It's a game about casting magic spells that also features minigames for doing squats and performing CPR. It's a story about a grotesque Elder God threatening to wipe out humanity, a plot which frequently takes a backseat to an anime love triangle and bird racing.
It's one of the most loved, hated, mythologized and misunderstood games of all time, and strangely enough, it's one that very few people seem to remember accurately. And with the recently-revealed remake on its way and the HD version available on PS4, there's never been a better time to revisit Final Fantasy VII.
(Note: I have attempted to avoid major plot spoilers in this post, despite this being probably the most-spoiled video game of all time, because my main point here is that You Should Play Final Fantasy VII.)
There's also a My Bloody Valentine reference within the first hour or so. And this was in 1997, before everyone knew they were cool.
In this era of video games as blockbuster entertainment, returning to FF7—itself one of the first modern gaming blockbusters—is a bracing experience.
Modern games are frequently big only in the most nominal sense, offering up expansive playgrounds filled with copy-pasted tedium and checklists of cookie-cutter content. But Final Fantasy VII is something different: it's a strange, sui generis epic with Promethean ambitions and a ton of heart.
Even with its super-deformed characters (whose dated animations still have more personality than a lot of today's HD automatons), it's hard not to be swept up in FF7 right from the opening scenes. Storming Shinra headquarters and escaping in a motorcycle chase straight out of Akira could've been the white-knuckle conclusion to any other game; here, it's just the opening act.
One of the best moments in all of video games is coming to the end of this weird, wonderful caper and realizing it's only a cold open, with a whole world left to explore.
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Geek commonplace holds that Cloud, the game's spiky-haired protagonist, is the mopey emo wimp that ended a proud tradition of happy-go-lucky JRPG heroes. But that's revisionist history: Cloud spends most of the game throwing out snarky one-liners and acting like a smug, mercenary asshole. He's the lovable rogue to Barret's po-faced hippy moralizer. For most of the game, Cloud is much closer to Han Solo than Shinji Ikari.
But he's also not the only character bowdlerized in the popular consciousness. Aeris, the flower girl from the streets of Midgar, is often depicted as a delicate, ethereal princess, for reasons I will avoid discussing. But this caricature has very little in common with the worldly, self-possessed, and impishly mischievous heroine encountered in the game; in her interactions with Cloud, she's Han Solo. (After all, he's just a bumpkin from Nibelhim; she grew up in the slums.)
Tifa, the game's other major female character, is precisely the opposite. Like her contemporary Lara Croft, Tifa is often remembered as a spunky sex symbol thanks to her considerable polygonal assets, but the real Tifa is much more complex: a wistful, romantic bundle of trauma and frustrated longing who just happens to beat up monsters with her bare hands. And even with all her mistakes and hang-ups, she steps capably into the role of leader when the heroic protagonist loses his nerve.
To be fair, she has help from Cid, whose character concept is basically "Chuck Yeager crossed with Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa." FF7's cast is full of characters like this: huge amounts of personality crammed into a handful of polygons.
The writing is much better than it gets credit for, and the game's uniqueness still shines through a notoriously dodgy translation (which often serves only to make the game even more endearing, in the classic Final Fantasy tradition). Even in English, there are powerful moments; in a chilling turn of phrase, a particularly terrifying monster is referred to as "a calamity from the skies."
Yes, FF7 is a JRPG, complete with amnesia, mysterious evil, and a motley group of heroes on a quest to save the world, but it also sidesteps cliché in interesting ways. After all, it's a rare game that has its tough guy hero start cross-dressing before the intro is over.
And every "badass" character in the game is deconstructed somehow: the Turks, the game's slick, modish Men In Black, are also incompetents who gossip like the cast of Mean Girls; Vincent, the shape-shifting vampire gunslinger, is a sad sack goth dork who gets mercilessly roasted by a teenage girl. (Note to anyone revisiting the game: keep Yuffie in your party, she has a lot of the best dialogue.)
Just as FF7's characters have been distorted by time, the details of its plot have collapsed into a blur of vague concepts: giant weapons, an evil corporation, the end of the world. But here, too, the reality is much more interesting.
At the core of FF7's mythos is a simple but poignant fable about the Faustian bargain of civilization. The Planet was once inhabited by a nomadic race called the Ancients, who lived in harmony with nature and traveled from place to place in search of a fabled Promised Land. (The game strongly suggests that the Promised Land is not a literal place, and that the search is what really matters; it's a bit like the Kingdom of God in Christianity, in that it suggests a variety of possible meanings that vary with time and place.)
But he's also not the only character bowdlerized in the popular consciousness. Aeris, the flower girl from the streets of Midgar, is often depicted as a delicate, ethereal princess, for reasons I will avoid discussing. But this caricature has very little in common with the worldly, self-possessed, and impishly mischievous heroine encountered in the game; in her interactions with Cloud, she's Han Solo. (After all, he's just a bumpkin from Nibelhim; she grew up in the slums.)
Tifa, the game's other major female character, is precisely the opposite. Like her contemporary Lara Croft, Tifa is often remembered as a spunky sex symbol thanks to her considerable polygonal assets, but the real Tifa is much more complex: a wistful, romantic bundle of trauma and frustrated longing who just happens to beat up monsters with her bare hands. And even with all her mistakes and hang-ups, she steps capably into the role of leader when the heroic protagonist loses his nerve.
Tifa is one of the most interesting video game characters there is, and the fact that almost nobody ever notices is entirely in keeping with her role in FF7.
To be fair, she has help from Cid, whose character concept is basically "Chuck Yeager crossed with Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa." FF7's cast is full of characters like this: huge amounts of personality crammed into a handful of polygons.
The writing is much better than it gets credit for, and the game's uniqueness still shines through a notoriously dodgy translation (which often serves only to make the game even more endearing, in the classic Final Fantasy tradition). Even in English, there are powerful moments; in a chilling turn of phrase, a particularly terrifying monster is referred to as "a calamity from the skies."
Yes, FF7 is a JRPG, complete with amnesia, mysterious evil, and a motley group of heroes on a quest to save the world, but it also sidesteps cliché in interesting ways. After all, it's a rare game that has its tough guy hero start cross-dressing before the intro is over.
And every "badass" character in the game is deconstructed somehow: the Turks, the game's slick, modish Men In Black, are also incompetents who gossip like the cast of Mean Girls; Vincent, the shape-shifting vampire gunslinger, is a sad sack goth dork who gets mercilessly roasted by a teenage girl. (Note to anyone revisiting the game: keep Yuffie in your party, she has a lot of the best dialogue.)
The cross-dressing episode is actually the tamest part of the Wall Market section, much of which plays out like Mac and Dennis' discussion of bears, twinks, and power bottoms from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Note: the characters on the sign over the gym read "MEN MEN MEN".
One day, some of the Ancients decided to stay in one place and build settlements, forgoing their spiritual quest in exchange for a life of convenience, and becoming human in the process. This shift to settled life (which mirrors early man's transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist) begins a spiral of ruin that culminates in the industrial dystopia of Midgar, a stratified city of polluting Mako reactors and abject human suffering. And the few surviving Ancients, who can literally hear the whispers of the Planet, find that these voices grow increasingly distant.
Later in the game, you discover that Mako energy comes from the Lifestream, a continuum of the souls of living beings; this means that Shinra is in the business of literally harvesting souls and processing them into fuel. Enron, eat your heart out.
Later in the game, you discover that Mako energy comes from the Lifestream, a continuum of the souls of living beings; this means that Shinra is in the business of literally harvesting souls and processing them into fuel. Enron, eat your heart out.
Shinra is the classic cyberpunk megacorp by way of the traditional Japanese zaibatsu: a vertically integrated "power company" with its own private army, bioweapons research division, and space program. (See also: Weyland-Yutani, similarly redolent of the "Japan Inc." era.)
At the beginning of the game, Cloud joins AVALANCHE, an ELF-style group committed to destroying Shinra. He joins for purely mercenary reasons; like Han Solo at the beginning of Star Wars, he's not interested in revolution. And AVALANCHE's opposition to Shinra is largely materialist, rooted more in the bleakness and misery of the Midgar slums than the legend of the Ancients and the Promised Land.
But as Cloud and company get outside the city, leaving industrial modernity behind, they encounter the forgotten history of the Planet and reconnect with the sacred search that their ancestors abandoned. It doesn't seem accidental that a character who provides a crucial cosmological lecture to the heroes on this journey is named after Johannes Bugenhagen, Martin Luther's pastor in Wittenberg and a key figure in the Reformation.
But as Cloud and company get outside the city, leaving industrial modernity behind, they encounter the forgotten history of the Planet and reconnect with the sacred search that their ancestors abandoned. It doesn't seem accidental that a character who provides a crucial cosmological lecture to the heroes on this journey is named after Johannes Bugenhagen, Martin Luther's pastor in Wittenberg and a key figure in the Reformation.
There are other intriguing allusions, like a giant artillery cannon called the "Sister Ray" and a pagoda filled with martial artists named after Russian authors. And perhaps most significantly, there's a high-ranking Shinra apparatchik named Heidegger. The fact that the character is a boorish, vulgar toady could be a jab at the great thinker, or simply ironic. (His association with Shinra might suggest the real Heidegger's complicity with Nazism, given the low value Shinra places on human lives.)
Still, invoking the philosopher's name at all serves only to highlight the themes the game shares with his work: human existence as inextricable from a world that tasks us with taking responsibility for our own lives; and the dismantling of contemporary assumptions to rediscover questions posed by the Ancients.
Still, invoking the philosopher's name at all serves only to highlight the themes the game shares with his work: human existence as inextricable from a world that tasks us with taking responsibility for our own lives; and the dismantling of contemporary assumptions to rediscover questions posed by the Ancients.
"Have you lost your way? When that happens we each have to take a good long look at ourselves. There's always something in the deepest reaches of our hearts. Something buried, or something forgotten."
Like (the real) Heidegger, Cloud and company do not advocate a simple return to the ways of the Ancients, if such a thing were even possible; they are not "fundamentalists." Instead they practice a kind of archaeology, uncovering ways of thinking and modes of existence that have been concealed by modern assumptions.
"Archaeology" is actually a strong recurring theme in FF7. Cloud and company's "archaeology of knowledge" (a la Foucault) is typically metaphorical, but it's often literal too; the game frequently has you exploring sealed and forgotten ruins in search of lost knowledge and buried secrets. And archaeology is also referenced in one of the game's key events: how Shinra discovered the lifeform known as Jenova "in a 2,000 year old geological stratum."
As they travel the world, Cloud and his party discover the origins of Shinra hegemony in places like North Corel, a mining town brutally subjugated by Shinra troops; Gongaga, a tiny village decimated by a Mako reactor explosion; Rocket Town, a kind of rust belt hamlet left to rot when Shinra abandoned its space program; and Cosmo Canyon, an ancient adobe city outside Shinra's dominon, devoted to the study of the Planet. Each destination reveals the history that gave shape to the present, and alternative ways of living that have fallen into eclipse thanks to Shinra 's dominion.
Along the way, a world without such wanton environmental destruction becomes thinkable, and a world order that once seemed inevitable and unchanging is revealed to be the contingent product of a traceable past. The train of Midgar, which "can't run anywhere except where its rails take it", is left behind; the journey itself opens up new territory and new possibilities. (As anyone who remembers Barret's dialogue can attest, train metaphors abound in FF7.)
"Archaeology" is actually a strong recurring theme in FF7. Cloud and company's "archaeology of knowledge" (a la Foucault) is typically metaphorical, but it's often literal too; the game frequently has you exploring sealed and forgotten ruins in search of lost knowledge and buried secrets. And archaeology is also referenced in one of the game's key events: how Shinra discovered the lifeform known as Jenova "in a 2,000 year old geological stratum."
As they travel the world, Cloud and his party discover the origins of Shinra hegemony in places like North Corel, a mining town brutally subjugated by Shinra troops; Gongaga, a tiny village decimated by a Mako reactor explosion; Rocket Town, a kind of rust belt hamlet left to rot when Shinra abandoned its space program; and Cosmo Canyon, an ancient adobe city outside Shinra's dominon, devoted to the study of the Planet. Each destination reveals the history that gave shape to the present, and alternative ways of living that have fallen into eclipse thanks to Shinra 's dominion.
Along the way, a world without such wanton environmental destruction becomes thinkable, and a world order that once seemed inevitable and unchanging is revealed to be the contingent product of a traceable past. The train of Midgar, which "can't run anywhere except where its rails take it", is left behind; the journey itself opens up new territory and new possibilities. (As anyone who remembers Barret's dialogue can attest, train metaphors abound in FF7.)
"In its essence, technology is something that man does not control."
[Side note: the process of liberation for Cloud and company is still bound up with technology, with more of the world map opening up as you acquire new vehicles: a dune buggy, a seaplane, a submarine, etc. However, it's worth noting that the ultimate vehicle is not the magnificent airship Highwind, but the gold chocobo; the only vehicle that can go anywhere in the game is a living creature.]
This process of archaeology becomes particularly literal toward the end of the game's first disc, when Cloud physically digs up the Lunar Harp in Bone Village and opens the passage to the Forgotten Capital, where one of the game's most memorable scenes takes place. (I'm gritting my teeth trying not to reveal what happens to the 0.0001% who don't already know.)
Barring the party's journey towards enlightenment is Sephiroth, the game's ultimate villain and a dark mirror of Cloud. Sephiroth also despises Shinra, but he takes AVALANCHE's environmentalism to its most radical possible conclusion: the only way to redeem the Planet is to remove mankind and civilization from the equation.*
"Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible—though I know not in what proportion—still remains."
This reasoning is not so far removed from that of deep ecologists like Pentti Linkola, who believe that without a mass die-off of human beings, environmental catastrophe will continue indefinitely. As another fictional villain from the same era put it, "human beings are a disease; we are the cure."
Both the heroes and the villain accept that the present structure of civilization is evil; in a sense, they only differ on the question of how deep the rot goes. Pretty intense themes for a video game about ninjas and talking stuffed animals—especially circa 1997.
* When Bugenhagen discusses the Planet's survival with Cloud later in the game, he leaves open the question of whether or not such a future would include humanity. The following is a spoiler for the game's ending sequence, but it really demands mention; highlight to read. FF7 preserves this ambiguity right through its final scene: 500 years after the events of the game, a much older Red XIII and his descendants watch over the ruins of Midgar, now covered with overgrowth and being reclaimed by the Planet.
Only two years separated FF7 and The Matrix. Much has been made of the film's similarity to Grant Morrison's classic comic The Invisibles, but it also has a lot in common with FF7. Then again, perhaps all three just tapped in to the collective unconscious of the 1990s.
Of course, Sephiroth's motivations are not really altruistic, and as the game goes on you discover that he is less interested in restoring the Planet than harnessing its energies for his own purposes. In this, he is much like Shinra, viewing the Planet and the Lifestream as resources to be exploited rather than shepherded.
But whereas Shinra at least has an interest in keeping its customers alive to extract money from them, Sephiroth has no such restraint. He aspires instead towards godhood—and as any JRPG fan knows, the ultimate genre cliche is the ending where you have to kill a god. The possibilities inherent in this final confrontation are outlined in Heidegger's famous 1966 interview with Der Spiegel:
[All merely human meditations and endeavors] will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world...Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.Much of the party's journey consists of preparing and readying themselves for this confrontation, and significantly, the only power capable of stopping Sephiroth's "ultimate destructive magic" is called Holy.
This willowy anime heel has usurped the power of a god. Are you a bad enough dude to defeat a god? (URL: videogamesandthebible.com)
It allows us to observe each of [its] many characters in the round, from every angle, to view them as individuals with their own backstories, philosophies, martial arts skills, and reasons for being there. We get to know them naturally, the way we get to know our friends: by putting in the time.This is a big part of FF7's enduring appeal: it's a game about deeply flawed and very human characters (even the non-human ones). They're a band of criminals, failures, thieves, outcasts, weirdos, cowards, and frauds—and they're the only ones who can save the planet, which itself is sick and coming apart.
For once, the Kabbalistic allusions so beloved by Japanese developers (there's a villain named Sephiroth, after all) aren't just for show. At heart, this is a game about healing a broken world.
Or, in Aeris' immortal words: "this guy are sick."
FF7's TV spots trumpeted a "multi-million dollar budget" and "years of development", things which are now de rigeur for every major release—but at the time, FF7 was a moonshot, and it shows.
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