One of the biggest fan theories floating around Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Is that Aerith – famous for dying in the original? Final Fantasy 7 – could escape her fate this time. Square Enix’s remake trilogy reaches this point in the story, and… well, honestly, we have a review code and I could ask someone how it turns out, but then I wouldn’t be able to sit here with the rest of it for free you speculate about embargoes and spoilers.
So I type this with my head in the sand and think back to how Aerith died in 1997. This provides a convenient excuse to reproduce a story we published in 2017.
Back then, we screened Final Fantasy 7: An Oral History, a recklessly extravagant behind-the-scenes look at what h appened before, during and after the PS1 game’s development. And one of the chapters of that story dealt with Aerith’s death and how it came about behind the scenes.
“Did you know that for years people have been coming up to me and saying, ‘You killed Aerith!?'” he said FF7 Character and combat visual director Tetsuya Nomura.
“The theme of Final Fantasy 7 was “life,” and we sacrificed Aerith to give weight and depth to that theme,” Nomura said. “Her death is a tragedy, but if we suddenly killed everyone else after that, it would dilute the significance of her death.”
“When a character dies in a video game, no one finds it 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 like her life just didn’t have much weight. With “life” as our theme for FF7I thought we should try to portray a character who really dies forever and can’t come back. For this death to resonate, it had to be of an important character. That’s why we thought killing the heroine would allow players to think more deeply about this topic.”
However, that doesn’t mean Nomura didn’t question his decision.
“Long after we had made the decision to kill Aerith and development had progressed significantly, I visited her [composer Nobuo Uematsu] in his room. Just hanging out and talking about random things. One day, towards the end of development, I visited him and asked him, ‘Do you think we did the right thing by killing Aerith?'”
“He said, sure, that’s what he thought,” Nomura said a moment later.
“I was relieved to hear that.”
What does this mean? Rebirth? Whatever happens, it seems a safe bet that it won’t turn out the same as last time, as player expectations are now part of the equation. You can’t surprise people by doing the same thing twice.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirthon which Nomura served as creative director, will be released on February 29th.
