How the rest will be divided up (my theory)

[JJ Strife]

Moral of the story: don't sniff Mako kids.

[Lord Golbez]

So I've been replaying the original and decided to clock some stuff to verify my thinking (that's not the reason I'm playing but since I was doing it. Basically, I'm doing essentially no grinding but talking to every person and trying to get everything as it becomes available including all enemy skills (that does not include buying everything as it becomes available which would require some grinding).

Anyway I clocked at almost exactly 6 hours my first save right out of Midgar. That's with doing everything I said. Trying to get everything and talk to everyone but essentially no grinding. The longest time drag other than what I mentioned is some battles taking longer than necessary because of trying to steal, but I think that's a wash with my postMidgar stuff because I did that there too.

Anyway, doing everything from the Midgar to Junon, including the optional stuff of recruiting Yuffie, doing the first Fort Condor battle, and getting all available enemy skills (except Beta which would almost certainly require grinding at this point) took almost exactly 2 hours to saving right outside Junon.

Going through Junon to getting on the cargo ship including leaving Junon twice to backtrack to Fort Condor for two more optional battles took pretty much exactly one more hour or 3 hours total for the rest of the Continent from leaving Midgar. In other words, as I expected - though more precisely than even I would have predicted - the rest of the eastern continent including optional stuff is almost exactly half the length of Midgar.

Throw in the Cargo Ship until it docks in Costa Del Sol was another 25 minutes for 3h 25 min total from leaving Midgar to Costa Del Sol. I'm actually quite surprised the Cargo Ship took that long but I'm chalking it up to dicking around a bit trying to figure out how to get the sailor out of the way to talk to Barret and that I was making a cup of tea at the time.

At any rate, the ultimate point is that even if you throw in the cargo ship, you're not looking at much more than half of the Midgar section in the original game if you stop with the cargo ship. That means you should either be expecting a game around half the length of the first part or extending things roughly double as much as they did for the first part of you're gonna end there. Do you really want that? What about the eastern continent, even considering Junon, makes you feel that it lends itself to twice the expansion of what Midgar got?

Anyway, I'm gonna keep clocking and see where I end up for the 12 hour mark. I'm sure it will be before Nibelheim but not exactly sure where. I'm not going to keep this up for the entire game for the simple reason that endgame optional stuff pretty much requires substantial grinding of various sorts so it would be a choice between choosing which optional things to omit or letting the estimations of relative length skew absurdly highly toward endgame due to the length of grinding for some optional stuff like the Master Materia and Gold Chocobo. There definitely should not be a whole game about getting a Gold Chocobo so it's kind of pointless. However I believe I can continue in roughly the same way at least up to the first northern Crater visit, so it might be good to check the time scale there.