Wolf:

(SPOILER)How in the world did I miss the Snow/Shinjiro Aragaki + Hope/Ken Amada link? You're right, they did copy that entire mini-plot almost exactly. And what they changed, P3 did better. Man, I feel like an idiot for not realizing that. Especially with how much I've been playing P3P lately.

And, yeah, it's ridiculous that they try to milk any suspense out of Sazh's "suicide", when it was painfully obvious that they weren't going to go there. It's like the whole "OMG, Squall died" thing at the end of FFVIII Disc 1. No suspense whatsoever.