I agree that the 3rd act has a lot of potential to be expanded upon. If I remember correctly, the 3rd act consists of the following segments:
- Execution at Junon
- Finding Cloud in Mideel
- Getting the Huge Materia in North Corel
- Getting the Huge Materia in Fort Condor
- Cloud's Mindscape
- Getting the Huge Materia in the Junon underwater reactor
- Getting the Huge Materia in the rocket heading for Meteor
- Learning more about the White Materia through the water projector in the Forgotten Capital
- Diamond Weapon appears
- Midgar Raid
- Highwind scene
- Last dungeon
That alone seems too little to fill a whole FF game, especially since several characters are lacking character growth or even meaningful moments. We do have a few good ones like Cloud and Tifa in the Lifestream (.net
) and Cid's arc conclusion and we do get some optional scenes for Vincent's backstory and with Red XIII and Bugenhagen and a few character moments like Reeve stepping more and more away from Shinra and Cait Sith calling out Barret for what he did with Avalanche, but besides that, there's just too little around to have the characters shine.
I like some of the suggestions
@Solordinn puts forth and I'll add a few more.
- A second visit to Wutai to bring it back to its former glory
- More scenes and sub-plot quests with Vincent to properly set up the confrontation with Hojo on the Sister Ray cannon
- In general more side-trips to other or even new locations to liberate them from Shinra's grasp (optional but meaningful and lore expanding side quests)
- Delving deeper into the lore of the sunken Gelnika
I believe that this 3rd act has the potential to be a great open world game with the Highwind at our disposal pretty much after the intro segment. Choosing what to do in which order (the original already did that to a certain extent) with loads of optional stuff to do, kinda similar to the World of Ruin in FFVI.