Exactly! Any return to Aerith that happens too quickly will render this scene meaningless and cheap.
And regarding my final perspective on all this, I’d like to explain one last time, as simply as possible, my initial message, because I feel like I didn’t express myself well.
For me, FF7 has always had a much more metaphysical aspect than a concrete one. Whether it's the end of the OG or what happens in Advent Children, reality mingles with the subconscious. I think the developers have always intentionally remained very ambiguous. Things that our characters perceive as signs could very well be coincidences for an external observer. Cloud seeing a hand reaching out to him when he needs it or his best friends departing happily into the light could simply be a representation of his subconscious. And I find that this gives FF7 a much more endearing aspect than the much more concrete and magical/fairy-tale direction we seem to be heading towards. I prefer ambiguity and implication over pure and simple exposition.
Obviously, Aerith hasn’t just disappeared. Obviously, this isn’t reality, and we are in a Japanese RPG. But I preferred the subtler approach we had with the OG. That’s all.
The weird endings to Remake and Rebirth absolutely play a role in making it hard to distinguish reality from spiritual/dream spaces and I do think it’s deliberate for design reasons and story reasons.
I think they knew that they had a tough choice to make with the weirder aspects of FF7’s story. The Jenova fights specifically present this problem. There’s also Cloud’s mind being depicted throughout the story ( the white void ) before finally leading to the LS sequence and I think the missing pieces of how these spaces work will be put in place then. My working theory is that most of Rebirth’s ending concerning Cloud takes place in his lifestream.
If part 3 is going to have Aerith as this talking piece for how this weird stuff works, overlaying her explanations to Zack over Tifa gearing up to enter Cloud’s subconscious, then I can see them doing stuff like that.
A character seeing a drop of water and recalling something Aerith said, or seeing a field of flowers and remembering a happy memory with Aerith is much more along the lines of what I expect to see.
They could do whatever they want. The setting’s rules are flexible enough to justify whatever, but the more outlandish the flex, the more I think the story loses its punch.
Between NPTK, the dream date, the dream forest, the “I’ve got this”, and the final cinematic on the plains, Aerith got one of the most thoroughly said goodbyes I think I’ve ever seen in media. If that ends up not meaning very much in the grand scheme of the game’s story… then it’s a yikes in my mind.
Do I think they’ll sneak another one in at the end of part 3? I don’t think so, but they certainly might give in to the temptation. To me, Zack and Aerith’s final goodbye is when Cloud puts the buster sword in the church, and the flowers at where Zack died, because that’s Cloud saying goodbye to them both.