Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2 is a go & New Screenshots

[Jpcc86]

Hiku said:

I'm sure a lot of details will be altered heavily. Appears that way from the trailers. But it's possible that they'll still stick to the same outcome for key parts of the story. Character A gets killed in a different way, or by a different person, but they still die in both versions.
Resident Evil 2 Remake is essentially that way. But FF7R is an even more ambition project, so they may very well change some bottom lines completely. Partially to make it a fresh experience, where you don't already hold all the important answers just by having played the original.

They could do things like introduce Yuffie or Vincent in Midgar in Part 1. But I imagine they want to have a number of new party members joining you in the next game as well, so that specifically may not happen. But altering the stage and/or timeline of certain events wouldn't be surprising to me.
And I think there may be incentive to change up some big things, on top of making it a fresh experience to some degree. Over the years they've gotten feedback on some things more than others, or thought things over and may want to explore certain possibilities that weren't in the original. And then there are things like the urban legends of getting the 'white materia' if you do certain things, in order to revive a certain character that I'm sure a lot of people heard about at some point back in the day because it was featured in popular gaming magazines, before internet was really a thing and you could easily find a conclusive answer.

I know a number of games have done this where they put something into the game because it was a popular fan theory. There was a very recent case that escapes me at the moment, but one example is Mortal Kombat. At the end of the original game, one of the developers names, Tobias Boon, appeared backwards in the credits due to a bug. Spelling out Noob Saibot instead. This quickly because a popular fake theory about a secret character you could fight in the game by accomplishing certain tasks. And so the dev team actually made that character and put it in the next game as a secret boss.

Another example is the mistranslation of "Shoryuken" in Street Fighter 2 to "Shen Long", leading to another well known fake rumor and hoax, of a secret character, which inspired the creation of both Akuma and Gouken in later entries.

I didn't think about FF7R Part 2 being possibly the first (since the tradition started) mainline FF game without Biggs and Wedge making an appearance, unless some things change there. So I hope they look at it that way. Or maybe it's an alternate story the developers wanted to explore anyway. But not getting my hopes up there.

When people describe the new additions to FF7 as 'filler content' in a negative connotation, I don't think they generally consider that the process of making the original games was very similar.

First of all, the initial story outline is just the basic story premise, and is missing most of the details. That's where the scenario writer usually 'fills' things in. And he was only brought in after he finished his work on Bahamut Lagoon. The initial plot of Final Fantasy VII was written and re-written more than once. And the idea of pursuing Sephiroth was an idea Nomura came up with later in the process.

And Tifa is a 'filler character', because Aerith was the only heroine of the game until Nomura later suggested they kill her off. Which made them not only have to rethink the future parts of the game without her, but they decided they needed another female character to 'fill' the void. So they invented Tifa because of that.

Aerith was also meant to be Sephiroth's sister at first, then his former love interest. And then they scrapped that idea and instead created Zach for that purpose.
Yuffie and Vincent were nearly scrapped from the game entirely due to time constraints, which lead to them being optional characters, etc.

The point I'm making here is that the process of creating both the story and other parts of the game involves a lot of what people call 'filler'. A lot of back and forth. Changes and adjusting. 
"This town looks pretty good. But the time the player spends here feels a bit lackluster for all the effort we put into it. Let's add a scenario that makes it more interesting. How about Cloud having to cross dress to infiltrate a brothel?"

Then there are all the ideas they wish they could have done in the original, but didn't have time, or didn't think about until afterwards, or decided to go in one direction so they couldn't go in the other. But now they can. Etc.
That's essentially always the case with any artistic line of work. And there are finished scenes and assets put unto the FF7 disc that they for one reason or another never ended up using. We may see some of those things in the Remake.

It would be very interesting if they do alter the story to feature scrapped ideas like the ones you mention cause that would add a certain depp that perhaps wasnt reachable back when the original game launched. I for one am curious as to how they portray Sephiroth's relationship with Jenova because I thought it felt weird and out of place back then, and it'd feel weird seeing it now unless they make a heavy change on it. 

Regarding playable characters I dont know. One thing I would absolutely not like them doing is altering the playable characters just to "fill the spaces" of the characters not yet introduced. That would indeed feel like filler. 
For example, if in the first part they only introduce Cloud, Barret, Tifa and Aerith I would preffer it if those were the only playable characters then, I wouldnt want them to make Jessie, Biggs or Wedge (to name someone) playable just to get to the "number" of total characters. 

BUT if they do introduce a character early on justo to reach a certain number, lets say to get to 6 characters, then I hope they double down and said character's story is drastically changed throughout all parts. Vincent and Yuffie are two good examples of characters that could work. You could even add parts of Dirge of Cerberus or Crisis Core into this game's overall story through out the 3 parts (or whatever amount of parts) its gonna have, and I'd love it if they do.