Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s sky sparks all kinds of weird theories

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth poses a ton of questions, and then it doesn’t leave players with very many answers.

Questions pertaining to the sudden appearance of the once-dead character Zack Fair, or the fate of Aerith, have implications that could change the game’s entire world and the story people have loved for decades. However, after letting those big questions dangle in front of players, the ending of the game still doesn’t give a clear-cut answer or resolution for any of them.

As I leave the game behind, I’ve resigned myself to not knowing everything; after all, the third game in the trilogy is yet to come. But even then, one small detail has continued to gnaw away at me. It’s a question that doesn’t just involve Rebirth, but also spans other media, like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7. It’s become the worm I can’t get out of my head.

My big question? I want to know what the hell is up with the sky in the Final Fantasy 7 games.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the endings of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, as well as discussion of plot points from Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7.]

I’m talking about the actual sky in the world — or worlds — of each game. A lot of the time, it’s just your run-of-the-mill sky with, you know, a bright blue color and clouds. But if you start to analyze the way the characters mention it in the story, it becomes clear that the sky plays a much larger role in the symbolism of the game and is one of the only recurring motifs that branches across several Final Fantasy 7 compilation titles.

The very first time the story introduces Aerith Gainsborough in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, she talks about living in the slums in Midgar city and how she’s afraid of the sky. She tells Zack Fair, her first love and friend of Cloud Strife, that she’s not normal. She says, “The sky… frightens me. It’s like it’s sucking me in.” Zack seems somewhat confused but also doesn’t seem like a guy to judge, so he promises to show her a sky that’s beautiful. Later, Zack reveals that he’s a SOLDIER and has mako-infused eyes because of it. In those moments, he likens his eyes to the color of the sky, and Aerith says, “Uh-huh… but not scary at all!”

The general idea then comes back full circle with the big ending of Crisis Core, when Zack dies after he rebels against Shinra. In his last moments, he lays on his back and looks up at the clouds. As he starts to pass away, his voice narrates, “She said that the sky frightened her. But it must feel so good up there.” Then, as his body lifts into golden, heavenly light, Zack says, “It does feel good.”

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

The symbolism of the sky seems somewhat more straightforward in Crisis Core. The developers use it as a way to highlight the contrasts between the confident Zack and, at the time, the more timid Aerith. The sky also appears to represent a sense of freedom — Aerith doesn’t leave the slums until she meets Zack — as well as the ultimate freedom from the shackles of life itself, when Zack passes away. However, this concept only gets more and more complicated as the story chronologically progresses and we get into the main events of Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth.

Remake has one of the most clear — and to me, most compelling — uses of this motif. The vast majority of the game takes place in the slums beneath Midgar. The residents of the slums don’t get to see the sky, but instead look up to the vast steel infrastructure known as the upper plate. There is a literal, physical class division between the sectors, and a huge way the game illustrates it is by showing that the slum-dwellers don’t even get to look up at the sky. However, after introducing this concept, the symbolism then gets muddied again at the end of the game, which takes a semi-fantastical turn.

In the final cutscenes of Remake, Aerith, Cloud, and the others stand on the dusty outskirts of Midgar after beating Sephiroth. The final scene then cuts away to show a different moment, perhaps in an alternate reality, where we see Zack carrying Cloud on his back, having survived after all — and apparently, now in a similar location just outside of Midgar. Zack wasn’t really a part of Remake, but that game did have a scene with a brief glimpse of his final fight scene against the Shinra troopers in Crisis Core. However, at the end of Remake, in this alternate scene, Zack appeared to have survived that fight. As Zack and Aerith seemingly pass by each other, each of them in different worlds, she says, “I miss it, the steel sky.”

Aerith’s line clearly connects to her first conversation with Zack, and possibly speaks to her larger discomfort around finally leaving Midgar. It also could connect to her embracing her fate — to die in order to save the world — with the blue sky she now sees being symbolic of her future death in FF7 Rebirth. This is all fine and makes sense, but then the developers went and changed the line several years after release. Roughly four years after Square Enix released Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the team edited the line in a patch. In the new, current version, Aerith says, “This sky… I don’t like it.”

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

The change seemingly came out of nowhere, substituting a more generic statement in lieu of one that more directly connected to Aerith’s story in Crisis Core. The change could almost be interpreted as some sort of meta-developer commentary about how the game has multiple worlds — maybe there was a world in Remake where Aerith said her original line instead. However, the developer also released other changes to Remake in that update that had nothing to do with lines of dialogue, such as redesigning Tifa’s cowgirl outfit. So it’s possible that they just wanted to change the line of dialogue for stylistic reasons.

But things then only get weirder with Rebirth, as the sky plays into a larger, confusing story that ties into the game’s entire multiverse concept. In Rebirth, there are (at least) two worlds: one where Zack Fair dies just like he did in Crisis Core, and one where he lives on to save Cloud and Aerith, who are both in comatose states. We primarily play in the world where Zack is dead, but we do get snippets of the world where he lives. As we play through those sections of the game, one of the first things we see is that the sky in this world has glittering golden rifts across it, and according to Elmyra, people say its appearance means the world is ending.

We don’t know what this sky means, but it obviously seems bad. Toward the end of the game, Aerith and Cloud go on an awkward date together in this alternate world where Zack lives. They don’t bump into him, but Aerith calls the world her “dream,” where she apparently is going on one last date before her inevitable death. However, before the two of them leave the house, Aerith makes Cloud promise not to look up at the sky, because she’s “pretty sure” he won’t like what he will see. The scene leaves the mention of the sky at that, but then the topic of the sky comes up again at the end of the game.

Image: Square Enix via Polygon

After Aerith seemingly dies in the main world of the game, the gang heads out to their next destination. Prior to their leaving, we’re treated to a melancholy scene during which Cait Sith, Cid, and Barret prepare the plane for takeoff as Tifa, Yuffie, and Nanaki grieve the loss of Aerith. Cloud can still see Aerith, for some reason, but that’s not all he sees differently. Just before leaving, he tells the group not to look up at the sky. From his vantage point, he can see glittering rifts in the sky that resemble those in Zack’s world, but when Barret looks, he just sees a regular blue sky.

We don’t get any explicit confirmation of anything at play here, really. The gold rifts could signify the impending doom of the world. However, the changed sky could also have something to do with the lifestream or Cloud’s multiverse travel. I personally think it’s entirely possible that it has some sort of connection to Sephiroth summoning Meteor, which he does at the end of the original Final Fantasy 7 to wipe out all life on the planet. Those gold rifts could just herald the beginning of his plot to fully destroy everything. Still, though, it’s not clear what the sky means now in terms of the greater story.

With the constant repeated mentions of the sky, and particularly with the edited line about it, the development team is definitely going for something here, but it’s not clear what. Everything else in this series tends to be more direct, and other points of symbolism in the game tend to lack any sort of subtlety. Whereas before, the sky could have been interpreted as a general symbol of freedom (and death), it now has some larger part to play into the overall logic of the story and the multiverse/multiworld confusion. Needless to say, the first thing I’ll be doing when the next game comes out is taking a good look up at the sky.