One thing to keep in mind is that many of the remasters being mentioned are PS2-era games or games that were PS1 but remastered DURING the PS2/GC era, only about five years after they originally launched. This is a game with prerendered backgrounds from twenty years ago that's never been remastered prior to this. Yea certain things don't look as good as they should, but in a functional sense, if those things looked as good as they could given necessary budget constraints, it still wouldn't be as big of a difference as people are making it out to be.
If you ask me people have these certain expectations and are missing the forest for the trees again, just like they did focusing on Wander's face in SotC rather than looking at the total package. There are problems and disappointments with this remaster, but at the end of the day this is my favorite FF and it's the best it's ever looked. If you want to tinker with the image then buy it on Steam and have at it, I personally do not like the AI-upscaled backgrounds because they're too sharp. I'm glad this is the default.
Going into menu, pressing exit and then loading the save again is the fastest way, it's not instantaneous like soft reset but it only takes about 10 seconds tops.
