I've followed the instructions on the Remako site, I even made a clean install of FFVII on Steam to be on the safe side, but it doesn't work. The game starts up as normal and there are no changes other than the movies being in better quality (since the original files themselves have been replaced, that's inevitable). I've also installed other mods like ones that change the character models and they're not showing up either. All mods have been activated, it's not like I just installed them and forgot to activate them which I'd guess might be one obvious cause. The game isn't installed in program files, I've followed the load order guide on this site.
Edit: I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the FF7 converter. Now when I try to do it, it says "could not find any languages". I've copy-pasted the directory and put speech marks around it, so I'm not sure what's wrong with that. When I first ran the program it apparently worked without errors, but maybe there was an error it didn't detect/display, and the converter didn't work in the first place (although it did ostensibly work, taking me to the config page).
Edit: The saga continues. Another clean install, got it working this time. The Remako upgraded backgrounds worked as did the improved field models. Then the game crashed upon loading Barret's initial dialogue to Cloud on the train platform (well that's what I assume anyway, it had Barret looking at Cloud then the game froze). Here's the log.
[00000000] INFO: FF7/FF8 OpenGL driver version 0.8.1b
[00000000] INFO: Auto-detected version: FF7 1.02 US English
[00000000] INFO: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GTX 970/PCIe/SSE2 4.6.0 NVIDIA 430.86
[00000000] INFO: OpenGL 2.0 support detected
[00000000] INFO: Found swap_control extension
[00000000] INFO: Max texture size: 16384x16384
[00000000] INFO: Original resolution 640x480, window size 3840x2160, output resolution 2880x2160, internal resolution 3840x2160
[00000000] INFO: Shader limits: varying 124, vert uniform 4096, frag uniform 4096
[00000000] INFO: postprocessing program link log:
Fragment info
-------------
0(133) : warning C7050: "refractedColor.w" might be used before being initialized
[00000000] INFO: FFMpeg movie player plugin loaded
[00000000] INFO: FFMpeg version SVN-r25886, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
[00000000] INFO: VGMStream music plugin loaded
[00000000] INFO: Loading external library Multi.dll
[00000000] LOCK UNLOCK TEST
[00000001] MATRIX INITIALIZE
[00000001] INITIALIZE DD/D3D END
[00000001] initializing sound...
[00000001] creating dsound primary buffer
[00000001] reading audio file
[00000001] loading static sounds
[00000001] sound initialized
[00000001] set music volume: 127
[00000001] set music volume: 127
[00000001] Entering MAIN
[00000001] Exiting MAIN
[00000001] START OF CREDITS!!!
[00000001] INFO: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\data\movies\eidoslogo.avi; h264/pcm_s16le 1280x960, 30.000300 FPS, duration: 11.133222, frames: 334
[00000077] set music volume trans: 127->0, step=60
[00000142] END OF CREDITS!!!
[00000142] Entering MAIN
[00000142] set music volume: 127
[00000142] Exiting MAIN
[00000142] START OF MENU SYSTEM!!!
[00000562] END OF MENU SYSTEM!!!
[00000562] Entering MAIN
[00000566] Exiting MAIN
[00000566] Field Start
[00000567] INFO: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\data\movies\opening.avi; h264/pcm_s16le 1280x896, 15.000200 FPS, duration: 119.465074, frames: 1792
[00002842] ERROR: unhandled exception