TYFP

DISCLAIMER: If you only wanted that scene to be Aerith getting shanked in updated graphics, you missed the entire point of the remake and this is only going to make you angry. You’ve been warned.

Prior to playing Rebirth I saw enough Youtube video thumbnails and article headlines about the ending to expect that like every good Final Fantasy, the final hours were going to be divisive. 

Before I get fully into chewing out everyone that thinks the ending is ambiguous, or that the ending ruined the Biggest Sad of All Sads, I want to set up my tirade with a comparison to the reaction the ending of Final Fantasy 16 got. People argued over the ambiguous nature of Clive’s fate, and for the most part it seemed to be heavily reinforced by players’ desires to see the characters have a happy ending, where everyone is friends and family and nothing bad ever happens again. Theories got so wild that the reveal of the book cover and byline of “by Joshua Rosfield” were evidence that Clive was alive and had used Joshua’s name and nom de plume.

The reaction to Clive’s death was, in my opinion, the result of a very strong reaction and love for the characters, and a dependence on storytellers to describe in the plainest of terms what the viewer is watching. The story of FF16 makes it very clear that in order to save Valisthea, the crew has to free it from magic, Mother Crystals, and eikons. This includes the last Dominant, and housing of all of the eikons, Clive. The game is pretty clear in showing a few things: Clive heals Joshua with the powers of Phoenix, and Clive is rapidly turning to stone while lying on the beach after the final battle. No amount of reddit posts about Jill seeing a boat, or having her wish granted by a star will change these very clear and obvious happenings presented to the viewer. It was bewildering to watch how clearly the events were shown, and still see people lashing out at others while grasping at anything to dismiss what they were seeing or feeling.

In FF7 Rebirth’s case, people are big mad about the Big Sad. The most atrocious examples of this are IGN’s youtube video “Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Makes a Mess of THAT Moment” and its comment section. The video states boldly that her death is only presented in “clues” (their word, not mine) and states that it is only obvious that the truth of her death is apparent after rewatching and analyzing these clues. One of the points they bring up as confusing the reality is Aerith’s appearance during the battle with Sephiroth, but this really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen Advent Children; we know that even though she is dead, Aerith retains sentience in the life stream and can still influence the world she flows through. Knowing this it’s not much of a stretch to see her emerge from a glowing white portal and understand that she is helping Cloud from the life stream.

 Whether or not a story is difficult to understand can be subjective, some stories rely on this to make their point, however this isn’t really the case with Rebirth. Square Enix isn’t trying to bait you into thinking Aerith is alive, and they aren’t being obtuse about it. It’s very clear that we are seeing Cloud’s experience and his perception of reality has been fraying through the entire narrative. Aerith is dead, and even though timelines are splitting and converging pretty rapidly during the final hours of the story, it’s made pretty obvious that she is dead and it is fucking Cloud up. Seeing these events unfold this way, especially Cloud’s worsening emotional and psychological degradation in reaction to it, has so much more impact than the 1997 game’s events.  

Aerith’s death in the 1997 version was a shock to many players, some who hadn’t played any video game with its level of narrative and graphical detail. The death scene has been stuck on a pedestal in gaming’s collective history and carries a kind of weight beyond its own value to the story that contains it, and so it’s natural that people would have a very high expectation for it in Rebirth. It’s to be expected that, like with any good Final Fantasy, it is going to be divisive, which is fine, because whether or not something resounds with you is going to be subjective. It’s frustrating seeing people make this presentation of how bad it is as if its ‘badness’ is a measurable value. As for me, I am far more grief stricken by the death of a much more fully realized and far more loveable Remake and Rebirth Aerith; especially because while the party mourns they have to suffer in the presence of a very insane Cloud. As a viewer, this is made even more harrowing watching Cloud act as if she isn’t dead, and completely dismiss the pain the others are experiencing, especially Tifa.

My gut reaction is to blame the Marvelization of media for people thinking these are examples of obfuscation and ambiguity and not just stylistic choices of portraying plot points. I want to argue that the very simple style of having characters dumb things down for a wide audience has made people dependent on these simple explanations and that any variation from them causes a caustic reaction. But it’s unfair to blame the MCU for this, since this way of telling a story and having a character wrap it up in a bite size morsel of exposition has been the primary way of creating stories for mass consumption for a long time. Anime is full of tedious exposition, and Star Trek made a trope of showing the audience something obscured by technobabble as a set up for a character to liken it to a very simple device or mechanic. 

Sometimes I think it’s not that people have dumbed down, or that the audience for Final Fantasy has changed in its growth; but that audiences have changed due to an increase in media consumption and no real quality check on this media. I blame youtubers, I guess is what I’m working towards.

Ultimately, Aerith is going to die, the story can’t really progress until she does, and Sephiroth shows enough control over the various timelines that he wasn’t going to let her escape. Even she knew this, and at times it was frustrating watching her almost refuse to be saved. And I do have some sharp criticism of the way the death was handled. It was emotionally jarring to have the party uttering their silly one liners and insults during combat after seeing a bloody Aerith dead in Cloud’s arms, especially since the creators showed enough attention to alter the limit gauges to show the party’s utter rage at Sephiroth for what he’d done. If they put the detail into altering this mechanic for storytelling purposes it seems disrespectful to the audience to hear Yuffie joking about being a one stop shop for clobbering sandwiched by scenes of her in horror and despair over losing a loved one.

We’ll have to wait to see just how badly Cloud’s psyche is fractured, which is such a great subversion of Aerith’s desire to find the ‘real’ him; and especially since Cloud’s discovery of his true self unclouded by Zack’s influence on his personality is an important point of his growth as a character and plot in the original story. Watching Cloud acting in such a wildly different fashion to the rest of the cast, as if clinging to a fantasy that he can prevent Aerith’s demise is made even more frustrating and heart wrenching for me, because it’s exactly what people were and are doing in reaction to the events in Rebirth and Final Fantasy 16.