Shamus Young's Experience Points Article, In Defense of Reboots.
You know, the thing is, "Final Fantasy" is like the ideal compromise: it's a "franchise" that allows the owners to build a brand and a customer base,
without actually tying themselves to rehashing the same IP over and over again.
I played seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve, and tactics; I got like a third of the way into six
If "Final Fantasy" is going to have something like a running theme, it's the the main character is a kid in their late teens that has an identity crisis related to magic bullshit:
6) Terra found out she wasn't a human but a kidnapped, polymorphed Esper or somethin',
7) Cloud found out his personality had been accidentally replaced when he was Hojo's lab specimen,
8) Squall found out his dad abandoned him to an orphanage that was run by the guy who ran a mercenary company of child soldiers but
wasn't the big bad guy (seriously "Cid isn't secretly evil" was the biggest twist I got out of 8),
9) Zidane was an amnesiac front-line infiltrator for an alien invasion,
10) Tidus was a simulated person from the ghost world who was gonna disappear when the ghost server shut down when you beat the Big Bad,
12) and 12 broke the chain, 'cause Vaan was just the bus driver; I still thought he was interesting 'cause he was supposed to be the naive dumb kid but he was the only one who could reliably judo the shit out of other characters in conversation, just say a few words and suddenly they're on the ground going "what just happened", but he never actually had a big twist where we found out that he was a failed attempt to create a host/puppet for those weird Alien Overlord thingies.
I heard 13 was boring and none of the characters seemed that interesting, so I got away from it. Also, as near as I can tell, it was some complicated political nonsense involving revenge for a character who died off-screen, pre-game, and thus somebody that nobody in the audience cared about; none of the characters found out that they're secretly an artificial personality keeping a spare clone body for the Imperial Prince warm, in case he needs a new one if he ever got atomized.
But that magical identity crises is important, because it allows the story to be a metaphor for growing up and changing who you are as a person, which will really speak to the teenagers who are notionally the target audience, but the Magic Shenanigans make it dramatic and different enough to support a big story without it just being cheap teen melodrama.
I guess one problem with a FF7 remake is, the first thing that bothers me, all the media that they've created since then has forgotten that
these people are bugfuck crazy. They're not going to get Gary Busey to voice Sepharoph, even though it fits so good. It will be too many soft-spoken bishounen, and not enough screaming about feeding the Planet to Mother while floating in the air, and then chucking tentacle monsters at the party to cover his exit while he flies away, spinning like a top.
But the biggest problem is, I don't want to hear Cloud's story again. I want Square to get back to the basics: make up a ridiculous science-fantasy identity crises for the main character to slowly discover, and then build the rest of the story around that: make a setting that enables that and so on.
The whole point of Final Fantasy is, it's not
sequels, it's a
franchise.
Well, that's what I would do if the Sony CEO lost a stupid bet and now he had to have me be the lead scenario writer or whatever: come up with an over-the-top identity crises related to magic, and then build the game around making that happen.