The Final Fantasy 7 Remake is looking to be pretty good at this point. The game has gone gold ahead of schedule and barring any unforeseen delays, will reach our systems on April 10.
A piece of bad news though as Red XIII, the cat… dog… animal from the original game will no longer be a playable character in the remake. It’s safe to assume that you will not be able to control him directly during battle but as it stands, it will not be in full capacity as previously seen during the PS1 release.
As stated by Naoki Hamaguchi in an interview with VG247, he goes on to explain why they decided to not include Red XIII as part of the active.
“We felt the point at which Red XIII joins the party in the story is very late on so we thought okay, if we’re gonna have him as a full character and try and get the player to enjoy his character development arc and growth as a character through that, it’s not really enough time to do that,”
“We thought that the best way to have him involved was as a guest character. Normally throughout the game you’ll be playing as a three-man party, but you will have him as a guest character that fights alongside you during the the last part of the story. He’ll be using all of his old really nostalgic moves, and you’ll see that. We felt that was the best way of showing him off as a character and who he is. That’s why we felt that was the best way to include him.”
At the moment, only 4 characters have been confirmed to be playable so far in Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, and Barrett. We’ll have to wait and see whether the rest of the cast like Yuffie and Vincent will share the same fate as Red XIII. Or, maybe they’ll be playable in the future installments?
Videogame Content Editor. A father and gamer. Would gladly trade what’s left of his soul to witness a Final Fantasy 6 and Xenogears remake done during his lifetime.
