Ammunition doesn't even exist as a game element in VII so that isn't really a valid justifacation for prefer a sword over a gun. You kinda just proved my actual point, which is that VII really glosses over realistic technicalities of combat. Nothing is fatal unless the plot dictates it, nothing runs out unless it's built into the gameplay. The strength of a gun shouldn't factor into Vincent or Barret's combat abilities either, never mind their unending ammo supplies. .
By that logic guns make even less sense, because they only do a set amount of damage in combat, as a game-play element. They hardly do damage at all for the most part.
Clearly, the guns in FFVII uses ammunition. You can see Barret throw casing around in his victory animation. Several prerendered backgrounds feature bullets.
(in terms of the remake this is made even more obvious by the fact that Biggs has actually ammo magazines strapped to his soldiers, and that every machinegun you see wielded by Shinra Grunts have the curved AK type magazines as well)
Point is, FFVII is a video-game. Most of what goes on in the game-play are abstractions and not meant to be used to derive any kind of firm idea of what actually is going on in the plot, or how the world actually work, or what is true for the lore. Gameplay sections of games are almost without except ambiguous.
My point is that from a lore perspective, it's completely reasonable to assume that guns
A.) function using ammunition, and that
B.) magic and make enhancements feature as counter-measures to conventional fire-arms based combat.
What is not reasonable to assume is that it totally doesn't make sense for people to use swords in a world due to conventional thinking about swords and firearms, in a fantasy setting with magic present.
The reason I brought up the second part about magic, was simply to illustrate the folly of pursuing the reasoning you did in the first place.
Because rules in these kind of games and stories are inconsistent to begin with. You can't expect consistency -
however, neither does it make sense to think therefore everything is absurd and any appeal to logic within such a story is therefore null and void.
And in obeying the game logic, not everyone can use magic effectively, just like not everyone can be a physical power house or a sharpshooter. So even then, magic is not an automatic preference to a weapon if you don't have the superior magical abilities. The game's own logic about materia being ancient knowledge, and the meta-lore that it requires a mental shock goes right out the window when an animatronic like Cait Sith can use magic just as easily as a being with a real biological mind and spirit
It's all a pointless thought process. The game exists by RPG logic when it comes to anything combat oriented. So again, putting in an entirely new aesthetic element to a character for such an obscure reason that flies against RPG logic seems really...silly? Why put this particularly realistic, and mundane concept into the game over so many other glaringly unrealistic elements?.
The thing is that this charaterisation isn't fair to what the game is, or what any game is - or any fantasy story for that matter. By this logic a game might as well be completely absurd. Or rather, either they'd have to be fully on one side of the fence or the other, it would seem.
Most games are not. They skirt lines.
Just because a game isn't 100% realistic all the time, does not somehow invalidate the choice to have some level of realism in certain instances, nor make it unreasonable.
My money is still on it being a narrative tool. You could argue that every character is hiding something on or about themselves in the original game, and the remake may be running with that theme.
The one does not preclude the other.
I'd just remind people to remember the multiple times in interviews Kitase and Nomura have been stressing realism for this game.
Let's not forget that this is the project where they decided to go out of their way make Cloud look gaunt and sickly because of a plot-point that won't be revealed until past the half-way point of the game.
Personally, I don't expect that the inclussion of glasses will be mentioned much at all.
I just imagine that during the design process, Nomura thought, "what makes a more realistic Barret?", did some research on fire-arms usage and decided to give Barret sun-glasses, but that this, of course, will never come up in the actual game.
When I posited, way back when, that it might be something he wears to decrease influence on night-time vision from the muzzle-flash of his gun-arm, I did not posit that to say that this was going to be some sort of facet of the in-game lore.
I posited that simply to say that this might have been a reason for deciding to give him the sun-glasses on the development end of things.
