I feel the demo is actually longer than the original. I mean the Scorpion Sentinel lasts like fifteen minutes lone in the demo, and considering the timer in the original was around ten minutes instead of the generous 20 to 30 given here, I'd say it was about twice as long as the original. Unless of course you're the type of person who likes to grind that early in the game.

Though this did remind me how the demo is a little over 7GBs large and the final game will be over 70GB, meaning we may have played the first tenth of the game, assuming the demo is not carrying a bunch of extra stuff from the full game that is locked out of course. I'm not really as concern about the length, as I feel the game was probably going to safely hit the 30-35 hour mark for a basic run. Probably longer for a completionist run. My real concern is how they are going to fill that time, cause as I've argued in the past, Midgar originally can take anywhere from five to ten hours to complete in the original, and now we're going to stretch that out to an average game length of 30ish hours.

As for how many episodes this is going to be, I'm still assuming it will be four or five total. I can foresee them dragging it out to seven, but realistically, four or five sounds about right. I feel the real judge of how they're going to go about this will come with Episode 2 when they have to deal with the first real story lull in the plot. It may also come down to whether the Nibelheim Flashback will still take place in Kalm like the original, or if fan speculation is true and they moved it into Episode 1. If the flashback takes place in Kalm, then I can see the second Episode only carrying us slightly past the Junon arc as they have a lot of material to work with and to expand with both the flashback and Junon scenario. It comes down to how much they want to expand the scenario I guess.