See this is exactly the thing I was talking about earlier.. The two games they've put out so far aren't perfect, they both get weird in their last 5%, but everything else about them far, FAR exceeds the original in every possible aspect. The characters are leaps and bounds ahead of their original paper-thin versions (which to be fair for 1997 they were great, it's just nowadays it's basic), the combat is so much better it's not even worth going into detail, the towns actually look and feel like towns instead of the 3-5 buildings they were back then.
Ah but you see, the real issue is that all of the nice things you wrote don't actually need a 3 parter remake at all. which is the core issue here. A remake can keep the same (or a good approximation) scope of the original and still improve over everything else, see the gamecube Resident Evil Remake, or the more recent Resident Evil 2 remake. Hell you made the perfect example with Fire Emblem. No one liked the DS FE1 remake because it did a bunch of pointless changes while still keeping the bad parts unchanged (like how Marth was the only "character" at all, and that's a big "quotation" since he is literally a wet blanket), while the 3DS FE Gaiden remake was praised for improving the cast and expanding on the original without completely changing the rest of the game
You can keep the same overall progression without adding a bunch of pointless fetch quests (like the sewer rats or Chadley). You can make the characters better, give them more dialogue and a better personality, adding voice acting without excessively extend the game size and scope. You can change the batte systems without having to reinvent the wheel
You don't need to make Midgar it's own full game to make Wedge, Biggs and Jessie better: give them more dialogues, give them more scenes, give the player a reason to care for their death, hell why not even make them (simplified) temporary party members? Same for the actual party members: the original game had the thing where only the characters in your party appeared in most scenes (outside of the most important ones) and for this reason most of their interactions where pretty bog standard, so change this, make them appear more, add extra scenes where the cast bonds or simply talks about what's going on, make Yuffie and Vincent forced party members and change the story so Wutai and the Lucretia side quests are no longer optional. None of this needs a complete remake
Do you really need an open world filled with Ubisoft towers if 80% of the story still happens at the original game locations? Then why bother: just bring back the original world map but give it an updated look. Same for the rest of the game areas. Give them a new look, add more "rooms", more npcs if it helps make the world more alive, but don't go overboard and waste years to model and texture a bunch of extra regions that serve no purpose outside of bloating the game's budget
Why do you need to shoehorn Sephiroth in the very first hour or make the last 5% of the game a mess? The original game worked, so simply keep Sephiroth/Jenova the mistery he was. You don't need to have him be the final boss 3 times in a row. Keep the impaled President Shinra, keep the impaled Midgar Zolom. What's the point of adding the Zack parts, hell why even bother with having the Zack parts at all. Despite his role in Cloud's past he is a complete noncharacter in the grand scheme of things, especially after Aerith dies
Hell why even change Aerith's death at all. Why "keep the mistery" of what happened until part 3 if the same thing will happen? And even worse why even have the possibility of having an alternate timeline Aerith and Zack appear in part 3 sice that will absolutely change the rest of the story compared to the original
You can remake FFVII and fix all of its issues, make a better battle system, bring it to a new generation, all of that while still making it "faithful" and standalone. Let's look at 2 recent remakes SE did. One is Live-A-Live: kept the original game almost unchanged but added voice acting, new graphics, new music and fixed issues. The improvements let the game be more "realized" while still being Live-A-Live. The best example is the opening song of the near future chapter, now an actual mecha anime op sang by fucking Hironobu Kageyama
And then you have Actraiser. Remade the game, remade the graphics, remade the 2d stages battle system, remade the music, fixed issues with the original, added more difficulty options, expanded on the story, even added a new post game region...
And then added a godawful tower defense forced minigame to every chapter. Why? No really why? To make the game longer? Because that's the only thing it does: make the remake take double of triple the time it took to finish originally for no benefit at all
Look at Persona 3 Reload. Completely new look, new soundtrack, additional scenes for the male party members (which lacked Social Links in the original), full voice acting, but deep inside it's the same story, with the same base progression and the same ending, so someone who never played the original can play it and still be able to then talk about it with someone who instead played the original PS2 release (or Portable). And most of all it doesn't have some obvious padding just to make the original game longer. This is the most important thing in a remake: allow a new generation who would never play the original because it's too archaic to try it on their own terms without fucking it up. Remake and Rebirth failed at this, and worse of it all making it a 3 parter is simply an excuse to ask for 3 times the money from fans. It's time to admit it: the game is in 3 parts just to make more money, it's not because of the director "vision" and it's not to make the game better. It's just a cynical moneygrab and I'm happy fans decided their money is best spend elsewhere
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