Found some new translated details from here.. not sure if it was posted:
https://game8.co/games/Final-Fantasy-VII-Remake/archives/287205
So they had to censor Jenova even if they didn't want to, the two additional scenes if Corneo picked Tifa and Aerith were sacrificed for a Tifa and Aerith section we got in the final game. I don't mind the change as I loved that section but imo they should have left them in as a trophy instead of the abysmal dressed to the nines trophy we got lol. Originally, Tifa would have not hugged Cloud in her resolution scene..... hah makes me really feel the devs intend the Aerith one as canon based on the whole "you can't tell it is real or a dream" Her words hold a lot of weight, etc.
They also go over the reason we don't go to the Avalanche hideout.... makes sense actually! Not bothered by the removal anymore. And of course the blood trail (red) was removed due to age rating.
Searching For the Right Way to Express Elements of the Original in the Modern Day
When you compare society now to when the original came out 23 years ago a lot has changed, did this have any effect on the story for the remake?
Toriyama: With the improvement of graphics, things like character's facial expressions become more realistic, and how much of that you depict, or don't, becomes something you need to take into consideration. For example, when the original came out we were all pretty young and things like "Is it really right to destroy the Mako Reactors to save the planet?" didn't really cross our minds at all. However with the remake, a lot of things have happened in the real world, so we as the developers have a responsibility to figure out how to make things relate as well as how far to go. In the original there aren't a lot of other NPCs around in Sector 8 so you only meet Aerith, but in the remake we added more people. Showing the player how destroying the Sector 1 Mako Reactor affected the people of Sector 8 was something I felt was important so we added it in.
Does this also relate to how there's a new plot point where Shinra is using Avalanche's actions against them?
Toriyama: That's right. With how the story flows we can't change the fact that Barret and the others are destroying the Mako Reactors, but we could add in that they're being used by Shinra to help soften their more extremist image.
It's also believed that the scene at the Honeybee Inn was changed to reflect the changes in society.
Toriyama: That's also true. The way games are rated has changed since the original, so from the beginning one thing we wanted to do was expand on the Honeybee Inn as well as Wall Market as a whole. We figured that if we were going to be changing it up, we may as well boost the entertainment factor and added in the dancing mini-game. The sort of sexy route that was at the Honeybee Inn in the original got moved to Madam M's portion.
Was the hand massage bit also hard to get past the rating check?
Toriyama: The way ratings are handled are different for each country so trying to make sure everything would be acceptable in any region was difficult, but thanks to the internal checks we started doing early on, I think we managed to get it just right without going too far.
At the beginning of Chapter 14 there's a scene that occurs in the flower garden with one of your party members that's like the date scene from the original.
Toriyama: The date scene that happened in the Golden Saucer in the original is something we couldn't removed from FFVII when retelling the story so we decided to try and add in a similar event based on the events that occured up to that point.
Hamaguchi: These events are actually called Resolutions and this time who you get the scene with is dependent on the quests that you do to raise the party's affection with Cloud.
Toriyama: While not strictly a "date", per se, I wanted to include a scene like this that would live up to the fan's expectations. For this reason, in the scene with Aerith you can't tell if it's a dream or reality and her words carry a lot of weight. For Tifa's scene, in the script I first wrote I had planned for Cloud to stop hugging Tifa quickly, but Kazushige Nojima told me "They're young so we can leave it as is," so we ended it with the hug.
Hamaguchi: We even did the motion capture without the hug but redid it to reflect the change.
Hamaguchi: This time the game is being released worldwide on the same day, so making sure that there wasn't anything that might be hurtful to other culture's took a lot of time.
Toriyama: Something more difficult for the rating check was actually Jenova. We all thought "Well she's not human so it should be fine, right?", but the fact that she was both naked and headless ended up being a bit of an issue. To rectify this, we added a mecha-type thing to her head and made it so she was covered up when Sephiroth was carrying her in the Shinra Building. Jenova is a pretty big part of Final Fantasy VII so I didn't actually want to change it, though...
Hamaguchi: Lines regarding human experimenation would also run into trouble so we had to make more changes there.
Toriyama: But if we changed the fact that SOLDIER are a result of human experimenting done by Shinra, then the game stops being FFVII, so we really pushed for that to stay unchanged.
Hamaguchi: We also really wanted to leave the blood trail that was left behind by Jenova, but in order to keep a lower age rating we couldn't use red blood. Instead we chose to use a purple magma-like substance that has more of a fantasy feel yet still leaves that feeling of unease. We worked really hard and ended up getting that checked about 5 or 6 times before we got the okay. There were a lot of times we had to think about the current day ratings while figuring out how to adapt elements of the original.
There's also the scene where Scarlet puts her legs up on a Shinra Troop on all fours that had a pretty strong impact.
Toriyama: We wanted to show Scarlet's sadistic personality through that one scene so we had her use her underling as a leg rest. What would be considered power harassment by today's standards seems to be totally fine with people who work for Shinra (laughs). Behavior like this that gets totally overlooked might also be the result of Shinra's abusive dictatorship. The poor Shinra Troop on the ground might be fulfilling their duties as a loyal underling to their superior.
