Wishful thinking:
Maybe the daylight shots are from the ending, after meteor, in a new, re-built Midgard.
I don't like to speculate like this, but I kinda agree with you. Post-meteor Midgar makes most sense.
Yeah. It's just kinda sad that a rebuilt post-Midgard makes little to no sense with the original narrative - not only due to practical concerns,
and the Nanaki scene at the end of the original game, but because even if it were to happen it would not happen while the cast
was still young, or perhaps even alive. Rebuilding the wreck of Midgard without proper power, after the impact of the meteor would take decades at least.
A reboot/reimagining of FF7 is what I hope for. Not a continuation of the trainwreck FF7 expanded universe. I saw a video on youtube just some hours ago ("top 5 I want to see in FF7R" or something like that) where the guy talking wanted the CC characters in the remake... The horror... I have also seen this in other channels/forums/etc. "I hope they bring X character in", "I hope they continue into the AC story"... Now, I don't mind new characters/storyline as long as it's done good (whatever that is lol). Most of the expanded universe characters though have a certain fecapalm-otaku appeal value to them that I'm sick of. Does that make sense?
I think you makee perfect sense. The extended universe products were all made without the same team as the original game, and they were
made much the same way as fan-fiction - not with regards for what would make sense with the original narrative, but with the intent of satisfying delirious fan expectations and desires. It's essentially glorified fan-fiction rendered into canon by having the label attached to it.
Non of the spin-off products make sense in and of themselves. They butchered the art-style of the original, and the added multiple new and needless layers of contrived BS and plot-holes.
The correct way to address that in a remake is obviously not to go way out of your way to force these products to make sense together,
which will invariably necessitate more contrived and ridiculous plot-bending, but to ditch them all together and treat the remake as an entirely new and stand-alone product. Tie-ins make even less sense from a marketing perspective, since a lot of the new potential players of the remake won't have played the spin-offs and therefore won't understand and get confused by the tie-ins unless they are self-contained and self-explanatory - which they probably won't be given time and resource limitations.
Some things to fix from the top of my head:
Cait Sith. Dat effin bastard. I wouldn't mind it that much if IT actually died in the temple of the Ancients, and did not return. Ever. Reeve could get other means to communicate with Cloud & co.
Many cut-scenes after Midgard could use some more meat. At certain points in the game the cutscene vs gameplay ratio is a bit off imo.
Yuffie's side story feels like fanservice. The turks and the don is too conveniently there. Not terrible by any means, but could also be done a lot better.
If only I had control over the remake
There's a lot of stuff you could "fix" in FF7, but non of it necessary in a sense - and all of it a potential disaster.
Enter anti-SE rant-mode -
People seem to forget that FF7 was essentially a silly 90's anime game.
Half of the plot was absurd - such as the entire Shinra HQ infiltration, which is hilariously weird. Or Cloud and Co sneaking across the ocean in the Shinra Boat, where the crew ended up being massacred by Jenova, yet walking off the boat all casual-like with no consequences what so ever.
Or Rufus going out of his way to commandeer the Tiny Bronco, a tiny, personal air-craft that serves no purpose to Rufus what so ever that can't be covered by the fleet of cargo helicopters stationed at Junon, or an Airship.
Point is that, most of the time, nobody cared about these scenes, or even noticed how absurd they were - because guess what? The entire game is pretty far out there, and you're invited to relish in the camp and the sheer joy of the experience rather than waste time nit-picking details pertaining to universe-logic etc. which essentially bear no real impact on the important notes of the plot to begin with (which would be Cloud's existential journey, and the themes dealing with loss and human's relationship with the planet).
It's an ephemeral and visceral experience, more so than a realistic, and logical one.
It's a story portrayed in glorious "I'm high on LSD"-like graphics with unnatural and impossible architecture, super-saturated color-palette, with weird and nonsensical characters fighting weird and nonsensical enemies (like a house morphing into a killer robot, or a giant revolver firing rockets). FF7 did not give to fvcks about anything or anyone. It was a trip, and it was a trippy one at that.
The compilation, and the remake (judging by the art-style) is fundamentally incongruent with the original, and that's why they all end up feeling really, really weird and bad. The style and narrative of FF7 was never intended to make sense in the way that we demand realistic/semi-realistically styled media to be.
It essentially flew under the radar in the same way that children's cartoons, and fairy-tales do. Remove that, and then suddenly all the absurdities became readily apparent and jarring as hell.
The more you try to make sense of it, the more contrived and corny it becomes, which is why all the spin-offs (and most likely the remake) end up feeling stupid, contrived and melodramatic.
FF7 is not, and never will be realistic, nor a logically coherent game. Trying to make it into such, instead of simply embracing the fact that it isn't and running with it, invites more and more issues down the road in production.
This is another reason I am so apprehensive of the remake - I don't think Nomura, Nojima and Kitase get this anymore. In fact, I think this ephemeral, fairy-tale quality to FF games was solely the result of the creative out-put of Sakagachi, because you still see it present in his post-Squaresoft games, yet non of it in SE FF games.
Nomura, Kitase, Nojima and the rest of the major FF creators in SE, have their heads too far up their own narcissistic asses to see that the stuff they design just reeks of bad fan-fiction.
The stuff they now design, is the game-development and artistic equivalence of the user-names that early teens pick for their characters in their first MMOs because they think it's "kewl" (XxOneWingedUchihaSasukexX etc. and similar manure).
Camp and childish fairy-tale elements was the saving grace of FF, and it always has been - because it's still a fact that most people who write and do creative design for games are immature and amateurish in the grander scheme of writing, musical composition, and visual design.
Accept that fact and embracing it leads to quality camp which is good in its own right. Not accepting and embracing that leads to pretentious post-Matrix BS.
No Nojima, you are no Shakespear, and no Nomura, you are no Leonardo Da Vinci and no everyone, FF7 is not the video-game equivalence of Citizen Kane.
If anything, FF7 is the video-game equivalence of the original Star Wars, and the reason the spin-offs suck are the same the reasons the Star Wars prequels suck in comparison to the original trilogy.
Rant over.
Seriously though - If I had creative control over this game, the first thing I'd do is have the entire game stylized using a cell-shaded graphical solution keeping 100% true to the style of the original, finished cast drawings. Then I'd throw all the compilation stuff in the garbage.
By doing that, I'd literally solve pretty much every stylistic and plot-related problem that could ever possibly manifest itself from the very get-go.
Seriously though - fvck you SE for going with that quasi photo-realistic style which will inevitably lead to you butchering most of the memorable moments and scenes of the game in favor of post mid-2000's melodramatic and cringe-worthy cinematography and writing.
GG.
I actually had an idea around how to influence Square Enix to make the remake in the way the fans would want them to.
The basic idea is a "pledge" website where fans pool their money to voice their opinions and pledge their money to SE if they design the remake according to their desires. For most practical purposes, the fan's money is not just a donation to SE, it's basically used to buy the game. The website is owned by an organization that acts as mediator between the fans and SE. If SE makes the game according to how the fans want it, they get the money (and the fans get the FF7R game), otherwise the fans get their money back, and possibly pledge not to buy the game or give SE any money.
Actually it's more complex than this; fans can divide their money according to different features, instead of all-or-nothing; SE might have an agreement with the mediating company to give fans a discount on the game; there needs to be specific criteria to determine if the fans got what they wanted; and lots of other logistical challenges. But, this could radically change the way remakes are done, in general, for all art forms (games, movies, etc.).
A couple of other problems I see with this are: (1) the remaker has more incentive to satisfy as many fans as possible to get the most money, which might actually not be a good thing, but then again they can always choose to design for a smaller crowd and be more special that way; (2) people with more money will have more influence, which isn't necessarily fair, although the fans will tend to be older and make more money, so this tends to be biased towards older fans, which is a good thing, for the older fans. (3) the fan's pledges and opinions need to be collected very early during development, early enough to actually be able to influence how SE makes the game. (4) Lots of other logistical challenges like this...
Anyway... Anyone wanna help me build this company and website? there's lots of other cool ideas related to this, like a system that's smart and continually learns about which different aspects of the game fans are interested in, etc.
That's probably not going to work. Firstly, you'd have to convince SE to play on board with this, and that's just not going to happen for more reasons than I care to elaborate on here.
Secondly, the majority of the people who'll end up buying this game, won't be original fans - certainly not purist fans of the original title.
SE will not change game-play- or story-design choices based on a small, albeit paying group of people when they have a marketing and research department telling them what design-choices the ought to go with to appeal to a wider audience to begin with.
Your idea assumes that the group of people who happen to stumble across your site, and make pledges on it will be a significant and representative enough group for it to be a group worth listening to - and that assumption is very difficult to justify, especially
in relation to a game like a complete HD remake of FF7.
The production costs of such a game is going to demand Call of Duty/GTA/Witcher level sales in order to justify its production at all.
How ever do you plan to make it so that the people drawn to your site will represent the advocates for changes that will steer the game in the direction of attaining such sales?
What makes you think SE will trust the opinions of these people on your site, more so than their own research department?