It sounds like the folks atSquare Enix have completed the story of the third entry in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. If you’re a bigFinal Fantasy 7fan like me, that means you’re able to’t wait to play the latest entry and - possibly -kind of forget what happened in the previous game, catch yourself back up on what happened in the previous game, and then remember that you didn’t rememberbecauseit doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.
Oh, you’re aware of what happened! Part of me is worried about spoiling things, but, honestly, this sub-series is relatively spoil proof? If I say ‘the multiverse is aboutcartoon military dog design’, I wouldn’t really be lying but nor would it even matter if I was.
But the last game in theFinal Fantasy 7 Remakeseries is going to have to tie up a lot of loose ends. Which is going to be easy, because so far the central theme of the games seems to have been ‘what if every end was infinitely loose and could never actually be tied together?’Final Fantasy 7 Rebirthreally feels like it takes a Schrödinger’s cat approach to the events of a game. It works pretty well, but it leaves a lot of questions to be answered. It’s literally hard to even say which characters are alive and dead!
Fortunately, Square Enix has done a great job so far with this new Final Fantasy 7 series, so it’s sure to have a lot of fascinating twists and turns coming. But with the games’ riddles growing like cracks in the sky of a doomed dimension, it’s going to take work to land the plane and deliver a satisfying ending.
Spoilers follow for the ending of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
What ‘s Going On With Cloud And Aerith?
The end of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leaves us ina strange spot with Cloud and Aerith. While the team knows Aerith is dead, Cloud sort of sees her and is kinda cool about the whole thing. Is this a dimensional split with two worlds being imperfectly merged? Cloud seems to have other visions that his teammates can’t see. We know that Cloud isn’t completely in control of his own mind, so perhaps it’s an illusion of his own creation? But it seems like Red XIII can also sense Aerith, so that indicates it’s more of a dimensional split.
Can The Team Focus On What’s Happening Rather Than A Mini Game?
One of the big plot points of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was that an infinite number of worlds were in danger due to Sephiroth’s meddling. It’s a bit more complicated than that - with what can be kind of, almost, not really described as factions of multiversal ghosts pushing and pulling at the events of the game to ‘restore’ a proper timeline.
Cloud Strife and friends are facing a threat beyond anything they’ve ever dealt with before. And to fight that threat, they stop every five minutes to play a collectible card game or learn piano or ride dolphins. Fans gearing up for the finale have to ask: will the team be able to put aside their little break times to prevent Sephiroth from destroying all timelines to become the ultimate god?
What Will Happen To The Different Worlds?
This feels a little obvious, because it seems like a lot of the various dimensions are already dying. Final Fantasy 7 Remake established that there was a sort of ‘canon’ series of events that were supposed to happen. And, now they haven’t, there are infinite variations which should not exist. We see a lot of them, each of which is discernible based on the world’s cartoon military dog design, a thing that sounded like a joke when I mentioned it even though we all knew it was true.
But if the crew broke the universe by defeating the Whisper Harbinger, does that mean that reuniting the worlds (and the rumored Final Fantasy 7 Reunion title) will fix things? For whom? Characters reach across dimensions to deliver things - do they all blink out of existence if Cloud sets things right? What even isrightafter splitting a multiverse?
Will Any Of The Teammates Say, ‘Hey, Maybe We Need To Cut It With The Mini Games?’
Like I said, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is approximately ten percent roleplaying game and 90 percent feeling a sense of annoyed horror whenever you come across another round of Moogle Mischief. And, without any evidence or good faith reason to think so, I’m going to say this is a metacommentary on how we all face our own day-to-day adventures.
Should we keep striving to complete the goals in our lives? Or should we just play another round of Pirate’s Rampageeven though a pirate-themed shooting mini game is apparently now in every video game remake? Life is full of choices, and multiverses are born of them.
So, I dunno, maybe at some point someone who’s friends with Cloud might clear their throat and be like, “Hey, so, um, not to be annoying, but, uh, we can’t really spend three hours trying to clear another Fort Condor thing. It doesn’t matter and, let’s be honest, this side story doesn’t have any juice.”
Can The Dimensional Split Help Characters Cheat At Mini Games So They Can Go About Their Quest Normally?
Hey, maybe some of the alternate dimensions actually have mini games with a point!
