All the party members in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth can ride chocobos, and that includes Red XIII despite his leonine appearance. The pose he adopts on chocoback is pretty ridiculous, and nobody was more surprised than the game's animators that creative director Tetsuya Nomura gave it the stamp of approval.
"Red XIII is a playable character, so along with others, he has to climb a ladder and perform field actions, as well as sit on a chair," battle animation director Hiroyuki Yamaji explains in a new YouTube documentary. "As for riding the chocobo, Nomura-san requested not to have him in a 'sitting' position, and it was a must for him to hold the reins in his hands, so from there we made several pose variations which we had Nomura-san review, and he said 'that's the one' about that pose."
"We really didn't think it would be picked, honestly," lead character artist Dai Suzuki adds. "It was hard to say."
"I made some variations of the poses just to mess around, and I think they were all pretty funny," Yamaji concludes. If this is what we ended up with, I can't imagine just how funny the rejected options might have been.
Of course, Red XIII proved to be a unique challenge for the devs even beyond how he rides a chocobo. "Similar to tigers and lions, it's hard to discern their full range of emotions from their expression," facial director Akira Iwasawa explains. "Their eyebrows don't move as much as humans, so you could tell if they were really angry or just neutral, but outside of that, sadness or joy are very hard to convey. These elements are very important where it concerns Red XIII, so we deviated from reality here a bit and gave him clear facial expressions that could easily be read by players."
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