>>723786357
I think there's also a factor of people's love of FF7 being exploited by Square Enix and Sony for 20 years (especially by dangling a carrot with that PS3 tech demo) reaching a breaking point. Having something they've wanted since the PS2 era finally come out and end up being an intentionally deceptive and whiny hate-letter was the 2000-lb straw that finally broke the camel's back. It didn't help that Remake also didn't even cover all of Disc One (people forget that Square Enix was also quiet about just how little of the original game's scope was being covered in Remake).
FF7 should've been the last game to purposely fuck around with massively, especially at the time since the non-MMO side of the franchise has really needed a shot in the arm for a long time. A more true-to-form FF7R should've been SE's way to remind veterans and show newcomers why so many fell in love with the IP in the first place. Instead, it's spoiled boomer creative leads decided that 7 being more enduring than later games was a fate worse than death and something the fans of it simply needed to be punished for with expensive selfish art therapy.
Speaking purely out of business tactics, it was fucking retarded of them to make it a subversive "fuck you" AND splitting it up into multiple parts over multiple console gens. Sure, they tricked like 7 million people into buying R1, but then PS5 Intergrade was a colossal bomb (even by add-on/upgrade standards) and R2 fell very short of R1's sales. Everyone knew what the catch was after R1 came out, and it wasn't compelling enough to keep most people hooked.
