Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
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.
Not really when the dates all end up being the same scenario of all the characters calling Cloud out on his weird behavior making them all thematically the same. Not to mention that Tifa and Cloud smurf at the end of Disk 2 kind of sealing the deal of their relationship. So it equaled little more than one arbitrary event to cater to the shippers.