I think one of the things in particular that irks me about the fact that they’ve gradually painted all the 90s tech out of VII (apart for the reasons why it was done, cough cough dirge hojo was a zip file buy the panasonic piv900) is because it would have actually made more sense to keep it.
It unintentionally added this rich layer of lore and alternate history to the game. In the real world, the miniaturisation of computers was driven by the space race. There was a need to minimise the weight aboard the shuttle and the resulting boom in technology happened in order to out-compete the Russians with who could make the smallest, lightest, most powerful chips led to us having computers and smartphones the way that they are today.
But the Shinra No.26 never took off. The Planet in VII never achieved space flight, and thus never had a reason to develop very very tiny computers, and thus logically would still be using brick phones and bigass CRT monitors and have no internet to speak of because that very vital step of Needing Computers To Be Small Enough For Repeated Space Trips just never happened.
And, because there was never that area to focus on in the first place, the biotechnology became super advanced in its stead, especially given Jenova’s discovery stole a lot of thunder from the space program and put more focus on things like genetic engineering and “medical science” (if we can call what Hojo and Gast did that).
I miss that extra bit of depth that that added, even if it wasn’t planned.
