FF7 Remake Part 2 needs to make 1 giant change to a key character

The first Final Fantasy VII Remake featured a shuffling cast of four playable characters, and assuming the direct follow-up brings the rest of the original's heroes into the mix, it'll be a total of nine. Among the remaining characters is a regular-sized man named Vincent Valentine who may or may not be a vampire. If recent gaming trends are any indication, then developer Square Enix should make some BIG changes to Vincent.

They should make him a 9'6" vampire, just like the widely beloved Lady Alcina Dimitrescu.

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For a number of reasons, gamers adore Lady D, a towering female vampire who is one of the central antagonists in the upcoming Resident Evil Village. She first appeared in a January digital showcase for the game and quickly gained a rabid following online. Then she appeared again in the conclusion to the excellent Maiden demo. She's formidable, ludicrously tall, and elegant. Everybody loves the big vampire lady.

So Square Enix should also make FF7 Remake's resident vampire a giant, right?

We're half-kidding around here, but as it stands, the first Remake game feels surprisingly less wacky than the original as it strives for realism more. Yes, it's an explicitly horny game that can be silly and weird, but it feels toned-down compared to the 1997 original.

Despite some radical changes to canon, particularly in the game's finale, there isn't all that much that subverts our expectations in FF7 Remake. A couple of minor characters (and one major hero) seemingly lived, the party destroyed "Destiny" itself, and yet we don't really have any sense of how all of this will change the story.

Introducing "Big Vinny" into the mix could be a way to recapture the weird camp of Final Fantasy VII with its slap battles and dolphin flips. Whether it's a height adjustment or more practical details like actually making him a vampire, the Final Fantasy VII Remake series needs to adjust its treatment of Vincent Valentine. (For what it's worth, he currently stands at a reasonable six feet even — taller than Cloud and most of the party, but shorter than Barret and Sephiroth.)

What if Vincent were almost 10 feet tall, as a joke, and then he shrunk down to normal size when he joined the party? At least Square Enix could be part of the whole big vampire conversation. Though he starred in his own maligned game — Dirge of Cerberus — years later, Vincent's backstory isn't fleshed out enough in FF7.

He is one of the last characters that players can recruit, and doing so is optional. When you meet the immortal man, he's sleeping in a coffin in the basement of an abandoned mansion grumbling about nightmares. And while he doesn't drink blood, he does transform into a variety of monstrous creatures. He's basically a vampire — except his story is a lot more complicated. To be honest, doubling his height seems within the realm of possibility for Vincent. (Major spoilers incoming for FF7 and future FF7 Remakes.)

Almost 30 years before the start of the game, Vincent is a Turk (like Reno, Rude, and Tseng in the present day) who's in love with Lucretia, a Shinra scientist. Even in Dirge of Cerberus, it's unclear if they were ever together in a romantic capacity. But sometime after Vincent found out that Lucretia may have caused his father's death, she wound up marrying Hojo (the same mad scientist from FF7 Remake) and became pregnant.

Hojo planned to conduct experiments on the fetus with Jenova cells, and when Vincent tried to stop him, Hojo shot him in the chest. Rather than let Vincent die, Hojo conducted other experiments on him that led to the former Turk suffering in a permanent state of undeath. Further experimentation involving corrupted Materia and a demonic being called Chaos transformed Vincent into a superhuman immortal that can literally unleash his inner demons at will.

Lucretia's child — who for all we know could be Vincent's — went on to become Sephiroth, the first SOLDIER and the series' principal villain who almost succeeds at destroying the world. Because he failed to protect Lucretia and stop Hojo, Vincent literally sleeps for decades until given the opportunity to get revenge when Cloud and friends find him. His backstory is perhaps the richest of all the characters outside of Cloud and Aerith, which is probably why Square Enix explored it further in Dirge of Cerberus, for better or for worse.

It's for that very reason that Vincent needs to have a bigger role in the next Final Fantasy VII Remake compared to the original. Whether or not he's literally much bigger is up to Square Enix.

FF7 Remake Part 2 is currently in development and Resident Evil Village will be released on May 7, 2021.