In remembering the original, I feel like the tone was similar in Intergrade. Yeah, we all probably have mostly memories of a certain “serious” scene with Aerith and a certain brooding edgy vampire type, but there was plenty of cheese to be had in the original.
I actually played through GoW just slightly before FF7. Yeah it’s a more serious - and Christopher Judge is the boss (even if he didn’t say “indeed”) - but it had some weird bits of cheese too and overall, it had the advantage of being a new plotline rather than a remake/modification of something that originally had an audience with 80’s-born teens.
I’m actually a bit of an initial naysayer on the remake. I didn’t trust the change from ATB to ARPG style combat, chopping it up into episodes, or just the fact that Square has frankly been fairly disappointing in several of the last few released I’ve played (the plot of FFXV was a disconnected trainwreck and FFXIII was a grind).
That said, it came out on PC and then hit a sale and I quite enjoyed it. Yeah there are cheesy bits, but many of them feel pretty intentionally cheesy and overall I felt it paid decent homage to the original, especially the Don Corneo part etc