Final Fantasy VII Remake Art Director Explains that it Isn't Just a Matter of Improving the Graphics

The most interesting thing here is how they originally designed Final Fantasy VII's graphics to look cool over being helpful and explaining things. The remake is working to use graphics as visual clues to tell you things about the enemies, like if one is fire, they'll emit fire particles. Before, enemies would just emit red particles if they thought it would look cool.

It sounds like this is really going to be more of a 2.0 version of the game, instead of a low effort graphics improvement or just high definition textures.