(Image credit: Square Enix)
By now, the dust has settled on Square Enix’s remake of Final Fantasy VII, which came out just over a month ago. Critics and gamers alike are in agreement that the game is brilliant, although there remains some much justified uneasiness about how the rest of the series will shape up. After all, it took five years to make this first installment of Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it only covers approximately the first 5% of the original game’s massive story.
Although Remake leaves off right as hero Cloud Strife and his companions leave the dystopian city of Midgar (the point where the original FFVII actually gets going), it still has a full, epic conclusion. But while much of the game is quite faithful to the original, simply expanding on the events of the 1997 classic, the end of FFVII Remake takes a huge leap into the unknown. It also opens the door for some much more drastic departures in future installments.
I pause now to say that if you haven’t finished the game and don’t want the ending spoiled, you may want to stop reading here, because there are massive SPOILERS ahead.
Saying the ending of Final Fantasy VII Remake is a bold one feels like the understatement of the year. To put it in a nutshell, as Cloud and company are about to leave Midgar, they decide to chase Sephiroth through a portal that leads to the dwelling place of the Whispers, shadowy creatures described by Red XIII as “arbiters of fate.” The Whispers are basically the protectors of the original Final Fantasy VII’s canon. Whenever Remake starts to deviate too much from the original story, the Whispers have a tendency to show up and force the characters back onto the “right” path, usually either by helping them escape danger or forcing them into it.
If that’s not meta enough, once Cloud, Aerith, Tifa, Barret, and Red XIII go through the portal in pursuit of Sephiroth, they come face-to-face with the Whisper Harbinger, the ruler of the Whispers. An epic battle ensues, our heroes prevail, and the big take-away is that they have vanquished destiny itself. There are some cutscenes and flashes that happen during that sequence that strongly allude to events changing, possibly even spreading into alternate timelines.
And if you still didn’t get what this all means for future games, Square Enix proclaims it outright by having a message pop across your screen right as the credits roll, proclaiming that “the unknown journey will continue.”
The protectors of the FF7 canon have now been defeated, and while we’ll continue on with the same cast, the sequels now have to freedom to take the story in any direction they want. What major events might be different? That’s what we’re here to talk about.
There’s a lot of story to cover, we’re going to focus specifically on events that come along early enough in the original game that they could make it into Remake Part 2 in some form or another. Some are smaller moments; others are among the game’s most iconic. Let’s get into it:
Yuffie and Wutai
After you leave Midgar and spelunk through your first cave in the original Final Fantasy VII, you can start encountering a Mystery Ninja in any forest on the world map. Fans of the series will known this shuriken-wielding tomboy as Yuffie Kisaragi, one of the game’s two optional characters. After defeating her, you have to correctly navigate a series of dialogue prompts in order to convince the brash Yuffie to come along with you on your planet-saving mission.
There are a few things to consider when thinking about how encountering and recruiting Yuffie might change in Remake. The first is that Final Fantasy hasn’t had any truly optional characters in a main-line game since FFVII, and even then, it was due in part to the fact that the developers didn’t have enough time to properly script those optional heroes into the story properly. The only game in the series that truly leaned into the whole optional character mechanic was Final Fantasy VI, where you could spend the entire back-end of the game recruiting all your scattered party members or opt to go straight for the final boss.
FF7 Remake is very cinematic and had to eliminate many small choices you could make in the original game, like whether you give the flower you obtain from Aerith in the beginning of the game to Tifa or Marlene. That might have worked when all Square had to do was write some different text boxes, but now that it would have to animate wholly new, beautiful cut scenes, it may be too much work. Given that, it stands to reason that Square Enix will take a more scripted approach to introducing Yuffie in Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 2.
And there’s another layer to the Yuffie conundrum to consider: the greatly expanded role that the nation of Wutai played in Final Fantasy VII Remake. Throughout Cloud’s journey in Midgar, Wutai is a constant topic of conversation: the Shinra brass even go so far as to frame AVALANCHE as terrorists who are being funded by Wutai in order to further their own agenda.
In the original game, there is exactly one mention of Wutai during the Midgar portion of the game, and the main story can be completed without ever even going there. Wutai is an optional side quest that is strongly connected to Yuffie (she is the daughter of the nation’s leader). So it seems pretty clear that Remake has laid the groundwork to expand Wutai’s role.
With all that in mind, it seems very likely that both your encounter with Yuffie and your party’s journey to Wutai stand to be significantly changed in the Remake sequels, though it’s hard to tell if the latter will feature in Part 2 or 3. It depends how deep into the story this next game goes.
Hojo’s Beach Vacation
Upon leaving the continent containing Midgar, Cloud and his posse’s first stop is a sunny beach town called Costa Del Sol. While there, they come across a familiar face: Professor Hojo, one of the game’s main villains. At this point in the story, Hojo and our heroes have very little beef (I mean, he only tried to force Aerith and Red XIII to breed against their will, but who’s keeping track…). When the group comes across the evil scientist in Costa Del Sol, he informs them that he’s getting a tan…and despite Cloud’s initial instinct to slice him up, they decide to leave Hojo to his vacation and continue pursuing Sephiroth.
In Remake, however, Hojo is way more of an antagonist. Not only does he plan to torture Aerith to try to ascertain the location of the promised land, but he then proceeds to sadistically force the heroes to fight their way through a lab infested with monsters so that he can gather data on them. Cloud and co. try to kill Hojo several times during that sequence, but the scientist outwits them each time and evades his comeuppance.
Ultimately, it’s the Whispers who intervene and pull Hojo away when he nearly spills the beans about Cloud’s traumatic past, something Cloud doesn’t find out about until way later in the original story.
It’s pretty hard to imagine Cloud or Red XIII letting Hojo off the hook so easily in Remake after what he put them through. And since the Whispers are (theoretically) no longer around to protect him, I’d bet that either this beach encounter won’t happen, or if it does, it will go down very differently.
Meeting Zack Fair’s Parents
With the story of Remake no longer tied to the story of the original game, perhaps no character’s fate is called more into question than Zack Fair’s. Throughout the climactic sequence that ends Final Fantasy VII Remake, we continuously see a black-haired SOLDIER — a member of the elite fighting force in service to the Shinra Electric Power Company — fighting Shinra troops on a cliff overlooking a Midgar wreathed in Whispers.
To refresh you, Zack is the SOLDIER responsible for bringing Cloud safely to the dystopian city, and helping him escape the Shinra experimentation that caused his traumatically fractured memories. In the original game, Zack is killed on that cliffside, and a disoriented Cloud takes up his Buster Sword before crawling alone to Midgar. This is why the Whispers are surrounding Midgar in the scene above: Zack is never supposed to reach the city.
In Remake, we see Zack — likely from a different timeline — making it out of his fateful encounter with the Shinra soldiers alive. This is something that could have enormous ramifications not only for Cloud, but Aerith as well, since Zack was her first love. But considering how twisty the whole situation is, it’s really hard to predict how it all might go down.
One situation that the original game laid out for us, however, is that shortly after Cloud’s group escapes the desert prison beneath the Gold Saucer they come across a village named Gongaga, where the villagers have sworn off Mako energy after a reactor explosion killed some of the townsfolk. While there, Cloud meets an old couple, who — upon realizing he was in SOLDIER — ask if he ever met their son…Zack.
This encounter will almost definitely be different in Remake. It could go from a few pieces of cryptic dialogue to a much more important and meaningful scene. Who knows…maybe we’ll even get another glimpse of Zack himself there.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
The Return to Nibelheim and Revelations of the Past
Of all the many locations in Final Fantasy VII, one of the most memorable is Nibelheim, Cloud and Tifa’s hometown. Remake gives Cloud numerous flashbacks to the tragic events that occurred there: we see his childhood house engulfed in flame, Tifa screaming over the body of her dead father, and Sephiroth walking through a town ablaze.
This is the genesis of Cloud and Sephiroth’s rivalry. When the party finally returns to the mountainside village in the original game, it’s one of the first real moments where Cloud’s memory of events is called into question. The village, which had been burned to the ground, is completely rebuilt and populated by townsfolk who claim to have lived there all their lives. It’s also filled with hooded figures bearing numbered tattoos, all of whom mutter incoherently about Sephiroth and the Reunion.
Something that pleasantly surprised me about Final Fantasy VII Remake was how much foreshadowing the developers decided to put in for these numbered lunatics and Sephiroth’s Reunion. By all accounts, it seems like Remake will be filling out the notoriously confusing story of Sephiroth’s “clones” in much greater detail.
In addition to all that, there’s a mansion in Nibelheim with a laboratory in its basement. It’s there that Zack and Cloud’s journey together truly began. In the original game, there’s not much to be gleaned there aside from reading some notes — which, of course, the party doesn’t know enough to make sense of — and having yet another ominous encounter where Sephiroth slips through your fingers.
With all the history surrounding this location, and how much more Remake has explored the characters, Cloud and Tifa’s return to Nibelheim could be a prime moment to alter and expand things.
Aerith’s Death
If Final Fantasy VII is known for any one moment, it’s when Sephiroth nearly forces Cloud to kill Aerith, and then — when Cloud resists with the help of his friends — appears to finish the job himself. In 1997, this sort of heavy scene in a video game was nigh unheard of, and it hit gamers with all the force of a megaton hammer.
Nowadays, dramatic character deaths are much more common in gaming…but still. If Cloud and his friends defeated destiny, paving the way for “boundless, terrifying freedom,” then the biggest question has to be whether Aerith still has to die so the planet can survive.
It’s a hard question to answer, and I don’t envy Square Enix the responsibility. On the one hand, Aerith’s death is the most iconic scene in the original game. On the other…it was freaking heartbreaking. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Final Fantasy VII fan who didn’t lament that it happened.
The good news is that Square Enix seems to be fully aware of how much weight this decision carries. Unlike in the original game, where Aerith’s death is a total twist, Remake foreshadows it from her and Cloud’s very first encounter, when Sephiroth appears to taunt Cloud that he’s “too weak to save anyone.” Ugh.
So how could this go down in Remake? Could Aerith escape death, and help Cloud and the others in their quest to stop Sephiroth? Could Zack factor into her survival in some way?
Or is her fate so set in stone that not even defying destiny itself could save her?
With any luck, we won’t need to wait another five years to find out.
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