Reflecting on Aerith's Death on the Eve of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Release

Spoiler Alert! This piece is going to cover spoilers from pretty much every single Final Fantasy VII thing that's come out leading up to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, including the original game, Advent Children, Crisis Core, FFVII Remake and even Rebirth's trailers.

For anyone that was into videogames in the 90s, it was one of the biggest legends of all time, an inescapable proto-meme that was being passed around even by people who'd never even played a Final Fantasy game. You would hear it shared in hushed whispers between friends while strolling through the shelves at Blockbuster or Electronics Boutique. Passionate debates would break out on playgrounds and in school cafeterias all over the world. On the internet, you can still find archives of fan forums from a decade after the game's release where people were still debating whether this legend was actually true or not. Invariably, the conversations followed the same basic pattern:

Gamer A: “Dude, there's, like, this secret quest that you can do in Disc 3 to revive Aerith** before you fight Sephiroth! It comes with a new ending video and everything.”

Gamer B: “No way, man! I've played every single FF a bazillion times, so I know that Aerith got completely wasted. You're full of crap.”

Gamer C: “Actually, my cousin's dad in California works for GameShark, so he got early access to the cheat codes that you have to use in order to get the quest to activate. Squaresoft had to cut the secret ending for PlayStation because it would have made the game Rated M. My cousin told me that Aerith totally impales Sephiroth with her staff in the secret video! It's freaking gnarly.”

Gamer B: (Now doubting every truth and institution that he has ever believed in) “Wait, seriously!? That's, like, the coolest thing I've ever heard of in my life!”

Gamer A: “Yeah, dude!”

Gamer C: “Dude… yeah.”

(**Note: Back then, everyone in my part of the world would have called her “Aeris”, but we're going to stick with the corrected localization)

The point is, Aerith's death was such a seismic and formative event for the still nascent video gaming fandom that we all reacted to it as if FFVII had forced us to watch a genuinely traumatizing murder. For years, all you had to do was show any fan that moment from the game—Aerith kneeling down in prayer at that temple in the City of the Ancients, with an ominous black feather floating down behind her just moments before Sephiroth descends like some unholy angel to deliver the killing blow—and, suddenly, they'd be going through the stages of grief all over again: Denial (“No, it can't be true!”). Anger (“Sephiroth, you bastard!”). Bargaining (“I just have to do the secret quest, right? Then we can have her back, right??”) Depression (“If the uncle from GameShark lied, then what is even the point of anything?”). Eventually, though, with decades of dashed dreams and faded myths in the rear-view mirror of our memories, we would all have to come around to Acceptance.

Then, Final Fantasy VII Remake came out.

To try and cover the gargantuan legacy and impact remaking Final Fantasy VII is a task altogether too great for one editorial piece (though some incredible video essays have been made on the subject, if you've got an afternoon to spare). In short, after over twenty years of rumors and speculation, the mad lads at Square Enix finally unleashed the first part of the planned trilogy of FFVII Remake games in April of 2020. Naturally, given the state that the COVID pandemic had left the world in at that point, Final Fantasy VII Remake was a monstrous hit that gave new and old fans alike the chance to return to the world of Gaia and the industrial dystopia of Midgar—and to be reunited with its familiar heroes and their familiar story. Or so we all thought, back then.

It's funny: At the time, I can remember joking around with some of my pals about all of the new stuff they were bound to add to the game—what with how Square Enix was now apparently dead set on expanding the story across three epic RPGs. One of us inevitably asked, “Do you think they'll work in some kind of reference to that old ‘Save Aerith’ urban legend?” We all laughed at that—mostly because that had been such a silly thing that so many of us were convinced had to be true when we were naïve kids.

Of course, even if one of the Remake games worked in a little joke about the myth, there was no way that they'd go so far as to actually let us save Aerith, right? Her death, after all, is the whole reason that she is able to make her plea to the planet's Lifestream and help Cloud and the other members of the party save Gaia from Sephiroth's Meteor spell. Besides, even if we were to assume that directors Tetsuya Nomura, Naoki Hamaguchi, and Motomu Toriyama were planning on changing up some of the events of the original game to make the Remake series stand out more—or even just fixing up some of the flaws of the first version of the story—Aerith's death is iconic. For a franchise with such a pedigree as Final Fantasy, which contains one of the industry's most die-hard (and, shall we say, “strongly opinionated”) fanbases, surely there was no chance that this new version of Final Fantasy VII would dare to risk undermining most impactful moment of its story.

The only crazier thing you could have suggested at the time would have been that Remake could end up changing something as utterly fundamental to the entire premise of the game as the death of Zack Fair. You know, the inciting incident of Cloud's entire character arc—which is so critical to the lore of the franchise that they made an entire prequel game to explore Zack's character and the events that led to his tragic death?

Right. So, it turns out that undoing Zack's death is exactly what Final Fantasy VII Remake did. Possibly. Maybe?

…it's a bit complicated.

To make a very long story short, the secondary plot of Final Fantasy VII Remake centers around beings known as “Whispers.” The planet created these ghost-like arbiters of fate to make sure that everything turns out like it's “supposed to”—i.e., how it happened in the original Final Fantasy VII. So when things get too far off track—like Cloud not being invited to join in on the attack on the Sector 5 Reactor or Sephiroth stabbing Barret through the chest—the Whispers intervene to force things to be how they are fated to be. However, interacting with the Whispers gives Cloud and friends several visions of future events (including Aerith's death!). So, at the end of the game, they decide to fight the Whispers and take back control of their own fate—an act that both makes the future unknown and seemingly undoes fated moments of the past (like the deaths of Zack and Biggs).

In this way, the “Remake” subtitle of the game was not just an indicator of the game's nature as a product; it was also a statement of intent on the part of both the game's creators and the characters in its story. With this, all bets were off. By the time the title of the second game in this trilogy of remakes was announced as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the question was no longer whether or not Square Enix could make significant changes to what may be the single most famous character death scene in the history of video games; it was whether they should.

I honestly cannot decide. On the one hand, I'm old enough now to recognize that the story of Final Fantasy VII is inextricably linked to the emotions conjured by that image of Aerith kneeling in prayer, doomed to be the sacrifice demanded as the price to pay for saving a dying world.

Ten years after Final Fantasy VII's release, Tetsuya Nomura even directed an entire sequel film that was all about Cloud learning to accept Aerith and Zack's sacrifice—a film that culminates in him slaying the resurrected zombie-ghost-memory-vision-thing of Sephiroth himself (who acts as a symbol for the burden of trauma and guilt that has been weighing Cloud down ever since Aerith died). We just got a theatrical re-release of Advent Children a few weeks ago, so it isn't like Nomura or the other heads of the FFVII Remake project have suddenly forgotten the themes of their own story.

In that sense, I hope that it would be obvious that simply playing events out exactly as they occurred before—only to have Cloud come in and slap the Masamune out of Sephiroth's hands before he has the chance to skewer Aerith—would be a fundamentally shallow and negligent approach to retelling this story.

On the other hand, though, these games are beginning to feel less like traditional “remakes” of FFVII and more like a series of bizarre quasi-sequels. They are, at the very least, games that are acutely aware of their relationship to one of the most beloved narratives in all of video games—and they have made the incredibly creative and risky decision to incorporate that self-awareness into the text of the story itself.

The result is a first game, Final Fantasy VII Remake, that very loudly declares that it absolutely knows how things are supposed to go but refuses to take the easy path by trading in on pure nostalgia. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth seems to be committed to the plan of giving us a version of the FFVII story that is always in conversation with its original narrative but is never beholden to it.

What's more, this borderline metafictional approach to telling the remake trilogy's story has the potential to solve the biggest issue that comes with reversing or altering the circumstances of Aerith's death. By using the script and design of these games to directly acknowledge just how massive a deviation such a turn could be from the way things are “supposed” to happen, the developers of Remake and Rebirth are ensuring that Aerith's death still matters—and that the decades' worth of memories that her story created for fans all over the world still hold all of their weight and power in players' hearts.

It would be impossible to “ruin” the impact of Aerith's death, because it's already a moment that has had nearly thirty years to fundamentally shape the landscape of modern video games and pop culture. The legend of Aerith's resurrection is just as important to the experience of Final Fantasy VII as her actual death ever was—so why not take that part of the story to its logical conclusion?

It's as if these creators of Final Fantasy VII have been standing there with us the whole time amidst the shelves of those old game stores and on the playgrounds of our schools, conspiring with us in hushed whispers and mischievous grins. After years of listening to our hopes and dreams of getting the chance to save Aerith, they finally said, “What if we took that old urban legend and turned it into an entire trilogy of games?”

It is, as my wife put it when I was feverishly explaining all of this FFVII lore to her, “the ultimate hidden Final Fantasy side-quest.”

I cannot say yet whether or not this new story is going to be able to do justice to the legacy of Final Fantasy VII, even as it carves its own unique identity going forward. I am, however, excited beyond all belief to dive headfirst into the blazing unknown with Cloud and the crew to find out what is waiting for them all at the heart of that ancient city—one way or the other.