Aeris - Death, Life, Resurrection - The Ben Lansing Articles
This issue is so big that it deserved its own section on this site.

Ben Lansing's first article stating you can resurrect Aeris
Ben Lansing's second letter admitting he lied

Ben Lansing's First Article stating you can resurrect Aeris

Ben Lansing's Original Aeris Rumor
By Ben Lansing

  Oh no. They did it. I wouldn't have known, because I had access to the full set of FF7 info ... but they did. I guess this means that I should have actually played through things to see if anything had changed, instead of getting tired of the game after translation purposes. I think everyone is gonna kill me for my insolence, because I really should have played through the game more fully before I said anything to make sure it was still possible.

  Throughout the past few weeks, I, myself, have been wondering why people were having such a hard time reviving Aeris, because according to everything I saw through the scenario translation process, it could be done fairly easy. Here's the Aeris revival process, in full.

  First off, throughout the game, you must make the logical choice of things to say to Aeris to indicate that you like her. You must never hurt her in any way by choice. What happens in scenarios, however, cannot be avoided (Aeris' beating by Cloud, for instance).

  Also ,with the sick man. There is no medicine, but you could have Aeris tend to him and make him feel better by learning about her heritage and returning to Midgar on the first CD. By doing this, the "GENERAL" as people call him, would trust you, and request you go buy his dying friend something from the store. A simple quest. After doing so, the GENERAL would tell you thanks, and that if there was anything else you need ever, to ask him for help. You then see a scene with his friend dying. A sad scene. :(

  Now, continue through the game as normal, and after Aeris dies, go to the second CD. Once here, return to Midgar with the key from CD1, and the GENERAL will ask you where the nice girl (Aeris) is. You explain that she has died, by Sephiros, and that there is no hope in reviving her. There would be a chance, but only if you could go deep under the waters of the floating castle (where Aeris died). The GENERAL would tell you that he thinks he may be able to help, and to come back later. After this meeting, you were to go to Aeris' church, where there would be a long scene with her spirit. If you had been nice to her, she would express a desire to return to help you. After doing this, return to the GENERAL, who would provide you with a Yellow materia that allowed the group to travel through water. With this, you could return to the floating palace, go up to Mr. Fish, and once you touched him, you would be transported under water, to a cavern, where, at the end, lay Aeris' orb/life essence. With this orb, Bugen Hagen could complete the ress process, and you could move on to a happier life with a neater ending.

  Well, the FMVs were all completed on time, but a lot of coding was not. They then delayed the games release by a month (Dec -> Jan). However, it seemed that even by late December, the coding STILL wasn't finished, so Square told production to wrap it up quickly. In order to get the game out on time, SqJP sacrificed what could have been a miraculously better game than FF7... The main coding that was not finished dealt with manipulating the transparent polygon of Aeris' spirit in the church.

  Since they were forced to wrap production up to meet the many-delayed deadline, they had to stop with the Aeris process unfinished. So, to keep things from ever happening, they simply removed the one item that allowed any hint of the process to take place... The Key to Midgar, from the first CD. This completely stopped the ability to resurrect Aeris. HOWEVER. they left out the removal of one thing, and that was the split-second of seeing the ghost of Aeris once you return to the church. Unfortunately, this, along with the insanely big size of the ending MOV, are the only hints to Aeris' existence that we have. Other than the original FF7 scriptline, from which all the above information came.

  I ran across this info while talking to John H. (another temp like me) trying to get some US script from him for our channel's page. Also, Seph wanted it. I asked him if it would be alright for me to release the script info in an altered form, and to release info on gameplay, such as Aeris' death/ress. Then he told me the deadline story, and I almost had a heartattack. He said that the process can still be done to its completion, sans a couple of scenes, with the Game Shark, but until someone develops a MOV player that handles multiple sector files, the true ending will not be seen.

  Ben Lansing

Ben Lansing's second letter admitting he lied

Ben Lansing's Confession
By Ben Lansing

  Hmm... you leave the internet community for a few months and people are STILL dragging your old shit around.

  Okay folks, this is getting a bit absurd. Can't you all take a joke? Look, I have a confession to make, and if you stick with me and this WHOLE post, you'll learn a lot more about this whole AERIS thing.

  A lot of you know me as Ben Lansing. Way back in March-April of 97, when FF7 had first came out, I bought it (an imported version), and loved the hell out of it. While rummaging around online one day, I stumbled across some madman raving about the scene with Bugen Hagen near the end of disc 2. The game being in Japanese and this guy being full-blooded American, this scene came across to him as something else: a failed resurrection attempt. He started posting to the FF7 Message Board about all of this, saying that perhaps Aeris could be revived...and people started jumping in on it. All sorts of stories began flourishing about the ways to bring her back, and I did a lot of research on this before I ever posted my first message on that board.

  I decided to see just how silly people could be. I had actually understood everything that had gone on during the game, so I knew lots of ways to trick people into believing things. I already had a silly audience who believed nearly anything, so I took the great step when I came out with my Aeris Resurrection process, under the name of Ben Lansing, an alleged translator for Square. Without even reading this process, people should have known I was lying to start with. I claimed to be a temporary translator for Square. Well, anyone with any common sense knows that Ted Woolsey and the Square team did NOT translate FF7 ... SONY did it, all in Japan,and all within the parent company - NOBODY WAS HIRED FROM THE OUTSIDE! But ... being the gullible fish that I thought everyone was, they swallowed it whole without a second thought, and I became a near-idol on that message board. I decided to see just how far I could carry all of this.

  Several people on the message board started rebuking what I said, claiming me to be a liar and even catching me with a few little fibs. However, I also had a strong support, backed by a few guys you may remember as Fish, Mooncalf, Smear, Caspar71, Zakna, and so on. We strongly opposed anyone who claimed we were liars. They do not know to this day it was all a hoax. Some of them even made up little lies themselves in defense of me. I thought that was a bit overboard, but people will be people. We went off and founded a channel on DALNet:#Aeris. You people may remember it, and some of you may even visit from time to time. We had contacts with Crow (Miranda's Cafe) who helped us advertise and such.

  Well, as more people came to know about us, more people started doubting me. I went as far as to give over ownership of the channel to Fish and Zakna, while having my name removed from the #aeris home page. Things were looking bad, so I made one final post to the message board and vanished from the net. Here it is, with comments I have to make about why I said certain things.

  Oh no. They did it. I wouldn't have known, because I had access to the full set of FF7 info ... but they did. I guess this means that I should have actually played through things to see if anything had changed, instead of getting tired of the game after translation purposes. I think everyone is gonna kill me for my insolence, because I really should have played through the game more fully before I said anything to make sure it was still possible.

  Okay ... this paragraph was just a little introduction saying that the resurrection process was originally in the game, and while translating things, I saw it and so confirmed it without playing the game. Sounded credible, didn't it? Obviously it did... read on...

  Throughout the past few weeks, I, myself, have been wondering why people were having such a hard time reviving Aeris, because according to everything I saw through the scenario translation process, it could be done fairly easy. Here's the Aeris revival process, in full.

  More babbling ... then I go on to describe the Aeris revival process IN FULL ... heehee

  First off, throughout the game, you must make the logical choice of things to say to Aeris to indicate that you like her. You must never hurt her in any way by choice. What happens in scenarios, however, cannot be avoided (Aeris' beating by Cloud, for instance).

  I added this cause it sounded believable too, as there wer several key decision points in conversation that seemed to have no effect on the story, when in fact they really do: their real purpose is to dictate who is going to date Cloud in the Gold Saucer ... read on ...

  Also ,with the sick man. There is no medicine, but you could have Aeris tend to him and make him feel better by learning about her heritage and returning to Midgar on the first CD. By doing this, the "GENERAL" as people call him, would trust you, and request you go buy his dying friend something from the store. A simple quest. After doing so, the GENERAL would tell you thanks, and that if there was anything else you need ever, to ask him for help. You then see a scene with his friend dying. A sad scene. :(

  There's a problem here... you don't find out about Aeris's heritage till Disc 2. Another dead giveaway that this was a hoax had people been listening carefully ... Couple with the fact that there IS no Midgar Key in disc 1 ... geez ... Oh yeah ... why did you guys call him the GENERAL? I never figured that out ... but I just took the name and ran with it ... hell, it worked, didn't it? :)

  Now, continue through the game as normal, and after Aeris dies, go to the second CD. Once here, return to Midgar with the key from CD1, and the GENERAL will ask you where the nice girl (Aeris) is. You explain that she has died, by Sephiros, and that there is no hope in reviving her. There would be a chance, but only if you could go deep under the waters of the floating castle (where Aeris died). The GENERAL would tell you that he thinks he may be able to help, and to come back later. After this meeting, you were to go to Aeris' church, where there would be a long scene with her spirit. If you had been nice to her, she would express a desire to return to help you. After doing this, return to the GENERAL, who would provide you with a Yellow materia that allowed the group to travel through water. With this, you could return to the floating palace, go up to Mr. Fish, and once you touched him, you would be transported under water, to a cavern, where, at the end, lay Aeris' orb/life essence. With this orb, Bugen Hagen could complete the ress process, and you could move on to a happier life with a neater ending.

  Gee ... people still believed me after hearing THIS? BUGEN HAGEN WAS NOT TRYING TO RESURRECT AERIS!!! GEEZ!!! Also, a Yellow orb gives commands ... I'll admit that there was an Underwater orb in the Japanese version, but it was removed from the executable code and cannot be gotten. It was later added in the US version. Geez ... what gullible people... But wait ... there's more ...

  Well, the FMVs were all completed on time, but a lot of coding was not. They then delayed the games release by a month (Dec -> Jan). However, it seemed that even by late December, the coding STILL wasn't finished, so Square told production to wrap it up quickly. In order to get the game out on time, SqJP sacrificed what could have been a miraculously better game than FF7... The main coding that was not finished dealt with manipulating the transparent polygon of Aeris' spirit in the church.

  Er ... manipulating a transparent polygon isn't that hard at all ... no more so than a regular one ... Look at cloud's Ultima Weapon ... geez ... probably several other transparent things too in the game ... and besides ... the blip of Aeris in the church is NOT transparent to start with. This is yet another blatant lie that nobody ever bothered to recognize...

  Since they were forced to wrap production up to meet the many-delayed deadline, they had to stop with the Aeris process unfinished. So, to keep things from ever happening, they simply removed the one item that allowed any hint of the process to take place... The Key to Midgar, from the first CD. This completely stopped the ability to ressurect Aeris. HOWEVER. they left out the removal of one thing, and that was the split-second of seeing the ghost of Aeris once you return to the church. Unfortunately, this, along with the insanely big size of the ending MOV, are the only hints to Aeris' existence that we have. Other than the original FF7 scriptline, from which all the above information came.

  Wow ... interesting ... the only reason Aeris appears in the church is Cloud's memory ... any moron should be able to figure that out.

  I ran across this info while talking to John H. (another temp like me) trying to get some US script from him for our channel's page. Also, Seph wanted it. I asked him if it would be alright for me to release the script info in an altered form, and to release info on gameplay, such as Aeris' death/ress. Then he told me the deadline story, and I almost had a heartattack. He said that the process can still be done to its completion, sans a couple of scenes, with the Game Shark, but until someone develops a MOV player that handles multiple sector files, the true ending will not be seen.

  Heh ... multiple sector MOV files. Right. And pink monkeyd fly out of my butt. Get real, people. You all need to take intelligence tests or something. Oh ... and that John H. guy was fake ... yet someone claimed to KNOW HIM!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

  Okay ... that was my 'closure' note to the world, shortly before I vanished from the net. Too many poeple doubted me and I didn't want to be caught, so I just vanished from the net for a while, letting things cool down.

  Here recently, with the advent of the US release, I was in full swing back on the net, roaming around, when I ran across people STILL DRAGGING MY OLD, ROTTEN SHIT AROUND! It was hilarious. After 6 months, there were STILL people believing that shit and starting fights over it!!! I had had my name in several top magazines (Gamespro, EGM, PSX, and a few others) with interviews with Square employees. The magazine would ask them about Aeris and some guy named Lansing, and each square employee denied all of it. And people still believed ME!

  I am writing this to quench all rumors about Aeris and the completeness of Final Fantasy 7. As Hironobu Sakaguchi said in an interview with one of the above-mentioned magazines: "Final Fantasy 7 was completed to the best of our ability and funding."

  If any of you question who I am, why not drop by #squareff7 on DALNet one day and let me know you don't believe that I am Ben LAnsing. I will do whatever it takes to prove it ... Zakna is still around sometimes in #aeris also ... and he knows my nick - Dariakus. Yes, I'm Dariakus. One of the leading ops on the #squareff7 channel on DALNet and also the head coordinator and HTMLer of the upcoming Web Guide for FF7.

  Oh well. If you guys still want to sling my shit around, that's cool and all, but you will be doing it KNOWING that you are an idiot, cause the SOURCE OF THAT RUMOR (myself) HAS JUST TOLD YOU ALL THAT IT WAS FAKE. IT WAS A LIE. GET OVER IT AND MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIVES!!!

  Ben Lansing