I've been playing Crisis Core: FFVII. Fun and fast combat system, but it gets repetitive quickly. The constant interruptions from the slot machine would bother me more, but I can fast-forward through those since I'm using PPSSPP.
Otherwise nothing interesting to say about it.
I remember really liking this game back in the day aside from the Jar Jar Binks of FF7 Genesis. What would you say doesn't "hold up" in it?
The slot machine is my main annoyance for sure. It's one thing for there to be an opaque system to give out random rewards, but what kills it for me are its animations.
If a battle takes long enough, you'll have to watch it go off multiple times. When it stops on a special move rather than a level up - more animations! To top it off, it only allows you to skip summons and flashbacks, not combos and buffs. So they knew it was a problem on some level, but didn't commit to solving it.
If you ever want to pick it up again, I very strongly suggest emulation to fast-forward that crap.
Monotonous encounter design is a close 2nd. They give you quite a bit of freedom to define your move set, but then don't challenge your choices. There's maybe a handful of encounters where you're (potentially) screwed without a spell, but otherwise you can clear everything by backstabbing for crits.
The result is that I don't give a shit about customizing my moveset. I use healing spells occasionally and robots get zapped with lightning, but that's it.
I dind't want to comment on the fan-fiction since I expected it to be bad, but since you bring up Genesis, him and Angeal really stick out as solutions to a problem that didn't exist. Fleshing out Sephiroth's arc was the better choice and stares you right in the face the entire time. They instead separated aspects of him into their own characters, resulting in two more shallow fools who (I assume) have to be neatly erased from the timeline.
Director Lazard and Hollander were enough to drive the plot behind the scenes, but instead there's this lunatic who cites bad poetry whenever he appears.
I had to bail out of BoF3 after 15 hours when I estimated (with a guide) that it's probably 50 hours long, while not having the quick pace and top-tier visuals of 4.
Was that enough to see the timeskip? I really loved that and the dragon transformations. On the whole I prefer 4, too. Nothing beats DQ though.