The big difference between Red and Yuffie is that Red has no other motivation to stay with the party unless he goes to his hometown. Yuffie does (materia, which stays constant through the game. We learn her backstory in Wutai, but it was always there, her motivations don't change, only our knowledge of them. She's still trying to trick you into giving her all the materia in disc 3.)She didn't have a revelation about how she was part of the team, she just got caught and knew she wouldn't get away with pulling that again.
Yuffie has no motivation to stay with the party either, because so long as she has any way to get home, she could jack all your materia and vanish at
literally any time. It's really just contained to the event in the west continent for game mechanic purposes, because suddenly having you lose a party member at random along with all your materia is SUPER lame and potentially game-breaking.
At the end of the Materia Thief arc, Yuffie brings you back to her place and gives you all the stolen materia back AND she even voluntarily gives you her own materia to use. She places more value on you having it now than the quick sort of smash-and-grab she was attempting before. Yes, she IS still wanting to get all of the materia from you in the long run, but that just goes to the core of the fact that
she still ultimately needs it to help bring Wutai back to what it used to be and even though she's putting that off to continue to help you hunt down Sephiroth and everything else after you save her, that doesn't suddenly also bring Wutai back to its former glory. Even her dad at the Pagoda asks her to:
"Yuffie, wait a minute. The Materia they all have... After their battle is over, you think they'll still want it? Go! Survive till the end! And return! With the Materia!"
Yuffie's objective changes from, "jack all the materia possible from these chumps and get back home" to "actively help these guys out to complete their objective and once it's all over, get the materia from them that they no longer need to rebuild Wutai"
Nanaki's journey goes from "I need to go protect my hometown because my father was a wastrel" to "I'll help try to save the planet and prove myself as a true warrior like my Father did"
Both of them have an arc where they take singularly selfish motivations, and then take self-improvement motivation and place the needs of the bigger picture first. Also, in the case of both of them (and to address Tres' point) this REALLY only holds the same sort of weight before there's a gigantic meteor in the sky letting you know the undeniable importance of the journey that Cloud & Co. are on, back when it's still just relegated to hunting down Sephiroth – again, why I think it's important to portray it as the core story, rather than throw-away side content.
X said:
This is especially because (following through a strategy guide notwithstanding), there's no good way of telling a player "if you keep going, all these things are gonna get fucked and you'll never find them out without restarting" AND it over-emphasizes needless completionism to do EVERY SIDE QUEST IMMEDIATELY WHEN IT'S AVAILABLE, NO MATTER WHAT OR ELSE YOU MIGHT MISS OUT that takes away from being able to enjoy the story at a decent pace without worrying about missing out on huge chunks of potentially relevant, potentially irrelevant information).
This is where multiple save files come in.
Sorry, but no.
I don't know if you realize how elitist that sounds. Essentially you're saying that even if the game could take 60-80 hours to play through, the COMPLETE story should only be understandable to those willing to arbitrarily figure out through a mix of trial-and-error save and load, obsessive completionism, or walking through a strategy guide what order to go through every optional part of the game as meticulously as possible, rather than relying on the game to have a well-planned and laid out narrative structure with its story content laid out end-to-end, with auxiliary content clearly marked as such.
Nothing breaks immersion more than suddenly reverting back X hours to go do things differently because you suddenly realized that you missed out on story content. (Hell, even my brother and I still have never forgiven FFIX for destroying nearly every sidequest on its final disc). On top of that, no one wants to be forced to into going and doing every single little meticulous thing on the off-chance that it might matter at the expense of continuing the story at a natural pace. When basically every open world game can manage to tell a coherent story with "Story Quests" and "Side Quests" there's really no excuse for that sort of absolutely piss-poor mechanic anymore.
Again – Most of this is coming from the fact that my girlfriend had never played a Final Fantasy game before watching me play through FFXV and she absolutely loved it, and I've been helping her walk through FFVII the last month or so, and realizing that – if you don't already know all of this shit from 20 years of obsessively dissecting the game, what an absolute fucking ballache it is to make sure that you're getting all of the right background elements and preemptive information to understand what is an already convoluted and confusing as fuck story (since the whole first section is being told by a crazy person).
If that was true, they would have been moved by being threatened by Soldier 342 "Don't think that headquarters won't be hearing about this."
The lack of loyalty to anything but each other makes sector 7 look like something Reno just didn't care enough about not to do it, given that they're willing to duck out of their orders if they really don't want to do it.
No way. MPs get knocked around by literally everyone. They're the grunts of the organization. Some nameless MP threatening to report them for not doing something when they're off duty is essentially meaningless because that person has ZERO clout in Shinra's organization – especially compared to the Turks. It's basically an empty threat that they might get a slap on the wrist. If Heideggar or someone was there, not only does he actually outrank them in terms of command (and could put them back on active duty with a word) – he has the power to turn the entirety of the Shinra military on them if they don't play ball. (Which is even more clear after seeing what happened when Zack ditched out and that literally happened).
Collapsing the Plate was a direct order from the President, who is their Commander in Chief. It's in no way comparable to some grunt who they outrank telling them they need to help when they're off duty.
X 
