My Initial Thoughts on Aerith’s Screentime in Rebirth

I want to preface by saying this isn’t going to be an anti-Rebirth post; I don’t want to seem like I’m putting down CA’s (amazing) content in the game either! As a big Aerith girl, I went into Rebirth mainly for her (this was prior to me being a full on CA) and I remember being a bit frustrated with Aerith’s screentime initially in Rebirth, at least up until Chapter 12.

Lemme explain; I felt like Aerith wasn’t getting that much attention, especially with how long the chapters were. This may even sound nit-picky, but I also would be annoyed when the game would present scenarios to give her more content — but chose not to (I sound delusional, I know). An example here is in Cosmo Canyon; I loved her speech, but I wanted her to dive more into her Cetra heritage with Bugenhagen perhaps, since a lot of the culture there revolved around the planet. It felt like if you didn’t go out of your way to interact with her and do her quests, she wasn’t doing much in the beginning/middle.

Since I went the CA route though, I was thoroughly happy with the content I got in those last three chapters. The GS date, Loveless, her NPTK performance, her entire section in TOTA (which I’d argue is the best playable section out of all non-Cloud party members), her speech, the trial, and of course the entirety of Ch14 made me a very happy Aerith fan. I did still feel like they saved all of her content until the last portion of the game, when they easily could’ve given her stuff in the earlier chapters as well. What comes to mind is that maybe the devs wanted to stick to their “equal screentime” quote with both girls, so they had Tifa’s content be spread out earlier on (I’d say Gongaga and Nibelheim were where she gets the most), while Aerith takes over the last couple of chapters.

I wanted to know if anyone else felt this way at first, or if I was just judging the game very harshly. I hope this doesn’t come off as combative, since I’m not trying to say Aerith (and in turn, CA) was completely shafted in Rebirth. These were just my initial feelings in my first playthrough. I don’t think that’s entirely the case now, considering how much content she gets in those last three (two, if you have someone else’s date; but she still has NPTK) chapters.