FF7 Rebirth’s ending wants to have it both ways with Aerith

[Ed. note: The following contains spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, as well as the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake.]

What does it mean for Aerith to die?

In Final Fantasy 7, Aerith represents that idea that no world is saved from calamity without cost. She represents senseless and sudden loss, how death can take someone you love at any time. As Polygon’s own Maddy Myers said to me once, she’s a stand-in for the planet, in a story about the planet’s impending death. She needs to die for the story to work. Character designer and scenario writer for the OG FF7 Tetsuya Nomura once said that it was important that her death be “sudden and unexpected,” contrasting Aerith with the types of characters who had sacrificed themselves in earlier FF games. Our shock and grief at a nice girl who never hurt anyone being killed while she prays for salvation is meant to motivate us, to push us forward, to anchor our emotional experience of the story.

From the very first moment, FF7 Remake traded on the question: Would Aerith survive? Her death could no longer be “sudden and unexpected”; that ship sailed decades ago. Remake centered a huge section of its plot around the Whispers, supernatural beings attempting to keep the “story” on track; at the end of the game, Cloud and company literally kill them. It’s Aerith herself who claims that this opens up the possibility of “boundless, terrifying freedom.”

They may as well whisper in your ear, “This time it might be different. This time you can save her.”

Rebirth leans into this just as hard from the very first second, when a newly alive Zack cradles a seemingly dead Aerith’s body in the exact pose Cloud used to cradle her corpse in 1997, as her hair ribbon is undone and the White Materia clatters to the floor in ultra close-up. “Will Aerith die?” is not the only motor driving Rebirth’s story, but it is by far one of the strongest and loudest, particularly for players of the original. As I played the game, I am ashamed to admit, I felt a certain… vigilance, looking for any sign of what the plot was going to do.

The game’s final hours really begin when the party heads back to the Gold Saucer in search of the Keystone that opens the Temple of the Ancients. Just as in the original, Cloud is asked on a date by a party member, but unlike in the original, part of this date is taking in a show: a production of Loveless, a play that has haunted the background of the FF7 metaseries through multiple games. At the end of this stage show, Aerith sings the game’s theme song for the audience while the party members who took part in the QTE minigame of the show itself watch from the wings.

Y’all, the literal title of the song is “No Promises to Keep.”

Even a tiny bit of scrutiny reveals the lyrics are Aerith writing about her relationship with Cloud: “I won’t say that it was fate / I won’t say that it was destiny / but if not, what could it be / that drew you towards me?” She goes on to sing about how she wishes she could have lived without “all the burdens I was born to bear / lived a life without a care / in the world save for you.”

Aerith’s growing sense of responsibility and even guilt about her role as the last living Ancient is a consistent thread in Rebirth, from her self-recriminating frustration at the White Materia being empty to her declaration to the festival-goers in Cosmo Canyon that, as the last of the Cetra, she has a responsibility to the Planet. Even the story of the Gi tribe, new material for Rebirth that paints the Cetra in a considerably less flattering light, involves their leader charging Aerith as the last of her race.

In both the original and Rebirth, Aerith heads to the Forgotten Capital with the White Materia because she firmly believes, as the last of the Ancients, that it is her duty and responsibility to stop Sephiroth’s plans through the Holy spell.

The difference comes in Remake and Rebirth infusing the ever-popular multiverse/alternate timeline trope into this story. As the final hours of Rebirth approach, we’ve understood that Zack is alive, but in an alternate timeline where a rift in the sky heralds the end times. In the events at the Temple of the Ancients involving the Black Materia, we find that Aerith can either inhabit or contact her alternate-timeline selves. One of them, in fact, provides the fully charged White Materia that Cloud takes back to his timeline’s Aerith in place of the empty one she was carrying.

This is the key difference between reading Aerith’s death in FF7 and reading it in Rebirth: The original Aerith in 1997 very likely had no idea Sephiroth was going to show up and murder her, but it feels as if the Remake-continuity Aerith absolutely has this knowledge. The alternate Marlene, talking to Zack, tells him that Aerith revealed to her that she’ll die because of a man with long, gray hair, who will kill her when Cloud isn’t there to prevent it. Marlene begs Zack to help Cloud wake from his coma so that he can reach Aerith in time to prevent this.

Thus we see a contrast between FF7’s Aerith dying a senseless, sudden, unexpected death, and Rebirth Aerith going dutifully to her own demise in the exact way that Nomura observed characters had in earlier FFs: sacrificing themselves to save others. On stage, Rebirth Aerith sings, “Till the day that we meet again / at our place, just let me believe / in the chance that you’ll come,” but it really seems as if at this point, she probably already knows her days are numbered. At the festival of lights in Cosmo Canyon, having spoken of the party as “wonderful friends” who came into her life and showed her happiness she hadn’t experienced before, Aerith finishes by saying: “Even if I can’t lead a normal life… there is one thing I can do — return their kindness. And try to make the most of what I’ve been given.”

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Aerith has the strength and will to give herself up so others can lead happy lives, or at least that’s what Rebirth is selling us. In talking about “No Promises to Keep,” composer Nobuo Uematsu mentioned that he deliberately left out the “ill-fated” and “poignant” melody of “Aerith’s Theme” in favor of writing a song that showed “the opposite of this, the strength at her core.” Her willingness to give up her newfound happiness and freedom for the sake of her friends and the world is that strength.

Which: Fine. I didn’t have a horse in the race one way or the other on Aerith dying in Rebirth, though I was curious how it would all go down. I felt like it was just as likely that she would live or die, after all; Remake (and Rebirth, as I was playing it) is full of examples of the game hewing to FF7’s original history one second and then bait-and-switch veering sharply off course the next.

The problem I had, in the end, is that the game’s ending, laden with the cursed baggage of the multiverse trope, removes any chance of Aerith’s knowing sacrifice being meaningful.

Jackson Tyler has already written for Paste about a huge failing of the game’s ending sequence: the looming feeling of uncertainty and unsettledness that permeates the endgame events. Cloud arrives in time, but Aerith dies anyway… or does she? She’s covered in blood, except now she’s fine, I guess? After the big boss battle with Sephiroth(s), she’s laid to rest, but we never actually see the body or what happens to it; we just see Cloud mourning alongside the party, but then talking to an Aerith that only he appears to be able to see. We see Zack back in his doomed timeline, determined to make it back to Cloud and Aerith somehow after encountering them in the Avengers movie-ass final boss sequence.

Is she really dead? What really happened? We have no idea, and it fucking sucks.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

To circle back to my original question, what it means for Aerith to die is that she is gone. That’s the core of her death in the original FF7: She very definitely, absolutely, without any doubt is gone from the party. After her death, we do not see her until the game’s ending. In fact, Aerith’s face is the last thing we see in the original FF7, but her presence is felt many times before this, even just in the ending sequence. Death in the FF7 universe — including in the Remake continuity — is frequently called “returning to the Planet” or “returning to the Lifestream.” Lore nerds say that because Aerith is a Cetra, from a race of people deeply connected to the Planet, she can direct the Lifestream itself, and is acting from beyond the grave in that way, but the original game is careful not to lean on that too hard.

Grief exists because we see and hear and feel echoes of the dead in our lives even after they’re gone, but for that grief to be real, they need to be gone. In the Rebirth continuity, thanks to the multiverse, we have no such closure after Aerith’s deliberate sacrifice. She might be alive, somewhere; we might be able to bring her back. We might meet her again, but maybe we won’t? Maybe Cloud is just dreaming her up. Maybe Cloud has Space Madness or something, which is why he’s seeing things the people right next to him can’t. Maybe it’s SOLDIER cell degradation at work, or maybe Sephiroth is still out there, whispering into his ear! Nobody knows!

Rebirth is a game that wants to kill Aerith, but for her to not be gone. It wants it both ways, and uses the multiverse angle to do it, but in truth, all this does is deeply cheapen the narrative and emotional impact of her death. Instead of being able to feel grief, or sadness, or even relief, we’re stuck in an emotional limbo. It feels like a pointless tactic to pull us along into the remake series’ finale in part three, a tactic that truly did not need to happen. We were going to follow this through anyway, guys!

I keep thinking about what an alternative might look like. My favorite version is that instead of Aerith, it’s Cloud who dies for good midway through the game, which would be extremely strange, but at least interesting. While I was reviewing the game I wondered numerous times if they were setting up Tifa to be killed instead, though the scenes at the Gongaga reactor put that to rest for the most part.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Largely I wondered: What would it mean for Aerith to live?

Modern audiences seem to be very mixed on this kind of happy ending. Yussef Cole, discussing Aerith’s death in Rebirth, outright says that “[t]here’s even a small part of us that wants her to be saved, even though we would never admit that, would never admit to yearning for such a pandering retcon of gaming’s canon.” There’s a certain point of view on this where Aerith surviving is more betrayal than positive change. Cole’s use of the word “pandering,” his implication that even wanting this to be true would make us feel shame, is extremely deliberate.

The promise of the multiverse or time-travel hook, story-wise, is typically “all of this went wrong, but you can change it this time!” Japanese RPGs use this story hook liberally, even just looking at Square Enix’s oeuvre. The lesser-used but still valid alternative is “you can try to change things, but some things are just meant to be”; stories about acceptance and adaptation rather than revolutionary change.

That promise is what Remake was selling us from the jump: not that it would save Aerith, but that it might. The problem is that when it came time for Rebirth to put up or shut up, it refused. She might still be out there! This might still happen! But it might not. You’ll just have to stay tuned and find out in two to three more years. It fucking sucks.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

Even if it would be pandering, I’d rather see a version where Aerith is definitely alive than in this ridiculous, MCU-esque limbo of fractured multiverses. That would be something that makes the story suddenly and sharply jump tracks, just as Aerith’s death in FF7 did. If I can’t have that, though — and that’s fine — I would so much rather have her be actually, definitively dead. Let me actually experience and process loss, instead of forcing me to corkboard up conspiracy theories about what might have happened and be on tenterhooks waiting for actual closure.

As Reid McCarter said, the remake continuity often feels more cerebral than emotional, “something that operates more on the level of the brain than the heart, which is sometimes gratifying but ultimately works to dull what emotional power the original game holds.” The emotional part matters, though. Grief or sadness, joy or relief, something; I wanted Rebirth’s ending to leave me feeling something real, something powerful. Instead what I got was a deep confusion and a gnawing suspicion that, whatever comes in part three to wrap this tale up, it will value “modern” storytelling tropes and convoluted plot twists far more than helping the player to actually feel something in their heart.