Ok ok let me explain because I promise I’m not (completely) nuts. I mean I am, BUT THIS IS MY NICHE BEAR WITH ME
So in spirituality, (a) revelation equates to a final unveiling, the moment where everything once hidden gets revealed and laid bare all at once, the ultimate truth. Hence the last book in the bible being Revelation, the end of everything.
And when you look at what they actually named these four games:
(Crisis Core) Reunion, Remake, Rebirth, Revelation.
This made me think of the four stages of the Magnum Opus in alchemy. I’m doing a piss poor explanation, but essentially there’s
1) Nigredo; the death and rot where everything falls apart so transformation can even begin.
2) Albedo after the destruction, where truth starts separating from debris, it’s the illumination, clarity, purification
3) Citrinitas is the awakening, the growth where you realize you’re the one creating the path now and have to work with what you have.
4) And Rubedo is the completion, the full synthesis of everything that came before it
BUT ANYWAY, if you take stages into account, that’s not four random titles, but kinda sounds like a map.
1) Reunion is about the scattered pieces before anything else can happen. Sephiroth, Zack, Cloud, even Angeal and Genesis and Aerith and Tifa, so on because Crisis Core is the pre-everything. It’s Zack inheriting the sword, Cloud being forced to carry S cells, absorbing Zack’s identity, losing his own memories. Reunion is also literal in the lore. The Reunion is Jenova’s cells calling her pieces home, fragments returning to the source. You cannot build anything new until all of that is gathered in one place. Even if you don’t take Crisis Core as canon, there’s still the Nibelheim incident, and the whole tragedy of what happened there is that it’s doomed and it has to happen first.
2) Remake is looking fate in the face and refusing to give into it. The Arbiters of Fate exist in this game because the story knows it was supposed to go a certain way, but that doesn’t happen because Cloud and the others are choosing, against the literal fabric of destiny, to rip up the predetermined script. You can’t change a fixed outcome from inside it, so you have to break the walls first.
3) Rebirth is what happens the second after you burn the predetermined script and step into the open world (LITERALLY) but there’s no guide anymore and fate is off the table. Everything is raw and new and Zack is alive in diverging timelines and nobody knows what that means yet. The rules are gone and you’re breathing in air that has never existed before. A rebirth isn’t supposed to be safe or clean, especially one that is alive when it was never supposed to be possible.
4) Revelation is (and I’m just speculating here bc all we know is the OG story) when the mask, the veil, the illusion all drops completely. You see the whole thing for what it actually was and that’s why this word that works for the finale of this story. Rubedo is the final and most sacred stage of the great work where everything that died in the Nigredo, was purified in the Albedo, and birthed in the Citrinitas merges into one single point and completes. It’s the full transmutation where nothing is hidden or false anymore and you get the total, undeniable truth of what the entire process was building toward.
Revelation in the Bible is the Apocalypse, which people hear as destruction and world ending BUT !!
apocalypse/əˈpäkəˌlips/The word apocalypse originates from the Ancient Greek term apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις), which literally translates to “an uncovering,” “disclosure,” or “revelation”. It combines the prefix apo- (“away from” or “off”) with the verb kalyptein (“to cover” or “conceal”).
The word literally means unveiling. It’s the moment where every prophecy, death and resurrection and promise made across the entire scripture converges into the finale. In the bible, what was always true becomes visible for the first time because everything that obscured it has finally been burned away.
And for FF7 specifically, every false thing gets named in Revelation: the lie Cloud built his identity around, what Sephiroth actually is, what Jenova was always doing, what the Planet has been up to, and all the timelines. That’s the great work proving it was real, Rubedo, the Revelation.
Zack being in the Remake trilogy always confused people. I mean the man died, his story was told, Crisis Core was his game and it ended, so why is he here?
But what if it’s because this map requires him. Reunion being released gathered his pieces back into the narrative of the remake trilogy: his sacrifice, his memory living inside Cloud, the question of what he was owed by the universe. Remake broke the fate that killed him, Rebirth let him breathe in a timeline where he survived, and I assume Revelation is where it all converges.
If anything, (and I’m biased because that’s my guy™) Zack’s presence in the trilogy +whatever else happens is the game showing its work (like the great work) and demonstrating that Reunion, Remake, and Rebirth actually did something, that fate was actually broken, that the pieces actually came back together into something new.
You needed all four titles to tell this story and they knew that from the beginning. So yeah. Bible study!! I have not slept in 48 hours someone sedate me PLEASE
