This article contains spoilers for Final Fantasy 7.
As the release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth looms over the 2024 calendar like Shinra Tower casting its shadow over Cloud, players familiar with the original game's story have many questions about how Rebirth will play out. Will Aerith still die? If she doesn’t, will someone else take her place? If so, who? The original’s famously shocking death is the big question mark, but there are plenty of other ways Rebirth could depart from the PS1 game's narrative.
My actual question is: how long 🍷am I going to care?
Let me explain. These sliding doors questions are being asked at all because of the departures 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake took from the source material. It was thrilling to dis𒅌cover this in♊ 2020. We had gone into FF7R expecting a straightforward remake of the 1997 original, only to be met with something much stranger. Instead of just expanding the story of FF7, Remake was a remix, and more than that, made those alterations part of the canon. It wasn’t just that FF7R took creative liberties, it was that those changes were being made, purposefully, within the story by mysterious cloaked beings who showed up at important moments to pull the lever and switch the train onto another track. The events of Final Fantasy 7 had happened, it seemed, in another universe, and these ghosts were trying to change the outcome in this one.
I loved it at the time, and I still look back fondly on the moments I realized that the game was doing something different than any other remake I'd played before. But, since 2020, culture has become increasingly inundated by art that takes a similarly meta approach to storytelling. Final Fantasy 7 Remake wasn’t the first multiverse story (if it even really is one). JJ Abrams’ 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Trek had Chris Pine’s young Captain Kirk meet Leonard Nimoy’s elderly Spock all the way back in 2009, while comics have been exploring alternate universes and their characters🐈 since the 1960s.
Our current multiverse of madness was willed into existence by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which, despite being a great movie, kicked off a wave of much less thoughtful, much more synergistic uses of the concept. Your mileage may vary on each of these films individually, but as a whole they add up to a frustrating trend. Since 2018, we've seen the release of Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Loki, Space Jam: A New Legacy, What If…?, Everything Everywhere All At Once, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:MultiVersus, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Qu💝antumania, The Flash, and Spider-Man: Across the S✱pider-Verse.
You may have noticed that, in that list, there's only one work based on new characters. To me, that reveals the entire problem with multiversal stories. Though you can undoubtedly do interesting things with the concept of endless universes, much of the work we've seen has amounted to little more than brand management. Can anyone honestly say that Space Jam: A New Legacy included a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rick & Morty cameo and Lebron James riding Harry Potter's broom because that was the most thematically worthwhile thing you could do in a sequel to a movie about the Looney Tunes playing basketball? That we're better off because George Reeves' CGI ghost haunted The Flash? That Across the Spider-Verse was better because Insomniac's Spider-Man made an appearance? These movies may, again, be worthwhile on an individual basis, but in aggregate they're an excuse to get characters from different properties together and increase awareness for the IP in a corporation's portfolio.
The Flash used the multiverse to include ꦉCGI cameos from multiple dead actors, inc𒐪luding George Reeves and Christopher Reeve.
The other thing that many of those works have in common is that they were produced by Marvel. The multiverse hit as a concept as the MCU was rapidly expanding into TV with its Disney+ streaming series. In Phase Four, the MCU produced mor📖e hours of content than in the first three phases combined, and much of that focusing on the multiverse helped to burn audiences out on the concept in a short period of time.
That isn't even discussing the ways the multiverse can undercut any sense of stakes in a story. Who cares that Tony Stark died in Avengers: Endgame? The multiverse gives Marvel a convenient out if they need to bring Robert Downey, Jr. back to revitalize the brand. Similarly, how do we know that if Tifa or Barret or Yufie die in Aerith's place, that the same agents of fate that killed them won't blow another way and bring them back to life? The multiverse leaves every door cracked, no matter how forcefully it may seem to slam.
Do Spider-Verse's creators ponder what they've unleashed like Cillian Murphy at the end of Oppenheimer? I don't know, and I don't know that they should really take the blame just because they made a great, popular movie that included the concept. But I don't doubt that the multiverse has had a destructive effect on pop cultural storytelling over the past five years. It makes me wonder if I'll be able to see Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth with the same naive eyes I was able to see Remake.
