One of many greatest fan theories swirling round Closing Fantasy 7 Rebirth is that Aerith — well-known for dying within the authentic Closing Fantasy 7 — could escape her destiny this time round. Sq. Enix’s remake trilogy is attending to that time within the story, and… properly, in truth we now have evaluation code and I might go ask any person 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 Closing Fantasy 7: An oral historical past, a recklessly extravagant look behind the scenes at what occurred earlier than, throughout, and after the PS1 sport’s improvement. And one among that story’s chapters lined Aerith’s dying and the way it happened behind the scenes.
“Do you know folks have been coming as much as me for years now and saying, ‘You killed Aerith!?,’” stated FF7 character and battle visible director Tetsuya Nomura.
“The theme of Closing Fantasy 7 was ‘life,’ and we sacrificed Aerith to be able to give weight and depth to that theme,” Nomura stated. “Her dying is a tragedy, but when we immediately simply killed off everybody else after that, it could dilute the which means of her dying.”
“When a personality in a online game dies, nobody thinks it’s that unhappy,” Nomura added. “They’re simply characters in a sport, in any case — you possibly can simply reset the sport and take a look at once more, or you possibly can all the time revive them someway. I felt that their lives simply didn’t have a lot weight. With ‘life’ as our theme for FF7, I believed we must always strive depicting a personality who actually dies for good, who can’t come again. For that dying to resonate, it wanted to be an essential character. So we thought killing off the heroine would permit gamers to assume extra deeply about that theme.”
That doesn’t imply Nomura didn’t second guess his choice, although.
“Lengthy after we made the choice to kill Aerith and the event had progressed significantly, I used to go go to [composer Nobuo Uematsu] in his room. Simply to hang around and discuss random issues. Sooner or later, towards the top of improvement, I visited him to ask him, ‘Do you assume we did the proper factor in killing Aerith?’”
“He stated, certain, he thought so,” Nomura stated a second later.
“I used to be relieved to listen to it.”
What does this imply for Rebirth? No matter occurs, it looks like a secure guess that it gained’t play out precisely prefer it did final time, as participant expectations are actually a part of the equation. You may’t shock folks by doing the identical factor twice.
Closing Fantasy 7 Rebirth, on which Nomura served as artistic director, releases on February 29.
