Yoshinori Kitase graduated from Nihon University College of Art with a degree in cinema. He had worked briefly in animation for commercials, drawing frames on a computer. In 1990, despite knowing nothing about software development, he applied to a game company in Tokyo called Square and was hired. What they hired him for was not programming. It was to direct the movements of characters on screen — the timing of their expressions, the gestures, the placement of dialogue, the music cues. It was, in a sense, directing for the stage where the stage was a grid of pixels.
Over the next six years he learned how to make role-playing games. Final Fantasy VI (1994) was his first as director. Chrono Trigger (1995) followed — a time-travel story built with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama. Both were celebrated. Both sold millions. But a question lingered in Kitase's mind: can a video game make someone cry the way a film does? Not as spectacle. As loss.
In 1994, after Final Fantasy VI, Square began discussing the next numbered title. Conversations went in several directions — a Nintendo 64 version, a 2D prototype, postponements to help finish Chrono Trigger. By 1995, when talks resumed in earnest, the decision had been made: the game would be made in 3D for Sony's PlayStation. It would be the first Final Fantasy released on a non-Nintendo platform. It would use full-motion CG cutscenes, a technology few RPGs had touched. The stakes felt high. So did the budget: initial projections landed around forty million dollars. Marketing in the United States alone would reach one hundred million.
Kitase was named director. Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the series, would produce. Tetsuya Nomura joined as character designer. Kazushige Nojima wrote the script. Nobuo Uematsu composed the music. The team assembled — large by the standards of the time — and entered full production.
Somewhere in those early planning sessions, the decision was made to kill a main character. Not the hero. Not at the end. A heroine, midway through the story, by the hand of the villain. Kitase, Sakaguchi, Nomura, and Nojima agreed. According to Tetsuya Nomura, he was frustrated with the 'perennial cliché where the protagonist loves someone very much and so has to sacrifice himself and die in a dramatic fashion.' They wanted to subvert that. Kitase later said: 'In the real world things are very different. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness.' During development, Hironobu Sakaguchi lost his mother. The themes of life and loss deepened. The Lifestream — the game's metaphysical river of souls — took on new weight.
The character chosen was Aerith. The method: a blade through the back, in the center of a quiet pool of water, halfway through the narrative. It was designed to hurt. The team debated killing more — perhaps most of the party. Nomura argued that doing so would dilute the meaning of Aerith's death. In the end, only she died. And the game did not allow the player to reverse it. No hidden revival item. No secret ending where she returns. She was gone. Final Fantasy VII was released on January 31, 1997. Within weeks, the death scene became the most discussed moment in gaming. Not for its spectacle. For its loss.
By the time sales ended, the game had moved over thirteen million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling Final Fantasy to date and one of the defining titles of the PlayStation era. Kitase's question had been answered. A video game could make you cry. It had. In quiet living rooms, in bedrooms, on small CRT screens, people sat and watched a fictional woman die and felt something real.
The loss was not an accident. It was chosen. Kitase and his team decided that games could carry grief the way films do — not as decoration, but as truth. They were right.