Aerith's death is one of the most emotional moments that players will experience in Final Fantasy VII and has memorably gone on to spawn countless rumours over the years about potential ways to save her and keep her in the party for the rest of the game.
In the past, for instance, we've heard all manner of made-up methods to bring the character back from the dead without the use of a cheat device, with some of the most memorable being completing a hidden sidequest involving Aerith's ghost, or using the white materia spell Holy to resurrect her. Almost none of these methods, however, have ever been proven to work, with the only legitimate strategy that we've come across being an incredibly convoluted glitch in the PC & Steam port, that was shared online earlier this year by the YouTuber 8-4 Productions.
That now seems to have changed though, as now it appears that yet another group has discovered a fascinating way of keeping the character in the party in the original PlayStation 1 version of the game, beyond her tragic death scene.
This discovery was made by the two Final Fantasy speedrunners AceZephyr and Kuma, and was recently publicized online by Luzbel (before being spotted by IGN). It involves the player using a Chocobo to glitch the game into letting the player walk across the sea to the Forgotten Capital, where Aerith will witness her own death before staying in the player's party for the remainder of the game. This method also allows players to skip the majority of disc 1, saving 2 hours in a speedrunning scenario.
As IGN notes in his own coverage of the exploit, the method to carry out this skip isn't exactly entirely worked out just yet, with the trick requiring players to use a version of the game with encounters disabled. This is because getting into a battle with enemies while walking on the ocean will softlock the game. The game will also reportedly softlock when Aerith appears in a scene where she's not supposed to be present too, but the community is currently hard at work on finding ways around these issues, meaning it may become a viable speedrun route in the future.
You can watch Kuma's explanation of the disc skip below: