I get that they wanted to improve the "shoot the purple cone before pixels fill your screen" which is widely regarded as "pretty lame" but the way they did it almost seems like the homage to the "lameness" of the original.

I mean, they got cyberspace mostly right in the remake IMHO - they removed the most annoying aspect of it being transparent walls that made it hard to see where to go, the controls are solid and shooting is fun.

But then comes the final cyberspace showdown with shodan and...you walk instead of flying, you have some weird gun you've never seen before, it's STILL "shoot cone until it dies" and you can "die" but you just respawn - what was the point of that? I almost found it funny they remade the whole thing but the end is as weak as the original just in a different way ;)

Thoughts?

I personally think the final fight is worse in the remake than in the original. The original implies that SHODAN is overwriting your consciousness through your implants, which is incredibly creepy if you think about it. It also gives you a huge sense of urgency. Now, there is no tension at all. You're just strolling around, without a care in the world, doing... stuff to SHODAN. Also, while the original was lame, it was at least short. The new one is just way too long, especially with how boring it has become now that they've removed all tension.

The infinite respawn makes sense from a game design perspective. Now that you're walking, you lose your mobility and are much easier to kill. That's why they made you basically invincible. As for why they make you walk instead of flying around as usual, that's probably because they also changed the intro. In the original intro, you could hear SHODAN getting corrupted after the hacker removed her ethical constraints. That passage has been relegated to the ending. So to make sure people listen to it, they had to force them to listen while waiting on a moving platform. And for that to be feasible, they had to remove your mobility.

In short, the final fight became worse as a result of multiple bad decisions culminating into a boss fight that is more boring, long-winded, and just simply feels wrong. I mean, SHODAN is an AI. She should be more dangerous in Cyberspace, and in the original, she is (since she overwrites your consciousness if you can't defeat her fast enough).

TL;DR
The original was pretty underwhelming, but the remake managed to make it even worse.