I don't mind the expanding in Remake as much as Rebirth tbh. Remake's does expand a lot of side character's, but they feel relevant to the story. Marlene, Avalanche trio, hell Yuffie's little side story, they're all good additions. EDIT: ALSO Wall Market! Best addition by far.

Rebirth is where I think it went off the rails a bit. The game really feels unfocused with a lot of the side quests, and it really drags a bit until you get to the last quarter of the game.

Maybe it'll feel better to revisit once we have the entire trilogy. But man, paying $70/ to play Rebirth feels a bit bad when it came out at the same time as the new Yakuza and Persona remake priced at the same point.

You know what's fascinating about that?

I'm pretty sure that every CD had the entire game and all the art assets for every town / place you could enter on the world map. Every enemy. All the music.

The only difference between each CD was the FMV cutscenes contained on them.

At least that was the story / rumor at the time. For optimization they could have reduced the art assets and music to only areas you could enter at that point in the game, and only enemy models you would see, but supposedly that wasn't the case.