Quote Originally Posted by Yuriev's ghost View Post
Source (check the 'Let’s just kill Aeris…' section). Not that I'm refuting that there were only three protagonists in the beginning though, I've heard that as well.
I can't get access to the site

My source comes from EGM issue 196 October 2005. It's on page 104 in a section called Afterthoughts: Final Fantasy VII. It features an interview with Director Yoshinori Kitase (director) and Tetsuya Nomura(character designer/battle director/ and co-author) and I quote:

EGM: We heard that the death of Aerith and the creation of Tifa both originated in a phone call between you two...

Tetsuya Nomura: It's funny, some magazine ran that story, but only the beginning and the ending of it. People think that I wanted to kill off Aerith and replace her with Tifa as the main character! [Laughs] The actual conversation between Mr. Kitase and myself was very, very long. Originally, there were only going to be three characters in the entire game: Cloud, Barrett, and Aerith. Can you imagine that? And we knew even in the early concept stage that one character would have to die. But we only had three to choose from. I mean Cloud's the main character, so you can't really kill him. And Barrett... well, that's maybe too obvious. But we had to pick between Aerith and Barrett. We debated this for a long time, but in the end decided to sacrifice Aerith.[/B]
The next question asked, is if they chose her to increase the drama and Nomura says yes. He mentions it being a tradition in the FFseries to kill off a character for dramatic effect but in the past it was always tough and gruff "last man standing" guys like Barrett. He chose Aerith cause he felt it would catch everyone off guard.

I'm not sure if it's enough to satisfy, but it looks like they had extra stuff on the 1UP.com website... so if they keep anything that old it should be there.