• I’m really glad to see that we’ll be able to explore the overworld. I hope it will actually have as much freedom as the trailer seems to suggest. (I’m not expecting an open world or anything, I’m just expecting a structure similar to the original game.)

    I’m also glad to see that Yuffie and Red XIII are playable as party members. I’m hoping that we can choose our party composition like in the original game, although I won’t be surprised if party composition is still mandated by the story like in FF7 Remake.

    • One of the things that bothered me about the original FF7 is that certain party members felt completely arbitrary. You could ignore them completely, and it would have zero impact on the game. I mean… why did we need Cait Sith? WHY?

      With FF7 Remake and Rebirth though, they have a chance to improve things. If the game forces us to use Red XIII in order to meaningfully develop his character in the process, I don’t have an issue with that, even if I have to bench Tifa for 30 minutes. Make the characters more memorable, give them greater relevance in the story, and I’m willing to put up with the occasional railroading.

      • Ideally I think it would make sense to keep the cast of characters small so they all participate in the story, but you still have the choice of who to battle with. But then it would be hard to do stuff like ambient dialogue between characters or whatever, and it wouldn’t make sense visually for the non-party members to disappear from the screen even though they’re canonically supposed to be there. So honestly I doubt the game is going to give us the option to choose our party members.