Oh, you'd be surprised, this argument comes back like a broken record.
Yeah, because the one segment of the fandom needs to invalidate her to prop up their ship.
I'm not sure how the devastation argument means anything. Cloud would have a similar reaction to Tifa dying, perhaps even worse.
Actually to be fair, I think Cloud would have a pretty bad reaction to anyone on the team dying.
I mean, thanks to rebirth we actually see what happens when Cloud thinks Tifa might be dead. He goes catatonic, and stays that way until Barret says "Tifa needs you." Actually for a moment after that, even.
I do, however, think this is a case of the promotional material and the stuff shown in Disc 1 giving certain fans a very strong impression that they are just unwilling to let go of. When you get so strongly invested in something, seeing it change can be hard to accept. Unfortunately, FFVII quite often plays with audience's genre expectations. Aerith is the white mage character, and I think at the time the personality type of those kinds of characters were the shy, introverted type while characters like Tifa are the more outgoing and direct type. White mage characters were the stereotypical love interest type characters too, which gets shattered later. And a character dying mid-game was rare. FFVII subverts these things, but too many are attached to the "stereotype" if that makes sense.
I know the healer has a passive personality is a trope because of a lot of other RPGs, but hilariously, it's one that FF itself tried to avoid. FF4 has two white mages, Rosa and Porom and both of them are very forward and strong willed, and it's Rydia, the black mage, who is shy. Like yes, Rosa is a white mage and she's a love interest, but she also decided to learn magic and archery so she could be of use on the battlefield for the man she fancied.
But yeah, FF7 was absolutely messing with expectations and a lot of people don't want to admit they didn't see past those.
By the way, the story actually does not work without Tifa, and you would have to rewrite quite a bit to fit into the present story.
You would have to change Cloud's motivation for leaving Nibelheim. You would have to change how he is fixed from his mako coma. Tifa is the one that introduces Cloud to Avalanche which allows him to meet Aerith in the first place. If Tifa doesn't go meet Don Corneo, Aerith and Cloud would split up at the playground. If Tifa didn't ask Aerith to save Marlene, she would not be taken to Shinra HQ where the cast is put on Sephiroth's trail. Much of the Nibelheim incident would need to be altered so that it's still relevant to Cloud's identity.
After Aerith dies, he would need another reason to break down at the Northern Cave as it's not Sephiroth's reveal of that breaks him but the perception that Tifa might have lost faith in him. Then he needs help to be pieced back together, also Tifa who took care of him as a vegetable.
That last part is especially important because he's a vegetable. This means she likely helped the nurse with responsibilities that are probably not an easy thing for someone to do. That's real love... being there for someone who might not ever even wake up or function normally.
Sorry for the ramble. lol
No, it's worth noting that the first plot beat- not the last, by any means, but the first- that would not be completely derailed by removing Tifa is the assault on ShinRa tower. Ironically, it would be the first where removing Aerith would be a major derail (That or the quest to rescue Tifa in Wall Market, though possibly Jessie could stand in for her, who knows.)
Nomura: I hope you enjoy the game we created and stay with us till the end. Even if someone misinterprets it, I say, "I see! Well, that can't be helped!", it's fine [laughs]
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『FFVII リバース』野村哲也氏が語る、『FFVII』の特別さとは？ オリジナル版から25年以上の時を経てなお語り継がれる“あのシーン”について、その思いを語る
Funny because Nomura isn't "leave it up to player's interpretation" anymore since he mentions misinterpretation. So yeah, we can't help them.
I don't think he ever was. I think Nomura was "you people can figure it out on your own. I don't need to hold your hands, talk about it."
And now he's realizing "Fuck, some of them do need the hand holding."
Welcome back. I also took a pretty big break from this thread till now having caught up finally.
This is the main problem pretty much always with their takes. There's never considerations made for what kinda impact these kinda decisions would end up doing for our characters. They only live in the exact moments but ignore what it would end up doing in the long run.
That take lives rent free in my head for how absolutely hilariously ironic it turned out.
I'd argue she's more of a heroine than Aerith honestly. Not to say Aerith isn't ofc, but Tifas removal from the game would require a full on rewriting of the game with how much it would change things. I'll never understand why someone would ever consider her a "non important side character" or whatever they say about her.
That's because you are coming at it from a position of coherent storytelling, and not shipping uber alles.
Since we're talking about how we first played FF7, It was in 98 for me. I bought a secondhand PS1 and some games for a steal from a classmate, played the fuck out of it. It was not my first RPG or FF so seeing a party member die for real was not too surprising. (FF4/ 2US will do that for you) and it seemed pretty obvious that Cloud had feelings for Tifa even early on, but undeniably so after Northern Crater and the Lifestream.
