My words here instead of his, but here they are anyway.
Badass synth heavy metal with an awesome organ.
YEAH!
I'm not really any good at describing music, but the original has a very strong, driving, and deliberate sounding beat to it and most renditions of it kind of gloss over it and put more emphasis on making it sound like techno or something.
Here comes another falk tl;dr.
(Prefacing this with another disclaimer that I am not discussing FFVIIr's development workings at all, but drawing from my own existing experiences with other projects that already are released as commercial games, interspersed with my own opinions. Sorry, too many people have quoted me out of context that I pretty much need to drop these disclaimers, heh)
Well yeah, I think we can all agree that for the case of an updated arrangement
for use in a game in the same context, e.g. as boss music keeping the feel the same feel/genre is paramount.
You're probably referring to the AC version of Still More Fighting, where the beginning riff isn't identical, and then it goes into techno. The intention of the music there is completely different. AC isn't supposed to be a spruced up version of Final Fantasy 7. The arrangement there isn't supposed to be a 1:1 faithful-to-original.
Another example that's been brought up in this thread is orchestrated Man with the Machine Gun. I think a lot of people simply are getting confused between 'arrangement' and 'orchestration' as I mentioned previously in the thread. The two aren't synonymous. The whole point of an orchestration, is to make the music playable by an orchestra in a live concert setting. Obviously it's not going to sound like the original, and obviously the intention for that was never to be used in a game, nor is it supposed to function as a 'HD version' or 'modern version' of the track.
Square Enix has had multiple HD remakes in multiple franchises, of which the soundtracks were touched up to varying degrees. You don't see the genres jump that much (even in the context of the 'controversial' FFX-HD music remaster, which I think the rearrangements are stellar, but that's another topic altogether).
If anything, the feel of the tracks for games that are meant to be the an updated version of the game are kept intact. These projects generally get overseen by the original composers as well. We had Yoko Shimomura signing off on every single track in the KH collections.
Also diving a little deeper into the nostalgia factor (Sorry, it does need to be said), the original tracks simply resonate a different way with different people. I'll just use myself as an example. There's an tinny, lo-fi quality to the chime synths used in Anxious Heart that I associate with the desolation of the scenes that use that track in the original FF7. Other people might not pick up on that. Some people might simply like the formant-y, chuggy, disjointed sound of the electric guitars of the PSX sound chip belting out Still More Fighting. You're simply not going to get that effect with real guitars.
There's a difference between keeping the feel of a track and paying utmost respect to the original when updating their sounds, and fulfilling every attachment that every single fan has ever had with the original. The former is and should always be a priority. The latter is a practical impossibility.
All that being said, FF7r really is on a remake scale that's unprecedented for Square Enix. At this point, anyone from the outside looking in really doesn't have enough information to make a call on what fits and what doesn't. For all you know, even updated versions of the tracks, faithfully recreated 1:1 with modern techniques, might not fit the overall aesthetic, since the original game is really a very charming cross between hyper-gritty and super-deformed aesthetic inherent to that early 3D era in gaming.
I think that all the assertions that the music is going to be shit just because, or that they aren't going to fit, or that Square Enix are 'going to screw it up', are really rather premature.