There’s no extra essential loss of life in video video games than that of Remaining Fantasy VII’s flower lady, Aerith. Within the 1997 sport, Aerith meets her finish by the hands of Sephiroth, who brutally stabs her in entrance of the sport’s hero, Cloud Strife, and by extension the gamers.
It was a permadeath that stayed with followers. “I felt it was crucial for us to point out the gravity and rawness of loss,” Tetsuya Nomura, the sport director who has labored on a number of Remaining Fantasy titles, together with this 12 months’s Remaining Fantasy VII Rebirth, lately instructed The New York Occasions. It was a formative second for a lot of gamers, who keep in mind the scene beat for beat, together with the second its iconic musical theme kicks in. When Sq. Enix introduced it was remaking Remaining Fantasy VII in a trilogy of video games, followers braced themselves to observe Aerith die another time, rendered in additional trendy, extra actual graphics—till the sport provided up a twist: in-game phantoms referred to as whispers and the power to presumably stand in opposition to destiny.
In different phrases, when Remaining Fantasy VII Rebirth hit consoles late final month, gamers had been confronted with the chance that Aerith could possibly be saved—or that Sq. Enix may be about to drag off the largest troll in historical past.
(Spoiler alert: Main spoilers for Aerith’s destiny in Remaining Fantasy VII Rebirth to observe. No, actually, the entire scene, spoiled.)
Rebirth’s recreation of the collection’ most notorious scene begins out acquainted. Cloud approaches a kneeling Aerith within the Forgotten Capital, the place she’s run off to wish for a technique to defeat Sephiroth. Cloud, overtaken by Sephiroth’s affect, practically kills her himself. When that fails, Sephiroth seems from the sky, comically giant sword in hand, to shish-kebab everybody’s favourite flower lady.
For a second, Aerith’s destiny appears locked into the identical one avid gamers knew so properly in 1997—till Cloud breaks free and deflects the blade on the final minute. It falls harmlessly to the facet, and Aerith lives.
Or so it appears, till the scene begins to glitch between moments of Aerith unhurt, after which bloodied in loss of life. What?
From there it solely will get extra complicated, as Rebirth evokes a multiverse it has been taking part in with all through the complete sport. When the solid finds Cloud and Aerith, it’s clear they’re seeing their pal slaughtered. Cloud, lengthy established as an unreliable narrator, nonetheless treats her as if she’s alive—and he or she performs the half properly, presumably as some form of specter.
Response to this scene in on-line fan communities has been one in all nice bewilderment. “Why make it so sophisticated?” wrote one Redditor in a publish asking for an evidence to the ending. “What was even the purpose?” wrote one other within the thread.
Sq. Enix’s twist on Aerith’s loss of life additionally implies that the scenes following her homicide play out a lot in a different way. Within the unique Remaining Fantasy VII, the sport’s solid individually mourns Aerith—Purple XIII howls in sorrow, Tifa gently pats her hair, and so forth—earlier than Cloud carries her out to the lake and lets her sink into the water. It’s these scenes that drive her loss of life dwelling: There isn’t a magic remedy, no plot twist that may assist her. She’s simply gone.
