Five events that could change in Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2

Yuffie and Wutai

After you leave Midgar and spelunk through your first cave in the original Final Fantasy VII, you can start encountering a Mystery Ninja in any forest on the world map. Fans of the series will known this shuriken-wielding tomboy as Yuffie Kisaragi, one of the game’s two optional characters. After defeating her, you have to correctly navigate a series of dialogue prompts in order to convince the brash Yuffie to come along with you on your planet-saving mission.

There are a few things to consider when thinking about how encountering and recruiting Yuffie might change in Remake. The first is that Final Fantasy hasn’t had any truly optional characters in a main-line game since FFVII, and even then, it was due in part to the fact that the developers didn’t have enough time to properly script those optional heroes into the story properly. The only game in the series that truly leaned into the whole optional character mechanic was Final Fantasy VI, where you could spend the entire back-end of the game recruiting all your scattered party members or opt to go straight for the final boss.

FF7 Remake is very cinematic and had to eliminate many small choices you could make in the original game, like whether you give the flower you obtain from Aerith in the beginning of the game to Tifa or Marlene. That might have worked when all Square had to do was write some different text boxes, but now that it would have to animate wholly new, beautiful cut scenes, it may be too much work. Given that, it stands to reason that Square Enix will take a more scripted approach to introducing Yuffie in Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2.

And there’s another layer to the Yuffie conundrum to consider: the greatly expanded role that the nation of Wutai played in Final Fantasy VII Remake. Throughout Cloud’s journey in Midgar, Wutai is a constant topic of conversation: the Shinra brass even go so far as to frame AVALANCHE as terrorists who are being funded by Wutai in order to further their own agenda.

In the original game, there is exactly one mention of Wutai during the Midgar portion of the game, and the main story can be completed without ever even going there. Wutai is an optional side quest that is strongly connected to Yuffie (she is the daughter of the nation’s leader). So it seems pretty clear that Remake has laid the groundwork to expand Wutai’s role.

With all that in mind, it seems very likely that both your encounter with Yuffie and your party’s journey to Wutai stand to be significantly changed in the Remake sequels, though it’s hard to tell if the latter will feature in Part 2 or 3. It depends how deep into the story this next game goes.