Ah the full story from Lansings mouth. ENJOY!
The True Aeris Story
This was posted on the FF Discussion Group by Lansing, a temp worker
for Square who did some of the translations. It lays to rest (finally)
the rumors of Aerith's ressurection:
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Oh no. They did it. I wouldn't have known, because I had access to the
full set of FF7 info... but they did. I guess this means that I should
have actually played through things to see if anything had changed,
instead of getting tired of the game after translation purposes. I think
everyone is gonna kill me for my insolence, because I really should have
played through the game more fully before I said anything to make sure it
was still possible.
Throughout the past few weeks, I, myself, have been wondering why people
were having such a hard time reviving Aeris, because according to
everything I saw through the scenario translation process, it could be
done fairly easily. Here's the Aeris revival process, in full.
First off, throughout the game, you must make the logical choice of
things to say to Aeris to indicate that you like her. You must never hurt
her in any way by choice. What happens in scenarios, however, cannot be
avoided (Aeris' beating by Cloud, for instance). Also, with the sick man.
There is no medicine, but you could have Aeris tend to him and make him
feel better, by learning about her heritage and returning to Midgar in
the first CD. By doing this, the "GENERAL" as people call him, would
trust you, and request you go buy his dying friend something from the
store. A simple quest. After doing so, the GENERAL would tell you thanks,
and that if there was anything else you need ever, to ask him for help.
You then see a scene with his friend dying. A sad scene.
Now, continue through the game as normal, and after Aeris dies, go on to
the second CD. Once here, return to Midgar with the key from CD1, and the
GENERAL will ask you where the nice girl (Aeris) is. You explain that she
has died, by Sephiros, and that there is no hope in reviving her. There
would be a chance, but only if you could go deep under the waters of the
floating castle (where Aeris died). The GENERAL would tell you that he
thinks he may be able to help, and to come back later. After this
meeting, you were to go on to Aeris' church, where there would be a long
scene with her spirit. If you had been nice to her, she would express a
desire to return to help you. After doing this, return to the GENERAL,
who would provide you with a Yellow materia that allowed the entire group
to travel through water. With this, you could return to the floating
palace, go up to Mr. Fish, and once you touched him, you would be
transported under water, to a cavern, where, at the end, lay Aeris'
orb/life essence. With this orb, Bugen Hagen could complete the ress
process, and you could move on to a happier life with a neater ending.
Well, the FMVs were all completed on time, but a lot of coding was not.
They then delayed the games release by a month (Dec -> Jan). However, it
seemed that even by late December, the coding STILL wasn't finished, so
Square told production to wrap it up quickly. In order to get the game
out on time, SqJP sacrificed what could have been a miraculously better
game than FF7... The main coding that was not finished dealt with
manipulating the transparent polygon of Aeris' spirit in the church.
Since they were forced to wrap production up to meet the many-delayed
deadline, they had to stop with the Aeris process unfinished. So, to keep
things from ever happening, they simply removed the one item that allowed
any hint of the process to take place... The Key to Midgar, from the
first CD. This completely stopped the ability to ressurect Aeris.
HOWEVER, they left out the removal of one thing, and that was the split-
second of seeing the ghost of Aeris once you return to the church.
Unforunately, this, along with the insanely big size of the ending MOV,
are the only hints to Aeris' existence that we have. Other than the
original FF7 scriptline, from which all the above information came.
I ran across this info while talking to John H. (another temp like me)
trying to get some US script from him for our channel's page. Also, Seph
wanted it. I asked him if it would be alright for me to release the
script info in an altered form, and to release info on gameplay, such as
Aeris' death/ress. Then he told me the deadline story, and I almost had a
heartattack. He said that the process can still be done to its
completion, sans a couple of scenes, with the Game Shark, but until
someone develops a MOV player that handles multiple sector files, the
true ending will not be seen.
Oh, and about the ending... There were supposed to be scenes with the
hidden characters, but things got cut short, so they weren't added, and
the end of the ending was terrible, without even the typical "THE END" in
the stars.