FFVII Rebirth: Questions Remain

 I beat FFVII Rebirth. I don't really want to get into anything specific here because talking about the ending will naturally involve spoilers.

Spoilers ahead:

The question that's been lingering with us ever since Remake introduced the idea of the Whispers as agents of fate, and our defeat of the Arbiter of Fate at the end of Remake, has been whether we'll be able to save Aerith.

Aerith's death in the original Final Fantasy VII was a shocking moment - a love interest for the main character, the default healer of the party (though that's less rigid with VII's Materia system) and, most of all, a paragon of kindness, joy, and more or less everything that's good in the world, is stolen away from you in the middle of the game.

But with the introduction of these Arbiters of Fate, we were left to wonder if there was some way we could change things - that perhaps, in this iteration of the 27-year-old story, Aerith could live and see the world saved in life.

Rebirth answers this with a resounding... yes but no.

Rather than changing the fate of this world, the destruction of the Arbiters seems to have allowed for a multiverse to exist. The Zack we see in the post-credits scene of Remake is not in our universe, but has sort of been whisked away at the moment he died to another universe. Who exactly shows up in this universe is unclear - Biggs gets whisked there as well. But it's also a universe that seems doomed - the Mako reactors have stopped working because they've burned up the entire Lifestream, and the people on the planet are just waiting for the inevitable.

When we go to the Forgotten Capital, and Aerith goes to pray to use Holy to stop Sephiroth, the Whispers try to keep Cloud from getting to her to save her. However, we're able to muscle through and we do deflect Sephiroth's blade.

But then... something happens, a kind of glitch in the world, and Aerith is run through nonetheless.

The original game, as I understand it, has Aerith, after becoming one with the lifestream, casting Holy to stop the Meteor, implying that, while dead, she's been able to help the party along the way, and does save the world.

It would seem, though, that this capability is more explicit, and known by Cloud by the end of the game. The rest of the party is in mourning for their fallen friend, but Cloud seems almost unperturbed - after all, the final stage of the final boss fight has you and Aerith fighting Sephiroth. (Earlier phases involve fighting Sephrioth as a profoundly JRPG-style boss, which is enormous and monstrous in design, with a head growing off the top of its head like the first head is a torso.)

The last we see of the party, they're taking off in the now-flying-again Tiny Bronco, leaving Aerith behind - though only Cloud seems to know she's there.

I think there's a lot of question about how all of this involves alternate timelines - at one point, Sephiroth suggests that Aerith is "hiding out" in the timeline that is doomed.

I don't know what it was that undid Cloud's saving of Aerith - like whether it was Aerith itself. I've seen a lot of takes here that feel that the convolution of the ending undercuts the emotional weight of the moment. And I've seen some takes that the fact that we don't seem to successfully save her is itself kind of gutless. I honestly haven't decided how I feel about it all.

I think it's also concerning that we spend the final dungeon of the game getting the history of how the Cetra captured and imprisoned the thing that would come to be known as Jenova, and how its whole MO was impersonating people you trusted - especially those you've lost.

However, similarly to how I felt about the last season of Lost, I'm not sure that I really want a beloved character who died hanging around and being the big bad. But we'll see.

With something like 106 hours overall, I enjoyed my time in FFVII Rebirth. I hope we won't have to wait a full four years for the next entry, but I surely intend to get it when it comes out.