You can see the banner ad now, a huge picture of Cloud, wan and moody against Midgar's grimy neon skyline. "Pre-order for early access to the 'Aeris Lives' expansion!" I jest of course, perhaps because mild amusement is the only appropriate reaction to the mating dance currently happening between Japanese publisher Square Enix and a vocal-but-how-many-are-there-really section of its devoted fanbase.

In June Square Enix announced a full-scale remake of the much-beloved Final Fantasy VII—a game released on the PlayStation in 1997—and lo there was much rejoicing. But devoted fans are never happy for long, and the recent forum-shattering news that FFVII Remake will be an "episodic" game brought such blowback that Yoshinori Kitase, director of the original and producer of the remake, had to issue a calming blogpost.

What Kitase said, and what Square Enix wants people to understand, is that FFVII Remake will be nothing like the original FFVII. In some ways, you can understand the confusion, but those expecting a 20-year-old videogame to translate even partially into the modern era are delusional.

This is not to denigrate FFVII, merely to say that it is a game which must be considered in and of its time. It is impossible to divorce from its context. FFVII was not just a great RPG, and a brilliant leap from 2D to 3D by SquareSoft, but one of the first videogames to have a marketing budget that could reach primetime at the same moment Sony was cracking into the mainstream. A much-repeated rumour has it that FFVII was one of the most-returned PlayStation titles in stores, thanks mainly to people buying it on the strength of a lush CG-led advertising campaign, then being put in control of squat polygonal figures. This was a defining title for the PlayStation, Square and the future of RPGs—and not always in a good way.

A design for the '90s

Every part of FFVII's design was a result of the pros and cons of the PlayStation and its CD-ROM storage, and nothing exemplifies this better than the three distinct visual styles it smooshes together. The game's locations were lavishly-rendered backdrops, featuring incredible detail and in some cases CG animations, which were navigated isometrically by 3D models. This character style had thematic benefits, not least in harking back to the childlike "chibi" style of 16-bit Final Fantasy games, and the basic utility of being distinct at various sizes on the maps.

The battle character models were different, with more realistic proportions and a greater level of detail, but combat didn't have the pre-rendered backgrounds. Then there was a full-scale blowout on FMV sequences, around 40-minutes of which are in the game, and even within these the style switches between the more realistic models and chibi representations of the characters.

SquareSoft's developers just about managed to get away with the transitions between these three styles, but the result is that FFVII's tone oscillates wildly. One question about the remake is whether a scene featuring Cloud cross-dressing in order to manipulate his way into a gangster mob will make the cut. In the original game this is a light and funny scene with simple 3D models, but in a realistic style it would require a more sensitive touch. Or there are entire characters like Cait Sith—a giant stuffed toy operated by a cat—that act as comic relief, before later driving some of the game's most affecting scenes. It's hard to see how such a wildly strange creature will fit the more realistic visual style without a significant overhaul, but then would it be Cait Sith?

Much of the world's tone comes from FFVII's roots in 8- and 16-bit RPGs and, more importantly, the tried-and-trusted techniques of its creators. Final Fantasy has always told stories with high stakes and fruity dialogue—something that series detractors characterise as overly melodramatic, but which I see as a storytelling technique born out of restrictions unimaginable in the modern age of videogames.

Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the series and hands-on producer of FFVII, began making RPGs on 8-bit hardware, as did director Yoshinori Kitase and co-writer Kazushige Nojima. All had to tell stories through the mouths of characters that were almost abstract in appearance, in worlds built around frequent combat, for players that would be dipping in and out. Thus the earlier Final Fantasy games have grandiose and sometimes gut-punching narratives, but always with characters painted in broad emotional strokes. Look at how they always have an overt goal or motivation that will be called out at periodic intervals before eventually being fulfilled, or lost.

A fork in the road—and no going back

Final Fantasy was not the first Japanese-made RPG but it is arguably the most pioneering series, and so as the genre has grown so too have its earlier designs been superseded in technique. FFVII represented both the high point for the series' storytelling, combining it with the latest audio and visual technology, and a fork in the road—SquareSoft would pursue a more realistic aesthetic style for FFVIII, and attempt to build a script around the silent hero's inner monologue, while Sakaguchi would pursue CG to the bitter end with his film The Spirits Within. FFVII is an embodiment of this transition: a game that's comfortable with its internal contradictions, and is almost entirely defined by them.

This is one of those hard-to-grasp, yet absolutely crucial elements the Remake has no chance of recapturing, through no fault of its own. Even if it was a totally faithful remake, like Gus van Sant's shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho, it couldn't do that. What FFVII is to many people is inextricably bound-up in 1997, or the time and place they first played it, and just how unusual and rich the game felt at that time. As well as being fun it was sophisticated and fresh, while modern irritations like random battles were one of those things you were happy to tolerate.

Perhaps this is what the fans really want back: a time when Japanese-made RPGs ruled the Earth, or seemed to. Time and place are the most insurmountable problems facing the remake, and the new aesthetics and the unavoidable shift in tone are the most visible symptoms. The trailers for FFVII Remake show a beautifully rendered world with a much more realistic style of character design, and so there are issues with the original game's icons: Cloud's buster sword looks so large as to be impractical, making his arms seem like noodles, while Barratt's chaingun arm (which is fine on a cartoon character) just looks like Blade fanart.

This is an inevitable result of the move from low-resolution polygon characters towards extremely detailed 3D models. There is much less imaginative space for the player, and designers have nowhere to hide: characters that have humanoid proportions, detailed facial expressions and voiced dialogue don't leave much to the imagination. It is not that either style is better, which is down to the implementation, but simply that they are incompatible.