Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Love, and Grief

How a video game, and its divisive ending, brought real love — and loss— into my life

(Earlier this year I played through the Final Fantasy series and tracked my thoughts on the evolution of the games on this Substack. Here are those pieces. This entry is only kind of about the latest game in the series, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Thanks for reading.)

I’ve owed you all this piece for a while now. I beat Final Fantasy VII Rebirth back in April but, for reasons that will become obvious, I needed time to stew on what I wanted to say about it. Readers may remember that I’ve used this space to share my reflections on every Final Fantasy game from I-VI and VII Remake so far; you may also remember that my reflections on each game got more and more personal as the series went on. That trend definitely continues here, and I’m not even sure I should share this one, but I think, for myself, I have to. If you want straight game design analysis, this piece is probably not for you. If you’re interested in the way our lives intertwine with the media we engage with, be prepared for some feelings.

Of course, I gotta analyze the game a little: I loved Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I spent basically all my free time in March playing it, from launch day (I even took a day off work to play a video game! The first time in my life I’ve done something like that) til I rolled credits four weeks later, about 102 hours in. When it comes to video games, this is a record for me; I’ve never hit a game so hard in so brief a time period. There are a lot of different aspects of the game I could gush over to explain why; for a minute, in fact, I had a draft of a very different post about how FFVII Rebirth was the ultimate road trip RPG, how it really captured the feeling of traveling around a new countryside with your pals — semi-goal-driven, but driven also by curiosity, wonder, and fun. I still believe that’s true, and I think it’s one of the big reasons the game had me hooked so hard for an entire month.

But what I really need to talk about here is the game’s ending. Even for a celebrated piece of media, I think it’s fair to say the ending is heavily divisive; if you hit up the Final Fantasy Reddits, there are big opinions arguing its quality on either side, and most of my friends who played have told me that, as much as they loved the experience of Rebirth, they found themselves let down by the final bits. Not me, man. I loved every second.

SPOILER WARNING for continued discussion: the last couple hours of the game feel like Loki meets David Lynch¹; Rebirth climaxes with the most iconic scene from the original FFVII, the death of Aerith, but in a super bizarre, multiverse-jamming way that makes it not totally clear what actually happens. Because of the… let’s just call them “incursions” of other timelines that our protagonist Cloud sees during the final scenes of the game, we’re left wondering whether Aerith was “actually” killed (the other party members certainly act like this is the case) or whether the timeline-breaking events of Rebirth managed to in some way stay Aerith’s terrible fate, allowing her to fight on with the party into the third and final game of this remade trilogy. The fallout of this moment is intentionally ambiguous throughout the epic final boss battles, so much so that the final phase of those battles sees Cloud and Aerith teaming up to defeat Sephiroth in some kind of multiversal nexus. But, after the battles are done, despite Cloud still seeing Aerith hanging around like she’s A-OK, there’s a pervasive feeling of grief blanketing the final scenes, a tonal flag that lets us know that, regardless of what Cloud is seeing, it seems the destiny set by the original may not have been diverted after all. But, again — it’s really not super clear.

One of my favorite games journalists, Aiden Moher, wrote a tremendous piece on grief, trauma, and Rebirth that I think does a perfect job explaining how the ending of the game channels some of our heaviest feelings and leaves us with this foreboding, uncertain note that forces us to deal with tragedy, which I honestly think is pretty daring for a AAA video game. I recommend folks read it; I’m not going to replicate the contents of his piece too much here because I want to talk about how that ending and those feelings impacted me personally.²

So, let’s start with an embarrassing confession: this is probably not a unique sentiment, but I feel like I had a crush on Aerith. When I wrote about FFVII Remake, I talked about how that game is forever connected with the struggles of the early pandemic in my mind, and how, looking for a lifeline, I really latched onto Aerith’s character in particular. Here were my effusive words about her:

And yet, for a character immortalized by her death, Remake does anything but fridge Aerith. Instead, she’s crafted so lovingly that she became my favorite character in this whole dang thing. The way she carries herself throughout the game, voiced with incredible beauty by Brianna White, is honestly something I find inspirational. She’s sweet and a little sassy, deeply passionate for the people around her, possessed of a desire to have a good time, and despite her knowledge of gloom to come, always hopeful that the actions of her and her friends can make a difference. I love this. I think we should all strive to be a little more like Aerith, a character who, in my reading, has seen her violent end and still chooses to meet every day with optimism and good humor. Playing Remake during the pandemic — especially in those early months where there really was no sense of how bad things could get — Aerith became a lifeline. We can’t stop the plate from falling, but maybe we can save our community before it does.

What I’m not saying there is that I really liked this digital persona. Like, like liked. I’m not really proud of that fact, but man, April 2020 was a hard time; I didn’t even mention in my Remake piece that, in addition to all the other stuff that hit me in early 2020, I had a serious relationship end that April as well. Tough timing! So you see why this sweet video game character became someone I latched onto.

And then, the next four years of my life: I moved a couple times. I lost a business, isolated myself during the height of the pandemic, rebuilt friendships, got a stable job in a new city, took up RPG design as a hobby, started writing here, bought FFVII Rebirth on launch day. At no time in those years did I have another serious relationship. I dated people, sure, and certainly harbored some crushes, but a mutual, emotional, adult relationship? No, that hadn’t come since April 2020.

In my Final Fantasy VI piece, I wrote about how I’m a pretty consistently single person. Around the time I wrote that, I was starting to really become okay with that fact. I think my strength is in finding love through friendship and creative communities; I was ready to accept that romance just wasn’t my scene.

Then I got to the end of FFVII Rebirth. After spending a whole game thinking, hoping, and angling to save Aerith (my crush!) — after a couple wild cutscenes that implied that maybe we did! — I took in the end credits of the game and felt drained. I knew, emotionally, that our heroes hadn’t done what we’d hoped they would do. I knew Aerith was gone, or changed, even though I didn’t really grasp how or why. It really affected me — so much so that I sat in the living room for probably a half hour in silent thought, just trying to work out what I’d seen and how I felt about it. And a key thought kept rising to the top of my mind — a thought I worded so poorly that, in retrospect, I think I monkey’s pawed myself. That thought was: I can’t be feeling this intensely about a video game. I need a real person to make me feel this way.

I got my wish.

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Chadley’s looking to be understood just like me fr fr

Immediately after finishing FFVII Rebirth, I hit the dating apps hard. I’d taken a hiatus from them for a few months, but with the inspiration granted to me by the end of Rebirth, I was back with a vengeance. I spent probably 30-60 minutes a day swiping, putting more energy than I had in a while into finding someone to connect with. During one of those swiping sprees — which happened to take place while I was out of town on a work trip — I met E.

The connection between E and I was immediate and vivid. I think we instantly recognized alikeness in each other. We saw and approached the world the same way. We valued both cleverness and bad jokes. We cared deeply about our fellow humans and found hope to be a radical response to political despair. We met the world, and each other, with playfulness, effusiveness, and curiosity. As soon as I had one conversation with E, about her favorite restaurants in the town where we matched, I knew I wanted to keep having them.

At first E was resistant to trying something long-distance, but after a gentle invitation to connect on Instagram, a couple of sweet DMs, and a note that “I think we owe it to each other to give this a try,” we did, and we started dating, 1100 miles apart. That first weekend, I think we spent about 14 hours on the phone. I joked with E that I was trying to put as many hours into her as I had into Final Fantasy, which I’d beaten over my last weekend at home.

What followed was maybe the best six weeks of my life. This was a magic I’d never felt in a relationship before. You can hate on Ted Lasso all you like, but there are a couple lines in there that are all timers, and to me, one of them is Roy telling Rebecca “you deserve someone who makes you feel like you were struck by fucking lightning.” That’s exactly how I felt. Everything, not just the things I did with E, felt better. Even day-to-day mundanities sang a little bit. I felt compelled to be the best version of myself I could be, because I knew that’s how E saw me.

In fact, I’m pretty positive the thing that felt most magical about our relationship was that we saw each other the way we each always hoped to be seen. She was a deeply passionate, creative woman who never missed an opportunity to try to make the world better. Judging by what she said to me (her words, I swear), she found me a brilliant, caring man who made her feel valued and protected. She even loved my labyrinthine sentences, the same ones you’re probably cursing right now! This was it, man. This was the relationship I’d waited my whole life for.

E and I put real, intentional effort into long-distance dating. In fact, maybe the best dates of my life were held over our phone lines. I introduced her to X-Men ‘97, which I thought she would like because of her political activism (she did!). She shared with me one of her favorite philosophy books, called Finite and Infinite Games, which she thought I would love because I was a philosophy major and worked in games. Love it I did, and we read it together, taking turns verbalizing sections aloud. Have you ever read a book out loud with somebody you’re into? It’s about the most romantic thing I can imagine. In a lot of ways, we even approached our relationship like a game — we challenged ourselves to write haikus for each other every morning, and we turned making playlists into a competitive activity, giving each other “points” if one of us sniped a song the other was going to put on their next mix (I snagged both “Constant Craving” and “The Luckiest" out from under her, so I won that particular game).

And then it was time to close that distance. I celebrated my 40th birthday at the beginning of this month, and E flew out to see me and spend the weekend together. And then… I don’t know. She came to me the Sunday morning, after two days in my presence, and told me she just wasn’t feeling a spark — that she wanted so badly for us to work out, but being in the same space as me, she wasn’t getting the romantic feelings she was hoping to. She told me our relationship needed to be over, and that she was sure, and then she walked out of the apartment a day before she was supposed to fly home .

And, I don’t really understand what happened here. I don’t know how something could feel so good across distance and fall apart over two days in person. She said she couldn’t articulate it herself. She swore I didn’t do anything wrong, and there wasn’t even a single thing she could point to that changed her mind — she just didn’t feel the romance.

Of course, her words haven’t stopped me from replaying the weekend probably hundreds of times in my head over these past few weeks, looking for some answer to explain this turn of events. I have guesses as to what might have flipped; one or two of those might even have elevated themselves to the level of “an interpretation.” At the same time, I recognize, logically and even emotionally, that I don’t have to understand it. All I have to understand is that E did what she felt she had to do, and that it was hard for her, too (she was truly broken up about it, which I guess makes me feel better?). On a podcast I produced long ago, my friend Brandon told me that he felt the drive to get answers after a breakup was just another attempt at control. And I hear that, but god, I wish I could have understood this just a little better.

If you’ll bear with me, though — this onslaught of grief, loss, and confusion I felt and still feel does indeed call to mind the ending of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It’s been argued, including by Aidan Moher in the piece I linked to above, that Rebirth’s ending is so confusing in part because grief is confusing. When it comes to tragedy, to real heartbreak, there are often no easy answers to be found. And just like when I finished playing Rebirth, after E walked out the door, I sat in the living room for at least a half hour, still in my thoughts, trying to work out what just happened and how I felt about it. Except this time, I had gotten my wish from before: a real person made me feel that way. And it felt, so, so much worse.

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Now, yes, this is a sad story, but it’s important for me to note the real good that has come out of it.

First: though brief, E and I’s relationship showed us both what we could and should expect from potential partners. The care, respect, and presentness we gave to each other set a bar that all future suitors are going to need to follow. A tall order, maybe, but having had this once, we’ve both been shown our romantic worth, and hopefully neither of us will settle for anything less again.

Following from that, and maybe a little obvious: our relationship also gave me the memory of having had this experience. E and I had a lovely post-mortem conversation via text the day after the breakup, and we both admitted that this had been love — just not, for E, the type of love she had wanted. But that’s still a powerful way to conceptualize our brief dating adventure. And while the memory of love hurts (as Moher’s piece points out, this is pretty much the definition of grief), it’s also cherished — to have felt this way even once is to have had an invaluable experience. It’s like what Butters says about his breakup in maybe my favorite episode of South Park: “It makes me feel alive; it makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before.”

And that’s the real takeaway, right? Over the couple months of dating E, I felt so alive. More alive than I had since 2020, when, in quick succession, I lost my dog, my then-girlfriend, and a business I’d spent three years building. Those punches shocked me out of some feelings for a while, I think, and I needed E to remind me what being a person felt like, even though sometimes it feels real shitty.

It’s funny — if you think about that timeline, you can bracket the time period during which I felt the most closed off with Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth. That becomes especially clear when you think about how many dang times I played Remake over the pandemic. That game became a lifeline for me when I most needed it, helping me access feelings virtually that the real me wasn’t using (as my friend Mary Beth Smith³ says, “art helps keep feelings warm for you”). Then Rebirth, with its intensely emotional ending, shocked me back into the world of personhood again. Hell of a thing for a game to do.

Thanks to Rebirth, I met E, and thanks to E, even though there’s barely been a day this month when I haven’t cried, I’ve made some real changes in my life. I’m actively on the dating apps again, but I’m also trying to be more engaged with my friends. I’m even exploring moving back to Chicago next year, to be around the people I would call my most cherished community. E helped me realize that having that kind of love in my life is something that I can and should strive for. And even though that’s not what either of us were hoping for when I convinced her to “give this a try” a few months ago, I think she’d be happy that I’m trying to get happy. I know that’s what I want for her.

I hope one day E and I can be friends, and maybe I can understand a little better why she and I didn’t work out. I hope one day I can think about or even just listen to the score of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth again without being reminded of her and becoming instantly sad.

And I hope that E really does find a partner who values her as much as I did, because she deserves it. We all do. But she really, really does.

Now, fuck. I think I have to find a new series of video games to play.

End of series. (at least, for now)

1. I’ll die on the hill that, when Sephiroth says to Aerith “There you are, hiding out in a universe that’s already accepted its fate,” I got major finale-of-The Return vibes. Aerith feels to me like a Laura Palmer that has more control of her own destiny. I’d love to write more about this one day!

2. I do, however, want to call out Aidan’s language about grief as “all the love we never had a chance to share with someone.” That’s a powerful thing to keep in mind.

3. Not relevant to this piece at all, but so fucking cool: Mary Beth is going to be on an upcoming episode of The 1% Club on Fox/Amazon. I wanna be on a game show so bad!!