Spoiler: Final Fantasy VII Remake ending opens a new world

Spoiler Alert: This entire article is a spoiler for the end of Final Fantasy VII

The ending of Final Fantasy VII Remake gets a little funky. There are a lot of swirling lights. Dementors are flying in every direction. Midgar appears to be destroyed and rebuilt several times. A meteor threatens to destroy the planet at least twice. And, if you are me, a climactic fight ends with a Fat Chocobo using its ultimate move to destroy Sephiroth. (My seven-year-old was watching, and she made me do it. The timing just worked out perfectly).

When the dust clears, our heroes are standing on a road outside of the city, chatting about things to come. But unless you are extraordinarily unobservant, you will notice clues that these are NOT the heroes in the game you just played. No, we’ve moved into some other dimension. The timeline has shifted, and we are now off the rails of what could be considered a Final Fantasy VII “Remake”.

Cloud, having used a number of weapons throughout the game, is now back to rocking his Buster Sword. Barret is back to having his original gun-arm from the beginning of the game. If you look carefully, you will see that Tifa has her O.G. gloves on, as well. These are not the characters that just fought their way through the Shinra headquarters. I mean, maybe they did, but not with you. Your characters are gone, either altered or in a different timeline.

Other subtle clues – brilliantly staged, to be honest – alert the player that going forward, things are going to be different. The most glaring is the flash we see of Stamp, Shinra’s mascot dog. This is a cartoon dog, all right, but it isn’t the same cartoon dog we’ve seen prominently throughout the game. We’re in a different world now.

Charlie Sheen (Biggs) is shown waking up in the orphanage. He has survived his injuries (why couldn’t it be Jesse? Come on, guys!), and seems to be making a recovery. He died in the original game. But this isn’t that.

Then there is Aerith, who makes the comment that she will “miss the steel sky”. Who the hell is this person? Not the Aerith that we just accompanied for thirty hours or so. These are different versions of the characters. Perhaps these are the characters from the original game – but I think not.

I don’t think any of the characters in Final Fantasy VII Remake are the original characters – either at the beginning or the end. The entire fight against the whispers and fate seems to have created a JJ Abrams/Mr. Spock alternative timeline – freeing up the devs at Square-Enix to move forward with whatever sort of game they want. They can rewrite history, offering alternative takes on familiar moments or hewing closely to the original.

The point is, at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake, we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Things have changed, and we’re now heading out into a new version of that familiar world. Here’s hoping it contains slightly less cut scenes, but just as many cats.