Aeris

Zack and Aeris’ relationship is very vaguely mentioned in the game. The first time through the game, I didn’t even realize that they even knew each other. (I sort of forgot to go to Gongaga on my way to Cosmo Canyon, heh.) I knew Aeris talked about her old boyfriend a lot, but I didn’t ever figure out that that boyfriend was supposed to be Zack.

There are about a bazillion different speculations on how deeply their relationship ran. It was apparently something romantic, as Aeris refers to him as her old boyfriend. But how serious they were is a complete question of how the player interprets the game.

For example, looking at just the surface, Aeris mentions that they weren’t serious, but that she really liked him for a while. One could obviously take that to mean that they were, as she said, not very serious. Or you could look at the fact that she hasn’t heard from him in over five years and she still thinks of him. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that they were serious. Or maybe it was a one-sided deal, or maybe just seeing how much Cloud was like Zack brought back the memories she’d been shoving aside for such a long time. We don’t know.

For this, we can’t even look at Zack’s actions for further explanation. Nothing we see of Zack has anything to do with Aeris, because it’s all from Cloud’s memories. Cloud seems to have never met Aeris before this point, so we can only guess that Zack only mentioned her in passing. Aeris didn’t really seem to think that he liked her as much as she liked him. Talking about him if you bring her to Gongaga, she says this:

"I think it was 5 years ago. He went out on a job, and never came back. He loved women, a real lady's man. He probably found someone else..."

Then again, she might just be saying this to convince herself of that. She’d rather have him off seeing someone else alive than have him dead. There’s a lot of mystery shrouding their relationship, and this was probably done on purpose. This way, the players can decide for themselves what the relationship was like.

We see this in other aspects of the game, where the player decides who Cloud goes on a date with. It’s the only Final Fantasy game aside from 5 and 6 (of 4 through 10, anyways) where the main couple isn’t pre-determined, and it’s the only game where you actually can manipulate the events of the relationship so that Cloud ends up with whomever you choose. It obviously works with other relationships in the game as well.

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