Awesome / Final Fantasy VII

It all comes down to this.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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The Original Game

• Back in 1997 when the game first came out, the intro cinematic by itself was a breathtaking demonstration of the cinematic potential gained from the leap to 3D. It begins with an abstract, wavering camera-pan through outer space set to an ominous droning with vague, echoing voices, then segues into showing off a fully-rendered Aerith. She stands up and slowly walks out of an alley onto a bustling Midgar street, and the camera begins zooming wayyyy out as the music swells, until we see Midgar in its entirety and the game triumphantly displays its title card as the music hits a climactic riff. The tracking shot continues, zooming all the way back in on another portion of the city where a train is arriving at a station platform; as it stops, the game nigh-seamlessly segues from FMV to in-engine as AVALANCHE leaps off the train and begins their assault on the first reactor. Even after almost two decades, it's still awesome.
• Our heroes are trapped in the lobby of Shinra HQ, surrounded on all sides with no way out. How ever will they escape? Cue Cloud riding down the stairs on a motorcycle. Everyone else piles into a pickup truck (which is hilariously on display in Shinra's car dealership) and they all drive straight through the window and into the chase sequence from the opening of Akira. Hell, yeah!
• Aerith had a CMoA, too, when she convinced wannabe-badass mercenary Cloud to dress like a girl, then made fun of him through the entire segment.
  • And there's the fact that she saves the world even in death, made particularly awesome by the last scene in the game, with her face being the last shot you see before The Stinger, showing you exactly who it was who called forth the Lifestream and destroyed Meteor. To say nothing of an innocent flower girl running off to stop a sword-wielding psychopath who can and did strike her down in one second. And it's been mentioned before, but it must be reiterated: All the heroes managed to do was kill the guy who summoned Meteor. Aerith stopped Meteor itself, and defied Sephiroth's will in doing so, from beyond the grave.
• Bear in mind, the minute Aerith embraces her heritage and goes to stop Sephiroth and Jenova, he decides she will be a problem and needs to die. She was the only threat to his entire plan, and may be the only one he ever feared.
• After going through 8 hours of the game where your attacks are doing from 50-300 damage, during the Kalm flashback when Sephiroth is semi-playable, watching him do 3500 damage per attack and taking 0 damage from a dragon which one shot KOs Cloud is stunning.
  • One of the reasons why Sephiroth is such an enduring villain is because of his tendency to pull these off with amazing style and finesse. These moments include his famous "walk amongst the flames" in Cloud's flashback, finding a monster you would have no chance of defeating at that point in the game without massive Level Grinding due to its almost-always lethal Beta attack (though a well-planned strategy can change that) impaled on a tree, and his famous Mind Screw of the main hero, Cloud. However, his real legacy in the gaming world was his shishkabob murder of Aerith... Even if it was just a Jenova imitator, not Sephiroth himself as most people assume. To her fans, this was his Moral Event Horizon. To others, it's both.
  • Cloud's fourth-wall breaking "Shut Up, Hannibal!" to Sephiroth, covering up Sephiroth's pretentious text box with his own, which simply says, "Shut up."
  • Cloud himself gets his CMoA in a flashback (recreated with much better graphics in Crisis Core): After the aforementioned torching of Nibelheim, Cloud stabs Sephiroth in the back with the Buster Sword. Most grunts couldn't even lift the damn Buster Sword, let alone run sneakily with it. ^note While Cloud had above average mêlée skills relative to most grunts, the Buster Sword is so heavy that two grunts in Last Order couldn't lift it even when working together. Later, when Cloud uses it, it is embedded in solid metal plating and Cloud effortlessly pulls it out. Those two grunts? Couldn't pull the sword out of dirt. Then, after Sephiroth impales him through the chest with his stupidly-large Masamune, Cloud pulls himself even further into it so he can use the sword as leverage ("...It can't be!"), then flings Sephiroth into a pit to his apparent death. The fact that he resurfaces five years later doesn't diminish the simple fact that a lowly infantry grunt did what armies couldn't: Defeat Sephiroth. Arguably more badass than anything Cloud has done since. The best part of this, at least in the original PS1 version, is the music. As soon as the Shinra grunt removes his helmet and reveals himself as Cloud, the first world map theme, sorely missed at this point in the game, begins playing one last time for a Triumphant Reprise. It crescendos gloriously as Cloud overcomes Sephiroth.
    • Cloud beating Sephiroth in Nibelheim and tossing him into the Mako was one already, but it becomes even more of one in retrospect after learning the truth about Cloud's past. An ordinary Shinra military policeman took on the biggest badass known to this world in a one-on-one match and won! The idea that a wash-out SOLDIER wannabe just happened to get called to the scene when Sephiroth went insane makes it very much a "Right Man in the Wrong Place" scenario.
    • Last Order's version of events changes things up a bit. After Cloud stabs Sephiroth, he helps Tifa and we clearly see his eyes are blue. Cloud then charges at Sephiroth to finish him off. However, just like in the game, Cloud pulls himself further onto the sword and tosses Sephiroth in the wall, crumpling it. Sephiroth, now mortally wounded and completely stunned, looks into Cloud's eyes... and they're glowing green with Mako. Cloud never went through Mako treatment (at least not to the same extent as proper SOLDIERs). He simply unlocked it himself with his anger and lust for revenge.
    • It gets better than that. Besides Zack getting a better showing this time around, Cloud was impaled not once, but TWICE. And he still has the stamina to overpower Sephiroth. The fact that Sephiroth more or less kills himself in this version doesn't diminish Cloud's achievement.
  • After a full game of the stress, fear, and pain that Sephiroth has caused you, murdering thousands of people, killing Aerith, and sending Meteor to the planet to destroy it, you beat him in the center of the Lifestream and he pulls you into a black void for one last duel. Cue Cloud's rage building until he unleashes Omnislash and cleaves that life-sucking psychopath in two!
    • Omnislash auto-unlocks especially for this fight. It doesn't matter if you're using another Limit Level for the Final Boss. It doesn't matter if you never found the Lvl 4 Manual for it and therefore don't know how to do it or know that it even exists! It's active. The limit gauge fills automatically for this fight, positively egging you on into going full Blade Spam on the prick!
• "SHUT UP! SIT YOUR ASS DOWN IN THAT CHAIR, AND DRINK YOUR GODDAMN TEA!" Cid hasn't joined the party yet and already he's actually managing to intimidate Cloud! Doubles as a Funny Moment.
• Cait Sith's "noble sacrifice", which is of course negated when another Cait Sith body activates as soon as he 'dies'.
  • Cait Sith gets another awesome moment when he calls out Barret near the end of Disc 2. He reminds Barret that when AVALANCHE carried out their terrorist attacks, innocent people actually died just so they could prove a point.
    Cait Sith: As long as Marlene is safe, who cares what else happens, right? I been itchin' to say this to ya fer a while now! When ya blew the Midgar No. 1 up, how many folks d'ya think died?
    Barret: ... That was for the life of the planet. Ya gotta expect a few casualties.
    Cait Sith: A few? Whaddya mean 'a few'? What may be a few to y'all is everything to them who died...... Protect the planet. Hah! Y'all sure sound good! Ain't no one that'd go against ya. So ya think ya can do whatever y'all want?
  • The above speech might've actually inspired Cloud to urge his friends to find their own personal reasons to fight, rather than the vague platitudes that Barret relied on to try and justify AVALANCHE's crimes.
• It looks like it's all over for Tifa when Scarlet strands her on the end of a huge cannon, and then a voice tells her to jump. Cue Barret showing up in a huge airship and lowering a rope.
  • Right before that, Tifa, having taken one too many slaps from Scarlet, gets pissed off and yells, "Quit slapping me! You old $*&^%!!!" and starts slapping her back. Scarlet quickly learns that engaging in a slap fight with a master martial artist is a BAD idea.
• Our introduction to the secondary antagonist, Rufus Shinra. The sinister Shinra theme music is playing at the time, and if you speak to your allies, they hype up his appearance. Aerith says, "I've heard no one's ever seen him bleed or cry." (Who is this guy, Chuck Norris?) When you go outside to meet him in person, his utter indifference towards your interference and his own father's death, plus his speech on how he intends to rule the world through fear, firmly establishes him as a bad dude who's set to be even worse than his dad.
  • Rufus' "death" scene in the original game. He stared down the cannon blasts from Diamond WEAPON without flinching or blinking. This moment was diminished somewhat by the revelation in Advent Children that he survived it... or, for others, it became even more awesome!
• Obtaining the Final Limit Break for any of the characters and learning them is a huge one in itself, especially some of the harder ones, such as Omnislash.
• When the group has to go back to Midgar to stop the Sister Ray from firing a second time, there's an awesome scene of the entire team dashing off, fearlessly, in a perfect straight line as triumphant music plays and the airship crew salutes them the entire way.
  • When you reach Sister Ray itself, you encounter actual 1st-Class SOLDIERs… as common mooks, as easy to defeat as the MPs and Grunts in the first reactor. It really shows how much Cloud and the rest of the party have grown over the course of the game.

Advent Children

• Well, Advent Children gave us Rufus managing to pull a massive screwjob on Kadaj for the majority of the movie magnificently, and despite having a lethal disease, he jumped headfirst out of a window many floors above ground to blow Jenova's head up without any regard for the safety of his own ass! The fact he managed to bullshit EVERYONE into believing he was totally harmless (including his own allies, based on their reactions), and perform a balls of steel level Moment of Awesome is pretty amazing.
  • Although it seemed as though the Turks were working towards this goal from the beginning. How else do you explain Tseng and Elena showing up as Rufus is plummeting towards the sidewalk, and they're armed with grappling-hook net-guns that nicely save their still-cool-headed-as-all-hell President? And Reno and Rufus don't see surprised to see the friends they thought were dead.
  • Two words: Magnificent Chessmaster. At Xanatos Speed Chess, even.
  • Let's not forget the awesome way Rufus not only pulled off the sheet hiding his face and the aforementioned massive screwjob on Kadaj, he also had the last word, as well! "A GOOD son would have known," is one of the best lines in the movie.
  • He knew that the best way to hide was to place in the plain sight. All Kadaj needed to do was lift up the sheet to look at him. Everyone assumed he covered up because he was embarrassed of the way Geostigma deformed his body. Kadaj face when Rufus reveals that he had the head the entire time just says it all.
• The kids of Advent Children. Did Marlene just chuck stuff at Loz? After seeing him beat Tifa, of all people, into the ground? (And remember that basically reads: Did Marlene just stand up to Sephiroth?). Neither of those kids like people messing with their adoptive mama, actually; Denzel charges straight at Bahamut SIN, which is decimating the place, screaming "You son of a BITCH!" The Complete version only made this better: Denzel smashing a fire hydrant to Kill It with Water, and the scene where Cloud drops Marlene off at the bar... and she tells him she knows exactly what he's been up to, and proceeds to deliver a Rousing Speech to a man four times her age. (That last one doubles as a Heartwarming Moment.)
• Sephiroth's return. A massive Oh, Crap! moment for the heroes, but a positively glorious entrance that reminds you exactly how hardcore he is.
  Sephiroth: ''Good to see you, Cloud.''
• The entire rematch between Cloud and Sephiroth. It's what this movie was made for, and it doesn't disappoint. The two of them use the entire ruined Shinra HQ building as their arena, with black clouds swirling overhead, fighting through the interior of the building, on the side of the building, on falling rubble (as in, standing on it as it falls, only jumping to safety moments before it hits the ground), and ending atop the tower, where Cloud proves once more he's got what it takes to put Sephiroth down - this time, it's the new and improved Omnislash that finishes the One Winged Angel.
  • Not to mention the soundtrack is a new version of "One-Winged Angel" with a full orchestra, choir, and Nobuo Uematsu's metal band The Black Mages (made up of Square employees) playing. For many fans, this is the definitive version of the song.
• Advent Children had quite a few, best described through their accompanying quotes:
  Cloud: I feel lighter... Maybe I lost some weight. All that dilly-dallying.
  Vincent: [joining the fray] Where can I buy a phone?

Dirge of Cerberus

• Yuffie bitch-slapping Shelke in Dirge of Cerberus after she calls Shalua a fool for sacrificing herself for her sake.

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