Final Fantasy 7 Speedrunners Just Figured Out How to Save Aerith…and Save Two Hours

Ever since the release of the original Final Fantasy 7, fans have agonized over the game’s biggest, best-known tragic moment: Aerith’s death. Could she be saved? Was it possible? For years, rumors have abounded about secret ways to save her and keep her in the party. And now, speedrunners have found a path to keeping her around that may also be a massive time-saver.

Discovered by speedrunners AceZephyr and Kuma and publicized by Luzbel, a new skip allows players to jump from Midgar all the way to Forgotten Capital with Aerith still in the party. Because it skips the part of the game where Aerith leaves the party, she sticks around, and ultimately witnesses her own death at the hands of Sephiroth only to join the battle against Jenova Life moments later.

The actual skip is pretty complex and the kinks are still being worked out. It involves using a Chocobo on the world map to trick the game into letting you walk on the ocean, and then Cloud simply strolls across the water over to Forgotten Capital without doing any of the other stuff required to get there. The cutscene there plays as normal, but the party composition remains what it was before. Kuma’s got a tutorial on YouTube here for anyone interested in trying it themselves.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of asterisks on this skip actually working. For one, if you don’t use a version of the game that lets you disable encounters, the skip is impossible, because getting into an encounter while walking on the water will softlock the game. And because Aerith isn’t supposed to be in the party at this stage, the game also softlocks whenever there’s a scene with the party that she shouldn’t be involved in.

The community is currently working to try and find ways around this, including one agonizing five-hour effort from AceZephyr using pause buffering to avoid encounters while walking across the water. Hopefully they find one, because if it ever becomes viable it will supposedly save runners around two hours, allowing them to blast through disc one faster than ever.

If this has sparked your interest in Final Fantasy 7 again, you don’t need to speedrun the original to enjoy it. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth are pretty incredible too, and together they cover a sliiiiightly different version of all the story that speedrunners are skipping on ye olde disc one. We gave Final Fantasy 7 Remake an 8/10, and Rebirth got a 9/10. Our reviewer wrote: “Final Fantasy VII Rebirth impressively builds off of what Remake set in motion as both a best-in-class action-RPG full of exciting challenge and depth, and as an awe-inspiring recreation of a world that has meant so much to so many for so long.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.