Final Fantasy 7's ending featuring Red 13 having survived and with his own children.

One of the big fears regarding Final Fantasy 7's Remake is how it's going to end. Because you can say what you will about the original game, it has it's problems, but how it ends is actually not one of them.

The thing is, we were all children at some point. Seeing (presumably) Red XIII survive how many number of years later is incredibly optimistic, yes, but it's also sad at the same time. Nature seems to have won and the planet seems to have healed over time, but at what cost? Do humans eventually die out?

I'm not here to give a definitive answer, but...

Screenshot of the Holy spell destroying the planet. It says Holy is having the opposite effect.

Yes.

The argument I see is that witnessing a story about the human spirit triumphing over trauma, and defeating threats to the planet through collective action, is super lame because at the very end everyone just dies anyways.

But the elder of Cosmo Canyon clearly foreshadows that Holy is going to erase humanity. Defeating Sephiroth does little to solve the human threat to the planet. This is a story about environmentalism that dares to think outside of human supremacy and exceptionalism.

The laughing children at the end is there to symbolize humanity being reborn as the pups, these are the new inheritors of a world cleansed of humanity's sins. The implication is that the spirits rejoin the lifestream to be reborn, not as humans, but as plants, animals, and even Red XIII's race.

The way I choose to interpret Final Fantasy 7 is not necessarily through depression, but rather the melancholy of humanity in it's final days. People are insisting on living even as they see the world dying around them, and in the end, they continue to live in harmony with nature, just not as humans.