A critically important detail here is that you have to look at the INTENTION behind the two statements being made there, which involves continuing beyond the the second highlighted section to include the rest of the sentence,
"If we don't ... make it that bigger and wider experience, then people just think they know what's coming. I want to avoid that."
Hamaguchi is specifically talking about the importance of not treating the future like it's already a foregone conclusion. That's the critical reason for placing so much emphasis on all of the characters' relationships to one another that they talked about earlier. Additionally, ALL of those changes are taking place within the PREVIOUS quoted context of not being a deviation that prevents arriving at
Advent Children which nobody wanted to do. These are both things that
Remake also already HEAVILY EMPHASIZES.
The mystery is "The Unknown Journey" and it's important to remember that
the JOURNEY ITSELF is oftentimes more important than the Destination – which in this case is the Forgotten Capital.
Aerith very blatantly spoke about this to Wedge when the Sector 7 Plate was inevitably going to collapse, even if you're certain that something awful is going to happen and you can't win, that's no reason not to act
as if you know you're going to lose and you can't change things, because you don't ACTUALLY KNOW
until you try. No matter what you're facing, the most important thing is that you conduct yourself such that you have no regrets about anything you did or the efforts that you made.
THAT is what's criticial to have as a mindset with the audience of players, and it's why you have to take all of these mixed and seemingly contradictory approaches because there needs to be enough room in the ambiguity of not being explicitly told what's going to happen –
which they never do in interviews. What they DO say is that things are changing, it's important to make players not have certainty about what's going to happen, and that the events will still follow the framework of the original game.
So – what happens as a result of Aerith doing exactly that in the face of Destiny's Crossroads at the end of
Remake?
There is some location where Zack survives an event that we KNOW killed him.
What Zack's apparent survival entails IS the mystery itself, because it's inextricably linked into the experience of loss and how you cope with those things. What types of events you're able to reverse and the ripple effect that that continues to have upon everything else if you do matters a LOT to how you understand attempting to take that type of action. It seems like the story is already going to be an exploration of what exactly that means when it comes to Cloud as our main protagonist – because without Zack dying, he's never gonna get his big sword or the responsibility to be a living legacy to his lost friend that are the foundation of his adopted Ex-SOLDIER persona, he'll likely never meet Aerith selling flowers after bombing a Mako Reactor, and countless other things will be altered – especially since
the official story recap mentions that Cloud bumping into Aerith (while looking like, matching the mannerisms of, and carrying the weapon of her dead ex-boyfriend) and her giving him a flower that represents Reunion is what set Destiny in motion.
Zack's survival itself is a mystery that's worth exploring because it's an unknown that takes a direct look at what happens if things DO go down the "What If...?" route with something. It's easy to walk down that path with the rose-colored glasses of saving your friend, but it's much harder to take a more honest look at what overwriting all of reality over a single fate would do to everything else that you've come to know and care about and love.
The screams of the Planet and the Whispers representing that Destiny that are undulating within Sephiroth that Cloud severs at the end of Remake are those who lived, Died, and RETURNED TO THE PLANET. Their howls of pain don't reach Sephiroth, but instead all of those moments & memories, precious & fleeting are like rain rolling off of his back, and he doesn't care if all those things are lost.
The Destiny that Cloud sundered at the end of
Remake are events of Zack's death.
I don't at all think that it's a coincidence that that're specifically mentioning the story leading to
Advent Children, given that the climactic scene of
Advent Children Complete is where
Cloud's Omnislash from the original game is countered by Sephiroth hit-for-hit, and Cloud gets impaled in a trigger to Nibelheim, and is subsequently cut down to the point of total helplessness... at which point Cloud ends up sliding outside of space-time to have a conversation with Zack in a location that doesn't exist in the real world, and then counters and defeats Sephiroth with Omnislash VERSION 5.
Dealing with loss is facing trauma which is dealing with a cyclical repetition of that pain that's just a little bit of a different version of the exact same thing over and over and over again. It's finding new ways to approach that narrative in order to be stronger having overcome it by the time you reach the end.
One part I can’t reconcile (and apologies, I've mentioned this elsewhere)..
In Advent Children, the entire party wears pink ribbons in remembrance of Aerith.
In Rebirth, the new synergy mechanic was created to highlight the bonds between the characters and their growth throughout the story. This has been stated in multiple recent interviews by Hamaguchi.
So it feels a bit contradictory to me to have Vincent and Cid be AI-controlled guests who may or may not even travel with the party throughout Rebirth. I find it mighty suspicious.
As a massive fan of Remake’s battle system, it’s especially saddening that I may never have Cloud, Aerith, and Vincent together in a playable party. My favorite characters. This is, of course, possible in the original game.
I covered a number of reasons that
Cid & Vincent make MORE sense being slightly removed from the main cast for this arc of the story, and how doing that actually serves as a catalyst to bring them in much closer to everyone else during the final game, while still giving a slight differentiation between them and the other Midgar-centric members of the party. Essentially, the Pink Ribbon is still representative of the person who helped to bring them all together and forged a bond between them.
You might be surprised how much the death of someone who's a member of a "core group" will end up bringing together a number of the people who were always just standing on the outside of that as a result. Speaking from experience, when the Program Manager of my team died unexpectedly despite her being extremely close friends with her team (consisting of myself & two others, as well as my boss), people who felt close to us as well as to her but weren't a part of that core group felt that loss just from the time that they'd spent with her in a way where they understood that loss of someone who meant a lot to them despite only having a fraction of the number of shared interactions that any one of us did.
Touching other people's lives isn't just about a cumulative series of constant presence or doing all sorts of things together, as sometimes it can even just be a few short conversations that form a bond that matters to that person which can get lost. Cid & Vincent existing on the outskirts can help to showcase how you don't HAVE to be one of the main members to feel that same pain and loss, because all of you lost that same person to the same circumstances. It makes you constantly yearn to have taken opportunities that don't exist now and never will – because it never felt like there was an arbitrary timer placed on those things and you never felt the drive to try and push closer because of that... but the undeniable reminder that life is fragile and short will change that.
Cid & Vincent's characters are ALREADY defined by loss. Vincent by the loss of someone he loved who was committed to something that he knew endangered her and couldn't stop, and Cid by the loss of his dream because he wouldn't seize that at the expense of the life of the person he loved even if they were willing to throw it away like it was nothing, and both of them are trapped in a cyclical type of regret and existential conflict that the entire party doesn't experience collectively UNTIL the Forgotten Capital.
That's why Zack's survival being on the table matters.
If you can't stop it from happening –
you can still reverse it...
BUT SHOULD YOU?
Cid got the ok from Shera to launch anyway. She was ok with a reality where he erased her in pursuit of the dream he'd had, despite knowing that it would erase any possibility of a future with her in it... and he aborted that launch, and they ended up unable to escape that pain for years afterwards... until he literally names a new airship after her. Vincent even manages to find Lucrecia but he tells her that her son Sephiroth who she loves and never even got to hold is dead, despite the fact that he's alive because he doesn't want her to have the hope of seeing him again, only for them to have to kill him.
Both of their stories are inextricably intertwined into the psychological strife with complications that don't take place until AFTER the Forgotten Capital, but I don't think that them being characters who feel more like Red XIII did in
Remake will diminish that, but rather I think that understanding Red XIII's loss with Ceto and him still being a child who eventually comes to be closer to the party despite initially being less of a "core member" throughout
Rebirth will emphasize that Vincent & Cid are just as important as everyone else going into the next game.
The "core group" don't feel an ownership over the experience of that loss, because they don't know what any of the moments that Aerith shared with them really meant to them. She's the type of person where even a simple conversation might hit them very personally in a way where they think about it and her absence all the time. Zack giving her the pink ribbon on their first date sets an establishing theme of that to represent their shared connection and Aerith still wearing it constantly after his death is really just her ALREADY doing the same thing in
Final Fantasy VII that everyone else is doing to symbolize their continued attachment to her in spite of that loss in
Advent Children.
View attachment 14036I'm wondering if this background is Northern Crater/forgotten capital
The rock surface sliced into squares with the glowing green below motif has pretty much always been the North Crater where the Jenova Synthesis boss fight takes place. It's definitely interesting to see that particular visual used here, but especially since
Remake used the Edge of Creation, it makes me curious if there's going to be a similar sort of foreshadowing or not in the finale of
Rebirth.
X 
