With all the noise Square Enix is still making nowadays especially with “Final Fantasy XV” just being recently released and two more role-playing video games confirmed to be in the works, it is no surprise that new details revealed even from their old classic games will still have people turning heads. The “Final Fantasy” franchise will be celebrating two milestone anniversaries this year and to commemorate such events, Polygon has made and released a feature on one of the best games ever, which is “Final Fantasy VII”. The creators behind the said game had divulged so many things that gamers would be surprised to find out.
The feature on “Final Fantasy VII” by Polygon revealed the development of the said role-playing video game from Square Enix. It discussed thoroughly with interviews from the popular creators themselves, telling detailed accounts of the origins, the characters, the story, and even after the release of “FFVII”. Of course, one of the things they tackled was the infamous death of Aerith Gainsborough.
Aerith is one of the main playable characters in “Final Fantasy VII” and with her set of skills, which focused on holy and light elements, she was an ally that the party needed and depended on the most. Unfortunately, Aerith was shockingly suddenly killed in the early part of the game, which was at the end of Disc 1 of the game. Back in the days, to cater to video games with huge files, the developers released them in a set, which usually consisted of up to four discs.
This shocking turning point in the event has gotten millions of fans back in the days (and even now when they remember it) flipping tables and throwing joysticks, metaphorically. The creators of the “Final Fantasy VII” game has even admitted that they were surprised to find out that so many were affected by Aerith’s death that these gamers were even brought to tears. Tetsuya Nomura, along with the other creators who were responsible, explained why Aerith’s death was an essential part of the story.
As a matter of fact, they have even revealed that they have originally planned to kill off more of the main characters so players should be thankful still that it was just Aerith who died in the game. There was even a point when they were debating between Barret and Aerith to die. After some bickering between Nomura and fellow director Yoshinori Kitase, Nomura has revealed that the latter, along with writer Kazushige Nojima, has actually proposed that almost all main characters in “Final Fantasy VII” were doomed to die. Nomura pointed out that after being blamed by fans about Aerith’s date, he opened up that he actually had to stop them from carrying out the original plans of the story.
It seems like director Kitase and Nojima had planned to kill off everyone nearing the end, with only the final three characters chosen by the player to head off to Midgar to survive. They were referring to the last parachute part towards Midgar where they initially planned the rest of the main characters to die from a plane crash instead. Nojima explained that since he was the writer of the game, he proposed Aerith’s death on his own but discussed with the main staff on killing off everybody else.
If the original plans had pushed through, that would have mean players would have been in for more shock but probably not as devastating as Aerith’s death since gamers still get to see and choose who to live whereas Aerith was just permanently killed. Pursuing the original plan would have meant multiple endings to the game as well. Thankfully, the creators of “Final Fantasy VII” remake is sticking to the official game plot because nobody wants to go through another surprise of emotional turmoil when everybody is already gearing up to watch Aerith’s death again in high definition.
