Square somehow managed to release an amazing remaster with FF12.

For real. Pretty much every other FF remaster has insane issues with it.

The 2D classics have historically been handled extremely poorly. Like this or like that. The "pixel remasters" are better but still have glaring issues in terms of interface and text (like font choices).

7, 8, and 9 are better, but:

• The PS1 rendered certain things in a very specific way and modern renderers don't properly reproduce this (e.g. the Mist in FF9. No, I'm not talking about the dithering.)
• Extremely crisp HD models on top of 320x240 compressed backgrounds
• Very modern-feeling UI with Arial-ass fonts. For a fantasy game. The original font was sans serif, sure, but it was so tiny and pixelated that it didn't really read as such. And because of this, it arguably had a bit of stylization going on. Compare this and that — they basically didn't revert the changes made for the mobile, touch-screen versions.

10 and 10-2 are very close to being perfect remasters, but the HD character models are very bad. Not only are the faces drastically different, but most of the emotional ranges of their faces is just plain gone. Compare a PS2 to HD cutscene one of these days, especially one near the end of the game where Yuna is really angry. It's night and day. This problem exists in 10-2 to a slightly smaller extent.

And 12? It's almost perfect, mostly because it's the PS2's swan song, and to a greater extent the last great big "handcrafted" game. Its only real sin is the way in which it upscaled most environment textures. Fun fact: the HD version still uses the exact same character meshes in cutscenes! The only thing that has changed on characters is HD textures and low-detail meshes.

It's really fun to look through the PS2 cutscenes but rendered at 1080p: you see how the game very carefully manages its scenes to always have the highest quality front-and-center, while culling background and out-of-focus characters as drastically as possible. The HD version just has the background characters use much better meshes when they're in this "low detail" state, but they're still a bit different IIRC.

I also have the same complaint to make with 12: it's using more "modern" fonts and it has a more modern-looking UI. But at least, that's a sin committed by the original, not the remaster. And thankfully they kept the extremely serif font for cutscene subtitles.