7. Aeris Can Be Saved - Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII remains one of the most brilliant and innovative video games ever made, helping to popularise the RPG with more casual audiences, and delivering an utterly spellbinding tale as it did so. It remains one of the first distinctly visceral, emotionally engaging games, and that's owed in large part to the fact that
SPOILER ALERT (as if you don't already know) one of the game's main characters, Aeris, is murdered by the villainous Sephiroth during the course of the game. It wasn't long before rumours began to run rampant that Aeris didn't have to die, and that performing a stupid number of actions in the lead up to that moment could cause her to survive. Dumb, naive kids that we were, we toiled away hours and hours of re-playing the game to try and save her, much to our frustration when it didn't work (wow, kids have so much time on their hands). The sad truth is that, short of glitching the game by using a cheat disc or cartridge, there is zero way to save Aeris, and the story only functions one way - with her dead. That hasn't stopped people still claim its authenticity to this day, however.