The storytelling at the end was lazy. The fact that the timeline is collapsing yet they're still rigidly moving through the same events with the characters not acting believably. Red XIII more than anyone gets lost in the shuffle because he "has" to appear and join the group near the climax of the story. They write some poorly explained crap to quickly put him with the party but swept under the rug, rather than doing a hard retcon and some real rewriting to have a story that works.
How many hours of gameplay are left after he is acquired (I am just about to storm the shinra tower)?
In my opinion, it seams kinda silly if he is introduced at the very end to waste programming time on a game that already took way to long to come out. But that’s just me. I never really used him as a playable character in the original game on many of my play-throughs, so I wasn’t too upset when I found out he was at the end of this game and not playable.
You acquire him in the original game as a playable character in the Shinra Building and can use him right away. So, again it's just laziness or poor design choice. Idk..so much bloated, unnecessary content but a major character isn't playable? Seems weird.
They could have made content for him too. Just think, if once you beat the game and had access to hard mode, since story no longer matters, you could switch in whatever party you want and have Red be selectable. Then his weapons could be scattered around hard mode to collect. There would have been plenty of content to use him in and given us a reason for a second playthrough.
The 4 playable characters are very intentionally balanced and very unique, and all the enemy types and encounters revolve around their skillsets. I'm not surprised they chose not to upset that and design another playable character from the ground-up with 2 limits, several weapons, 5 unique abilities and a special triangle move on par with the others and re-balance all the encounters to accommodate him when he'd only be there for one chapter, especially since they may have to alter it in the next title anyway. The alternative would be making him more bare-bones, to accomodate the fact he's more like a guest character, and people would complain they butchered him because he wouldn't be as fun to use as the others. Like Brock said earlier, they didn't want to change the static party dynamic that late. Not to mention, suddenly having to learn a new character that you're given no time to use would probably be jarring. Every other character is introduced slowly and built up throughout the game. From a developmental standpoint there are a lot of good reasons to keep him as a guest character besides wanting to blow off work early to drink at the bar.
I'm perfectly fine with Red having not been playable, but I didn't think the explanation was all that good. They didn't have to give him a full loadout to make him playable. I don't think anyone would have expected him to have a full set of weapons, abilities, and stat growth given you only would have had access to him for like 1% of the game. I could understand them saying the cost wasn't worth it if he was truly just a guest that didn't take part in battle. The problem was he did fight, so they pretty much did most of the work. I don't see where it would have cost that much to give him an ability or two and allow him to equip materia.
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