Game Theory: Let's talk about the wild ending of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

It’s been three weeks now since Final Fantasy VII Rebirth came out, which, even with the game’s massive, 90-plus-hour length, is long enough for a lot of players to have reached its ending—a conclusion that was both foregone and fairly perplexing, given the source material Square-Enix was working from. As with its immediate predecessor, 2020's Final Fantasy VII Remake, Rebirth goes aggressively cosmic in its final hours, jettisoning its pretense of being a straight recreation of the events of 1997's Final Fantasy VII in favor of something more meta-textual and strange. Those ambitions crystallize, of course, in its treatment of that game’s most iconic moment: The death of central character Aerith Gainsborough.

From its opening moments, Rebirth knows that you know where it’s almost certainly headed: To the coral-covered Forgotten Capital, where Aerith—having departed the party for a number of reasons, in the closing hours of the original game’s first disc—will pray for a miracle, just moments before the game’s antagonist, Sephiroth, descends from the rafters and fatally impales her. It’s the Final Fantasy VII moment, the one that taught thousands of young gamers that, no matter how powerful you get, how many gods you have on speed dial, how big your sword, you can’t always save everybody.

Except, well…

It’s not clear, exactly, what happens when Rebrith’s fuzzy-headed hero, Cloud Strife, gets to Aerith this time, fighting off Sephiroth’s mental compulsions to off his friend/love interest himself. Certainly, we see him manage to actually defy fate and deflect that fatal blow—but then the screen distorts, and we see Aerith still dying on the ground, murdered all the same. That’s the big reveal of the ending of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, really: Square-Enix has decided to have its cake and eat it, too, in terms of heartbreak. Aerith both does die—she must, canon demands it!—and does not. Call it Schrodinger’s waifu, if you like.

Everything that follows from this moment is mostly an expression of Rebirth’s exhilarating, sometimes exhausting devotion to maximalism. Obviously, you can’t end a 90-hour video game (longer than the original, despite recreating only a third of its plot!) by having the party just fight off what’s ultimately revealed to be a clone of Sephiroth, which transforms into an eldritch horror patterned off his alien birth mother/DNA donor Jenova, as in the original game. Instead, the finale rockets through a dizzying array of boss fights that knit together the game’s loosely defined multiverse, seeing Cloud fight off a humanoid Sephiroth in an alternate dimension, while his party members battle a gigantic recreation of the form the megalomaniac took in the final boss fight of the original game. (In a clever touch, the party members all start these fights with their rage-based Limit gauges filled after seeing Aerith cut down, except for Cloud, who believes that she’s been saved.)

It all culminates in a recreation of the final 1-on-1 mental duel that ended Final Fantasy VII, Cloud vs. Sephiroth—except, just as they’re about to face off, a rift opens in the void, and out steps Aerith Gainsborough, ready to personally dish out 27 years of long-delayed gamer revenge herself. It’s a deliberately confusing moment, but also a deeply cathartic one, as the duo beat down a would-be god whose response to an endless multiverse of possibility is a stated drive to turn all of existence into just himself, forever. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth isn’t going to let a devotion to that kind of rigid canon stand, y’know?

Between the introduction of the multiverse concept and the frequent focus on destiny, it’s hard not to compare Rebirth with last summer’s Across The Spider-Verse, a film that both introduced, and then openly defied, the idea that certain characters’ stories “have” to go the way we’ve always seen them go. (In an era of endless remakes, reboots, and retreads, we’d argue, it’s one of the only ways recreated stories have to carve out an identity of their own.) The actual mechanics of how Aerith and Sephiroth are both trying to defy their fates are deliberately murky—the implication is that both of them, at least in that final fight, are their versions from the aftermath of Final Fantasy VII and its sequel film Advent Children, their memories of future events being passed around inside the magical orbs called materia in a sort of cosmic shell game. But given how frequently Rebirth drills in, throughout its epic-length journey, on the idea that death is a natural part of the cycle of existence, and also not actually the end of anything, it feels fitting to have Aerith kicking genuine ass from within/beyond the grave.

And so we end Rebirth with canon events having both triumphed, and not. The party believes Aerith is dead—an understandable conclusion, given the presence of her, y’know, corpse. Cloud, meanwhile, bids her an affectionate farewell, speaking to her… alternate universe version? Ghost? Straight-up hallucination? (It doesn’t help that the game ends on a grim reminder that, cathartic showdown or not, Sephiroth’s fingers are still firmly lodged in Cloud’s squishy, porous brain.) And, just as the first game in this very odd series ended with the promise of the “unknown journey” ahead, the second one ends with the reminder that “No promises await at journey’s end.” Translation, as far as we can tell: It’s only going to get weirder from here.

It’s a strangely satisfying ending, for all the questions it leaves raggedly open—at least, for us. But how did it hit for you? Did you draw the same conclusions from Aerith and Sephiroth’s final battle? Or derive the same satisfaction from seeing her momentarily wipe that smug smile off the bastard’s face? And where the hell can this trilogy possibly go from here, when the second game already ended with a bigger, louder recreation of the ending of the original? (Also, does Red XIII acknowledge Ghost Aerith in the ending? We can’t tell?!) Sound off in the comments—we’ve had this ending kicking around in our heads for a month now, and we’re excited to see what other people think.