We finally got our first good look at the Final Fantasy VII remake on PS4 today, as it goes with remakes there tends to be some changes from the original release, obviously a trailer is not enough to go into an in depth comparison, however we did got a good glimpse of five characters in the game: Cloud, Barret, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge which you may remember are the crew that destroy the mako reactor on the opening of the game (which is also the portion of the game that the trailer shows.)
So just for fun I've been looking at the details from the trailer to try to point the character changes, now, as mentioned on the title this isn't really a complaint, just all in good fun.
For the sake of this I'll keep it to Barret, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge only, this is how they were supposed to look on the original release:
Take a good look at them.
Anyway, starting with Wedge.
He looks very faithful to the original, he's got the bandana, grenades and he's fat, seems on point.
Differences to note are the color of his pants as they're darkish gray instead of bright blue, also addition of knee caps, also Cloud looks very skinny.
The rest of the expendables crew here, Biggs and Jessie also look close to the original, note that Jessie's arm wear is very different from the original.
Much closer look, Biggs got an earing and a beard (did he had one in the original?) also Jessie got an extra piece of clothing on her chest.
Now the man with the big changes, Barret, here's the first good look at him.
I always suspected he'd get a big redesign for the remake, while not quite as drastic is way bigger than from the rest, first of all his Mr. T look seems gone for a more original feel; those glasses are, of course, the biggest addition as Barret didn't wore glasses on the orignal game, at all.
Noteworthy too is also the tattoo, it's completely different than the one in the original, in fact is the same one he got on the more drastic redesign for Advent Children.
Here's a better look at the rest of the body.
Once again, his arm gun or whatever is closer to the Advent Children redesign rather than the original one, apart from that his outfit is very close to the original, except the abs of steel, they seem gone, he's wearing a shirt now and that jacket seems to try to recreate the look of the abs, but not quite. There's also all those things on his pants.
That's all I got on character designs, but looking at the trailer there's other interesting things.
Note that health, at this point of the game it should be about half of what its there, so maybe they start with more health than on the original or on a higher level, that is assuming this is at the start of the game.
Interesting too that you can play as Barret, changing characters in combat sounds interesting.
Also this.
While Cloud has way more health than what he'd have in the original, he is inflicting and recieving about as much damage as he should, so he doesn't seem way overleveled, note that his MP is way lower than what it'll normally be.
Maybe he just has a lot for testing purposes but whatev.
So that's it, what other character design changes are expected for the future? Well for one, I'm expecting Tifa to get a breast reduction, and possibly a more radical outfit change, something closer to AC (note, what I'm expecting, not hoping), not really expecting much else from the rest of the crew.