If you’ve reached the end of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, you may be wondering if time travel played a role. While the game follows the original’s plot pretty closely up through the Shinra building, it takes a wide right turn towards Kingdom Hearts levels of confusion during the finale.
If you had only a basic idea of what was going on, you’re not alone. Fortunately, there is a relatively clear cut answer to whether there’s time travel in FF7 Remake if you read between the lines.
Warning: Major spoilers below.
Is there time travel in Final Fantasy 7 Remake?
I won’t get into a full explanation of the last part of the game here (I’ll leave that for another article). We’re just going to look at how time travel is used in FF7 Remake, if at all.
One of the things that is making fans wonder if time travel is part of the plot of Final Fantasy 7 Remake is the description of the penultimate boss, Whisper Harbinger, and his cohorts. When you use the Assess command, this giant is explained like this:
“An accretion of Whispers, the so-called arbiters of fate. The creatures appear when someone tries to alter destiny’s course. They are connected to all the threads of time and space that shape the planet’s fate.”
His three minions are described as:
“An entity from a future timeline that has manifested in the present day. It fights with guns to protect the future that gave shape to it.”
So, it seems like the Whispers are agents of the planet from the future. They seem to have come back in time to make sure the party follows the sequence of events that lead to Sephiroth’s defeat. However, this isn’t the case.
The description of Whisper Harbinger gives us a clue we need to determine whether time travel is actually used in Final Fantasy 7 Remake or not. The Whispers are connected to all threads of time and space. While we, the player, and all the inhabitants of Midgar experience time in a linear fashion, this isn’t so for the Whispers.
No entity in FF7 Remake actually travels through time in the traditional sense. The consciousness of the planet experiences all points in time simultaneously. Sephiroth must have found a way to tap into this power, and that’s why he can appear and manipulate Cloud and the party.
