Fans are baffled as to why a new update for the four-year-old Final Fantasy 7 Remake has altered what Aerith says at the end.
With Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth due to launch on Thursday it’s an exciting time to be a Final Fantasy fan, especially as Rebirth is even better than the already much-loved Final Fantasy 7 Remake. But it’s a confusing time as well, because Square Enix has just made an inexplicable change to the first game.
Three games will be needed to remake the original PlayStation game in its entirety, with Rebirth picking up where Remake left off, as the heroes leave the partially destroyed Midgar.
As they do so, the final cut scene (and this isn’t a spoiler) involves Aerith looking up at the sunset and saying, ‘I miss it. The steel sky.’ Except now she doesn’t.
The line relates to the fact that Aerith, and most lower class citizens, have been living under the artificial plate that holds up Midgar’s upper levels, so she rarely gets to see the actual sky.
Considering what’s happened in the game it seems a pretty good line, as Aerith ponders her uncertain future and the unexpected freedom she has won for herself (embodied by Rebirth having an open world map to explore).
Now though, the line is the rather less poetic, ‘This sky… I don’t like it.’
It still means essentially the same thing, but it’s hard not to see the original as better.
The change was first noted on ResetEra but there’s so far no agreed fan theory as to why the change has happened, although the most straightforward explanation would be that this is closer to the original Japanese dialogue.
Translating form Japanese to English always requires a considerable amount of interpretation and dialogue is rarely a 1:1 translation, but that still doesn’t explain why this line in particular was singled out.
The answer is probably because the line is used in one of the Rebirth trailers (the one below, right at the beginning) but then the obvious question is why didn’t it just use the original dialogue?
The new update also makes another very minor alteration to Remake, by changing the outfit Tifa is wearing in Remake’s flashback scene to match the one in Rebirth, but that seems perfectly reasonable by comparison.
Since the new line isn’t terrible or anything it ultimately doesn’t matter, but it is very strange.
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