I expect that our 3 remaining characters – Cait Sith, Vincent, & Cid will probably show up in a trailer after
Ever Crisis releases, since at that point they'll have a game that has all those characters and ways to build up on cross-promotion for their reveal. Pacing-wise, the party reaching Nibelheim and Vincent joining them at that point happening before arriving at Rocket Town and meeting Cid as the last character of the party, it wouldn't make sense for Vincent to be a DLC. Yuffie needed one because she didn't have a true entry point to lead her into the party in a narrative way and
INTERmission needed to set that up so that potentially still having a random bump into her in the wilderness can still be how she teams up with Cloud & Co.
On those three new characters, while Vincent matches Barret's ability as a long-range character and Cid as a Dragoon has a pretty well-defined combat gameplay style, they're also both pretty well-liked characters where what to expect from them is pretty straightforward. Even Vincent's Limit Break transforming him and putting him under AI control works really naturally with the existing gameplay style, so I think that those two will be really straightforward all things considered. Even with Yuffie, I think that her addition to the team will probably be the entry point for introducing the team-up attacks since she doesn't want to just be a third wheel to everyone else, but she NEEDS someone else.
Not just that, but they already hinted at those from a gameplay perspective in
INTERmission with a unique level of attention to detail from things like how half of Yuffie's abilities are written in hiragana because she's just a kid, but also in how she takes command in teaming up with Sonon is focused specifically on what she needs. Not only is Sonon a non-controllable character, but his Sonon's ATB charges more slowly when he was teamed up because he was a natural loner, and he even begins equipped
exclusively with Independent materia that don't link to other materia. It has a ton of vectors that really push that interdependent relationship ...and that's what's got me
REALLY curious how they're gonna both design and implement Cait Sith.
Especially since I always found his big stuffed moogle utterly adorable and really wanted to use it more, but his gameplay is just well... not the best in the original game that can change in a good way. I've got really high hopes for how he ends up being done in this that helps to reshape perspective on his character in the same capacity that
INTERmission really nailed that sort of "character redemption" for Yuffie already and seems to be playing a big role in her as a standard party member.
First is his VERY different initial Limit Break system with Dice that play really heavily into the old school RPG element of damage numbers, where that seems like the Dice will be present but maybe the mechanics are changed up slightly. His slots seem especially interesting in just how many unique things that they'll get to have and how all that will work, and if we get a sense of how that type of magic works that's unique to Reeve.
Just like with Yuffie as the outspoken leader, Cait Sith's original weapon is a megaphone, which is something that feels decidedly un-weapon-like – but Red XIII's collar makes that a non-issue and gives the Megaphone a way to be portrayed as a sort of controller for the Toysaurus. Combine that along with the weapon upgrade system from
Remake giving the weapons their own upgrade path, and it's basically just modifying how the Toysaurus attacks while Cait Sith is wielding various controllers. That has a mechanic that gives a really unique feeling to their relationship in subtle design of the gameplay elements that are really similar to what Yuffie's story has, which makes sense with him as the first completely new character we'll meet.
Since the Toysaurus he rides around on is just an absolutely MASSIVE unit, and being able to go bashing fists into the enemy seems like it'd be a ton of fun, I'm curious whether or not Cait Sith & Red XIII will get weapons that are more visually noticeable on their models or not, because as they're also the two non-human characters. Even if the Toysaurus had wristbands that matched the style of the Megaphone or something, and Red XIII got some accessories in his mohawk mane, that would be neat. Most of all though, with the introduction of the team-up attacks I'm betting that we'll have moments where that disconnect between Cait Sith & the Toysaurus get emphasized. Not only did Dirge have Cait Sith roaming about on his own and even puppeting a fake Reeve body at one point, he was also standalone in the
Remake scene of the pillar collapse. It seems like there'll be plenty of opportunity for that to be a sort of minigame segment from time-to-time, and also start to emphasize that interdependent element.
That stands in a juxtaposition to Vincent who's "other self" is something that he can't escape from and which controls his actions, cutting him off from the party in the same way that Yuffie experienced with Sonon, which also makes me think that there's a decent chance that she's the critical component to why he joins the party since she's really drawn to that type of personality and telling them what to do, but this also gives an effective vector for the two of them to eventually have to face up against Nero & the Deepground stuff together that fits with their stories and isn't as intrinsically interconnected to the rest of the party initially. If anything would be a DLC, I expect it'll be Vincent & Yuffie going to infiltrate that potentially post-Meteor's appearance.
That brings us to Cid where his relationship with Shera is defined by how they're both attached to one another but in ways where that relationship has totally distorted itself into an unhealthy dynamic that makes both of them feel uncomfortable but even worse about doing anything else. There's a lot of design pieces that reflect the abuse dynamics of Shinra to Sephiroth as well as Jenova to the Planet that start to get reinforced by Bugenhagen in how those connections can turn parasitic and controllingly abusive from something that was initially each one trying to help the other the best it knew how.
Even before it adds in the additional complexity of linking up the story to Reeve's espionage with his helpless entanglement in being one of Shinra's execs, I think that Cait Sith has a MASSIVE opportunity to shine in this part of the game, especially since a big arc of this game builds up to his speech at the Temple of the Ancients about how even a copy still has a unique existence when he understands that he's the natural sacrifice to allow them to retrieve the Black Materia. I'm really hoping that they can manage to sell that part as well as the loss of the Tachikomas in
Ghost in the Shell: SAC.
Not only is that an important part in examining how you process the concept of loss & replacement like a rebuild Nibelheim, but it's also a key part to how that applies to Cloud's current perspective regarding his own identity crisis and the other Sephiroth Copies in general, and how he has to consider Sephiroth's offer to him in
Remake at the Edge of Creation.
Sephiroth's existential perspective of Jenova making puppets of the dead Ancients by making copies of them is what happened when he went insane, mass murdered a whole village of people, and then beheaded his own mother, in addition to changing from the personal pronoun to refer to himself that distinguishes different Sephiroth's in
Remake. This all heavily informs Sephiroth's own existential perspective of Cloud as an extension of himself, motivating his drive for just making the Planet into the same thing as a means of facilitating a recreation of the world into a different future and a new reality.
That's why he's perfectly comfortable discarding the entire world and make a new one with copies of everyone else... which is antithetical to how Aerith feels about the concept of discarding the existences & suffering of everyone to make a different reality with things that are just copies of the real world redesigned and remade in order to alleviate the pain of one person. That's why a critical step in obtaining the Black Materia is self-sacrifice and why that's a critical story beat in what the player has to consider in approaching the potential loss of things that aren't just able to be copied... like how Cloud & Aerith both lost Zack – but now we have a separate reality where there's a copy of him that we can potentially choose to turn into the true reality.
I think that's gonna play a huge part in how Cait Sith gets introduced as the fortune teller for Cloud & Aerith, and what things that's going to emphasize between the characters thinking about a future that they'll never get to see – since we've been shown one ever since
Remake, where none of the party we're playing as will ever experience those things. Cait Sith is a vector to make everyone potentially feel very differently about the idea of embracing the future where all the good & bad, the happiness & losses that you suffered to make your way to where you are now ALL disappear.
Because what that's doing is really just making a copy of the dead rather than honouring the choices that they made., and unlike a true puppet like Cait Sith, you can't do that with real people. There's a lot of really complex moral and existential quandry that Cait Sith really kicks off that, in the original game, gets overshadowed by him being a spy and his RNG making him a less-than-ideal party member in turn-based combat, especially since he can just trigger a Game Over without warning.
I think that
Rebirth really has a chance to use Cait Sith's crisis of identity with the party as being Reeve underscores additional layers to that, but even moreso is that his character emphasizes needing to embrace RNG that you can't control as being something that you just have to accept as-is and move forward from to handle as best as you can. No one understands this better than Reeve being on the executive board and STILL being unable to stop the Plate collapse from happening, which is why it's important that he was there slamming his fists into the ground during the cutscene in
Remake.
On top of that, the relationship between Cait Sith and his Toysaurus to really open up on how it explores the deeper elements of the game in a way that work WAY better than the original, and also help to give Yuffie and
INTERmission's focus on building healthy ways to be interdependent upon your teammates as an important part of trying to repair where those relationships are strained or even broken – which is the core of the focus on why Tifa's reality is being called into question. The elements between Tifa, Cloud, Aerith, & Zack are a really big part of how those themes get explored in a way that pulls into the primary narrative with Nibelheim that all of the
Rebirth trailers are focused on but all of those things also focus on what the concepts of a "Remake world" or a "Rebirth individual" mean and when those are things that should be embraced and accepted and when they're things that should be opposed absolutely – because it's not an easy answer since you ALWAYS lose something no matter what, it's just asking what you're willing to lose and whether or not that's a cost that's right to pay, like the Whispers saving Barret's life but not President Shinra's
which was solely because that was Fate not because it was a morally just thing to do, since that type of choice is the player's burden to bear now through Cloud.
Aaaand that's a bit of a deeper peak into why the whole tease with the
Rebirth trailer showing us body duplicates of Barret, Red XIII, Tifa, & Aerith has more to do with setting up critical story details – and even while they're the most mysterious and quite unexpected, I don't at all think that the mystery has anything to do with what it appears to on the surface, but rather that it's a vector to help to reinforce those themes via multiple different avenues as the game also gets into the cosmological relationships with Bugenhagen.
Hopefully that tl'dr is an interesting look at the TYPE of analytical breakdown that I've been working on for Remake in an exhaustively massive scale, but also why that's a project where I'm not going to commit to finishing it until the final game of the Remake Project gets released even though it'll still take up a lot of time to work on throughout that, since it's sort of covering how those themes, designs, and storytelling evolve from the original game through this one.
While I'm still half-tempted to make some of those thoughts into something like a continuation of my "The Potential Of" articles, I kinda think that it's a type of analysis which, while it's fun to make in a predictive capacity like I have ever since figuring out Rufus' identity back in the ACF days and I'll still post bits and pieces about that stuff on the boards from time-to-time, there's something about focusing on that only after it is whatever it is has been finalized in a concrete way that brings a bit more to me these days, even if it does keep a majority of that work totally sealed off from external interaction for a long while. Given that I have a lot less mental/physical energy than I used to, taking that analytical energy to be more deeply introspective rather than predictive is where my time ends up being prioritized.
I also glad to be able to have a bit of it to share in forum-facing predictive tl;dr again now though.
X 
