I would guess they are even moreso. Keep in mind, Final Fantasy XIII was very well received in Japan, by critics and audiences alike. The country has, in general, a focus on more story-driven and less-gameplay driven games than the west, as far as I can tell.
Yes and no. The Japanese gaming industry is also what gave us Super Mario, Sonic, Mega-man and the Souls Series.
If anything, there is a strong divide in the industry and the gamers in regards to what games should play like depending on
preferences.
Also, we should be careful about generalizing based on this article though, because the sample selection of the poll is very unlikely to say anything of substance about the fans in general - I've seen plenty of comments on articles about the remake at famitsu that mirrors the general opinion of people like DLPB as well. But, I was guilty of that with my comment in either case, but I was tired when I wrote it, so there's that.
In any case, if it's so that the Japanese fans of FF at this point care more about Aerith revival than anything else, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Japanese fans care more about narrative structure than game-play concerning the remake as a whole - it might simply mean that the range of FF7 fans at this moment, as I said, are actually percentage-wise mostly compilation fans rather than fans of the original game, and because the compilation is dominated by a movie, a novel(s), and a few action games it makes sense that they wouldn't much of an attachment to the set-up or design of the original game.
The "problem" with FF (and arguably what made it so popular across countries and cultures to begin with) is that it's always been standing in the middle of that divide delivering strong character and story driven experiences with a lot of game-play to boot.
Lately though, it's been shifting more and more towards the "cinematic" game approach - which is, unfortunately, I believe largely due to the fact that the Japanese market is moving more and more away from games that demand a lot of engagement and time from the players (because the average Japanese person above elementary school simply don't have all that much time to game, except on the go), and because the technology (and I would argue humans - because even if the game supported AC style combat, how would you control that stuff and keep up with the enemy A.I?) still doesn't allow games to play like what Advent Children look like, which is essentially the type of action a lot of FF fans have come to expect from the franchise after the release of that movie.
FF as a franchise has shot itself in the foot in many ways.
It's lost to the times, social pressures and economical pressures, and what we're left with is products that are to JRPGs what Call of Duty is to the FPS genre.
They're not horrible games by any account. Plenty of people buy and enjoy them - but they're not groundbreaking or top of the line either, which is problematic for most old-school fans of the series who've fallen pray to the inevitable rule of diminishing returns.
Sure, if I hadn't played every single FF title ever released, and pretty much every JRPG ever made for SNES, PS1 and PS2 era (not an overstatement - I mean really.), then FF13 might have been a really good experience.
As it is, keep subtracting the things the made the older games great, whilst not adding enough new to compensate - making them bland and uninteresting experiences of rehashed material in a shiny wrapping with one or two original game-play elements that aren't particularly good, or even needed, to begin with.
I think voice acting is a big no-no because everyone had their own idea about what each character sounded like and you could imagine things that weren't shown due to the limitations of the console. But to show full HD characters, with voice, takes away some of what made the original game great - your own imagination.
I would agree with this if the rest of the compilation hadn't been using voice acting since the release of Advent Children way back when.
For most people, Cloud and Co already had their voices defined at that point - and as the saying goes "what has been seen (or in this case, heard) cannot be unseen."
Thankfully, my first viewing of AC was in Japanese, and those voice actors fit pretty decently with my conception of the character voices (with the exception of Barret of course, because his voice was always definitely African-American sounding in my head).
Another point I think that people don't realize, from a scientific point of view, is that the mind doesn't actually (as is physically incapable of) conceptualizing voices in your head that aren't ambiguous. You don't actually hear voices in your head when you read - you conceptualize and abstraction based on experiences and memories, that manifest much the same way as a memory of a long-since passed event etc. I.E it's fundamentally ambiguous and abstract.
Whatever you or others think Cloud sounds like in your head does not actually translate into actual sound. It's just like a foggy/false memory and it cannot actually be accurately replicated. There is a whole range of Cloud voices that probably fits your conception of Cloud's voice, but you won't be able to actually peg that down until it's right there in front of you, although you might think to yourself right now that you can.
That being said, a voice can still end up being outside of that range, and as such, end up being a disappointment. But, the fact of the matter is that voices are largely products of physical traits that are, to a certain degree, fairly predictable - and it's the experiences you've had with speech that determines your expectations to what a person will sound like when they speak, which furthermore is pretty uniform among humans in general.
So, the range of voices that fit Barrets, for instance, is pretty given and not very hard to realize in a way that will fit with most people's conceptions of what a large, muscular black person raised in a ghetto would sound like.
I would actually say it takes a special kind of person to get Barret's voice wrong, or to imagine Barret's voice in such a way that it conflicts with what most other people would conceive of it as.
It didn't bother me with FFX because we got introduced to it that way, but with FF7 I am not so sure it's a wise move. And that's before we get on to what Hian mentioned with the cutbacks in other departments to compensate. Disc storage shouldn't be an issue if they compress the audio properly. They absolutely did not do that with Metal Gear Solid 4. off course, they could allow you to turn the VA off... but will they?
Compression can only do so much if you want to keep the quality of your audio intact though, and it's going to go into the disk with all the graphical resources etc. Looking at the whole of it - will they have space to squander on NPC voices?
There is another point to be made though, from a stylistic perspective - How would non voice-acted scenes look with the current graphical quality? I'd imagine it would look kind of absurd to see a bunch of semi-photo-realistic people standing in a circle, moving their lips (or worse - not moving them and just staring at each other silently) with no sound, and the dialogue appearing in text-boxes.
Just a few thoughts.
Still agree that cutting content, dialogue/exposition perhaps most of all, would be damaging to the experience.
You don't walk into a remake expecting less than the original - you walk into it expecting more.
