Verdict: Confirmed False · 1990s
Her death at the end of Final Fantasy VII's first disc was so unexpected that a generation of players refused to accept it, and passed around methods for bringing her back. There were none. The people who made the game said so, repeatedly.
Final Fantasy VII killed one of its main party members, Aerith — spelled "Aeris" in the original 1997 English release — at the end of its first disc, and it did so permanently. Players had spent years learning that fantasy RPG deaths were negotiable: a Phoenix Down, a Life spell, a plot twist. From the game's release onward, rumours circulated that she could be resurrected, or that she had originally been planned to come back and the ability had been cut. Both claims were passed around in schoolyards, magazines' letters pages and early internet forums, each version with its own convoluted method. Tetsuya Nomura, the character designer, later said that the team had known the world expected her to be brought back to life, precisely because that was the genre's convention, and he has categorically stated that neither rumour was ever true. Director Yoshinori Kitase received a lengthy petition from Japanese players asking for her revival and dismissed it, saying there were many meanings in her death and that bringing her back could never happen. The persistence of the rumour is itself the best evidence of what the scene achieved: a death that felt so wrong in a video game that players assumed the game must have a hidden way to undo it.
Death in 1990s RPGs was a status effect. Characters fell in every battle and were revived with an item; story deaths were frequently reversed a few hours later. Final Fantasy VII spent its first disc teaching the player the same rules, then broke them in a cutscene the items could not touch.
Nomura's explanation is telling: the team knew players expected a resurrection, because that was the convention, and chose not to supply one. The rumours were the audience holding on to the old rule. Every elaborate method for reviving her was, in effect, a player insisting that the game must be playing fair by the genre's standards — and the game's refusal is exactly why the scene is still remembered.