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.