20+ Year Old Aerith Revival Easter Egg Finally Found - Videos for the 97.4%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQEAFxjqr-E

TL;DW version: haha April Fools. The supposed SquareEnix staffer's name even translates to mean "Not For Real". Rumours that there was a way to save Aeris/Aerith or that there was supposed to be a way to save her but SE had to cut content to make the shipping deadline have been going around since the Japanese release and the big twist that she's killed off hit (and was immediately turned into a weaponized spoiler among the western FF fan community that were rabidly waiting for the first 3D FF).

I mean, anyone with modern modicum of knowledge of VII would see it from a mile away because we can quite literally comb every single scene and sequence in the whole game by modding. If there was a legitimate Aerith revival scene, it would've been found years ago

Knowing this always makes me kind of sad. There's no real mystery or hidden shit in most games anymore because we've gotten to the point where datamining is so accessible and prevalent that pretty much everything from hidden scenes to actual cut content is known pretty much instantly, sometimes even before a game actually releases.

Although every now and then, even with datamining, people still miss things.

For example, FFIX's Benero sidequest wasn't found until 5 years ago. Almost 13 years after release.

You can still do it. It just requires more cunning.

There's also stuff where it can be datamined but you actually don't know the context or method of accessing said datamined content. I forgot what it was exactly but there was one secret area in Doom that took years to find because it had a very specific thing you had to do. People knew where the secret was, but never found out how to access it legit.

FFXI's devs used to occasionally insert items into the item tables with an update that had no purpose and no legit method of being spawned in the game, and they were basically there for the dataminers to find. I can't remember the description attached to one but it more or less meant "we know you're looking at this so hi lol" but not in those words. I don't know if they've kept that up in recent years as FFXI moved to long-term sunset life support and FFXIV stepped forward.

Someone translated an article from a few years ago that had an interview with a former dev for Super Metroid. In the article he explained that he hid a small easter egg in the pattern the Evirs (the baby Draygons) make before Draygon herself appears. That easter egg spelled out a message to his then girlfriend at the time.

To be fair, we're still learning a lot about some of old games. I'm part of a Super Mario World modding community and one of the people doing a proper decompile of the sound engine found a string of data that seems to be a slightly modified duplicate of a piece of the boss battle theme that lacks some instruments. We don't know if it was just dummy data or if maybe it was planned to be used in some way. After they modded it back in, they placed it around 0:48~ of the original song and it seems to fit pretty well. The only reason newer games are so easily datamined is because everyone has the tools to do it because everyone uses familiar formats that have been documented for years; all that we need is an entrypoint into dumping the raw data. Older games are so much more complicated.