On the writing of Johnny's character:
In addition to being really fantastic as that sort of overly energetic bombastic character, Johnny plays a really important role of being a foil to Cloud's original persona when he gets grabbed by Shinra. Yes, Wedge calls him bro – but there're a lot of really specific reasons for Cloud to care about Wedge. Johnny is a walking disaster, and Cloud was just prepared to just eliminate him as a risk at first, which is why the extreme juxtaposition between the two of them in Wall Market plays so well and is so important.
While in the Sector 7 Slums, despite being 10,000% not interested in helping with the water filters, Tifa helps Cloud to establish himself as a mercenary & feel like he has a place where he can be useful and belong. That's the relationship he grows to have with the Avalanche crew. However, after the slum-wandering with Aerith just warmly wandering around and helping people out JUST to help them, Cloud's even more significantly breaking out of that cold facade. It's to the point where he's not just instantly cold-shouldering people out of the way, and he's starting to not just approach every situation as a zero-sum interaction. This is why, despite having an established disdain for Johnny & Johnny being an abject disaster of incompetence – the fact that they're teamed up in Wall Market going around on missions matters. It's 100% different than Cloud getting to like someone he SHOULD like, like Wedge. It's about him getting to shake his head and smile at someone trying to do the right thing & failing spectacularly, while helping out someone who he literally doesn't have any good reason to, other than just trying to be a decent person.
Johnny tries everything first, fails spectacularly, and then warns Cloud when you show up to try the same thing. His only redeeming quality is literally just that he genuinely cares. Mercenary Cloud has no reason to give a shit about that dude, but protagonist Cloud understands the REASON that motivates Johnny's actions, and is learning to appreciate that, and starts to show him that it's not all hopeless – even when you fail constantly, the things that Johnny wants to achieve are still worth trying for.
That sets the narrative tone for the entire story post-Wall Market, so I'm gonna flat-out hard disagree that his writing is bad or made
Remake abjectly worse. If anything, it added in the bordering-on-cartoonish bombastic elements that let characters like Beck, Butch, & Burke feel at home and pull the game up into the sort of lighthearted slapstick whatnot that the original had – again, because Mercenary Cloud'd've just flat-out killed them, but the traveling-with-Aerith protagonist Cloud is totally content to just let them play dead and go on about his business.
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