I didn’t understand the plot of FFVII Remake Intergrade

tl;dr, I didn’t realize going in that FFVII Remake isn’t actually a remake of the whole original game, so after beating it I feel really confused and want to know if I should keep trucking along with the remake trilogy or just go play the original first?

(Apologies if this kind of post appears a lot, also gonna spoil some things if you haven’t played the game) So I have never played any FF games before and have only ever tangentially heard of them. I absolutely ADORE Magic the Gathering though, and if you didn’t know, they are coming out with a FF set in the summer, so I decided to play some of the games so I could be more familiar with the franchise, and hopefully better appreciate my future overpriced cardboard. To start, I wanted to try out FFVII because my understanding was that it is the most popular game of the franchise. I decided to play FFVII Remake Intergrade, naively assuming that a game labeled remake is actually a remake of the original.

I just finished beating the game and came away really conflicted… aesthetically the game was awesome, I really loved almost all of the characters, the music was great, and the gameplay was pretty decent… but I don’t understand wtf happened with the story? Like I knew going in that Sephiroth is supposed to be the big bad guy cause he and Cloud (and Tifa/Aerith to a lesser extent) were the main characters I had heard about/seen before, but their rivalry felt completely without context and kind of tacked on. Like the beginning of the story (excluding flashbacks and everything which I still don’t understand) made sense, it’s just stereotypical steampunk “lets go beat the mega corporation” stuff which I’m all on board for. But then like in the last two chapters, Sephiroth kind of just appears, and then everyone just seems to accept (or explicitly states) that he’s really the actual bad guy and they somewhat forget about Shinra. And it seems clear that Cloud and Sephiroth know each other (and Aerith too I guess?) but Barrett and Tifa never even question Cloud/Aerith why they seem to know Sephiroth. And now that the game is over… I STILL DONT KNOW WHO THE FUCK SEPHIROTH IS? Like there’s some stuff with like Jenovah or something that makes no sense to me, and then a bunch of stuff about fate and destiny (and there’s also red 13 and those black cloaked guys with the number tattoos I don’t understand), but I just feel like I don’t have enough information to piece that all together, yet the characters seem to imply they know what’s going on (at least somewhat). So all that I really know is that I’m just supposed to treat Sephiroth as the big bad guy but I just don’t understand why. Granted, aesthetically he plays the part well, and the final fight sequence was awesome thematically, but I just found myself really pushed out of the immersion of it because I just didn’t get what things were happening. Also like the entire game seemed to be foreshadowing Cloud’s past experiences, and then besides that Zack guy who I have NO IDEA who the fuck that is, I feel like I learned almost nothing about Cloud’s (and most of the other characters for that matter) past. Also I just remembered that scene where Aerith mentioned that she used to be in love with a SOLDIER but when she says the name Cloud goes all flashback and we never hear it, and then proceeds to not show me what that’s about. Like am I supposed to infer that it’s that Zack guy? Or Sephiroth? Idk fuck me I guess because the game just spent 30 hours of my time foreshadowing some things that it never told me about.

Anyways, sorry for all the words here, I honestly just needed to rant a bit and didn’t have anyone I know to rant to. I’ll go ahead and preempt one response here, I now know this game is supposed to actually be part of a trilogy (wish I had known that beforehand though so I’d have different expectations, seems weird to call a game “Remake” when it isn’t actually a full remake). So some of the above questions might be answered in the sequel, but like I just wanted to ask, should I keep playing the sequels, and these things will be more clear to me, or would I be better off just playing the original? I have to assume that some of my confusion is just a product of my assumption that I was playing a full remake and not just the first part of a remake trilogy, but like please tell me the story of the original is more coherent than this. Like I have to assume that if Sephiroth is such an iconic character, surely he couldn’t have been so randomly tacked on the game at the end like it felt like he was to me here. Or is he just carried so hard by his aesthetics that people love him despite his plot being kind of out of nowhere?