@TheProfessional: Personally I wouldn’t have been interested in anything close to a 1:1 Remake. More often than not, I consider those to be a waste of resources. I prefer direct ports/remasters that keep everything about the original intact (which already exist for VII), or full reimagined Remakes that act as a supplement to the original without making it obsolete. The VII Remake project is by far the best example of how to do this well in my book.
VII Remake rumors have been swirling around for over a decade before it was officially announced and I never shared the general excitement about the idea, because I considered it pretty much impossible to do it justice.
There is a reason why modern FF games aren’t as varied as they were during the golden age, which for me is the PS1 generation. It’s easier to create rich and varied worlds when you’re working at the much higher level of abstraction of the older games, but in modern AAA games towns aren’t a handful of pre-rendered 2D backgrounds anymore and NPCs don’t communicate exclusively via textboxes.
The point is that higher expectations in terms of production values have made the creation of wolrds like FF7’s much less feasible in modern AAA gaming, which is reflected in the criticism of the fanbase when it comes to modern entries of the franchise.
Even as someone who likes most of the modern FFs there is clearly a different aura about the VII Remake. It’s the first time that the franchise truly feels like it has recaptured the greatness of the golden age for me. In that sense it feels more authentic to me than a 1:1 Remake ever could, because it doesn’t try to replicate what the original is today, but what it was in 1997. An insanely ambitious, jawdropping game that almost feels like it shouldn’t be possible.
