@danbruno it's structured a bit like 3rd so I imagine they can just shoehorn in random people pretty easily. Also from the preview images we are getting Rixia and few others who were conspicuously missing from CS4.
I gotta say, I loved all the Rean/Cassius stuff but also him getting Divine Blade was a little confusing and anticlimactic. Like, whatever, I'm not mad about it but... eh.
Oh I liked the Calvard related side quests too, and the Remiferia stuff!
@darius Yeah, I expected to see the B team from the Crossbell arc in Lloyd's route—Rixia, Wazy, Noel, Dudley, and Arios is already a bunch of people not in CS4. But I also feel like they would be offset by losing some other folks—hard to imagine they'll give us, say, Xeno/Leo and Ines/Ennea again…but maybe I'm wrong!
I guess even if not there are new characters too—I see we have another masked character who goes by "C", heh—and that'll make up the difference