I really liked FF7 Rebirth at first - it's everything I wanted Remake to be, from an actual re-creation of FF7's world perspective - and a pretty solid game on its own too. But, man, they just killed it with the whole Aerith thing at the end. It was so ungodly stupid.
Not sure why both FF7 remakes had to completely bungle the last 10% or so of the game. Like seriously, both games had their weak points but were mostly good, then they just completely went off the rails in the last 10%. First one has you fighting a bunch of fucking time gods on the Midgar Highway, second one has an absurdly long/tedious Temple of the Ancients followed by Aerith's death scene being cut away from so they can do a bunch of bullshit where they're all ambiguous about whether she lived or not, then have her spirit hovering around talking to Cloud all throughout the ending so it's like she never fucking left.
Is the third game just going to be more of that bullshit with Aerith's ghost hovering around? Talk about missing the entire point of FF7, coping with loss.
It drives me so goddamn nuts after how good the rest of the game was.
They just needed to do one of two things. Either remake Aerith's death and break our hearts all over again, stay true to the message of the original. OR have her death be prevented and have a great moment of catharsis that after all these years we'd get to see the rest of her story actually play out. Instead they went for the JJ Abrams Mystery Box bullshit. She's dead but we're gonna be all mysterious about it for 20 minutes so you're not actually sure at first, then we're gonna have her spirit pop up so much that the death means fuck-all. They somehow managed to be the worst of both worlds.
