At long last, speedrunners have found a way to prevent Aerith’s tragic demise in Final Fantasy VII (in a manner of speaking), marking the biggest game skip discovered since its original release almost three decades ago.
The skip, first unveiled by speedrunners AceZephyr and Kuma, lets players travel from Midgar to the Forgotten Capital without Aerith leaving the party, utilising glitches and precise positioning to reach out-of-bounds areas on the game’s overworld map. Check out how the skip works via an X/Twitter post below, courtesy of user Luzbel:
By exiting the Chocobo at a specific point on the map, players will be able to walk on the ocean, allowing them to head straight for the Forgotten Capital without encountering the portion of the game where Aerith leaves the party. Due to this, the party’s composition remains the same even during the cutscene where Sephiroth kills her, and she hilariously remains in the party during the Jenova boss fight that follows. Yes, even though she just got killed moments ago, she’s here in the fight now, meaning she’s still technically alive, right?
It’s worth mentioning that pulling off the skip requires many specific variables. Apart from knowing the exact spot needed to glitch the game and allow Cloud to walk on the ocean, players must use a version of the game that allows the disabling of encounters, as getting into an encounter whilst walking on water or triggering any scene where Aerith is not meant to be there will cause the game to softlock.
If done right, this skip could potentially save speedrunners two hours of gameplay, improving their timings by a fair bit. Due to this, members of the speedrunning community are currently working out ways to get around the softlocks, with AceZephyr even undergoing a gruelling five-hour effort using a speedrunner tactic known as pause buffering to avoid encounters.
With the passionate speedrunning community still uncovering hidden tricks even for the 27-year-old game, here’s hoping that such efforts will be put into “breaking” Final Fantasy VII Rebirth too, so players can finally get to save the life of best girl Aerith… in HD.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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