Final Fantasy 7 Remake is over four years old, but Square Enix hasn’t stopped tinkering and poking at it to ensure everything is proper. Earlier today, a big patch was published to bring Final Fantasy 7 Remake up to date with specific modifications made in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, with the goal of making both games a seamless experience.
For example, Tifa’s character model in Remake’s flashback sequence has been changed to match her attire in Rebirth’s Nibelheim episode, which is a nice touch of attention to detail.
However, this patch has somewhat altered the game’s finale, modifying the final sentence said by Aerith as the party escapes Midgar and travels out into the unknown. Better still, no one knows exactly why the line was modified.
Before the patch was published, Aerith would glance up at the sky and exclaim, “I miss it.” “The steel sky” refers to Midgar’s upper plate. Aerith now states “This sky…I don’t like it” after the update, which basically implies the same thing as the previous sentence but is much more explicit.
It’s considered a step down from the original, and many are still trying to figure out why it was modified at all. People believe it has been modified to properly reference Crisis Core. Those who have played the game will know that Aerith finds the metal plate above the Midgar slums reassuring because it is all she has ever known and that the open sky frightens her because it seems like it is “sucking her in”.
Aerith’s new sentence in Remake evokes a touch more pain and dread than her old one, despite the fact that the words are nearly identical.
Another possibility is that Square Enix recently revised Final Fantasy 7 Remake to make the line more similar to the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy 7.
While the “steel sky” phrase was cool and a good way to conclude the game, there is no mention of a steel sky in the game’s original Japanese version, thus many believe it is just putting the two in line a bit more, despite some believing it is a definite degradation.
In any case, it’s unusual for a creator to change a game’s conclusion four years later, especially since the changed line has no bearing on the storyline of Remake and Rebirth. Then, maybe it’s all part of Square Enix’s great plan, and we’ll all look back on this line change after finishing Part 3 and consider the devs to be wonderful narrative geniuses. Only time will tell.