Y'know, I was really worried about this at first, but something was pointed out to me: Square Enix has a surprisingly good track record for remakes. FF4DS (and later iOS, Android, and PC) had awful graphics and atrocious voice acting, but it was absolutely true to the original in gameplay and story. They made balance changes, but at its heart it was still clearly FF4. FF1 and 2 have been remade several times, and all of these remakes have been well beyond than satisfactory. The FF6 remake for mobile has terrible art and serious technical issues with scaling and tiling, but it also gets the story and gameplay right.
However, they have a extremely poor track-record when it comes to how they treat the FF7 franchise.
Instead of giving people the remake they always wanted, they ignored fan-sentiment to release spin-off upon spin-off that nobody asked for - spin-offs that changed the art-style, retconned everything from story to character personalities, and even added new things that make little to no sense in light of the original narrative.
The question will always be - is this going to be a remake that is made is if all that stuff didn't happen, or is it a remake that's going to
expand upon and acknowledge all the other shit in the franchise that they added in later years?
As strawberries as the company has been with spinoffs, direct sequels, and new games in all of their franchises, they simply do not have a history of messing up the gameplay or story in remakes. The closest they ever came to that was FF3 DS, where the added a story because the original didn't even have one. It would be out of character for them to change it; their usual story/gameplay awfulness has been thus far never hurt a single remake they've made.
However, as far as I am aware, non of the games they've successfully remade has the same mess of an expanded universe as FF7,
so that was never really an issue for these games to begin with.
I legitimately don't think they understand what people liked about FF7 or why it was good, but I don't think that'll be an issue.
If you don't understand this, you can't possibly qualify the later sentiment in this statement.
They don't WANT to risk changing it, as that would be more work (and therefore more money) than doing it right, and has a good chance of printing them less money. That's not a creative decision, it's a business decision, and especially after the piss-poor market performance of Lightning Returns, there's just no way they would come to any other conclusion.
Actually, I think granted the current state of the market, and the production-costs associated with AAA gaming, they wouldn't risk not changing it - because despite what FF7 fans like to think - there are not enough FF7 purists around to justify spending the kind
of cash you would need to spend for a full-blown, fully 3D, fully voice-acted FF7, which means that if that's the kind of game
SE are going to make, they have to make it and market it to a bigger demographic, which is why the safe thing to do here is to change it.
SE aren't stupid. They can see the success and sales-numbers of the new generation of console RPGs, like Fallout, Witcher, and Dragon Age. They are also bound to have noticed the interest and promise of FF15. They're not going to go "Let's release an RPG with game-play conventions from the 90's aimed mainly at a minority of purist fans that's going to cost us millions upon millions of dollars".
According to what I read by someone on this forum not so long ago, they couldn't even get Zack's death right in the "remade" scene for the spin-offs. And that's just one scene. Imagine the poor bastards trying to make the entire game keep to a sensible portrayal of the original story. Not a chance. More chance of seeing a chocobo, flying or otherwise.
That's right. They bastardized the entire Crisis Core plot-line, by making Zack, who was originally not a very good soldier by any stretch of the imagination into this super-hero who could fight hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers at once, or face of against Sephiroth without being instantly one-shot.
The entire death scene of Zack has been turned into this Matrix-esque "This is is Sparta!" emotional jerk-off.
Take into account the addition of pointless and narrative-breaking characters like Genesis and Angeal and the entire thing becomes even worse.
CC was a good game IMO, but it made a mess out of the FF7 lore.
That's essentially my thought too - or at least if they made it conventional 3D, to do it similarly to Kingdom Hearts "cartoony 3D".
Despite annoying changes to the characters to make them look more cute, and contrived costume changes, the Kingdom Hearts (the original that is, since later editions started using the AC designs for some retarded reason or another) rendering of characters like Cloud and Cid IMO are probably the best modern 3D renditions of the characters there is.
At least by opting for that graphical approach they could keep pretty much the environmental designs, character designs etc. close to the original.
Good luck to the dev team making places like Gold Saucer true to the original with the current direction. lol.