After completing the demo for
FFVII Rebirth covering the Nibelheim Incident, when I went to look up something about this again, and I found that this thread was one of the top Google search results, so I felt it was necessary to come back to this thread to bump it for a little bit of additional clarification. First of all,
the FULL quote by Sakaguchi actually comes from a magazine with slightly more context, which helps to present how & why this is still a core element to that happens later on in the story:
Explain the theme of Final Fantasy VII
"Ever since my mother passed away, which was when we were creating Final Fantasy III, I have been thinking about the theme "life". "Life" dwells in many things, and I was curious what will happen if I attempt to analyse "Life" in a mathematical and logical way. I'm an engineering major, so maybe this was my approach to overcome the mental shock in me. Although I've been occasionally sharing my thoughts on this issue with Mr. Uematsu, this is the first time in the Series that this particular theme is actually brought up in the game You might have difficulty noticing it, though."
So the passing of Sakaguchi's mother is foundational to the overarching theme of "Life" in the original
Final Fantasy VII, and there is a detail that is particularly important that comes up in
a larger interview with him in Japanese just speaking about his career history where he talks more in-depth about what occurred and how it impacted him:
坂口：FF3を制作していたときに、母が自宅で火事に遭ったんです。電話で聞いて、すぐに夜中の高速をぶっ飛ばしたのですが、実家に戻ったときには、もう家は燃えカスでした。たぶん、20代半ばの頃ですね。身近な人の死に直面したときって、悲しみが突然やってくるんですよね。急に涙がボロボロとこぼれてきて、「なんでオレ泣いているんだ？」と、変に俯瞰で自分を見て驚くんです。
大切な人が死んでしまったときの、生き残った者の辛さをいやというほど味わいました。そして、どうやって、この悲しみを乗り越えていけばいいのか、生き残った者のすべきことはなんなのか、そんなことをいろいろと考えるようになりました。
――それが、その後のFFの「死」をテーマに扱う物語に繋がっていった。
Here's an English translation revised from the auto-translations of Google & DeepL:
Sakaguchi: When I was working on FF3, my mother had a fire at her house. I heard about it over the phone and immediately hit the highway in the middle of the night, but by the time I got back to my parents' house, it was already a smoldering mess. I was probably in my mid-20s. When you are faced with the death of someone close to you, grief comes over you suddenly. Tears start to stream down my face, and I see myself from a strange bird's eye perspective and wonder in shock, "Why am I crying?"
I have experienced the pain of those who survive the death of a loved one. I started to think a lot about how to overcome this grief & what the survivors should do.
--This led to the subsequent stories that deal with the theme of "death" in FF.
So, what's important to look at here is how that event is the core element that contributed to a specific focus around how & what the survivors of a lost loved one are supposed to do, because that is CENTRAL to all of
Final Fantasy VII, especially with regard to what the party experiences throughout the game with
multiple different characters' fates.
The most critical part of this is actually what happens in Cloud & Tifa's pasts as well as the Nibelheim Incident, because those are the groundwork of how their characters handle later tragedy, and shape specifically what happens with the major loss later on.
Tifa going off to Mt. Nibel after her mother dies is when she falls, and Cloud gets away with nothing but scraped knees while she falls into a coma for a week. This is where Cloud takes responsibility for leading her off and endangering her, whereas he was actually just the one following. This is what builds up his complex to join SOLDIER, as well as why the promise to be her hero and save her when she's in a pinch become such a defining foundational trauma for Cloud and why he's always continually trying to get stronger to attempt to prevent tragedy, which Sephiroth stringing him along and putting him through hell is constantly motivating him to do throughout the game.
This is what leads up to Tifa going back up that same mountain pass when Sephiroth comes to town with Zack to check out the Nibel Reactor (a parallel which the
Rebirth demo emphasizes). And like before, they once again fall and go through stressors where they survive, but that just leads into a repeat of that trauma. The truth at the Reactor and following events are what eventually lead to Cloud arriving back in town too late to save his own mother from being burned to death, and
when you arrive at her home in the original game, there is no dialogue – Cloud only hangs and shakes is head in total silence. Immediately after this is THE MOST ICONIC DEFINING IMAGE of Sephiroth:
Turning his back on Cloud while surrounded by flames ...and walking away to meet his OWN mother.
Remake adds in the very first appearance of Sephiroth from
Cloud's traumatic flashback triggered by a collapsing bridge (something that continues to occur multiple times throughout the original game, but even more emphasized in
Remake as a trigger that shakes Cloud up even if he survives when he seemingly shouldn't like happened with Tifa). In
Remake, this trigger sets off the visual hallucination where
he sees his home burning with his mother inside, which is followed by Sephiroth taunting Cloud by repeating his mother's dying words to him,
"Run, Cloud... Run away. You have to leave. You have to live." This quote being spoken by Claudia is something that was clarified in additional
Remake materials, and you actually hear the line said in Claudia's voice during the Nibelheim Incident demo for
Rebirth, where there is also an even greater emphasis on recreating that precise feeling of helplessness of waking up and rushing out the door only to showing up to the charred wreckage of a house where your mother is already dead inside and there's nothing that you can do to stop it –
exactly the way Sakaguchi experienced that.
Additionally,
Remake also emphasizes this detail in
Tifa's variant of the cutscene in Chapter 14 after dealing with the deaths of Biggs, Jessie, & the other inhabitants of the Sector 7 slums, because her friends were slaughtered and their home was left as nothing but a burning wreckage
AGAIN. One of the things about traumatic events is that there is a cyclical pattern to them and what your brain notices between them that makes those things exceptionally defined in the emotional experience that is attached to that.
Remake does this in reverse by seeding in elements of Aerith's fate continually that Cloud is having preemptive emotional responses to in the same way that the players of the original game experience seeing these things "again" for the first time.
This is all to say that while Aerith's fate in the original
Final Fantasy VII may not have been directly a story decision made explicitly by Sakaguchi, the underlying theme of life being explored in the foundational narrative structure that fundamentally defines the game and how it deals with what is THE most famous example of that type of loss in video game storytelling. That narrative emphasis and the way in which that was told flat out
WOULD NOT EXIST without Sakaguchi's personal experience and his reflection on those things explicitly shaping that theme as the core foundation of the game.
SO: IT'S NOT MISREMBERED BY FF7 FANS, IT'S SIMPLY NOT USUALLY GIVEN SUFFICIENT CONTEXT TO CLARIFY HOW & WHY.
Given that
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the game that leads everything to the Forgotten Capital and is presenting this portion of the story by starting out with the recap of the Nibelheim Incident as told by Cloud at Kalm (along with a number of other reinforcing details which I won't mention at the moment as they'd be spoilers that were not already details given by
Remake or its accompanying materials and this is a thread still within the non-spoiler
Remake portion of the forums), it seemed important to make sure that this information was updated as there will likely be a LOT more reasons to look at what those parallels are and how that underlying theme of "life" is still the core guiding element in
Remake &
Rebirth that they adhere to VERY closely even if it's providing new questions and perspectives on those same events.
So, while it's almost 4 years later, hopefully this removes any misunderstanding or sense of ambiguity around that particular link.
X 
