I don’t just mean the game gets harder without a healer or a feeling of “wasted” time levelling Aeris or whatever, I mean there’s a fundamental rule that’s broken when she dies and it leaves you with a tantalising feeling that there should be some way to solve this. Some way to do things differently.

Phoenix downs and revive spells exist in the gameplay but they can’t reasonably exist within the story logic of the world, otherwise the next question would be why anyone is allowed to die at all. But even when NPCs die early on in the story and the game mechanics have introduced phoenix downs, the player’s mind doesn’t connect the dots that way. There’s no question of why you don’t use phoenix downs on an NPC that’s died. It’s an unspoken rule that’s accepted even if you’re not familiar with the conventions of JRPGs.

Aeris dying permanently is meant to put you off-kilter. Going by the logic of the game you’ll ask yourself: how could we revive her earlier in the game and now we can’t anymore? The player may be expecting her to return within the story, maybe if they keep progressing the plot something will happen and she’ll come back? And she doesn’t. She doesn’t get revived and although the player is given more explanations for why she died, there’s still plenty of ambiguity left over.

The fascinating thing that happened with a lot of players was all the ways they began to approach the gameplay as some means to resolve this leftover ambiguity. They looked for solutions to revive Aeris or even prevent her death entirely. There was a real feeling that the game would offer an answer, just like the phoenix downs did in the right context.

And so people would replay the game and do things differently! They would give the flower to Marlene or Tifa, they would try to find all the niche soldier figurines, they would wait in a playground park for EIGHT HOURS hoping it would change the outcome. There are multiple dialogue options, affection mechanics, hidden sidequests, key items, secrets found when exploring the world. All these options and variation in the game and one of the most popular ways to replay it was in attempting to change this ONE story beat where the rule was broken.

Despite all the urban legends surrounding it, the outcome never changes. But when Kitase said:

“When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, ‘If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.’ ”

It’s obvious how well that feeling was communicated, because so many players initially reacted the same way. “What if I had done things differently?”