What you need to realize is that it is simultaneously both. Never forget the Japanese penchant for double entendre ever. The idea of 'remake' extends to the story and world as well. Cloud & Co are literally remaking the story as they go because fuck destiny. And in this sequel, the world was remade in a karmic cycle of rebirth. I actually think it's kinda brilliant.I wasn't happy with the bait and switch of promising a remake and delivering a sequel
I know KH gets used as slang for obtuse storytelling with lots of proper nouns and magical macguffins, but nothing in FF7R gets remotely confusing. I also feel like you're forgetting that FF7 is originally, inherently, a story at its core, about a guy who gets amnesia and thinks he's his friend, because he almost died killing his idol, who went insane because he learned he was part monster, and decided to go on a rampage, and he came back from the dead and killed your girlfriend and is trying to destroy the planet with a summon spell, only for the spirit of the planet and your dead girlfriend stop it all in the end, and did your party survive? Who knows? Like, obtuse storytelling was FF7's M.O. well before Nomura was allowed to touch the writing/plotting in games. And all reports indicate from the devs that Nomura's main point of emphasis on the FF7R project was rigorous adherence to the original game and not letting the story get too out-of-hand/deviate from the original - despite the rest of the project's creative leads wanting to change things up even more than what we eventually got, so this weird narrative of Nomura Bad is just funny to keep observing.it was the perceived quality of the resulting changes that were my bigger issue. The whole thing was painful to watch and play in those moments, genuinely as awful as the worst of KH's excesses
Red XIII was in so little of the scenario for FF7R that from a development standpoint it really didn't make sense to flesh out his combat mechanics and have players learn a whole new set of mechanics right before the final boss. Modders long ago tweaked the game to make Red XIII playable, and he has a full combat move-set so the devs are working on getting him up and running, Red XIII just lacks all the special attacks, combos, special animations for Frog, etc that would make him a full character in FF7R's combat system.Thinking about it practically it makes sense. If you didn't want to make new character to team up with Yuffie, the most logical one would be Cait Sith as a man on the inside for the operation, but animating a cartoonish cat riding a big moogle like creature would have been more effort than just making a new human character tailored to what was needed for the 5-6 sidequest.
The Yuffie DLC makes a lot more sense when you realize it's basically just a beta test to iron out how Yuffie's combat would work in the next game. I get the feeling Cait Sith might not be a playable character in the next game, or maybe even ever because of how goofy/discordant he is with the tone of FF7R. Maybe he'll be like a support character or something. But regardless, Yuffie's OC-do-not-steal friend in her DLC also makes more sense when you look at things from a development standpoint. Remember, Cid is a polearm user, and I'll bet good money that Cid's combat style is going to look a lot like Sonon's. It'll be interesting to compare combat animations whenever the sequel comes out because I figure they'll even lift whole animations from Sonon for Cid.