This is the 4th of 3 articles. Find the third here.

There comes a time when the creator realizes they unduly limited themselves by arbitrarily declaring their story is complete. I decided to break my short silence to achieve something closer to my original intent, to scratch an itch that was bothering me. Prequels are always unnecessary (and by the same logic sequels). Even the great Star Wars had to shoehorn episode numbers in later. (To Lucas’ credit, it was added almost 20 years before he would actually make prequels, but still.) But just because something is unnecessary doesn’t mean it can’t be good. It just usually isn’t. Prequels hold even more weight than a sequel because they are narratively bound by their inevitable conclusion, that moment where they meet their origin point, and it would be unsatisfying if it didn’t meet that obligation. Normally, all prequels end where the original begins. But this is Nomura we are talking about. My last article, chronologically, became more of a dumping ground for my feelings on the creator of much of the expanded Final Fantasy VII universe, Tetsuya Nomura. This time we are diving into a game that he technically only worked on from afar, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. This game alters one of the most integral moments of FF7 so profoundly that I am surprised it hasn’t become a greater point of contention. Let me talk to you about the time Zack met Aerith.

There are two ways I imagine they handled Zack and Aerith’s first meeting during the story writing process. Either they were deciding to do it as an homage to the original, wherein Cloud falls through the church roof right onto the flowers Aerith tends to. Or, they wanted to unearth the very foundation of the will-they-won’t-they love story Cloud and Aerith were seemingly meant to be. First, let’s examine the nexus point in both games, Aerith. In the original she could be described as mature, sure-footed, and down to earth. In CC, she is much less of all of those things. She’s a little more timid, scared of leaving her sector, and way less sure of herself in general. Honestly, this is a good narrative start, we get to see her arc into the person she will become when Cloud meets her, but there was something more sinister at work here. Something they may have even done unknowingly, depending on your point of view. Put a pin in that for the moment because now we can introduce the cause of contention. Now we get to Zack.

To talk about Zack we actually have to investigate the construction of the entire FF7 world. First, Zack is a man of boundless optimism who brightens anyone’s day. Not coincidentally, he and Cloud have a very similar background, both growing up in “the sticks”, the middle of nowhere. And here is where we find a whole new layer to the FFVII universe. The original game has you focused on the pursuit of your goal, which is exactly how all FF’s were built prior to it, but with the sixth entry, world building started to become more important. The character’s lives are always intertwined with the very fabric of their world. This is why Midgar becomes so important to the original because it tells you everything you need to know about the universe in the first hours of the game. CC expanded this idea by sourcing the game in the very same place and having you travel out to jobs, collect information, and return to homebase. In fact, you learn much less about Midgar than you do the rest of the world. In this way, Zack becomes the explorer that Cloud never had the time to be. But in tying both of them to similar origins, Zack also ends up telling you about Cloud’s life. Zack and Cloud are big dreamers from small towns who move to the big city that ends up taking advantage of both of them in the exact same way. They both become pincushions and test dummies. They both fall for the same girl. But the key difference between them is that Zack met Aerith first. Zack had a life changing effect on Aerith that Cloud never really understands. And now, we are at the heart of the problem.

Let me frame my perception of the original Aerith meeting. First of all, Cloud meets Aerith as a flower girl in the aftermath of his very first eco-mission with Avalanche. It was quite the little meet-cute. Boy meets girl, helps girl up, buys girl’s flower, she teases him, they part ways. This is actually important to remember for later, follow me though. On his second eco-mission, an accident sends him flying from the upper-deck, luckily falling on the very bed of flowers Aerith tends to. At this point, she makes sure he has a pulse, then carries on with her work while he gets his stuff together. Cloud puffs his chest and they have a cute little back and forth, cultivating in becoming her bodyguard and escorting her home. During this time, he gets to know her a little better, and she seems playful, insightful, and a little wistful. After some time, she confides in Cloud that she had a boyfriend, he was also in SOLDIER, but he died. This scenario had me believing that Aerith was a girl, somewhat experienced in love, and was building the courage to move on. You get the sense that Aerith can’t help but recognize some minor similarities, though she may have some reservations about Cloud because he is also in SOLDIER, she can’t help but see how helpless he is without her. For a long time in the game, her ex-boyfriend was nameless. Zack was just an idea. But Crisis Core made Zack the progenitor of almost everything that would come to pass in FF7 (seriously, EVERYTHING), and in doing so, it also fundamentally changed the perception of the Tifa-Aerith-Cloud love triangle.

Now let’s rewind all the way back to Zack meeting Aerith in Crisis Core. In a mission at the same reactor Cloud would one day have his fateful accident, Zack meets a similar fate. Everything about the scenarios with Aerith between either Zack or Cloud is alarmingly similar. And it’s the similarity that is the problem. Before CC, Cloud and Aerith’s meeting was original and unique. But having Zack meet her in the same exact way before Cloud makes it seem a little cheap. Remember how Cloud’s initial meeting with Aerith results in him buying a flower? This also was hijacked by CC, because it is Zack who gives Aerith the idea to sell flowers to begin with. In CC, Aerith loves her flowers, and she wishes Midgar had more, so Zack tells her to sell them and even rushes off to build her a cart to sell them with. Now Zack not only hijacked one of the most iconic story moments in FF7, he also is the whole reason that it worked to begin with. Without his idea to sell flowers, she never would have met Cloud before the moment he fell through the church to begin with. 

CC pushes our conception of the original narrative even further by having Aerith’s story arc involve her becoming the playful, assertive version of herself. She is confronted with Zach’s boundless optimism and is forever changed by it. We always knew Aerith had a dead boyfriend who was part of SOLDIER, but we never get a good sense of the depth of their relationship or a good idea of what it means to be a part of this company sponsored military. CC lays the groundwork for all of this, but most importantly it lays down a timeline. Aerith and Zack meet, spend somewhere between a couple weeks and 6 months getting to know one another. One day, Zack says he has to go on a mission, an important one, and he doesn’t know when he will be coming back. Aerith asks if it’s alright to call him (cellphones) or write to him (email and snail mail?), and she does, but after a while Zack is unable to answer. This is because he would spend the next 2 years in the lab underneath the Nibelheim’s mansion with Cloud, undergoing experiments mastermind by Hojo.

So how did they get there? We have to take a quick walk through the narrative of the other main characters. Throughout the game, the highest members of SOLDIER begin slowly going rogue. I won’t go into explaining much about these characters, but suffice it to say, there are 4 including Zack. First, there was Genesis, a red leather-clad mini-sephiroth, who begins the game MIA, and is later announced dead, despite actually having gone rogue. Shinra knows this, but puts out bulletins through their sponsored media saying he was KIA. At the heart of all this, it should be remembered that Shinra is both a company AND a government. The original hints at the obvious collusion, but leaves it very matter-of-fact. Next, Zack’s mentor Angeal (that is his name), is MIA and then KIA, leaving him the very unique buster sword that Cloud will carry throughout FF7. It turns out Angeal’s family had that sword specially made for him when he joined SOLDIER. It almost bankrupted them. And then, finally, the great Sephiroth follows in turn, MIA turned KIA.

The story jumps ahead a few weeks or months, and now Zack is the most elite member of SOLDIER, carrying Angeal’s buster sword as his own. All this time, he has been running small missions and returning home to spend time with Aerith, a little less optimistic than before, but Aerith tries to help him through it. Then, because of his close ties to the former members of SOLDIER, Shinra sends him away to deal with his former senior members, previously reported as KIA. In the back of Zack’s mind, he has a feeling that this is going to be a sucide mission, that he will deal with his old friends, and Shinra will in turn deal with him. But he longs to know more about why any of this is happening, and follows orders. In a flashback in FF7, we see the moment Cloud confronts Sephiroth for the first time. He is just a regular Shinra grunt, but seeing his childhood friend Tifa laid out in the Nibelheim reactor next to her dead father, Cloud picks up Sephiroth’s discarded blade and goes in for an attack. It turns out that the “real” story was that, before all of this, Zack does battle with Sephiroth, and narrowly loses the fight. The weakened Sephiroth ambles toward his “mother” Jenova in her test tube, crosses over Zack’s beaten body, and knocks away Tifa. Now enters Cloud. Zack tells Cloud to pick up his buster sword and take a shot. Zack and Sephiroth are Mako infused super soldiers, so the battle is stacked against Cloud. Still, regular human Cloud gathers his courage and lunges at Sephiroth, misses, and in turn gets impaled by Sephiroth’s blade. The impaled Cloud finds some inner strength, pushes himself further down the blade, lifts up the stunned and weekend Sephiroth, turns, and sends him falling deep into the reactor, presumably to his death. 

Cloud and Tifa have now passed out, but Zack is still holding on. He is unable to move and just as he is about to pass out, Hojo and a team of scientists show up. Hojo had been watching the whole time, waiting for a conclusion. Hojo expected good work from Zack, but he never expected the SOLDIER reject Cloud to be the one to make the final blow. He decides that Cloud is worth experimenting on and puts both Cloud and Zack into a Mako Reactor tube that makes men into SOLDIER members. It never directly states it, but I believe the purpose of the project was to transfer all of Zack’s abilities into Cloud, and some residual memories of Zack’s life came with it. It turns out, being infused with Mako significantly shortens your lifespan, so taking your best and most loyal SOLDIER’s abilities and passing them on to a new host would be a boon. No need to train them. They would end up spending two years in stasis, all the while Aerith continues to write and call, despite surely hearing in the local news that Zack has been KIA. In that time, the village that Sephiroth burned down has been completely restored and the memories of everyone in town have been erased. The only one who got away before this memory wipe is Tifa. To be clear, I don’t recall if it states that they wiped their memory, but it tracks a little better than the alternative, wherein the townspeople just act like it didn’t happen because they are scared of Shinra.

Now we can begin to compile this. The incredible thing about Zack, despite everything he knows, he remains a company loyalist until the very end. It may be because being on the inside is better than the outside, but it seems that he believes that the only way to be a hero, his dream, is to work for Shinra, making the world “a better place”. We never see him directly betray the company until it directly betrays him. After waking up, he takes a comatose Cloud out of the facility and makes a mad dash back to Midgar. His new mission is to see Aerith and to confront Shinra. But Shinra can not let that happen because it goes directly against their narrative. The game ends with the famous Zack standoff just outside of Midgar. While Cloud is hidden, Zack is killed by a barrage of bullets at the hands of Shinra. Cloud, finally somewhat coming out of his dream state, finds Zack’s bullet ridden body, hears his final words, and heads for Midgar. Now, how much time passes between Zack’s death and when Cloud meets Aerith is a bit of a mystery, but it has to be less than a month. So we can imagine that, based on CC, two things are true. Two things that drastically change the perspective one has when playing FF7. First, even up to the moment that Aerith runs into Cloud after the first bombing, it’s likely she was still leaving messages for Zack. And the second thing, the most damning of all, is the moment she met Cloud for the very first time was the moment she realized her boyfriend was dead. Why? Because Cloud is carrying the very same, very unique buster sword Zack carried with him everywhere.

Knowing this, it is reasonable to believe that Aerith isn’t drawn to Cloud out of love, but instead curiosity. She wants to know why he has that sword. And when she finds out that Cloud doesn’t even seem to be aware, it must make him that much more intriguing. In FF7, she never does come out and say this, and she also doesn’t in FF7 Remake, but if CC is going to become cannon, it would mean that she would be very aware of this. But that also means that in reality, there was never a love triangle; Cloud never really stood a chance and Tifa never needed to feel jealous. Now, this whole side story is arguably ignorable. It mostly only exists to suck the life out of FF7 in order to breathe life into its own story. There are lots of tangents to this as well. It’s possible that Tseng of the Turks, now remodeled to be much more caring of Aerith than in the original, told her that Zack was indeed killed. Not that Aerith has much reason to believe someone who works so closely with Shinra, but even in FF7, she isn’t so much afraid of the Turks, as she is about being put into confinement at Shinra. She is aware she is always being watched. We always knew Aerith knew too much and said too little. She never really ends up trusting the team enough to divulge what she does know. Or maybe she isn’t sure they will understand. In hindsight, she was probably originally created this way because it made her seem more mysterious. But now, with all this information, it just makes her seem… careless.

The day Zack met Aerith is the day the Final Fantasy 7 universe began to bear too much weight. It can’t handle the pressure of all this information, all these connections, because it was built to look cool, not be functional. It was never meant to be a building block for something more. It would be a lie to say I am not excited to see what is going to happen to them in FF7 Remake 2: The Remakening, but I can’t help but feel that their decision to tie all of the various universe additions into one cannon ultimately hurts the original. If a newcomer were to enter the universe at its origin point, which is what most people do when coming to a new series, by the end, they wouldn’t understand where they started from. Compared to Star Wars, a universe where you can enter during any of its starting points 1, 4, or 7 and complete a circle, the FF7 universe is more of a spiral, never connecting to its origin point. In turn, the more you learn about the FF7 universe, the emptier you feel, because it never completes the circle. It isn’t that it’s not interesting or even fun, but it’s interesting like a twinkie is cake. It’s technically true, it is cake, but it’s certainly not satisfying. Let us have our cake Nomura. A real cake. A real end. A complete circle.

P.S. I felt I should mention that this is just my take on the story. I did my best to keep the details straight, but admittedly, I may have missed some of the finer details or misremembered them. I also did a fair amount of reading between the lines when it came to my perception of the characters emotions and motives. But the broad strokes are all there. Zack does become the focal point for everything that comes to pass in FF7. There is also way more information about who and what Sephiroth is in comparison to Genesis, Angeal, Zack, and even Cloud. Still, Zack meets Aerith first and sets both her and Cloud on their paths. Zack is the reason Aerith is always laughing at Cloud, not in jest, but in irony.