There’s spoilers for the early parts of Final Fantasy 7 and pretty much all of Final Fantasy 7: Remake in this post. Just all over the place. The thing is lousy with ’em. Read at your own peril. Or because you’ve already played those games. Or because you don’t care and just want to read. I’m not your boss.

As I’ve gotten further and further into Final Fantasy 7: Remake, the difference in my experience of the game–between my first time playing it back in 2020 and playing it now after beating the original Final Fantasy 7–has grown. There really isn’t a lot, early on, that hints at what the remake of the game is really about and the hints it does give are generic enough that I wasn’t really missing anything as I played. I mean, I felt like I was missing stuff and that had me pretty well distracted, but I wasn’t actually missing anything. It wasn’t until I started getting deeper into the parts of the game that feature Aerith that I started to notice something. It mostly started out innocuously enough. Aerith comes off as a little strange and somewhat ethereal. She’s mysterious, clearly different from everyone else, but also so considerate and kind to everyone she meets that she seems to be the personification of the place she lives: a flower garden growing amidst the garbage. Plus, our first interaction with her includes not just the famous flower scene from the original game, but her running into some kind of strange creatures that are trying to pull her away from Cloud. It’s an odd moment that only grows more odd as we find out that the mysterious Turks (high-powered agents of Shinra, the company that plays the part of the game’s initial villain) are watching out for her and trying to bring her in, as she immediately emmeshes herself in Cloud’s life, and as she seems to be almost fatalistically down to participate in everything that’s going on despite Cloud’s initial reluctance to involve her and her mother’s demands that she stay home where it is safe. What turns this from an expansion on the contents of the original game into something on its own is the way that Aerith always knows what is about to happen.

She doesn’t know the small details or specifics, mind you. That is beyond the scope of her foresight. She knows all the major beats, though. She knows she is supposed to follow Cloud and therefore refuses to leave him alone. She knows that she and Cloud will be fine if they go into Corneo’s mansion of depravity. She knows that the trio, (Cloud, herself, and Tifa) will not get back to the pillar in the Sector 7 slums in time to prevent it from falling. She knows that she will be fine, escaping well before the plate falls and is able to remain calm as a result. She knows she will be rescued from Shinra, she knows the party will survive, and she knows that, ultimately, she will die in the end. Every major plot beat, she seems to already know what is going to happen, even if she seems to mostly be making up the bits in between as she goes along. In fact, her foreknowledge is so specific that it seems almost like she’s played the original game at some point in the past.

It was that thought, that popped into my head as she dodged questions from Tifa about saving Sector 7 while the trio was trooping through the sewers, that made me realize Aerith is specifically the voice of the players who played the original Final Fantasy 7 game. She represents all of them, cursed with the knowledge of how this story will play out but lacking any of the more minute specifics since those are all brand new to this version of the game. Despite all that, she is ultimately uncertain that even the party fighting fate itself, or whatever higher power that is represented by those strange ghost-like creatures (named “Whispers” near the end of the game by Red XIII), can change the future she sees. Now, I haven’t played Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth yet and while I’d love to believe that the events of Final Fantasy 7: Remake were enough to alter the course of fate, Aerith’s quiet and sad agreement with the party as they cheer their newly brightened future at the end of Remake leads me to believe that she still sees her death on the horizon. I suspect it will not be quite so simple, this time around, as events have changed in ways that are small but potentially important (like the fight against Sephiroth right at the end of Remake, the fact that Aerith did something to supposedly awaken Red XIII rather than him being in control of his faculties the entire time, and the existence of so many people who Cloud and company helped who didn’t exist at all in the original game), but I don’t think that they’ll really play out that differently.

Regardless, Aerith gives voice to the things running through my head as the various characters in this game express the hope that they can make a difference, that they can save lives and prevent the tragedies of the original game from occurring. What was quiet implication and foreshadowing before, when I played Remake the first time, has become a confirmation that the things I know to expect will, in fact, come to pass even as the party fights against them. Thankfully, rather than rely on stretched coincidence or battles I won mechanically turning into battles I somehow lost narratively, there is a literal force in this game ensuring events play out a specific way, a force than be bough fought against and hated for constantly intervening to ensure that all the major points of the story come to pass as they did when the game first released in 1997. Aerith’s role in this game is a difficult one to fulfill, one that she is consistently shown to struggle with, and while almost all of the other characters attempt to rescue her from what she says is her fate or her position at the center of this swirling gale of fate’s enforcers, she seems to understand that little anyone can do will actually bring change. It is a sad, depressing voice to have as a character in the game, to be constantly trapped between meta-awareness and the world unfolding around her, but Aerith’s position as an ultimately tragic character means that it fits in perfectly with not only the Aerith we knew from FF7 but also the one we get to know in Remake.

I’m excited to see if this continues in Rebirth, as the story develops further and the beans of what is really going on begin to spill, but I still have the final chapter to finish in Remake and then all of the Intermission to play through before I can get to it. I’ve got plenty of other ideas to write about, in regards to what I’ve played so far, so I can probably keep up at least one post a week until I’m finished with Rebirth and am ready to write about that, but I suspect I’ll have more than just one per week. I mean, I’ve got a four day weekend that will be used to clean my apartment and then play the various parts of the modern Final Fantasy 7, so I’m hoping to make some quick progress! After all, I really can’t wait to see what the voice of me, the now-experienced Final Fantasy 7 player, has to say in the new game. So much more happens after the party leaves Midgar and I have no idea how much they’re going to expand on what has already been shown in the original game AND in chapter one of the Remake.