Huh looks like Barrett was recast in the Japanese version.
In remake he was voiced by Masahiro Kobayashi but, in Rebirth he is voiced by Mahito Funaki. Looking at JP twitter they are saying Kobayashi was suspended. I don’t know what that means.
There're some comments indicating that he might be taking time from work potentially for health-related reasons (
385, 388, 391, 396, 397, 398), but I think that it's one of those things where there isn't a public announcement about it so we won't know unless there's news about him later on. If there were any type of scandal or other thing happening it'd be all over the place and everyone would be mentioning it, but this is one of those things where I think that the privacy of the business world means that all we know is he appears to have suspended his work at the moment.
Hmmm, that's interesting. While I doubt that means right after Aerith is killed, I wonder what it could be. Leaving off right after the Weapons are awakened makes more sense to me, I'm still open for whatever
The interview
also mentions that the sequence in which certain events transpire is also being shuffled in some places, like Wutai not happening until the final game. Especially with the mention in the official summary of the Weapons, and the fact that they don't activate until Meteor gets called in the original game, but the official
Rebirth synopsis states,
"Meanwhile, Zack—beaten and battered from his fight against an army of troopers—hobbles across the wastelands into Midgar with a mako-poisoned Cloud on his shoulder. Though he has managed to escape death for now, the ominous rift in the sky gives him little reason to rejoice. That is hardly the only threat facing the world, however. The Shinra Resistance Committee, backed by Wutai’s interim government, declares war on the company; figures shrouded in black robes carry with them the corpse of Jenova, a veritable calamity from another world; and the Weapons—fierce and monstrous guardians of the planet—have recently awakened."
So, the sequence of Meteor being summoned as the catalyst for the Weapons awakening doesn't seem to be something that's limited to that event, and is even Aerith mentions that she doesn't like
the sky. Despite her not being in the world where there's a rift in it yet, her being an Ancient likely makes her see the world differently, which we've already gotten a hint at in
Remake, given that when Cloud meets Barret & Tifa in Chapter 13, those are in the real world, but when Cloud meets with Aerith you can see big glowing sections of Lifestream of the dead returning to the Planet from the Sector 7 collapse. I expect that Aerith's uncanny awareness of things is part of that connection with the Planet and its energy that the trailer also mentions and is a core part of the visit to Cosmo Canyon.
From the fact that the Weapons have apparently already recently awakened, it seems to have been at least partially triggered by the events at the Singularity during the end of
Remake – which makes sense given that the Whisper Harbinger was another one of the Planet's safeguarding defense systems. That makes even more sense given that this sequence of events has ALREADY left a rift in the sky over Midgar – albeit where Zack is rather than Cloud & Co, but it's pretty clear that the preservation of events that the Whispers were in place to manipulate through more influential and manipulative means is something that the Weapons are in place to preserve via a more confrontational and aggressive method.
Given that we're facing a different set of circumstances and Zack's world already has a rift in the sky, and we know that Aerith is praying for Holy there are slightly different pressures. While Cloud's unconscious after the Temple of the Ancients he also gets Sephiroth in his head making it clear that he's going to stop her from interfering. As the middle piece of a trilogy serves as the crucible, it's meant to hit the lowest point and force you to turn and face what seems like insurmountable odds as the stage it sets for the final chapter.
Especially given the crimson sky over Sephiroth that's separating Cloud & Zack on the cover artwork, I don't really see this game NOT having Meteor's summoning heralding the antithesis of literally everything that Aerith believed in and the impending destruction of the world that currently exists being some part of that ending, and thematically that's why it's also worth mentioning something about the Jenova LIFE boss fight that typically occurs at the Forgotten Capital.
The biggest point of the fight there is that it gives you LITERALLY ZERO TIME to process what just happened. I've been watching a number of streamers checking out the original
Final Fantasy VII over the last few years and a near-universal part of that experience is that as soon as it happens, it continues playing her theme while pushing you into a boss fight. It's an inherently discordant experience because it doesn't have battle music. You're intentionally not psychologically given the tools to try and focus on fighting that the entire rest of the game has provided you. Essentially everybody breaks at that point and doesn't understand how they're supposed to deal with the battle or process what's happened because it's all happening at once and it's too overwhelming to try and deal with emotionally and logically. (Speaking technically, the amygdala & prefrontal cortex share an inhibitory pathway in the brain, so it literally IS overwhelming to try and have both of those being set off at once).
THAT experience is what the middle chapter crucible moment is all about.
Given that we're dealing with Zack surviving in one sequence of events and not in another, we also don't know what that means for Aerith in that setting. Nomura mentioned that this trailer is one that's more for general audiences and that the next one would be more focused on the mysteries, so I expect that we'll end up getting a LOT more clues about some of the stakes involved with how they're setting up the conclusion at the Forgotten Capital, but I think that we're likely going to get something like
Remake did where the exact way that the finale comes about is slightly different than before, but the core of what it's doing with that moment remains the same.
Personally, I think that the question it's intending to set up is – Would you allow this world you're living in to get completely and utterly annihilated just because the Terrier series of events exists? Would you sacrifice everyone's memories from THIS world and kill the Planet & everyone on it just to secure yourself a shining new future on a different world where that loss never happened? – Because that's exactly the thing Sephiroth's been trying to do the entire time by obliterating everyone with Meteor and then using all of the energy to transport himself there. It's just that rather than in a more literal "crash into another planet" sense, this game is giving us something more existential that's linked into characters we already know. It's why Sephiroth trivializes Aerith's death and tells Cloud his emotions aren't even real. He's trying to make Cloud WANT to let go of this place and concede to burning it all down for something better for himself the exact way Sephiroth did in Nibelheim.
The end of this game should be to make you feel conflicted about wanting that, so that at the VERY end of the next game the moment after Sephiroth is defeated and there's that scene where Cloud could grab Aerith's hand or to snap out of it and grab Tifa's in the real world feels like a choice and reflects him learning how to accept the seemingly insurmountable losses that he's been forced to face, and understanding the whole theme of meeting her in "the promised land" and how it means what it means. Hence, the crux of the conflict in this game is whether or not you'll undergo a
rebirth into a different world or if you'll fight to protect this one.
What makes this a challenge is that the crucible experience makes it so that it's hard to know when exactly you just off the continuation of that journey. Typically it leaves you staring at the goal that now feels impossibly out of reach, and I think that post-funeral everyone looking from the Forgotten Capital towards the North Crater and starting off in that direction, you could almost LITERALLY just use the ending shot from
The Two Towers as your perfect storyboard:
So, that brings us to everything with the Black Materia in the original game, and how the way that all plays out feels a bit repetitive, and that works a bit better if you have some distance between those moments – but especially because all three are also designed essentially as standalone games. They get it at Temple of the Ancients which results in Cait Sith's death and then
immediately lose it when Cloud gets mind-broken by Sephiroth and attacks Aerith as Cait Sith II arrives in a moment he even comments feels a bit awkward. Then in the Forgotten Capital, Cloud loses control and almost attacks Aerith again which results in her death.
While defeating Jenova DEATH in the Whirlwind Maze allows them to get the Black Materia back again, what makes this moment different is that Cloud's in a COMPLETELY different state mentally when he hands it over to Sephiroth. Unlike the first time where his mind is broken and he's a little kid who's disassociated from what his body is doing, THIS is the moment where Cloud gives up and apologizes for not being "the REAL Cloud" – which in this context can be used to refer to the catatonic dude that Zack is carrying around Midgar in the Terrier timeline.
This whole sequence is key to the mystery of if Cloud is actually the same kid that Tifa grew up with or not, or if he's just some Shinra experiment doppleganger that's copying someone else to have a place to feel included. As much as that's a part of the mystery in
Rebirth, none of the follow-up and resolution for that takes place here. It's better to give those whole sequences a place to exist in the next game and a way to raise the stakes by having a turning point where the Weapons start actively defending Sephiroth carrying weight because you see the before & after happen all contained in THAT game.
I don't know that you'd really be able to tell the story of the existential hopelessness with Cloud and ultimately have everyone help to get him back, but most importantly spend the time for everyone to disband and find their own reasons to come back together and fight. The next game has a LOT of things that it needs to build its story and moments off of and the "handing over the Black Materia in the North Crater" feels like it's a pivotal part of that, and that's reinforced by the Icicle Inn tapes and other things about Aerith's past that give a way to start off with emotional hits that remind you of the loss from the previous game because that's something that the next title has to emotionally reestablish and there aren't many other points where it'd be able to do that otherwise.
Suffice to say there's a lot to think about ways in which things are changing while staying the same, and how the sequence of certain things could shift in some places to alter that, and the more time I spend thinking about it as a 3 game project, when it comes to the ending itself I think it really can't be anywhere else.
X 
