I have never played FF7, so I don't really have any feelings about the remake. In fact, so many years since I last touched a jrpg, let alone a final fantasy.. if one day I have time or interest in playing a jrpg, I might give a try to see how it feels as an adult who didn't have the FF7 experience as a teen. Does it hold up? Did you have to "be there" to appreciate it? Does Sephiroth really kill Aeris?

No Aeris ends up getting revived pretty quickly.
 
I really like FF7. It's so disappointing to see a company do something crazy by accident and then desperately return to it for years dragging zombie water out the dead well. And it has been happening INCESSANTLY lately!!! It would be like if Hieronymus Bosch made the Gardens of Earthly Delights by sitting on some wet paint and then on the canvas, and then it got so popular he churned out just regular prints of his ass for the rest of his life, sweating nervously, hoping every patron he handed them to wouldn't be taken aback that it looked nothing like his One Good One.
 
~ stream of conscious complaint~
I don't know at what point we went from "Let's make this game just as colorful and lively as an anime!" to "Let's make this game exactly as retarded as an anime, while looking more boring than real life." Because I'm not crazy in thinking that was a popular goal, right? A shitload of games ape cartoons but especially anime sensibilities. In the 90s things got closer and closer to being an actual anime and then at some point it became... cool I guess to pull away from that? Or rather, games started taking inspiration from 2000s anime, which is a lot more dour and stupid.
Re: cartoon characters, there was a big court case between Nintendo and somebody copying their chips - that came down to a battle over the definition of "linear player images" versus "animated cartoon characters", which Nintendo's chip was powerful enough to display and theirs weren't or uh something like that. Eventually it was just one lawyer scribbling body parts onto a character asking if this hip, this tail was enough to make it "nonlinear". Very funny. Nintendo got creamed.
[i wanted to put a picture of the sketch of the weird little scrawly character here but I can't find one]
You see this in ads, in fans talking about the games - how much they're like cartoons, and how much life and expression that gives them. 
It comes back to a point that gets repeated on this forum again and again: When it was harder to represent things, the representation was so much better! What the fuck's up with that? You could look at it as a matter of "now it's easier to make games so more trash is being made", but that's not core to the issue, because it's the biggest companies with the most resources that turn out the most dire and mark-missing shit. Is there just something about elaborate lighting systems that turns people's brains off and makes them think that's the pinnacle of unreal interactive experience?
We possess all the tech to straight-up make cartoons that behave like games and all those other things that got attempted but failed due to lack of speed and storage space. Now we have both in abundance and we use them to hold megatextures and 80,000 lines of Shakespearean acted dialogue HEY WHATS THAT NOISE. GONA GO CHECK IT OUT. Why don't you watch a movie since that's clearly what you want to do?
It seems like a long-term change of attitudes for the worse and I really don't understand it. I don't even know whether the changes I perceive even exist because I wasn't there to see things firsthand with my own eyes. I grew up in a world where video games were old and big, and they got more and more boring and lame with every year - also more popular. Is growing more boring and losing life what it takes to make a medium grow? Oh well, I guess that is more or less what has happened to every medium! It's obviously a folly to think of it in some hurrrr 90s kid everything was better before *I* was born lame ass way, but I am PRETTY SURE that even the shit then was better than the shit now. Because the act of downgrading the visuals, sound, and concepts made art. Even someone completely bereft of artistic fervor (a games company) created art without meaning to because that's what you have to do to fit stories into old computers. Okay, now I'm pretty sure it's that.
 
Also Barret IS too thin. Cloud is too femme. Weirdly enough they did manage to make Wedge as big and lovably dopey as he's supposed to be, of course he's the legacy joke instead of somebody who gets to go on a cool quest. It's all the "Extended universe" FF7 stuff that kicks the original game in the gut, takes its ball, and runs in the opposite direction with it. I strongly recommend playing the real game for what it is - there is a REASON it captured so many people's imaginations and became such an iconic thing, and it's far stranger and more creative than its iconic status and its iconic reputation would have you think. Nothing really manages to capture the same holy spark that FF7 does in the same way that no FPS since Doom has attained quite the aesthetic ultra-union. Anyway, while I strongly recommend playing the game, if you are strapped for time there's also a surprisingly excellent screenshot LP from a guy called Elentor, and he is unusually good for an LPer - no annoying personality, knows a FUCKLOAD about the game + has been playing it since he was a kid (so he shows you EVERYTHING the game has to offer, including secrets and a few glitches) + thinks nothing of the extended universe (so he's careful to make a distinction between the genuinely good parts of the game and the part everyone just remembers because that's the laminated photocopy version of FF7 that has entered the sphere), and also he's from Brazil and goes off on these non-irritating tangents about all sorts of interesting Brazil shit like how the society there and the one in the game world have parallels that not every player would experience.
 
edit: Actually, I'm gettin' real sick of comparing my views to that of crotchety old fist-waggers! Especially when I've never actually been CALLED crotchety for these views, I'm just deciding to call myself a hipster or an old man because I don't want to confidently say that *I KNOW THE TRUTH* and *EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG*. But that's a fucking stupid thing to do I'm NOT a CRANK because I DON'T LIKE GARBAGE, none of us are, and I refuse to accept the idea that my seeing more value in work that HAPPENS to be old is crotchetiness. I just hit drinking age! The very core of the matter is that there is a lot of heart in tiny stumpy cartoon people and no heart at all in extremely elaborate people who don't look like cartoons. In a year or two there will be countless videos recorded by people who have uploaded their bodies as models into games using the next popular kinect-style put-our-camera-in-your-room and they're all going to use this technology to run around in VR Minecraft.

There was a TON of uninteresting junk! FF7 was so far up its own ass! But it went so far up there that nothing else looks and feels quite like it. I just started understanding the plot after reading that guy's lp twice. It only comes through backwards, told through flashbacks and lies and obscure items hidden in towns you would have no reason to backtrack to. A lot of important shit is unfathomable, while some sappy anime subplots appear very clearly. And what's more, everyone remembers it as a game with the one big plot twist, but there's an even bigger curveball way down the line. Like you said, exactly, Cloud's an awesome anime hero and also spent a lot of the game looking like a child's toy. When you were done kicking ass, your party members did a dumb little dance, and they did it EVERY TIME. Also it had MIDI-based music. And wheelchair cloud. (I hope wheelchair cloud still makes a reference to an external non-ff rpg.) I still haven't finished it, but I think I still want to one day.
 
Also hyperragnarpost

I heard that Doom 4 was surprisingly good, but the fact that they actually had the balls to just straight up call it "Doom" is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen and I can't explain to other people why it bothers me so much. You can't just ride the coattails of something like that and simultaneously... cuckoo it out of a title and... search results. It could be the best game in the world (it isn't) and I would never want to play it because they did that. Conned out of the Pure Doom Experience. There ought to be laws that force you to put ": The Remake" on the end. And laws that force you to say it every time you're talking or thinking about it.

Final Fantasy 7 was a fricken weird game. It was all over the place in terms of tone, you could play it for an hour every day and experience something genuinely unique each time you play it. One day you're snowboarding, one day Tifa is slapfighting the shinra lady, the next you're doing that weird rts minigame for the super materia, then you're finishing red 13's quest and seeing his petrified dad in cosmo canyon, then youre breeding and racing chocobo, then youre having a random encounter with a house or like a naked torso swinging on a pendulum, then japanese dracula joins your party, then cloud becomes an invalid from mako poisoning.
 
FF7 was such a wild, wild game and my biggest fear with the remake is that they'll just drop everything that doesn't fit into their hardcore cool-kid modern vision. Like I'm sure the big iconic moments will be done well, but without all the weird nonsense in between then, well, it just won't be ff7.

I feel pretty confident in saying that brand of crazy no longer appears in commercial games. I would be happy to hear an example to the contrary but I think that the current industry simply can't support termite-levels of passion and creation. Any attempts to transplant the crazy forward in time will fuck it up. Every good aspect will fail to shine through. This is an FF7 fan's prophecy.
 
The only thing I can imagine them not fucking up is "This guy are sick", and they're definitely going to fuck that one up.
 
Something pretty important about the original game is that Aeris is the cool tomboy, tough and loud and spunky, with agency and even an aggressive sexuality. Tifa is the yang equivalent. She's a total mess, like a Romantic poet. Their class and story archetypes are the opposites of their characters, just one reason why the game's weirder and more interesting than most - Tifa is a bartender/kickboxer or something, and Aeris is a last-of-her-kind flower saleswoman and party restorative. (Isn't that like the lowest way to make something interesting, making it the obvious opposite of what it should be? But even that is "one step up" above what most games bother, and FF7 tries it a lot.) It is very telling of how little the company understands their own product that ever since then, they've portrayed these characters with their personalities switched around. In the extended universe shit you see Aeris acting like Tifa and Tifa acting like Aeris because most people do not notice the healer isn't the lovey-dovey one. It's incredibly fucking obvious to me now as an adult, and *I* didn't notice myself! I had to have it pointed out to me. Most of the main characters have this sort of "one extra layer" of twist that gives them more energy than total one-notes. (The ones that don't have huge personality psyche-outs are made even weirder by their lunatic designs, like cait 'fucker' sith.) The game never throws it in your face SEE WHAT I DID? THE PINK ONE IS LESS GIRLY, unlike a lot of silly manga bullshit that it proudly does; it doesn't mind if you misinterpret it because it spends a lot of the time deliberately misleading and lying to you. Or really, the characters are all lying to one another, each lost and made miserable in their attempts to be more than who they are. ff7 is really quite clever in lots of ways that you only notice if you pay lots of attention, and it makes me wonder why it's often remembered as a generic rpg with a couple of inexplicable moments when it tries so hard to be different. It just goes to show why so many things are boring - because they don't have a competitive squatting minigame.
 
I guess I just don't get why people want to go back in time and scrub off all the parts that make something interesting. It's like how they went back to calling her "Aerith" officially instead of just rolling with the (in my worm opinion) more memorable nonsense name that the screwed-up transliteration gave them. The Cloud/Earth thing is absolutely retarded and I'm pretty sure that's the whole of why she's called that, so it's not like they gained anything by backpedaling over the top of something special.

Yuffie is the cocky annoying ninja kid thief, but her backstory is intense when you think about it too: she belongs to an ancient society that was destroyed, gutted by Shinra and basically turned into a tourist trap. She hates them because her whole culture got erased and none of her family is willing to take the fight to the company because they don't want to die. so she feels frustrated and lonely enough to join up with the weirdos she distrusts. She's also a selfish cock and will straight up jack your shit, which is no fun to play, but very hilarious and a good idea.
 
The LP I linked goes into more detail about this but yeah everyone's life has been completely emptied and claimed by this horrible power company. The continent (you can buy Korean BBQ item, so, Korea too?) is 100% under the thumb of rich assholes trying to monetize an alien even though they already own all the money in the world. Or, metaphorically, the most powerful entity in an almost dead world makes a grab for infinity, is struck down and reversed by the resultant dregs of its own victims returning the hoard of life to earth, or, more generally, the ol' HUBRIS/fuck you, richy. Telling that through a story so straightforward as "evil power company sucks electricity out of the afterlife" is pretty ballsy. (And of course the whole point is that what they're draining is really "the Earth" and "all dead people" at the same time.) A standard anime thing I hear but frankly it seems like a standard everything thing, a very essential and universal sorta thematic motif that I don't really get tired of.
 
I can't really remember why Vincent and Cid stick around but I think it has to do with them hating Shinra for wrecking their lives and not having any other group of people to fight alongside. But yeah no one is just there because THOU SEEMST A CURE FOR THIS AWFUL... BOREDOM! MIGHT I JOIN THEE IN THINE QUOST?
 
the game also keeps track of how you've treated everyone and sends you on a date with aeris, tifa, yuffie, or, if you've deliberately been a prick to all of them, barret. So that's a lot of replay value - always good in a video game.