After watching it in JP it's clear the latest trailer hadn't had the flaps matched to English (if they're doing that like they did with Crisis Core) because things like Reeve's TERRIBLE delivery was really poor.
I think the voice acting in English is going to cheese up a lot of the script personally. Adult Cloud's voice coming out of baby cloud, Aeris's voice is grating but not nearly as bad as Mena Suvari's take (I preferred the girl in Crisis Core who sounded like a normal girl instead of someone trying to intentionally high pitch their voice, especially that ending line of "I want to help the world. Everyone." which sounded like they went with the first take), Cloud's ridiculously yelling in Part 1, when even when Cloud is talking about the Nibel incident to the group he's just calm and collected and when he meets him several times he's just confused by what he's even seeing (almost as if its foreshadowing something later in the game HMMMMM).
Red XIII wasn't bad but every time I hear something that wasn't in the original script it sounds off too, and things like Jessie being more chipper and waifu bait now makes me want to play majority japanese after I hear the banter in English, because they never subtitle the banter in English in these games (even if they do it for the bombing run).
I think out of the trailers thus far the only characters I like are Palmer, RedXIII and President Shinra, and most of the others are either a downgrade or barely different enough to have warranted the change. I still think 8-4 does better localization work (have no clue who's handling FF7R) and better direction for its VAs, and most of the stuff in the Remake thuse far just sounds like people reading off a script.
I mean....Final Fantasy VII is meant to be both dark and silly as shit.
That's because they're not speaking like native English speakers. They're speaking like Japanese people translated into English.
Just go watch a Japanese song and then read the translated lyrics. It almost sounds like gibberish.
There's not much you can do about the dialogue unless you're willing to make substantial changes.
Final Fantasy VII kind of is a Saturday Morning Cartoon. At least 50% of the time.
Anyways, the Witcher 3 is a western videogame. JRPGs are not hence why most of them don't sound so good. Japanese is too different from English and videogames are harder to dub than anime is because the way the mouths move are so much more detailed.
Then it's a failure of the Localization company to not...do better with the script. Trying to "explain" that JRPGs are supposed to sound stilted like they do in Kingdom Hearts and FF7 does nothing to explain why games like Shadows of Valentia, Nier, etc all have stellar VA and script localization. Your comparison to jpop to actual lyrics makes no sense either.
And NO, FF7 was not "always silly like a saturday morning cartoon" and I wish people would understand the difference between having humor/specific anime takeaways and just being "silly."
FF7 takes itself very seriously in its script when it needs to and anyone who says otherwise is cherry picking. Barret being one of the only bad examples (something I blame on the localization but it was a different time) and the slap fight meaning nothing because it was a minigame, and if we use minigames to judge the rest of the script then everything becomes "silly." There can be "game-y" parts of a game without saying "It was always silly."
Saying "there's not much you can do about the dialogue" is basically asking for the bare minimum and the original script even with the localization errors was solid enough, but the new lines in the newest trailer and the cheesy Sephiroth lines and other lines that have been added weren't even in the original script, so that too, is a terrible comparison to make.
Localization companies exist solely for this reason, just because they did a shit job doesn't mean "that's how it be sometimes"
