I'm not disagreeing with that, I'm just saying that Kendra's character and personality are hardly important factors in Dead Space. We're not talking about a story-based RPG or an adventure game or a visual novel. We're talking about a survival horror game where story is more or less an excuse to keep the pacing going.
Saying that Dead Space Remake sucks because Kendra's personality is now different is - to me - like saying that Demon's Souls Remake sucks because the UI is more plain. They are changes, but hardly reasons to say 'They ruined it'.
Sure, it's obvious that they de-bitchified Kendra and she and Hammond are not at each other's throats like they were in the original, but these things were hardly the reason I loved the game or why I play it again and again.
We're not talking about complete lore destruction like in Mortal Kombat 1, here.
They fucked up the horror elements too, though.
Original:
Remake:
The original room was, by design, meant to overwhelm the player's senses through the sound. The dancing shadows on the wall also looked like Necromorphs approaching, even though there are none in the room - for that reason, it's technically one of the safest rooms in the game, but you still want to escape it ASAP because the SFX/VFX is so harrowing.
Meanwhile, the remake tones all that amazing work down. It just sounds like a diesel engine room now, not scary at all. And because the developers didn't understand what made the original room scary, they then had to introduce a blobby monster door to shoot in order to make the room interesting again. It's just an astounding failure by the developers to understand the source material's intent. From the mouth of the original's director:
"what we were looking for is how we can scare people just with sound, no monsters, no nothing"
Another example is the environmental storytelling. Acquiring the kinesis module in the original is an extremely creepy vignette of a blind woman stroking and re-assuring a pile of dismembered meat that everything will be okay, before dying herself and dropping the module.
In the remake you just rock up to an engineering table and... pick it up. It's lazy.
I also strongly disagree that the character's personalities are not important factors. They absolutely are. Hammond and Kendra's fighting and their unhinged broadcasts to the player throughout the game reinforce the feeling of total chaos. It's a background layer that communicates to the player that, top-to-bottom, the mission has utterly gone to shit and we are seeing the interpersonal relationships of the crew strain and break down.
Saying that doesn't matter is like saying that the relationships between the characters in The Thing, where everyone gradually ceases to be able to trust each other, don't really matter. Now, for as good as the special effects and the scares are in that film, the main driver of the horror is the audience being able to relate to the paranoid feeling of the characters.
You simply can't compartmentalize bits of a game and say "well this is a story bit so another bit is separate and can't add to it". Would some of Clair Obscur's saddest moments be as impactful if the music didn't hit just right?