Final Fantasy 7 Original Vs Remake Part 23: Everything About You Is Wrong

(Sorry that my audio is a bit low. I turned the game audio up and forgot to turn it back down again. I don't have a production team to balance these things live on the stream.)
In this series I play all of the FF7 original and remake and compare them, one part at a time. / bsvino and / cubesos for stream notifications.
Note: In this video I disagreed very strongly with their direction for the finale. Here are my thoughts now that I've had some time to reflect about it. I'll avoid explicit spoilers but it's probably best to read this after you've watched the video.
By doing these changes they're throwing out 23 years of my own investment in the story and characters. I felt an empty spot in my heart because none of that will matter anymore, and the characters we're going to watch from now on will be, in the game's words, different people. They showed you images of what happened in the original and one of the characters said, "This is what happens if we fail here" and they succeeded. Can we then reasonably assume that they're starting the story over from whole cloth?
Their audience comprises three groups of people. 1) The people who would be disappointed if the remake takes a different path. 2) The people who aren't disappointed. 3) New people who don't know the original. By doing this they're taking the risk that the #1 group will be small. In this video I assumed that group would be large, but maybe not. But, why take that risk at all? Why make a game that turns away a potentially large part of your audience?
I called the answer "arrogance", which has a kernel of truth, but the real answer is probably "They wanted to be creative and do something new and exciting with the series." That's a great reason not to carbon copy the old game. But I don't think most people wanted a carbon copy. The Sector 5 reactor sequence was an excellent example of them going in and creatively upgrading the script. The new ATB battle system has a few minor problems but is mostly great. I would have been perfectly happy with even larger diversions from the original plot. There's plenty of room to be creative and do new things.
But what they did here was lie to their audience. They called it a "Remake", but apparently in this case "Remake" means "Reboot" rather than "Remaster". In the absence of them communicating this fact to their audience, they left me and many others to assume it was more like a remaster than a reboot. If they had communicated the fact that it was a reboot ahead of time, they could have prepared their audience for what was coming. I would have known what I was getting into. I would have been disappointed but on board. But they made the decision (in my opinion a mistake) for this to be a surprise plot twist. If you're going to remake possibly the most popular game of all time, I would argue that you should think about your fans first--it should be closer to remaster than reboot. But if you really must go the reboot route, you should manage your fan's expectations better.
I've had some time to get over my disappointment. I'm now ready to approach this game as what it is: a completely new game that's somewhat related to and borrows most major story points from original. As such, I'm going to judge it based on the new content and decide whether I want to invest my time in it with a clean slate. Let's go.
A lot of the decisions they made in this reboot are great and strengthen the story, they clearly have some talented narrative designers on their team. Other decisions feel opportunistic or poorly thought out. Multiple timelines and [spoiler] surviving his fight is a hard sell. Square now being a Sephiroth Pez Dispenser is disappointing. Aeris as a semi-psychic planet-wizard rat-dog-whisperer instead of just a girl who can sometimes talk to spirits is just so that she can psychically explain plot points and give exposition whenever the writers get stuck. At the end of the story a new player has no idea what Jenova is, why Sephiroth broke her out of the Shinra building, or even that Sephiroth broke her out of the Shinra building. Who is the black haired guy with Cloud's sword? What was that weird cat thing with the crown? A newcomer to the series is going to be completely confused as to what happened between the end of the Drum and the Rufus fight. Sorry, if you're going to throw out 23 years of my investment in the original with writing like that then I just don't have faith that you can have a strong enough story to keep me interested. I'll be much happier playing games like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Spiderman.
There are certainly people who will enjoy this ending and look forward to the next episodes. I'm happy that they get something they enjoy. They're entitled to their enjoyment and I'm glad this game and the subsequent ones work for them. I'm personally just not interested in what comes next.

[@davedogge2280]

more exposition in the end game scene than a years worth of lady Gaga

[@Operation_Bagel]

Honestly yeah I hate it too I and many other fans just wanted FF7 for a new generation but they did this weird secret pseudo sequel stuff nobody asked for and if you voice dislike defenders just say “Oh you expected a 1:1 remake?” Like no it’s not bad because it’s different it’s bad because it’s bad