I know that saying this will upset a lot of people, but it makes sense on so many levels. Cloud is a blank slate whose life is mostly a lie. Aerith is the last surviving Cetra, whose existence has profound meaning—from that alone, it’s easy to see that Cloud’s life has less weight than Aerith’s, and further, the game wouldn’t have to change from that point onwards.
This argument doesn't even make sense. The whole ferning central theme of the game is Cloud's rediscovery of himself. If he dies, you lose that. Ultimately, the other protagonists do very little growing throughout the game. Their character development mostly takes the form of revelation rather than growth.
Even if you were to somehow make that work, if you were able to give Tifa or Barret or Aerith a more complex, involved character arc with more focus on growth than merely backstory, it also utterly misses the point of Aerith's death. It was significant
precisely because she was the last of the Cetra, as well as the most innocent of the party members. The whole point is that of all of them, she was the one whose life was worth the most, and who deserved to die the least. THE ENTIRE FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING GOSH DAMN FUCKING POINT IS THAT HER LIFE AND DEATH HAD MORE WEIGHT. If you have Cloud die instead, it just becomes random and meaningless, and confuddles up the storytelling since he was the protagonist before that; at that point, you might as well just not kill anyone at all.
but this time, their leader will be Aerith, whose wise and gentle counsel will make sense
Aerith is anything but wise. Gentle, sure, but she does not have what it takes to be a leader. She is weak and foolhardy and got herself kidnapped. In Cloud's absence, the de facto leader would be either Barret or Tifa; both of these characters have strong personalities, a good head on their shoulders (despite Barret's temper), and the ability to lead from the front lines instead of the back, which is what a leader should do in such a group.
(as opposed to Cloud’s constant whining).
It's like the author accidentally confused
FF7 with
Kingdom Hearts or
Advent Children. Cloud doesn't really whine at all in FF7. At his worst, he's just a jerk who feigns apathy.
This article has a foul stench to it. I can't tell if it's clickbait for clickbait's sake, or if the author has been wearing the idiot-colored glasses too long to have a firm grasp on reality or basic storytelling, but the end result is the same. Y'know, if she'd limited it to reasonable things, such as giving Tifa and Yuffie more modest costumes, and maybe making Elena a little less of a useless fangirl, I would've been able to get behind that. But this article went
full retard almost from the get-go. I'm angry I wasted five minutes reading it.
As an aside, the end of the article praises Lightning and reboot Lara Croft. That alone is enough to discredit it; both games were rife with awful, hamfisted, "tell-don't-show" storytelling, and in fact Lara came across as
weaker than her original badass '90s counterpart, not stronger.