Aeris was also important to the story because of the Gold Saucer date. This was an example of real player choice in a JRPG, where over the course of a game, a player's dialogue options eventually culminated in a scene that could be quite different. It also had an impact on the romantic situation of the rest of the game. If Aeris goes on the date, the rest of Cloud and Tifa's relationship looks like that of close friends. If Tifa was on the date, it seems like much more.

That was one of the beauties of FFVII's writing. Cloud and Tifa's relationship was sufficiently ambiguous to seem differently in the player's minds depending on the choices they made up to that point.