It is, but you haven't grasped this project accurately.
This is going to be a series of full-length games based upon the VII story.
Yeah right. Give me a break. My first playthrough of FFVII when it was first released was 47 hours, and that included killing the weapons. They aren't going to make the remake two and a half to three times the size of the original.
Yes, they will.
And it isn't even that they're puffing up an old game with extra content for the fun of it, or to justify multiple episodes. Translating the story/world of FFVII to modern game standards inherently creates a much larger project.
Let's consider a single area in FFVII.... say, Wall Market.
The original was 3 pre-rendered jPEGs with 10-15 simple polygon NPCs in it. Essentially 3 rooms, and a small handful of dialogue boxes that you could read faster than you read this post.
In a modern game, that will be a much larger space to be worthy of exploration and worthy of being a "town". 3 rooms won't cut it. And it will have unique NPCs with voiced dialogue, cinematically directed cutscenes, side quests, and tons of little visual and gameplay details. What was a 20 minute sequence in the original game might be 2-3 hours of gameplay or more.
Now apply that to every town, sequence, cutscene. Everything will get blown up 10x as a mere fact of being translated to modern game development.
If you wanted FFVII with a new coat of paint, they'd be done by now. Just re-render all the backgrounds and put higher poly characters on top. But that's not what this is. It's a new AAA game based on the original story.
