The following will ignore the tech demo as well as the heavily hinted at remake at the end of Crisis Core. It will also ignore the constant stream of rumors. Instead, this entry will look at FFVII as one of the few chapters of Final Fantasy which deserves a remake.

Final Fantasy VII actually began it's life as a tech demo known as Final Fantasy 64. This is because the game's tech was showcasing the Ultra 64's capabilities. In this short demo, 3D flatshaded (goroud) characters took their turns dishing damage to a golem. In the CES where this was shown, Hiroshi Yamauchi, notorious for phrases like "Online gaming is a fad" publicly humiliated Square's efforts on that hardware despite it being a very basic demo using FFVI characters. Maybe it was this that drove Square into the arms of Sony or the fact that, while Square pushed for larger and larger RPGs (Chrono Trigger and FFVI are still among the largest SNES games), cartridges were struggling to keep up. Regardless, this tech demo displayed the graphical fidelity which would later be known as the "game map" characters. Simple, untextured, and very very basic. This is one style.

The battle versions of the characters, however, would be much more realistically proportioned and even have higher poly counts despite running the entire visuals in 3D. And the eyes of the characters featured something not done yet in any of Squares previous 3D efforts... actual textures. This art style is the much more noticable and striking. People don't remember Final Fantasy VII's box armed avatars from the world map. The Battle Engine characters were much more memorable.

The locations in FFVII were largely comprised of 3D rendered backgrounds and animation clips. Occasionally blending gameplay into the movies which played in the backgrounds though this was excessively rare. Regardless, the low detailed poly models inhabiting this space were a direct and offensive visual clusterfuck. It was literally watching two different games fighting for screen space.

The overmap, however, was actually fully 3D, and textured to boot. Most locations were represented by sprites or simplified models. And finally the models used outside of battle weren't glaringly simplified since they took up so little screen space. In a way, the Overworld map is the most visually consistant aspect of FFVII.

Certainly the visual discrepencies and contrasting art styles wouldn't bleed into the cutscenes, would it? Actually, yes. In many of the cutscenes, the SD variants of characters take a staring role but in most of them, the much more detailed versions show up. Cloud and Co also seem to randomly gain or lose accessories between cutscenes.

In other words, despite FFVII being largely considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time, the art style lacks a unified direction. FFVII is unique in the series in this regard so you have to ask, why only FFVII?

Well, as pointed out above, FFVII's roots stem from Ultra 64 and span the SNES add-on Playstation to the stand alone Playstation. So much of their assets were being created when the company basically didn't know what was and wasn't possible. And rather than test and keep a consistant style, FFVII's development was literally a visual exploration of Playstations capabilities. While this is fun and exciting to imagine an art staff constantly shifting direction and style all throughout development, FFI-VI didn't suffer from this. Likewise, FFVIII-XII had a consistant style. FFVII remains the enigma, the bastard stepchild, and ultimately the most deserving of a remake. Because while many FF games aren't aging, with each passing year, FFVII becomes more and more abrasive.

This, and this alone, make the case for an FFVII remake.