My post will be kind of harsh, but realistic. Assuming it's a fan project it's already doomed in the moment you posted it. Why? Couse it's just an idea and not even deeply thought, ideas die fast if people doesn't get paid for it or if they don't join seeing that it have arms and legs and is already started. Sure if you ever worked about any commercial product you can think somebody that just know a little bit about everything can be project leader, can start it or whatever. Fanmade stuff is light years far from that. If you don't show a skill in doing something yourself nobody will really give part of his life to make your dreams/visions come true. You don't give any work from self other than spending some time on google in excitement after you probably got excited with similar project with the difference it didn't had your dream story/characters etc.
Didn't come up with it based on anything I saw anywhere else, a number of different things actually sparked the idea, number one being the amount of boredom due to, in my opinion, a lack of worthwhile games being released currently. There are several other reasons I thought about this to begin with, which I won't go into detail here.
Modding a game is something that's on the edge of legality and all depends how company which have rights to it will look at the project. Idea of a completely new game, on different engine and what's worst based on FFVII isn't even modding anymore and more it hits value of Square brand, and most likely will be instantly considered by them as illegal nevermind protections you could use. There were similar projects when people taken characters/story from one thing and tried to make a remake at other game engine. Just look at Quake3A mod which started as DBZ mod, pretty soon, before even finishing their work, they needed to abandon all DBZ related stuff ending with something completely different.
There are several games out there which have fan-made "mods" for other games and anime, in fact the DBZ community has countless recreations over several game engines, complete with custom models that recreate it in good quality. In fact, there is one game engine that I think would work perfectly, properly modified of course, with a DBZ theme. That would be the game engine used for the IronMan PC games.
Using new graphic engine to show copyrighted characters is a NO-NO as it makes the company loosing money, shows people that they can wait for freeware instead of buying new original creations of company which owns copyright and even if you could make it somehow legal, they would put you down one way or another. Just going to the court with it would be nothing for them if they could gain by stopping you, your private budget would pretty much die taking off the project very fast soo think over it a few times before you get some more briliant ideas. In other words there are two things you must always consider whose toes you wanna stand on and how much you weight. In this case althrough company is big we can assume owners are japanese which makes their feet very small leaving those toes very sensitive and pretty much anything big enough will be a pain they'll kick off and make sure it doesn't return.
Again, this has already been done with countless "mod" projects and custom models over various different platforms. S-E would lose no money as none of it is "official" in any way, and any remake they might do (even though they say they won't be doing any) would be, more then likely, different then the custom fan made models done.
You should surely read at least once this sticky topic:
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8759.0
If you think it's not your case couse your idea is something else, read again, and again untill you understand Halkun's words from this topic trully and understand that this idea shouldn't leave your head or at least leave it in other place as such project here would be risky for whole FFVII modding community.
That talks about the ripping of models and the use of "content not your own". In the case of this possible project, all materials used would be custom made, not ripped models. The only thing that would be directly "reused" from the original would be the story itself, retold in a different way. I've read that sticky several times, if you notice I'm not new to the forums, and before I registered I did "lurk" the forums for quite some time before I found a need to voice any of my own comments, I actually remember when that rule was put in place, and was done so because of the discussing of ripping Crisis Core models into Final Fantasy VII, which not only requires the hacking of the PSP, but also the deconstruction and reverse engineering of a new game engine created by S-E. As stated in that rule, the use of complete custom models based on the looks from other games is still allowed.
Don't get me wrong idea isn't stupid, but it's far from briliant as most people here thought about something like that at least once, but even optimist wouldn't start anything alike looking at some of examples Square shown in the past. If you really want/must learn it the hard way, feel free to try, just make sure you don't risk this modding community with your ambitions. In other words, I would politely ask you to do it somewhere else. >.>
I know that it is more then likely not the best idea for a game, the idea I had for a playstyle of this remake would be most aptly described as a TPS/RPG like Dirge of Cerberus was, but a bit more advanced in the options, allowing you the equipment and materia options available in the original (complete with summons) but in a real-time style. I, personally, think it would be awesome to play the FFVII game in such a playstyle, which is the reason for the idea. This is the kind of feedback I was looking for more then the issue of legalities.
As far as taking the discussion elsewhere, if the moderators think that my idea and the discussion of such in any way jeopardizes the rest of the operations here then they are free to give me their own C&D and delete the posts. Not trying to sound mean here, we're all entitled to our own opinions, and I respect everyone and their own opinions. The modding community is certainly one that can't afford to be naive about legalities, though what I'm envisioning wouldn't be any more dangerous then a combination of the Q-Gears and the new Avalanche Project (more specifically, the bombing mission), which would be updated graphics on a new game engine. Only differences between those two projects combined and what I'm attempting to do is, Q-Gears requires reverse engineering FFVII (HUGE no-no in the programming world), and my own idea would be a rework of the original story into a different game style.
EDIT: Just realized, after all these posts, that I miss clicked when doing my original post, was intended to be posted in the General section instead of here, if a mod would be willing to move this over there, give the go ahead to continue here or give a C&D, it would be much appreciated.