One of many largest fan theories swirling round Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is that Aerith — well-known for dying within the unique Final Fantasy 7 — could escape her destiny this time round. Sq. Enix’s remake trilogy is attending to that time within the story, and… effectively, in truth we have now evaluate code and I might go ask any individual the way it performs out, however then I couldn’t sit right here and speculate with the remainder of you, freed from embargoes and spoilers.
So I kind this, head within the sand, pondering again to how Aerith died again in 1997. Which gives a handy excuse to repromote a narrative we revealed in 2017.
Again then, we ran Final Fantasy 7: An oral historical past, a recklessly extravagant look behind the scenes at what occurred before, throughout, and after the PS1 sport’s growth. And one in every of that story’s chapters coated Aerith’s loss of life and the way it happened behind the scenes.
“Did you know people have been coming up to me for years now and saying, ‘You killed Aerith!?,’” stated FF7 character and battle visible director Tetsuya Nomura.
“The theme of Final Fantasy 7 was ‘life,’ and we sacrificed Aerith in order to give weight and depth to that theme,” Nomura stated. “Her death is a tragedy, but if we suddenly just killed off everyone else after that, it would dilute the meaning of her death.”
“When a character in a video game dies, no one thinks it’s that sad,” Nomura added. “They’re just characters in a game, after all — you can just reset the game and try again, or you can always revive them somehow. I felt that their lives just didn’t have much weight. With ‘life’ as our theme for FF7, I thought we should try depicting a character who really dies for good, who can’t come back. For that death to resonate, it needed to be an important character. So we thought killing off the heroine would allow players to think more deeply about that theme.”
That doesn’t imply Nomura didn’t second guess his choice, although.
“Long after we made the decision to kill Aerith and the development had progressed considerably, I used to go visit [composer Nobuo Uematsu] in his room. Just to hang out and talk about random things. One day, toward the end of development, I visited him to ask him, ‘Do you think we did the right thing in killing Aerith?’”
“He said, sure, he thought so,” Nomura stated a second later.
“I was relieved to hear it.”
What does this imply for Rebirth? No matter occurs, it looks like a protected guess that it gained’t play out precisely prefer it did final time, as participant expectations at the moment are a part of the equation. You may’t shock individuals by doing the identical factor twice.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, on which Nomura served as artistic director, releases on February 29.
