Yeah but that's why I mentioned specifically that there's some differences I think that were handled better than the remake. It's true some people out there have nostalgia glases and will always think doing it the OG way equals better but i don't think it's fair to say that's everyone either.
I mean look, we all know how we are as individuals. I'm straight forward with this. Which scene effected me more....
So for example:
Plate fall in FF7
VS
Plate fall in FF7R.
In FF7 it felt much more ominous, it didn't have the ghosts surrounding a certain character, it didn't have weird rock music playing the whole time, it had the president listening to opera music as the plate fell.
So it just had more emotional impact. It's not me thinking FF7R's is different so it's bad it just had less impact on me entirely.
Same goes for the Shinra scene. Walking down the halls with bodies everywhere...leading to Shinra with a sword in his back had a huge emotional response to me. There was just so much less building up to the moment and it lead to..... kinda a silly moment with him on the edge.
You can easily compare things and see flaws. Different doesn't mean bad, if different leads to a more effective scene that hits it's goals better. It's just sometimes it didn't.
I think stuff like President Shinra or presentation stuff like the music during Plate Fall is swings and roundabouts. Some people prefer the cinematic presentation of Remake, others prefer the presentation of OG. President Shinra, maybe because we were expecting a certain thing, it lost impact. I've seen some blind lets plays and they've reacted in utter shock to Sephiroth impaling the President in Remake. So, expectation maybe plays a role. I agree with comments about how him hanging over the edge of the building was a bit lame, its such a tired cliche. It felt straight out of a cookie cutter superhero movie set in New York.
One thing I would point out about Plate Fall and the blood issue, not that you're bringing this up specifically, but stuff I keep hearing people say.
Some people talk about Plate Fall like everyone was saved and nobody died, so its been minimalised. I think its important to point out that this is not the case. Reeves said the sector is home to 50,000 people, we would have saved what... a few hundred? Its small change, Aerith and Wedge saved people and thats great, but they were ultimately pissing in the wind. The scene clearly showed the plate falling on people in the slum too, so we didn't even manage to save all the people there, and the people on the upper plate would have been completely screwed, nobody to save them. One lets play/reaction video I saw pointed out that Jessies parents are dead, thats a whole family wiped out. The Shinra middle management employees are unaccounted for? There were loads of childrens bikes and things on the upper plate too, which are clearly there to paint a picture for whats to come. A lot of people don't seem to connect these little details.
I can argue cinematic approach, but that it was less severe? Not so much, we saved some people and thats wonderful, but compared to the amount who died, we did very little.
I feel more torn on the blood thing, on the one hand it adds a touch of realism to the scene. On the other hand, the presence of blood doesn't make it mature. Blood and gore != mature, otherwise hammer horrors would be mature, except they're not. If anything they're often the most immature films going. So, I feel on the fence about that one.
In a wider trade off though, I think Remake is generally more mature than OG across the board and isn't without its darker, more complicated content. People talk like they've transformed its tone into KH, this simply isn't the case and I think what people really mean is that it isn't "edgy" enough... in that "in your face edgy" kind of way. But OG wasn't *that* edgy or dark in the first place, I think because a lot of people were very young when they played it, it just felt that way.
Also, these days everything is smothered in gore, death and violence, every anime and its sister is trying to be grimdark and edgy. There is also a lot of insecurity with gamers where they feel like their content has to be really grim to be taken seriously, so it isn't labelled for kids. A lot of this I think stems from anime culture.
So in a way, we're at a point where it has to be Last of Us Part 2 to even feel edgy and serious in the first place. I look at that game and kinda feel like this is the end point for that kind of attitude towards games. Where being as edgy as possible in order to appear "adult" becomes a substitute for thoughful storytelling. And I'm not talking about edgy in the way a lot of the 'controversy' around that game revolves around, there is nothing edgy about lesbians, or female action heroes etc. these days. I mean the brutality and general quality of storytelling.
