I was re-playing the first part, through Midgar, and then i remembered something form the Golden Saucer, if she’s the one that goes on a date with you.
Now, forgive me if someone has said this before, or noticed it, it is an old game, and smarter people than me have posted here before.
However, I think Aeries knew about Cloud’s ‘problems’ from scene 1. I noticed when Cloud mentions he was in soldier, she immediately thinks of Zack, and then she lies about her knowlege of Soldier, and Zack.
When you re-construct the shards of the story, and fit Zack and Cloud’s flight form the shinra, and Zack’s execution on the hill overlooking midgar, you’d notice that this all happens fairly recently. Zack was supposed to meet with Aeris within weeks, possibly even days of Cloud joining Avalanche and then meeting her.
So, jumping out of the facts for a moment, and into the relm of speculation. Aeris seemed to know the moment her mom’s husband was killed in Wu Tai, due to her communication with the lifestream. So, it is entirely possible, that Aeris knew the moment Zack was killed. And he was probably killed close enough, that she had a chance to communicate with his spirit before it was absorbed into the planet.
All this being said, all i know is that there was a lot of “behind the scenes” work going on with Aeris. It’s the only real explanation i can come up for her statement, “I want to meet the real you, cloud.”
At first glance, and how i interpereted it at first, i thought she meant she wanted to get to know him better, and deepen their relationship, but now i think she was refering to Cloud’s personality problems. IT explains how she was so forgiving of Cloud when he pounds her face into the mud at the Temple of the Ancients, and for giving Sephiroth the Black Materia.
Once again, sorry of these ideas have been brought up before, but i don’t really frequent game boards very often, and it’s so old that i didn’t expect there to be much about this in the recent history.
Or she could simply be that old trope of anime stereotypes, the saintly healer girl. I’ve noticed that anime characters, especially female ones, often do things which many of us would find ridiculous, and don’t need any kind of supra-story excuse to do so.
I’ve noticed that anime characters, especially female ones, often do things which many of us would find ridiculous, and don’t need any kind of supra-story excuse to do so.
Like running off on her own to summon Holy, INSTEAD of going with her whole team, which would have been safer, thereby almost guaranteeing that she would die?
Sorry, but that still bothers me to this day. If they’d given some better reason- that she was afraid the others would die, or that she knew she had to die for the summoning to work, or something like that. Heck, ANY reason at all!
And I agree with Flint: she HAD to know that Zack was dead, at the very least, given her spirit-talking abilities. And I think she knew something was wrong with Cloud (it was not that hard to figure out, what with all his flashbacks, for example) though not necessarily how far his mind was screwed up.
Oh, and Aeris was NOT completely the archetypical, shy girl-next-door from most games like these… she had her moments where she came across as bittersweet, or even naughty (like during the Don Corneo intimidation scene.) 
You know, there’s a very short and somewhat ambiguous scene in Crisis Core which supports your theory pretty well…
It was my understanding from what Beugenhagen said in the Lost City, that a Soul has to actually return to the planet with the prayer to summon holy, for it to work. As far as I know, there is only one way to return to the planet.
I think another reason is that Cloud might have lost control and killed her, or interrupted her before the spell was complete. I think Sephiroth wanted it that way as well, since it wasn’t until Cloud regained control that he struck.
I can understand your frustrations at not having a clear cut answer, but it is my opinion that some of these gray areas of conjecture are one of the things that makes the game one of the best of their series. How many games are still being discussed in depth 11 years after their release, 12 if you count japanese release
However, i think the answers are there, it just takes a discerning eye and a head for puzzles. I was so young when i first played it, that i dismissed a lot of “evidence”, or just didn’t recognize it. It’s weird the things you notice when you’re playing it as a 13 year old, and then what you notice when you play as a 24 year old.
I don’t think she consciously or literally knew about Cloud’s past; but she definitely intuitively knew he wasn’t quite telling the truth about it. The Gold Saucer date is in fact a reference that she knew Cloud was putting on a false front. But I don’t think it was some kind of psychic power she was using to see the prologue of the game.
Aeris is hot
It’s my personal opinion, especially after learning info from Crisis Core and the ‘newer’ FF7 spinoffs, that because Zack basically tells Aerith that his rank of SOLIDER is pretty exclusive, in Crisis Core Aerith is extremely untrusting of anyone in SOLIDER. Also, at the end of this game if you pay attention you realize that Zack dies VERY SHORTLY before Cloud returns to Midgar. And Aerith knows it. The fact that she met Cloud Very shortly after Zack’s death, and he ‘didn’t know zack’ I think the reason she acted the way she did was in part because she KNEW Cloud -had- to have known Zack. The reason she kept him close was to try and figure out what he really knew.
AHHHH ZOMBIE THREAD
But anyway… what people forget is that FF7 takes place one year after the end of Crisis Core. Cloud arrives in Midgar, but the first scene in FF7 (the reactor mission) takes place after Cloud has been in AVALANCHE for quite a while already.
There’s also a scene in FFVII itself where Tifa finds Cloud laying about in a gutter where he’s still trying to sort his identity crisis and after Tifa suggests that he joins Avalanche where he finally decides to adopt the mangled persona that he has at the beginning of the game.
The tl;dr being that he was pretty much wandering aimlessly on his own in Midgar for some indeterminate amount of time before Tifa scoops him up and cons him into joining Avalanche and thus the game begins.
The argument for Aerith could be taken in the way that she either realized that he was dead to begin with, or that she didn’t know what happened to Zack but figured that Cloud did since he was parading around as him right down to whippin’ around his one and only sword and then from there realized that he was dead and decided to work on Cloud instead as he was too fucked up not to try to help fix.
Or something to that effect.
Killmore: No, it isn’t a gutter. Cloud is in the train station. He’d just arrived. That happens immediately after the ending of Crisis Core.
I don’t remember if Zack actually had the Buster Sword at any point when he was with Aerith. He only got it very late in CC.
Angeal: Use brings about wear, tear, and rust.
Cloud: drags the sword on the ground all the way back to midgar
Sorry, but that always made me chuckle a bit
I agree definitely that Aeris knew Cloud was putting on a fake front. I’m not so sure this knowledge was literal information she got from the Lifestream; rather, she just sensed with her intuition that Cloud was not happy with himself and was trying to be someone he wasn’t. I think she also says something like “you even talk like him” i.e. in reference to Zack. Which uh implies that she either thought Cloud knew Zack, or she was just wondering about how she seemed to fall for the same types of guys.
EDIT: woops, I already replied to this, and I just said pretty much the same thing I said in my first reply
I don’t remember that scene. I remember Tifa mentions something like that, but I don’t remember them actually portraying it.
It’s part of the “secret scene” which details the end of Crisis Core (Zack and Cloud making their way to Midgar).
Actually I’m referring to to the scene inside of Cloud’s Cosmosphere where Tifa is trying to fix things when she suddenly realizes that Cloud’s selective memory disorder is contagious. By which I mean she starts to remember the apparently really important stuff that she probably shouldn’t have ignored for so long like why Cloud wanted to protect her in the first place.
The hidden scene only covers the stuff up to the point when Zack died and Cloud wakes up as Zack right outside of Midgar.
Bing, you’re right. I conflated the two.
I thought Zack was the guy in the pipe.
The guy in the pipe was originally probably supposed to be one of the Sephiroth clones, but Square cleary dropped whatever sideplot pipe guy was to be involved in.
Why does this thread keep coming back from the dead?
If only Aerith were this unkillable then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.