Considering remakes are partially meant to attract new gamers to play a game that for whatever reason they couldn't/didn't play, spoilers should be treated as carefully as with new games imo.
I don't agree. I don't think the FFVII remake is meant to attract new gamers so much as it's meant to capitalize on nostalgia and get people who played it and loved it to play it again.
If a game is as old as FFVII, and as renowned and you haven't played it yet and are in a thread about it or the remake and get something spoiled then you only really have yourself to blame. Enter threads like this that may have people talking about old storylines at your own risk.
Lot of people are upset about this, understandably so. If each "part" is a full price game then that will end up costing players $180+ to play the full experience. It also means it'll probably take a lonnnnng time before the full story is told.
On the plus side, this hopefully means that the first part will be released sooner rather than later. Also this could mean the quality of the full product is better as a whole because they will have a longer amount of time to work on the product. Rather than trying to get the whole thing done in a few years, and inevitably rushing/removing aspects because of time restraints, now they won't really need to do that, hopefully.
Yeah this makes it seem like Square Enix is in too big of a hurry or they're putting too much on Nomura's back. He's being asked to work on one of the most anticipated 3rd games in history(KHIII) and faithfully remake the most significant JRPG of all time at once. So this is Square desperately trying to squeeze the VII cow for milk ASAP and a creative director trying to do this in a manner that doesn't involve waiting 10 years like the other project he is working on. Yikes.
Not that I'm against episodic games but the question becomes how much content can each episode cover and how much each episode is worth. If episode 1 is, say, all of Midgar then that is a pretty nice chunk. But if it is literally the tutorial level, then that is a paltry amount and this game would take actual ages to be the equivalent to the old game.
Part of me also wonders if this is a method to getting around having a big over world. Such a thing is super costly and it hasn't been Square's preferred way of doing things in a while. VII has hallway syndrome in Midgar but that is an intentional design choice. If you take out the over world you lose a lot of thematic meaning.
I am sorta optimistic in that Nomura seems to get Cloud as a character, at least as he is in FFVII. Barret...well we'll see if they have the guts to have him say stuff like "Well to me it looks like a golden shiny wire of hope."
It's pretty much the first JRPG series in the proper sense. Arguably it never caught up on the West because each game was ported too late and the game were no longer as groundbreaking.