Spoilers for Final Fantasy VII [1997], Remake, and Rebirth.
Even with far more barriers in the way, the desperation began almost as soon as the original game was on shelves and the first person saw Aerith die in Final Fantasy VII. The singular question haunted AOL chat rooms, usenet, and game magazine mailboxes for years: Can we bring her back?
Games have such a strange relationship with the idea of death, so it makes sense that players in 1997–starved of narratives with any real permanent stakes beyond how many quarters you can pump in or whether you really wanted to fight all the way back to the place you died–would have a reaction to Aerith being permanently dead. It’s baked right into the narrative in fact, with Cloud, even with all of his emotional damage, grasping the enormity. “Aerith will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry, or get angry….” Cloud wrestles, in the moment she dies in his arms, with grief for the first time. And Sephiroth does not give a shit. Sephiroth is beyond human concerns. He knows what Cloud is, and flies away with his gentle amusement. Cloud is a puppet. To him, emotions for someone ultimately meaningless in the larger context of time and space are no different than a toddler weeping because it accidentally stepped on a dandelion. But this is the internal struggle that would define the next stretch of FF7. Cloud discovers what he is, and has to come to grips with what it actually means to be human, because just copying Zack Fair’s homework will only get him so far.
As a singular work, Final Fantasy VII’s ensemble of rebels comes to the end with proud, full hearts, accepting what must be done to save Gaia. But it doesn’t take long for fans and Square Enix to find ways to cheat death, from GameShark codes allowing players to keep Aerith in the party after she’s dead, to Square Enix futzing with their own rules to utilize Aerith in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts. In a medium where death is always an easily solvable problem—hell, in a game series where resurrection is usually one Phoenix Down away—Aerith being dead should be a temporary inconvenience at best. She’s only mostly dead, right?
The greatest gift, and the greatest power of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, is that there is no such respite to be had in it. From the second the game starts, Aerith’s days are numbered, with the inevitable moment when players would have to grapple with the potential of her martyr’s death acting as an oppressive weight on the entire game. The dread of Shinra, Sephiroth, and the lifestream itself, all of which could put an end to our party’s quest, adds to the pressure, forcing our party and every playable character to contend with the peril in their own way. The only one who never buckles is Aerith.
Aerith, from the very start of Remake, knows more than anyone about where the path leads for her and her friends. It’s never said outright, but the implication is seeded fairly often that she knows how she dies. It becomes clear how many forces conspire against them, threatening to tear the entire party of heroes asunder. And yet, in that moment, standing outside Midgar, all Aerith can do is look at the possibilities of the green, verdant world stretching in front of her, and be grateful for the company she gets to share it with. There’s something to be said for just how much of Rebirth is sidequests,new mechanics you get to use once and never again, and strange flights of fancy. And yet, unlike most open world games, that friction between the importance of the greater quest and the frivolity of the optional stuff isn’t so much a dissonant note, but the entire point.
As the game comes to a close, Aerith takes an unconscious Cloud through her memories of the Midgar Slums. Shinra is flying to the Temple of the Ancients, and Aerith wants you to try candy.
Sephiroth is waiting for his chance to murder everyone. Aerith wants you to pick out jewelry.The multiverse that is Final Fantasy VII is threatening to collapse. Aerith wants nothing more than for Cloud to look at her and hold her hand.
There was a Eurogamer article not long ago where Robert Purchase asked a reasonable if misguided question: “Why is it that in a role-playing game where the stakes are usually ‘the end of the world’, the end of the world always has to wait for us to finish our sprawling to-do list first?” A reasonable question approached from the wrong angle. The question, more often than not, is why the end of the world always feels inconsequential? There’s a reason why 0% speedruns of Breath of the Wild where players rocket over to fight Calamity Ganon the second they put a shirt on never feel out of pocket: that’s a game that holds the consequences of saving the world cheap, in order for the player to create that treasured immersion developers love so much. Nintendo’s far from alone on that; this is how most open experiences are meant to operate to give players power.
Final Fantasy VII was never designed in a way where the threat of Sephiroth, Meteor, Shinra et al were meant to fade into the background. Once Sephiroth makes the fateful call, the beautiful overworld music vanishes, replaced by one of the most ominous pieces of music Nobuo Uematsu would ever compose. You literally cannot step outside without remembering what must be done, and part of why it’s effective is because we’ve seen the game willing to take someone precious away from the player to get there– something irretrievable and irreplaceable. It’s only after the fact that players and Square tried to fill the hole of Aerith’s absence without retconning the whole thing. Rebirth, on the other hand, knows where it’s headed from minute one.Right from the beginning, it’s begging players to look at what they have, the world they inhabit, and the people who make their home here; the humanity that Sephiroth holds so cheap and the friends so dedicated to preserving it all that they’re willing to look the silver-haired, one-winged angel of death in his smug fucking face and tell him that “yes, we’re going to fight you for all this.” And by then, players will have a deep, beautiful basis of experiences in life and love to back that up.
That brings us to the moment.The moment in which it almost looks like Square might spare us the pain of watching Aerith–now a character so much more genuinely and beautifully written and executed than her 1997 counterpart–die in Cloud’s arms again. But no. Despite some deft swordplay, Aerith is stabbed. The materia falls down the stairs. The theme plays. And again, many will weep. As it turns out, this is, to borrow another multiverse’s parlance, a canon event. Even given how much Remake and Rebirth stray from the path we all know, some things are inevitable. Aerith dies in the Temple of Ancients every time.
But something’s different about Rebirth. Through Cloud’s temporary surrender to outright madness and nihilism, we’ve seen just how much of this universe is inevitable. But the magic of it is this: you are encouraged to fight it anyway. Humanity–being a thinking, feeling, emotional being–demands it. And the real difference between Rebirth and the vast majority of experiences is that everything you’ve done prior informs it.
This seems to be a running motif in Square’s work in the FF series of late, with XV and XVI both playing with the idea that, while ruin is inevitable every tiny interaction creates a vast tapestry of reasons to save the world anyway. Despite being faced with death time and again, Square has asked us to revel in these peoples’ lives, in all their messy glory, because it all actually matters. When death comes–and it comes heavy in all these games–it has a face. Life, on the other hand, has many. And the sacrifice of confronting the end of all things means absolutely nothing without seeing those faces first. In a truly meaningful RPG narrative, that is why the end of the world must be allowed to wait.
For Final Fantasy VII, we have spent literally real-world decades waiting for the opportunity to stop Aerith from going away, never truly accepting that our time with her is short. Rebirth’s great power is that it gives us more of that. We have all the time in the world to fall in love with the very act of being alive and breathing the way she does, so that when the end comes, there aren’t regrets.
When Aerith died in 1997, all Cloud could focus on was the loss–the things we can never get back, the things she will never do again.
When Aerith dies in 2024, Cloud swallows the sorrow, holds her hand, and tells her, “I got this.” And he lets her go to fight for the world she loved.
When that fight is over, Cloud’s perspective undergoes a shift; straddling timelines, able to see the void left by Aerith’s death, but carrying her with him, or at least, a multiverse echo of her. But still. Cloud knows it’s not her. He can’t suddenly give Aerith back to his world, and he will be uniquely equipped to share what he knows of her to get his friends through it. Our heroes mourn. But it is so much more important that Rebirth shows they are not doing it alone, and that all of them are better for having known her.
And thus, Rebirth imparts its lesson. One of the hardest but most crucial lessons of the year. We have had to let Aerith go for so long, many of us forgot why it hurt to begin with. But Rebirth lets us remember, and revel in it, and finally accept. We let her go, gladly, having fought, played, and sung with her in ways we never imagined back on PS1. There is an art to accepting the end is coming. The Remake project altogether has been, above all else, an invitation to look out at the horizon and, even knowing it has an end, to revel in what’s ahead regardless.
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