
heavily agreed on (almost) all counts, although i think the Aerith situation is less settled than it appears – the literal metatext-being-made-text of the original game's story actively fighting and grind against a retelling/reworking of the same story was really intriguing in the first game and for me it remains intriguing here. Our animus in the retelling leads to Aerith living, but the original game's plot directly overpowers that fact for now – I may end up being really disappointed (and I'm already anxious about the possibility of Aerith being relegated to just "a magical overseer of the most important people" for the entire rest of the story) but the direct time wounds portrayed in that section, with all the ambiguity of how it will settle, is so so cool to me and I really hope it remains this directly confrontational, with itself and our hopefulness as players, in part 3. also continues to make Cloud's relation to the party more fucked up and interesting if he's emotionally cut-off from the party esp. Tifa for even more reasons now!
but i've still got some anxiety here and there about how things may settle, and sure, the feeling of all that buildup to "the save" undercut by "wait, it didn't work?" is fairly crushing (i love that personally lol)
everything else tho i agree for sure. Tifa + Aerith gal pals had something weird about its execution. Emptiness of banter during open worlds and flavor being siphoned into sidequests was really meh. enjoyed your phrasing of all of this 
i did skim over the finer details of the ending in my piece for sure, to me the imagery of literally bidding farewell and flying away kind of felt like they were taking a specific stance, but there is plenty earlier in the scene/the zack timeline with them maybe playing around with her fate more than i made it sound for sure.
in general i don't love mystery box writing, especially leaving off a game on that kind of a note, but i can't say im completely uninterested in how they handle Aerith and Cloud's relationship to the party in game 3 either, yeah. and it's true also that this was always going to be part 2 of 3 (though this same team made 13-2 which I feel handles a surprisingly large amount of similar stuff better, so shrug).
anyway thanks for the thoughtful comment, and glad you liked the game and found the ending interesting! definitely looking forward to discussing this game with people as they finish now too
oh i feel like i DIDNT like the game overall lmao but yeah the ending was fucked up in a cool way for me hehe
or at least it was very hard to distill, which you already saw my review so...
but ya the final bow on the "ooooh im intrigued" for me was aerith asking for cloud to promise and cloud saying "i promise" and then the text NO PROMISES AWAIT AT JOURNEY'S END like that's so explicitly dramatically playful i love it
as opposed to the theatre scene which was dramatic (in a different sense) and playful and which was a fuckin goose egg. at least i got to experience 3 seconds of a reality where cloud is in love with barrett
oh yes the different names threw me off but now i see which review was yours yeah. i agree with a lot of points you made, and i agree with you that Barret is one of the biggest standouts of the game for sure.
and yes the promise thing is genuinely good, agreed, though its only in retrospect i came to appreciate it lol. (also i will say i liked the play, despite the problems it has, i just liked seeing everyone in cute costumes and doing wooden acting, just charming to me. (unless you meant the aerith ballad after the play in which case im with you that it did not land that well for me lol)
but yeah truly a game of different ups and downs for everyone :p (and yes cloud/barret is So real)
lmfao i did not consider until now that my presence on this site has nothing to do with my typical @ of fontiago wow. yeah
it’s so funny how much of the game is just the ingredients of it. so many of the chapter affectations are standalone affairs that don’t feed into other stuff that a lot of the game becomes “if you like this genre already, you’ll like this part”