Squaresoft's 'statement' of Rufus' dead was:
Rufus being engulfed in a big explosion, caused by one of the most powerful creatures in the planet, and stated to be dead by other characters. All that happening during the story's closure of the conflict between AVALANCHE and ShinRa, where every important bad guy(Scarlet, Heidegger, Hojo, etc) were being killed, and ShinRa was falling apart.
Watch the cutscenes, read the dialogues, and see the context they are being presented. That's the way chosen by Squaresoft to show that Rufus was dead.
Precisely. Also, these "He could have hid under a table" arguments are off. I have seen the FMV again and he falls forward, there are no tables around him from which he can recover. In fact the AC Video shows him being bombarded by fire.
Unfortunately AC suffers from "Got to have great graffix innit, got to be dumbed down" Syndrome where we see Cloud shoved into a wall at 200 MPH and fly around the place. The original FF7 was far more realistic portrayal (and yes I KNOW it is fiction, but there ARE LIMITS).
I am with OWA, in that you do not need to see a corpse to know someone is dead, dialogue is king, and FF7 makes it clear that Rufus is as dead as the do-do. The game was never intended for a remake, and so Shin-Ra is effectively finished, Dyne is dead, Sephiroth is Dead, Aerith is Dead, Shin-Ra heirarchy are mostly dead and Jenova is dead.
The whole game ends with things being cleared up and done. Then comes along money and we get excuses for it all.
Rufus isn't really dead he:
a. Hid under a table
b. Had fire elemental materia equipped
c. Was super human
d. Was very lucky
or that FF7 is just a fiction and thus anything is plausible and that real world laws do not apply. They do. In every fiction you see, it is based on real world laws to an extent, if there were no emotion in characters there would be no story. If there were no gravity, characters would leave the ground, if characters were all incapable of being killed in 1 deadly stab (Aerith), there would be
No
Dramatic
Tension
There have to be these things and they have to be done relaitively well within the fictional world for it to be at all emotionally moving, dramatic and realistic. Otherwise no one gives a shit. We can bring back Dyne, bring back Weapons (shit they did that didn't they
I prove my own point), bring back a whole host of dead characters.
It doesn't work. It ends in a mess.