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

Hojo’s Beach Vacation

Upon leaving the continent containing Midgar, Cloud and his posse’s first stop is a sunny beach town called Costa Del Sol. While there, they come across a familiar face: Professor Hojo, one of the game’s main villains. At this point in the story, Hojo and our heroes have very little beef (I mean, he only tried to force Aerith and Red XIII to breed against their will, but who’s keeping track…). When the group comes across the evil scientist in Costa Del Sol, he informs them that he’s getting a tan…and despite Cloud’s initial instinct to slice him up, they decide to leave Hojo to his vacation and continue pursuing Sephiroth.

In Remake, however, Hojo is way more of an antagonist. Not only does he plan to torture Aerith to try to ascertain the location of the promised land, but he then proceeds to sadistically force the heroes to fight their way through a lab infested with monsters so that he can gather data on them. Cloud and co. try to kill Hojo several times during that sequence, but the scientist outwits them each time and evades his comeuppance.

Ultimately, it’s the Whispers who intervene and pull Hojo away when he nearly spills the beans about Cloud’s traumatic past, something Cloud doesn’t find out about until way later in the original story.

It’s pretty hard to imagine Cloud or Red XIII letting Hojo off the hook so easily in Remake after what he put them through. And since the Whispers are (theoretically) no longer around to protect him, I’d bet that either this beach encounter won’t happen, or if it does, it will go down very differently.