Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Ending Poorly Answers a Question It Never Needed to Ask

Spoiler Warning: This piece discusses the ending of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in explicit detail and at great length. Do not read it if you do not want to know how the game ends.

As I write this, it is still five days until Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is released. You are reading this in the future—a future, you might say, unbound by fate—but allow me to make a bold prediction. The reaction will be not just glowing, but effervescent. Some naysayers will, not without merit, decry the switch of one of the leading RPG series in the medium to a Horizon/Ghost of Tsushima also-ran replete with an icon laden map filled in by Ubisoft towers. But largely the delightful character writing, the genuinely best in class action RPG combat, the fantastic soundtrack, and sheer variety of minigames both joyous and terrible will win people over. A new era of Final Fantasy will be declared—finally they put out an open world game full of dozens of hours of bespoke side content and the engine didn’t collapse under its own weight and almost kill the company. Final Fantasy is back on top, all’s right with the world.

A couple weeks after release, they’ll start finishing the game.

It is not an exaggeration to say that there is only one scene in the Remake project that actually matters. It isn’t the most pivotal or emotional scene in the original, and yet it has taken on a cultural weight bigger than the game itself. It has hung over the entire project since before it was even announced, since the first playground rumor spread that you could take the desert rose to the church and she’d come back. The question is the reason this game exists, the number one cultural concern straight from the front page of the New York Times: will they kill Aerith this time?

To falter somewhat in the wake of such immense pressure is understandable. You cannot please everyone, and Remake’s bold choices were already seen by a large part of the fanbase as a betrayal. Whatever happened at the Forgotten Capital, some part of the audience would be going home unsatisfied, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about that. What they chose to do, however, was seemingly created in a lab to not just disappoint and annoy every single side of the audience at the same time, but does not even effectively communicate what actually happened. Is Aerith dead? It’s complicated.

The final boss fight is a 45 minute long epic of JENOVA and Sephiroth forms, fought across multiple different worlds and party compositions. Universes merge and unmerge as the fate of possibility itself is at stake, Zack’s there then he’s gone again, Aerith is saved but then she’s dead, but then she’s back as a ghost, and then finally dead and alive at the same time in permanent multiversal superposition, with Cloud perceiving a different stage of reality to his party members. Or is she just straightforwardly dead, a hallucination of Cloud’s psyche, a lifestream Ghost, an echo of a possibility that never came to be? After all, it seems Red XIII can feel her presence and all of Cloud’s other instabilities are due to Sephiroth’s manipulations, and seeing as we haven’t seen Stamp we don’t know which universe we’re technically in, and none of that accounts for the Black Materia in the Buster—woah. Sorry about that. But that’s the problem here. There’s so much stuff happening and fuel for theorycrafting over future games that the ending completely fails as an emotional climax in its own right.

It is a decision so disorientating it almost single-handedly threatens to undo the previous 89 hours. The game focuses on vagueness and mystery at the exact point that emotional clarity has never been more paramount. In the original game, the best moment of the scene is not when Sephiroth stabs Aerith, but when he stands over her monologuing about his plan to become god, and Cloud’s text box interrupts him, blocking his words from the viewer: “Shut up.” Aerith was a person, and now she’s gone. Her theme tune plays over a relatively easy boss fight, and she is laid to rest in a mako burial, an iconic scene that Rebirth skips because to explicitly depict it would destroy the sense of mystery the entire ending hinges on. In Rebirth, her theme only plays for around a phase before shifting to an epic remix of J-E-N-O-V-A, because otherwise it would have had to play unchanged for over half an hour. The bloat of scale and spectacle completely destroys a classic moment that was impactful specifically because of its quiet and simplicity.

Which brings us to another, far more fundamental problem with this ending: why are they recreating this moment so faithfully yet so differently? How did Rebirth end up in such a lose-lose situation in the first place? The ending to Remake promised that The Unknown Journey Will Continue, as the party and narrative were freed from the constraints of the original story. Yet Rebirth follows those constraints even tighter than Remake, with its divergences being both louder and also more inconsequential. Zack’s survival led to less than an hour of playtime and ends with him back in his own doomed universe. The Shinra-Wutai war turns out to be a false flag operation masterminded by Sephiroth, completely undermining the excellent groundwork laid by Episode Intermission, and subsuming that conflict into the same “stop Sephiroth” plot the game was already about in 1997. The wide open sky is gone, the boundless possibility space has shrunk and we’re back to a lavish recreation of the classic game Final Fantasy VII but stopping for 90 minute intermissions where occasionally Sephiroth explains the multiverse.

As it is, it feels like a compromise that will ultimately please no one. The fans who want a faithful HD recreation and complain about Remake’s “Kingdom Hearts Nonsense” will feel betrayed, as this is still a game where Cloud travels the multiverse to refill the White Materia by working together with Aerith-variants against a timeline-traveling Sephiroth. But equally, the fans who loved the exciting swings of Remake and wanted a true thematic sequel will be let down as all of those seemingly drastic changes merely culminate in slight movements of pieces around the board. Sephiroth—despite clearly being aware of future events in the prior game and having a radically different motivation in his dynamic with Cloud—still just wants to cause the Reunion and summon Meteor, there’s just an extra step of multiverse flattening involved. Aerith—despite her increased awareness and newfound ability to coordinate with her multiverse selves—still just wants to summon Holy at the forgotten capital. And Cloud—despite the fact that he has fought and defeated Sephiroth at the mythic edge of creation two times now, and reunited with Zack in the process—still doesn’t know who he actually is.

It leaves the game in a double bind where it keeps introducing interesting ideas but refuses to diverge enough to actually explore them. What actually is Zack’s Universe? At first it appeared to be a simple parallel timeline, a window into the tragic events that would have occurred if Zack survived. But then the sky starts to tear, and Biggs from Remake shows up with completely contradictory memories, and suddenly it seems less like a multiverse situation and more like a purgatory for dead characters, unwittingly kept in hell by the wishes of those who remember them. But Marlene remembers the main timeline, and she’s alive there, so what’s going on with that? Then Aerith and Cloud wake, keeping their memories from the main game, with the explanation given that this is Aerith’s Dream, as they uncomfortably re-create Aerith and Zack’s date from Crisis Core, as an exploration of the hollowness of trying to live in the past. Then finally—if you’ve been paying attention to the dogs—you can see it’s not just one universe but several splintered worlds and fate is exerting itself in all of them as the characters keep finding ways to somehow run into their iconic deaths in completely different contexts.

All of these are interesting metaphorical lenses through which to tell a story about multiple realities (my favorite was the brief middle period when I thought this was a Lost-like Flash Sideways), but all told this takes around an hour of playtime in an almost hundred hour game. It feels half baked and vague despite its massive structural importance to the plot and ending, because if it was the main focus it would distract from the main task of remaking Final Fantasy VII.

A little later than half way through the game, Cloud straight up kills Tifa. He slashes her like Sephiroth did in Nibelheim, and sends her plunging down into the lifestream. It is an electric moment, the climax of an incredible dungeon, and the payoff to a game-long arc of Sephiroth focusing his manipulations around Tifa this time, in order to position himself as Cloud’s only true soulmate. Less than half an hour and a short lifestream vision later, Tifa is back in the party like nothing happened and we’re off to Cosmo Canyon, with the only real change being the party learning that the planet is having a Dragon Ball Z beam battle in the lifestream between the good and bad whispers. 

At Cosmo Canyon itself Seto’s moment is interrupted by Gi Nattak, who reveals that the Gi are beings refused by the Planet, unable to return to the lifestream and thus unable to live in the cycle of death and rebirth of Gaia. The Black Materia was made from their desire to finally find true peace in Oblivion, before being stolen and imprisoned by the Cetra due to its danger to the Planet. It is an electric moment, a piece of lore so monumental it completely destroys the foundations of Final Fantasy VII; the lifestream is not merely the natural state of the planet upset by the calamity from the stars, but it has a will and an order that elevates certain races while eternally cursing others. The White and Black Materia represent not good and evil but merely the wishes of the winners and losers of the cosmic design, in many ways no different to those who live on the plate and those who live in the slums. The entire history of Aerith’s ancestors is tainted and her sacrifice pre-emptively called into question; it would be utterly inconceivable at this moment for the party to simply continue on the pre-ordained narrative path of Final Fantasy VII.

Which brings everything full circle. To Aerith praying on that altar, in a moment that has been so complicated by the game’s new ideas that it strains credulity she would even be there at all. Yet for all its bluster the only divergence the game can stretch to is whether she does or does not get stabbed, and even that is stripped of its closure and impact. But the answer was never the problem, it was the question. “Will Aerith die this time?” is so limited in its scope and ambition that it warps the rest of the game around it like gravity. The only actual answers are “yes” and “no” and the game breaks itself in two trying to find a third.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth fails at threading a needle that should never have been tried. In trying to simultaneously be faithful to the original while also following up on the promise of a new story made in Remake, both goals are left unsatisfied. It’s a game with many excellent moments—there is a genuine Run DMC/Beastie Boys musical number in a mainline Final Fantasy game now—and they would all be better in a Final Fantasy XVII without 30 years of baggage, expectations and lore. As it is, Rebirth is the longest Final Fantasy game with the least that actually happens, 90 hours of treading water for a catharsis that never comes, unsatisfying ideas scattered on the floor in the hope this will all be worth it in part 3. Post your fan theories and come back next time. The Known Journey Must Continue.

Jackson Tyler is an nb critic and podcaster at Abnormal Mapping. They’re always tweeting at @headfallsoff.