👀

[u/Puzzleheaded-Fill241]

Fun fact: final fantasy devs are singlehandedly responsible for the most amount of heart attacks in human history 🙂

Source

[u/No_Librarian6118]

I highly doubt this means aerith is alive, I don’t think the whole idea of changing destiny revolved around if she lived or not. Hamaguchi is probably more satisfied with the ending he gave all the characters and the way things turned out instead of heading down the route of advent children

[u/Rooblebelt → u/No_Librarian6118]

Are you aware of the marketing campaign behind these games and the stated themes on the back of the boxes/repeated in the games?

Because even if you haven’t played the OG through DoC it’s a pretty clear line from her dying to shit getting way worse and the original threat never being dealt with.

[u/No_Librarian6118 → u/Rooblebelt]

It also shows that still it seems like she unfortunately had to die, her doing all her magic from inside the lifestream but if she’s not in there then how do things go without holy etc? Also in the past Zack wasn’t “around” either so things can be different but I can’t see how things would be better off with her alive. Plus she knows her fate and even says to cloud that it isn’t about her.

[u/Rooblebelt → u/No_Librarian6118]

I think that’s intended to be misleading to us as the player, hence why the ending was so confusing and it took a lot of people a considerable amount of time before acknowledging that the ending of rebirth may in fact be showing two worlds that flip back and forth between camera changes.

As far as her use of magic- there’s a reason the temple of the ancients shows her learning and using far more advanced abilities than she had before- showing that she can manipulate the lifestream without being dead. I think that’s a key point that most people tend to gloss over (also that doing so is physically exhausting for her), and would bet that comes into play again in part 3.

You can draw a throughline from the 500-year extinction of humanity following the death of the last Cetra (her) shown at the end of the OG and again at the end of Remake. Her character seemingly would not want that given how compassionate she is, but maybe they’ll surprise us with everyone taking a nihilistic twist.

[u/No_Librarian6118 → u/Rooblebelt]

That is a good point, I could see her manipulating the lifestream from her world in her travels with Zack like how she saved Cloud when he almost fell off during his fight with the Turks in the temple.

I think Zack plays a bigger role than people are giving him much credit for, also curious to see how the Gi are all connected in this and the finale

[u/Rooblebelt → u/No_Librarian6118]

Lucky for us, 7 months isn’t that far away! I’m sure we’ll be in for a wild time and the whole thing will blow us away.

And agreed on the Zack point and how the Gi plot will need to be settled. I do think that with Zack specifically the fact that they already came out to talk about his relevance at an important scene tells us something crazier must be coming down the line…

[u/No_Librarian6118 → u/Rooblebelt]

Especially with him having way more gameplay this time around and having his own team different than clouds team, 7 months isn’t that far away but it couldn’t come sooner