My thoughts on the remake so far:
Graphics and presentation overall are top-notch, but that was to be expected anyway, seeing as those are the points that SE has been focusing on in all of their main FF games for the last 10 or so years while neglecting more important things like gameplay and story (cough*FFXIII*cough). The character design doesn't look half-bad, save for a few design choices that really left me scratching my head. I understand Tifa's bra, but why would Barret need sun glasses in a city where you can't even see the sky most of the time (the slums being below the plate)?
Anyway, on to the more important points:
The battle system: Personally I would've preferred the classic ATB system, so when they first announced an action-oriented combat system for the remake I felt quite disappointed. I'm not saying that action-based systems are bad in general, but they're simply not my style. Their recent announcement that you should be able to choose between action mode or turn-based mode does make me feel a LITTLE better, at least, but as others have said already, it'll all depend on how they implement that. I can hardly imagine having two different combat systems in one and the same game, so I'll remain sceptical about this one... unfortunately it's impossible to judge the battle system just from watching trailers, as you can't see which/how many buttons the player needs to press in order to perform the actions on screen.
As for the episodic release, that was perhaps the biggest bummer to me when I first heard about it, leaving me with the same questions that so many others have asked already: how are they going to handle level-ups? Or the World Map? Will there even be one? I cannot imagine FFVII without one, yet at the same time, I don't see SE coming up with a world map again, seeing as they've scrapped that idea even for FFXV where such a thing was originally planned. How will data transfer from one episode to the next be handled (not just stats, materia and items, but also treasure chests openend, sidequest completed, dialogue choices i.e. love points for the Gold Saucer date)? Will it be possible to revisit locations from earlier episodes? They very much need to be, seeing as most of discs 2 and 3 in the original consisted of revisiting former towns and dungeons again. But that would mean that all locations have to be present on every blue-ray, and if that's truly the case the very choice of making the remake episodic in the first place becomes... questionable...
Finally, about the 'believability' discussion: I can understand what DLPB means. On older consoles, battles in RPGs were meant to be merely symbolic and not to be taken seriously. There has always been a clear differentiation of what a character can do in a battle, and what he's capable of in 'field mode'. Every fictional world, despite being a fantasy universe only, still has to follow its own inherent rules to maintain credibility within its story. The characters in FFVII were always supposed to represent regular people like you and me, and while their physical capabilities may exceed those of others due to some of them being martial artists and/or having undergone military training, it never went out of control in the original game.
That changed with the Compilation, starting with Advent children: I've only watched AC once, but I still somewhat remember that battle against Bahamut in Midgar. The one that ends with Cloud jumping/getting thrown endlessly high up in the air (you can see the city of Midgar waaaayy down below), slicing Bahamut, and then dropping back to earth and landing on his feet... unhurt! And those are the kind of scenes that rob the universe and its characters of any credibility, for no one can seriously buy that Cloud would ever be able to pull something like that off. It goes against the very nature of the FFVII universe. Or did you never ask yourself: if the party characters were indeed capable of jumping that high, why did they ever bother to climb the floors of the Shinra headquarter by foot? According to AC, they should've been able to just jump from the building's entrance to the top floor and be done with it.
And that's the entire point of the believability discussion. The original game had established a clear set of 'rules' for the FFVII universe (most of which follow the same rules as the real world as far as human physical capabilities go), and AC started to violate those. The characters of the original weren't any godlike superhumans, as they've never displayed any such skills outside of battles. They couldn't jump up to the high voltage pole in Junon on their own, they needed a dolphin to help them. They couldn't just smash through walls in buildings, they had to take the doors. They were meant to be normal, albeit physically well-trained people. Yet AC started to turn them into Dragonball characters, something that simply doesn't fit into this game, and quite frankly has no place in it.
The bottom line is: Anything that happens in battles is there merely for the player's entertainment and has no bearing on the games' respective universe, save for scripted battles that are specifically designed for story purposes (e.g. Tellah getting killed by Golbez, Galuf getting killed by Exdeath, General Leo getting killed by Kefka etc.).
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