream inspired upgrade screen replaced with boring, flat 2D nodes? And the new 3D menu feels slower to navigate compared to Remake. All of this isn't really all that important, but really disappointing nonetheless.
Second, people complained about Remake feeling padded, besides chapters 9-11 I thought it moved pretty well, but holy hell...Rebirth feels so slow, plot barely moves at all till after costa del sol. The game also has a weird hyper focus on a more lighthearted tone for the first half of the game, I don't mind that, but it leads to tonal whiplash later on, (i won't spoil it for people holding out on PC) Part 3 really needs to balance pace and tone better. Remake was only silly where it made sense, and the tone shifts were more gradual.
Third, I actually like the fact it's content rich with all the mini-games, challenges etc... but I find the difficulty of all this stuff absurd for getting 100% completion, imo the mini-games should not require such precision to get the highest score, and the combat challenges felt really off balance, expecting players to play 100% flawlessly, challenge is great, but the tuning here just felt...too much. Now do note, I am physically disabled, so I probably struggled more with the combat challenges and mini games more so than the average player, so my experience is a little skewed. But I was able to Plat remake without too much hassle, and I've given up on platting this. (Also the mini games' heavy use of triggers was a huge deterrent to my enjoyment, that's a me issue though, but wish they had remapping like yakuza)
Fourth, I am not bothered by the plot, would rather have a new experience than a totally butchered copy of the OG. But...the execution in a few areas could have been much, much better. But I don't wanna go into all those specifics right now.
So yeah, didn't hate it, but coming from Remake was let down, I'm weird though and one of very few people who thinks Remake is superior.