YesFinal Fantasy VII details [1997]Remake and Renaissance.
Even with many more barriers in the way, despair 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 plagued AOL chat rooms, Usenet, and gaming magazine mailboxes for years: Can we bring it back?
Games have such a strange relationship with the idea of death, so it makes sense that gamers in 1997, hungry for narratives with real ongoing stakes beyond how many quarters you can pump or whether you really wanted to fight to the end the place where you died, would have a reaction if Aerith was permanently dead. In fact, it's built into the narrative, with Cloud, even with all his emotional damage, understanding the enormity. “Aerith will no longer speak, no longer laugh, no longer cry, no longer be angry…” Cloud struggles, the moment she dies in his arms, in pain for the first time. And Sephiroth doesn't give a shit. Sephiroth is beyond human concerns. He knows what Cloud is and flies away with his gentle amusement. The cloud is a puppet. For him, emotions for someone who is ultimately meaningless in the larger context of time and space are no different than a small child crying because he accidentally stepped on a dandelion. But this is the internal struggle that would define the next stretch of FF7. Cloud finds out what he is and has to confront what it really means to be human, because copying Zack Fair's homework will only get him so far.
As a singular work, the group of rebels in Final Fantasy VII reaches the end with their hearts full of pride and 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 that allow players to keep Aerith in the party after she dies, to Square Enix playing by their own rules for using Aerith. Aerith in Advent Children and Kingdom. Cups. In a medium where death is always an easily solved problem (heck, in a game series where resurrection is usually a Phoenix Down away), the fact that Aerith is dead should, at best, be , a temporary inconvenience. She's just almost dead, right?
The greatest gift and greatest power of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is that there is no such respite to be had. From the moment the game begins, Aerith's days are numbered, with the inevitable moment where players would have to deal with the potential of her martyr's death acting as an oppressive weight on the entire game. The fear of Shinra, Sephiroth, and the lifestream itself, all of which could end our group's quest, ramps up the pressure, forcing our group and each playable character to confront danger in their own way. The only one who never gives in is Aerith.
As the game comes to an end, Aerith takes an unconscious Cloud through his memories of the Midgar Slums. Shinra is flying to the Temple of the Ancients and Aerith wants you to try sweets.
Sephiroth is waiting for his chance to murder everyone. Aerith wants you to pick out jewelry. The multiverse that is Final Fantasy VII threatens to collapse. Aerith wants nothing more than for Cloud to look at her and hold her hand.
Not long ago an article appeared in Eurogamer in which Robert Purchase asked a reasonable but misguided question: “Why, in a role-playing game where the stakes are usually 'the end of the world', is the end of the world does it always have to come? Wait for us to finish our extensive to-do list first? A reasonable question approached from the wrong angle. The most frequently asked question is why does the end of the world always seem inconsequential? There's a reason Breath of the Wild's 0% speedruns, in which players launch into battle against Calamity Ganon the moment they put on a t-shirt, never feel out of pocket: it's a game that keeps the consequences of saving the world at a low cost, so that the Player can create that precious immersion that developers love so much. Nintendo is not alone in that; This is how most open experiences should work to empower players.
Final Fantasy VII was never designed in a way where the threat of Sephiroth, Meteor, Shinra and others should take a backseat. Once Sephiroth makes the fateful call, the beautiful music of the overworld disappears, replaced by one of the most sinister pieces of music Nobuo Uematsu would ever compose. You literally can't walk away without remembering what needs to be done, and part of why it's effective is because we've seen the game willing to take someone valuable away from the player to get there: something unrecoverable and irreplaceable. It was only after the fact that players and Square attempted to fill the void of Aerith's absence without reconfiguring everything. Rebirth, on the other hand, knows where it's going from minute one. From the beginning, it begs players to look at what they have, the world they inhabit, and the people who live here; humanity that Sephiroth values so little and friends so dedicated to preserving it all that they are willing to look at the silver-haired, one-winged angel of death in his damn smug face and tell him “yes, we are going to fight you for all of this.” And by then, players will have a deep and beautiful foundation of life experiences and they will love to support it.
That brings us to the moment. The moment where it almost seems like Square could spare us the pain of watching Aerith, now a much more genuine and beautifully written and executed character than her 1997 counterpart, die in Cloud's arms again. But not. Despite some skillful swordplay, Aerith is stabbed. The matter falls down the stairs. The theme sounds. And again many will cry. It turns out that this is, to borrow the language of another multiverse, a canonical event. Even considering how much Remake and Rebirth deviate from the path we all know, some things are inevitable. Aerith dies in the Temple of the Ancients every time.
But something is different in Rebirth. Through Cloud's temporary surrender to utter madness and nihilism, we have seen the extent to which this universe is inevitable. But the magic of it is this: they encourage you to fight it anyway. Humanity, being a thinking, sentimental and emotional being, demands it. And the real difference between Rebirth and the vast majority of experiences is that everything you've done before informs it.
This seems to be a recurring motif in Square's work on the FF series lately, with XV and XVI playing with the idea that while ruin is inevitable, each small interaction creates a vast tapestry of reasons to save the world from everyone. modes. Despite facing death again and again, Square has asked us to revel in these people's lives, in all their messy glory, because it all really matters. When death comes (and it comes hard in all these games), it has a face. Life, on the other hand, has many. And the sacrifice of facing the end of all things means absolutely nothing without seeing those faces first. In a truly meaningful RPG narrative, this is why the end of the world must be allowed to wait.
By Final Fantasy VII, we've spent literally decades in the real world waiting for the chance to stop Aerith from leaving, never really accepting that our time with her is short. The great power of rebirth is that it gives us more of that. We have all the time in the world to fall in love with the very fact of being alive and breathing like she does, so that when the end comes, there are no regrets.
When Aerith died in 1997, the only thing 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 his pain, takes her hand, and tells her, “I've got this.” And he lets her go fight for the world she loved.
And so, Rebirth imparts its lesson. One of the most difficult but crucial lessons of the year. We've had to let Aerith go for so long that many of us forgot why it hurt to begin with. But Rebirth allows us to remember it, revel in it, and finally accept it. We gladly let her go, having fought, played and sung with her in ways we never imagined on PS1. There is an art to accepting that the end is approaching. The Remake project as a whole has been, above all, an invitation to look at the horizon and, even knowing that it has an end, to delight in what is to come.
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