Final Fantasy 13 spiritual remake of 7?

For the longest time everyone wanted a Final Fantasy 7 remake but the developers said it would be too difficult and they'd have to go through and change a ton of stuff and like a year ago, playing FF13 I sort of got the sense that FF13 was (without implying or making obvious) a sort of spiritual successor's if not outright remake of Final Fantasy 7?

It's a different game/story, but it's quite similar I think, and I felt the themes were quite the same as well perhaps?

What does everyone else think, or is it just me? maybe it was not ENTIRELY, but I felt like it was at least a tiny bit.

For example, the main characters names being based on elements/weather. Cloud/Lighting, and at the beginning they are riding a train (huge re-occurring symbol in ff7) and then fight a giant robot scorpion like in the beginning of Final Fantasy 7 and also, there's lots of green-ish kind of hues everywhere like in FF7, and there the some of the main villain/antagonists are like the corrupt government/establishment. I felt as though cocoon acted and was not all that different from Final Fantasy 7's Midgar and Shinra, etc.

Oh crap I can't edit, but I forgot to mention as well, the soldiers of the tyrannical, corrupt government are main enemies as will that you commonly fight, and you are virtually fugitives on the run, like I think the party as in FF7 though it wasn't made that big of a deal of.

And Snow and his group he head were sort of like Avalanche a bit there. There is also actually a token black character like Barrett (where as I don't think there's any other main black characters) and a huge story segment involving an amusement part type of place much like the Gold Saucer in FF7.

I'm..really not seeing that strong of a similarity dude.

There are some similarities (deliberate ones even), but overall, the plot of each game has little similarity to that of the other. There's really nothing comparable to the fal'Cie, l'Cie and the foci in VII, nor anything like Jenova, Sephiroth and the Lifestream to be found in XIII.