Well first off, the characters and setting have that style I reject. They're in that awkward pseudo-realistic style best represented by Advent Children. You just can't try to be 'realistic' but at the same time give these characters silly haircuts and outfits like Tifa's and boyishly oriental faces. It just doesn't work together. You either go in fully realistic direction with suitable consequences or make it all look hardcore animu (which was obviously the style the original was designed for considering the artwork, battle models, and final encounter), there is no inbetween, it looks silly especially on male characters. I can't take many male characters seriously because of this. Barret is the only one that looks acceptable since he was always meant to look mega masculine in the first place. Finally, "realistic graphics" only really are needed if you're writing realistic scenes for them. AC didn't do that. FF7r will surely have tons of AC style fights and "Hollywoodisms" like having Cloud charge right into soldiers firing bullets. Let's take the scene where Sephiroth steamrolls Zack. I can imagine today that the scene will be 5 minutes long and have an "epic" battle between the two.
Speaking of Tifa, how they handled her design doesn't bode well for how they plan to handle bits like infiltrating the manor of Don Corneo and the Honey Bee Inn sidequest (which if you recall had a non-SJW friendly depiction of gays). They didn't just lower her breast score, but an article admitted there was internal pressure at Square-Enix to alter her design for "current year concerns."
Furthermore, Sakaguchi is gone, Nomura needs to be reined in, and Nojima's not much more trustworthy than Nomura. It's obvious when you compare FF when Sakaguchi was onboard with the series after him or even just the Compilation that he was key in FF7 and other works turned out.
Most importantly, both the devs and fans seem to forget that FF7 was essentially a weird 90's anime game stemming from the same postmodern wave that Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena came from. Enough plot was absurd, such as the entire Shinra HQ infiltration which is hilariously weird. Or Rufus going out of his way to commandeer the Tiny Bronco, a tiny personal air-craft that serves no purpose to Rufus what so ever that can't be covered by the fleet of cargo helicopters stationed at Junon or an Alairship. Point is back in the day nobody noticed and yapped on how absurd the game was. The entire game is far out there, and you're invited to relish in the camp and the sheer chaos of the experience rather than waste time nit-picking for srs brs details etc. which bear no real impact on the important notes of the plot to begin with (which would be Cloud's existential journey, and the themes dealing with loss and man's relationship with his world).
It's an ephemeral, surreal, visceral experience. It's a story portrayed in glorious LSD animu graphics with bizarre and impossible architecture, super-saturated color-palette, with weird and eccentric characters fighting weird and eccentric enemies (like a house morphing into a killer robot, or a giant revolver firing rockets). FF7 did not give to fucks about anything or anyone. It was a trip, and it was a trippy one at that. The compilation, and the remake are incongruent with the original, and that's why they all end up feeling really, really inappropriate and bad. The style and narrative of FF7 was ultimately not designed to be some gritty grounded story ala 24. It was more of a vidya Twin Peaks.
Try to make it "srs bus realism" and then suddenly all the absurdities became readily apparent and jarring as hell. The more you try to force it, the more contrived and corny it becomes. Which is how all the spin-offs (and most surely the remake) end up akward and and melodrama.
I don't think Nomura, Nojima and Kitase see this anymore if they ever did. Nomura, Kitase, Nojima and the rest of the major FF creators in SE took the camp seriously. The stuff they design just reeks of bad fan-fiction. The stuff they now design, is the game-development and artistic equivalence of the user-names that babiees' first edgelords pick for their characters in MMOs/RPGs/Fanworks since they think it's "kewl" (XonewingangeledgelordsasukeX etc. and similar).
To be honest, I don't think too much has changed intrinsically since the 1990s.
Sure, we have upgraded internet technologies, video games have achieved high realism levels, cars have autonavs and intergrated on board CPUs, but it's not like everything that's all fucky with today isn't a culmination of past shit that has festered. I'm even talking about the SJW AIDS shit too, that can all fuck off.
There are plenty of video games from the 1990s whose material resonates even more today than ever thanks to a failure to make the human condition better. The only things we've gotten are more toys and shiny colorful distractions for the young to make them dumber and more unwise than ever, which a lot of stories from the past have forewarned us to some extent.
As for some of your objections about FFVII:
*I believe that the reason why Shinra has its shiny toys yet doesn't exactly have factories to mass produce heavy technologies is an example of presenting a "paper tiger" or something about the irony of the limitations of resources. In world, monsters exist throughout and that kind of ecology is said to make it hard to excavate things necessary for "modern tech", yet this has allowed for the prevalence of robotics due to them being potentially less hands on maintenance and to perform tasks to reduce the workload of manpower. Please also note oil, like the real life equivalent of petroleum oil, has not been bothered to be extracted yet.
*Monsters are largely attributed to both lab experiments escaping to the wild and fucking or bathing and drinking Mako, which causes typical "radioactivity" mutations. Others include defective defense robots.
*The whole bit about Cloud being able to take head on fleets of gunners with machine guns is attributed to SOLDIER treatment, the enhancing effects of Materia, and the power of the Lifestream acting like Ki powers from anime, which is seen through limit breaks. Honestly, it makes a whole lot more sense placing it in another world than a real life setting.
*The Compilation isn't the greatest, but it at least goes for a feel of coldness and isolation even in more affable positions. Pre FFVII is due to employment with Shinra, while post FFVII is due to mankind needing to start from scratch away from leeching life energy from the planet and being "reliant on their own" as the planet begins to heal. You think you're the only one who hates the whole angle of FFVII being put on a pedestal? The character Genesis Rhapsodos was introduced solely out of spite for FFVII being blown out of proportion by the chunnibyous and more mental fans.
*Final Fantasy tends to have a tendency to try to be a mix of symbolism and a dream wrapped up into a thematic D&D session with different worlds every new playthrough. Good? Bad? That's up to you, really.
*Sakaguchi also was a bit responsible for the "science fantasy" angle too for FF. Look at Spirits Within. FFVII was also done out of the death of Sakaguchi's mother and the whole Lifestream/Spirit Energy concept of his was done out of grief therapy.
*Pat of Socks Make People Sexy can eat dicks and get cucked forever. EDIT: So can Noah Antweiler.
I don't know about the remake, but I like action RPGs and I am no FFVII purist. Fuck it, bring it, life.
