SSpoilers for Final Fantasy VII (1997), Remake, Rebirth.
Despite even more barriers, despair set in the moment the original game was released and the first people saw Aerith die in Final Fantasy VII. There was one question that plagued AOL chat rooms, Usenet, and gaming magazine mailboxes for years: Can we bring her back?
Games have such a strange relationship with the concept of death that it makes sense that players in 1997 would be hungry for a narrative with real, permanent stakes that went beyond how many quarters they could commit or whether they really wanted to fight to the end. . The place you die will have a reaction to Aeris being permanently dead. In fact, it’s baked right into the narrative with Cloud, coming to grips with the enormity despite all his emotional damage. “Aerith will no longer speak, no more laugh, no more cry, no more anger…” Cloud wrestles with grief for the first time as she dies in his arms. And Sephiroth doesn’t mind at all. Sephiroth transcends human concerns. He knows what the cloud is, and flies with gentle pleasure. Cloud is a puppet. To him, feeling for someone who is ultimately meaningless in the larger context of time and space is no different than a child crying because he accidentally steps on a dandelion. But this is the internal struggle that will define the next phase of FF7. Cloud must discover what he is and understand what it really means to be human. Because just copying Zack Fair’s homework will get you where you are.
As a unique piece of work, Final Fantasy VII’s rebel ensemble ends proudly and wholeheartedly, accepting what they must do to save Gaia. But it’s taken a long time for fans and Square Enix to find ways to cheat death, from GameShark code that allows players to keep Aerith in the party even after they die, to Square Enix using its own rules to utilize Aerith in Advent Children and Kingdom. It doesn’t take this. mind. In a medium where death is always an easily solved problem (hell, in a game series where resurrection is usually a Phoenix Down hit away), Aerith dying should be a temporary inconvenience at best. She’s mostly just dead. Right?
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s greatest gift and greatest power is that there are no such breaks. From the moment the game begins, Aerith’s days are numbered, leading to inevitable moments when players must grapple with the possibility that her martyr’s death will act as an oppressive weight on the entire game. The fear of Shinra, Sephiroth, and the Lifestream itself could end our party’s quest, adding to the pressure, forcing our party and all playable characters to face danger in their own way. The only one who never wavers is Aerith.
From the beginning of the remake, Aeris has known better than anyone else where the path she and her friends will take. Although it’s never said outright, it’s implied quite often that she knows how she will die. It becomes clear just how many forces are conspiring against them and threatening to tear the entire party of heroes apart. But at that moment, all Aeris can do as she stands outside Midgar is to see the possibilities of the green world unfolding before her, and to be grateful for the companionship with whom she can share it. You could say how much of Rebirth consists of side quests, new mechanics you only use once and never again, and strange flights of fancy. But unlike most open-world games, the friction between the importance of the larger quest and the frivolity of the options isn’t quite so dissonant, but rather the point.
At the end of the game, Aerith brings Cloud unconscious through his memories of the Midgar Slums. Shinra is flying to an ancient temple, and Aerith asks him to try some candy.
Sephiroth is waiting for his chance to murder everyone. Aeris asks you to choose a gem. The multiverse known as Final Fantasy VII is on the verge of collapse. Aerith wants nothing more than for Cloud to look at her and hold her hand.
A while ago, in a Eurogamer article, Robert Buy asked the wrong question. Would you like to wait until we finish our to-do list first?” A reasonable question was approached from the wrong angle. The question often asked is why the end of the world always feels trivial. There’s a reason Breath of the Wild’s 0% speedrun never leaves the pocket, as players rush to battle Calamity Ganon the moment they put on the shirt. This is a player that can create the valuable sense of immersion that developers love so much. Nintendo is by no means alone in this area. This is how most open-ended experiences work to empower the player.
Final Fantasy VII was never designed in a way that allowed threats like Sephiroth, Meteor, Shinra, etc. to fade into the background. When Sephiroth makes his fateful request, the beautiful overworld music disappears and is replaced by one of the most sinister scores ever composed by Nobuo Uematsu. You literally can’t go out without remembering what to do, and one of the reasons it’s effective is because we’ve seen the game willingly take loved ones away from the player. That is, it is irreparable and irreplaceable. It was only after the fact that players and Square tried to make up for Aerith’s absence without rethinking everything. Rebirth, on the other hand, knows from the start where it’s headed. From the beginning, it asks players to look at what they have, the world they inhabit, and the people who make their home here. Sephiroth’s love of humanity and his friends who are dedicated to preserving it all are willing to look at the silver-haired, one-winged angel of death reflected in Sephiroth’s smug face and say, “Okay, we’re going.” “I’m going to fight you for all of this.” And by then, players will have a deep and beautiful foundation of life experience that they will love to back up.
A moment that seems Square could have eased the pain of seeing Aerith, a much more truthful and beautifully written and executed character than she was in 1997, die again in Cloud’s arms. But no. Despite her skillful swordsmanship, Aerith is stabbed. Materia falls down the stairs. The theme plays. And many people will shed tears. As it turns out, this is, to borrow another multiverse term, a canon event. Even considering how far the remakes and reincarnations have strayed from the path we all know, there are some things that are inevitable. Aeris dies in the Temple of the Ancients every time.
But in the case of Rebirth, something is different. Through Cloud’s temporary surrender to outright madness and nihilism, we’ve seen how much of this universe is inescapable. But the magic of it is this: somehow you are encouraged to fight against it. Humanity demands it because we are thinking, feeling, emotional beings. And the real difference between Rebirth and most experiences is that everything you’ve done before affects Rebirth.
This seems to be a running motif in Square’s recent work on the FF series. Both XV and XVI play with the idea that destruction is inevitable, but every little interaction creates a vast tapestry of reasons to save the world anyway. Despite facing death time and time again, Square asked us to enjoy the lives of these people and their messy glory. Because all of this actually matters. When death comes – and it comes heavy in all these games – it has a face. On the other hand, there is a lot to life. And sacrifice in the face of the end of all things means absolutely nothing without first seeing its face. This is why truly meaningful RPG narratives require waiting for the end of the world.
In Final Fantasy VII, we literally spent real decades waiting for a chance to stop Aerith from leaving, never accepting that our time with her was short-lived. The great power of Rebirth is that it gives us more. We spend all the time in the world just like her, in love with the very act of living and breathing, so that we have no regrets when the end comes.
When Aerith passed away in 1997, all Cloud could focus on was the loss, something we could never get back, something she would never do again.
When Aeris dies in 2024, Cloud swallows his grief, holds her hand, and says, “I got this.” And he sends her off to fight for the world she loved.
After the fight, Cloud’s perspective changes. We can see the void left behind by Aerith’s death, but we can also take Aerith with him, or at least see her various cosmic echoes. But still. Cloud knows it’s not her. He suddenly won’t be able to return Aerith to her own world, and he will be uniquely equipped to overcome this by sharing the Aerith he knows with his friends. Our heroes are sad. But it’s much more important to show that Rebirth isn’t doing it alone and that they are all better because they knew her.
So Rebirth imparts a lesson. This is one of the hardest yet most important lessons of this year. We’ve had to let go of Aeris for so long that many of us have forgotten why it hurt in the first place. But Rebirth allows us to remember it, enjoy it, and finally accept it. After fighting, playing, and singing with her in ways we could never have imagined on PS1, we gladly let her go. There is an art to accepting that the end is coming. The remake project was, above all else, an invitation to look to the horizon and enjoy what lies ahead, even while knowing there will be an end.
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