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alt title(s): Advent Children; Final Fantasy7; FF 7 
The seventh entry in the unspeakably popular Final Fantasy series.
Easily one of the most famous games of all time, Final Fantasy VII helped extend console RPGs into the mainstream gamer community in the west (for better or worse, depending on which fandom you ask) during the PlayStation's reign.
Considering how lucrative it has proven, one prevalent rumor is Square Enix is going to do a remake of the game for a next generation console or PSP. Final Fantasy VII director Yoshinori Kitase stated in an interview that such a project could be undertaken, but only if the original team could be reunited to work on the remake (which is incredibly unlikely as they have since been assigned different projects). Still, announcing the release of the Final Fantasy VII remake is a very popular (to the point of being overdone) April Fools Day joke. It has, however, been released in all three regions (finally) on the Playstion Network DLC service, for US$10 instead of the normal US$6 of PS One Classics. Though, given the size, and the fact that Amazon was charging $45 for a used copy, it's hard to begrudge that.
Characters:
As for the villains there's Sephiroth, Professor Hojo, Jenova, the Turks and Rufus Shinra.
Few people completely grasp the plot at the first playthrough - even for a RPG, this game can get extremely complicated. Also, this game is probably the world's biggest victim of Hype Aversion.
Squaresoft (now Square Enix) published Final Fantasy VII on Sony's Play Station console after a falling-out with Nintendo over the latter's extreme censorship policies, as well as a reported refusal to move away from the industry-standard ROM cartridge, which severely limited the scope of a game. Sony was more than willing to permit more 'mature' content on its systems — that, coupled with the impressive storage capacity of the CD-ROM format, proved to be much more accommodating to Square's design philosophy.
Squaresoft had already attempted to release a game on CD — Secret of Mana was slated for release on a Nintendo-proprietary but Sony-created CD-ROM peripheral for the Super Nintendo console. Negotiations between the three companies soured, however; while Secret of Mana was eventually released on a cartridge in a stripped-down form, the anticipated CD device died in Development Hell, and was eventually released by Sony as a stand-alone product called the " Play Station". Squaresoft would only release a few more titles under the Nintendo brand before following that CD device to Sony.
It proved successful enough to spawn a fair amount of merchandise, including including novellas told from various characters' perspectives, and a raft of Spin Offs collectively known as the " Compilation of Final Fantasy VII". These included:
Oh, and this is the game that can be blamed for forever shattering the Final Fantasy fanbase. Because this is the one that got popular.
The Final Fantasy VII characters got their first cameo shots in the oft-forgotten Fighting Game Ehrgeiz.
This game contains examples of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Sephiroth's Masamune and Cloud's First Tsurugi blades are capable of not only slashing cleanly through massive pieces of concrete building that are far larger than the swords themselves, but setting the edges of the cut concrete ON FIRE. Of course, the swords, despite repeated clashing, never damage each other.
- Abusive Parents - Hojo and Lucrecia do genetic experiments on their son while he's still in the womb.
- The Ace - Zack
- A God Am I - Sephiroth's motive: To wound the Planet itself, and absorb the Lifestream energy that the Planet uses to heal.
- Advent Children expands on his motives: he wasn't just going to blow up the world and call it good, but then use the Lifestream's power to travel to another world and fuck it up. Just like Momma Jenova had done in the past.
- Alas Poor Villain - Kadaj
- Alien Scrappy - Cait Sith
- All There In The Manual: The Sapphire WEAPON's name was revealed nearly a decade after the fact when Square began selling figurines of it.
- Always Night - Midgar seems to be like this, but it's only because of smog and fallout from the Mako reactors.
- Angst Coma: Cloud's coma midway through the game may have been caused by Mako poisoning, but it's not until he deals with his amnesia and other psychological disorders that he's cured.
- Anticlimax Boss - Final final duel with Sephiroth, which is basically an interactive cutscene.
- Apathetic Citizens - To the point where one NPC muses that the destruction of an entire sector of Midgar is annoying because the kickup of dust ruined the soup he was cooking outside. Note that said citizen is not one of the rich people living on the upper plates, but one of the destitute people living in the slums. Meaning he has no reason to complain, so shut up!
- Arm Cannon - Barret
- Artificial Limbs - Barret
- The Atoner - Rufus and the Turks, following the end of the game.
- Vincent Valentine sees himself as this when you first meet him. He gets better.
- Ax Crazy - Barret's old buddy Dyne, who racks up quite the body count before you battle him.
- Back From The Dead - Sephiroth in Advent Children.
- Sephiroth in the original game, as he was killed by Cloud 5 years prior to the start of the game.
- Badass Longcoat - Vincent and Sephiroth, although the latter is a villain.
- Bare Your Midriff - Tifa and Yuffie.
- Battle In The Center Of The Mind - The final battle.
- Beyond The Impossible - Advent Children breaks the laws of physics so many times and in such spectacular fashions each time it probably managed to punch out reality.
- The creators admitted they realized this and pointed out they were not trying to obey the laws of physics. They were just trying to make it look awesome. The alternative, replicating the turn-based combat, would've looked silly.
- BFS - Cloud and Sephiroth each have one.
- And Sephiroth's is a no-dachi. It's not just any no-dachi, it is six feet long in the game. In other words, almost longer than he is tall (his canonical height is 6'1"). In Crisis Core and Advent Children, the no-dachi gets a downgrade to a much more manageable four feet long (as if that makes it better).
- Does THIS look anything CLOSE to 4 feet long? Even in Dissidia Final Fantasy it was confirmed that his sword is easily longer than he is tall (a good 2 meters in length) and that is not counting the handle.
- The swords seem to change size from incarnation to incarnation, and even within incarnations. In the original, the sword's total length is 7+ feet. In AC it seems to average at 8 feet (though the shot of Sephiroth impaling Cloud in the above video makes the sword at least 9 feet). In Kingdom Hearts its at least 10 feet in KH 1 and 12 feet in KH 2. Crisis Core has it around 7 to 8 feet in rendered cutscenes and around 5 to 6 feet within the game itself. Dissidia had about 9 feet in renders and the in-game model is anywhere from 10 to 13 feet depending on the shot or maybe it grows during attacks... who knows. It looks at least twice his height in overall length when viewing his character model in Dissidia's museum.
- Bifurcated Weapon - Cloud's new BFS in Advent Children.
- Big Brother Mentor - Angeal to Zack and Zack to Cloud.
- Blade Lock - Happens several times towards the end of Advent Children.
- Blade On A Stick - Cid
- Blind Idiot Translation - "This guy are sick" and "To the settling of everything," among other mistakes.
- The game says otherwise, but do not "attack while the tail is up" in the first boss battle.
- To be fair, the translation isn't as awful as many of Square's previous efforts. However, it could have easily been averted, if not for Sakaguchi's stubborn refusal to let Ted Woolsey anywhere near the game and insistence that the Japanese development team also do the translation (despite the previous time this was attempted directly giving birth to a certain Spoony Trope). Thankfully though, Square's localisations would be much improved starting with Final Fantasy VIII.
- Off course!
- Boisterous Bruiser - Barret and Cid embody the trope.
- Bonus Boss - The WEAPONs.
- Bosom Buddies - The infamous crossdressing scene in Wall Market.
- Boobs Of Steel - Tifa. Much like Sephiroth's katana, Tifa's massive, er, assets are considerably toned down in the Compilation, though still quite ample.
- Broken Aesop - After spending an entire game ranting about how environmentally destructive Mako extraction is, Barret goes off to look for an alternative, less harmful energy source: oil. Only in a fantasy world would that be the preferable alternative.
- Broken Base - Whether or not the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII should have been made and which, if any, portions of it are worthwhile.
- But Thou Must - halfway through the game, you get a Mac Guffin and are told to give it to someone else for safekeeping. Everyone but Barret or Nanaki declines to accept it.
- Cant Drop The Hero: Cloud, unless it's Tifa or Cid (which it only is for about two hours). Even with Leaked Experience, other party members often Cant Catch Up to him.
- Cash Cow Franchise: Compilation, anyone?
- Chainsaw Good: Vincent's Level 3 limit break Hellmasker.
- Character Derailment: Cloud in Advent Children and Vincent in Dirge of Cerberus. Both resort to brooding stereotypes despite overcoming their demons (literally!) in the original game.
- Problem is, Cloud didn't get over his problems, he just got over his self deusions and focussed on defeating the threat to the world. He's still a severely mentally damaged person, with massive guilt over letting Aeris/Aerith die and giving Sephiroth the Blck materia, though even in Advent Children he seems to be getting better.
- Professor Hojo could be seen as an example, as well. Throughout the course of the original game he is always calm and in control, but as time goes on this slowly begins to slip, and in the end his insanity consumes him completely. Not only that, he is also a bit of a Deadpan Snarker, shown in how he deals with Cloud. In Dirgeof Cerberus he's become nothing more than a stereotypical Mad Scientist with a nasally voice. Crisis Core seems to reverse this slightly, but Your Mileage May Vary.
- Chekhovs Gunman - One of the Shinra grunts in Cloud's flashbacks.
- The Chessmaster - Rufus Shinra manages to pull the wool over Kadaj's eyes for the entire movie.
- Chivalrous Pervert - Zack. He gets better.
- Cluster F Bomb - Barret and Cid have a tendency to launch into these. The harsher curse words are censored, since this game has a "T" rating. Interestingly enough, the PC version was censored more than the PS 1 version, with hell and damn censored too. Bill Gates must have been sensitive that day.
- Combos - Various characters' limits breaks: Cloud's Omnislash, Tifa's entire string, Yuffie's Bloodfest and Doom of the Living, and Cid's Big Brawl.
- Complete Monster - This title belongs to not Shinra, not even Sephiroth, but to sociopathic Mad Scientist Hojo, whose experimental atrocities arguably led to the main conflict.
- And the conflict before. And the conflict after. And the conflict after that. Let's face it, Hojo could almost be the poster child for Complete Monster-ism.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive - The entire senior management of the Shinra company... Cranked Up To Eleven.
- Subverted with Reeve, who controls Cait Sith for the benefit of the team later in the game.
- Cosmic Keystone - The Lifestream
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: "Shut up."
- Also, when Cloud first stabs Sephiroth, then gets stabbed by Sephiroth, then, using the fact that Sephiroth still has his sword in Cloud, turns him around, and hurls him off the catwalk to his doom!!! The fact that that moment can also be described in Crowning Music, below, makes it all the better.
- Motorcycle FTW.
- The end, where Cloud dives into the Lifestream to handle Sephiroth once and for all, and does so by unleashing an almighty Omnislash on the villain. Your Miliage My Vary, but bringing Sephiroth back in Advent Children takes away the power of this scene, as Cloud's attempt to finish Sephiroth once and for all doesn't matter.
- Also, nearly every single fight scene in Advent Children. Thank you, Rule Of Cool.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: This scene.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome: right before Sephiroth's Face Heel Turn, the music consists solely of a gong ringing out in regular time. Then he snaps—"Out of my way. I'm going to see my mother."—and suddenly the song is the background of his character theme.
- Similarly, in a late-game flashback, we see how Cloud took out Sephiroth at Nibelhelm. The music is the standard World Map theme, but only looping the mellow part. It keeps going over this part, nothing too dramatic. Until, Cloud not only takes Sephiroth's stab, but turns it against him, at which point the music undergoes a huge swell into the fanfare part of the song. Words can't even describe how well it works.
- Advent: One-Winged Angel. Oh yeah!
- One-Winged Angel in general. Whether or not you think it's a good song is entirely irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, the song changed the face of video game music forever, it pushed the envelope in ways video game music never has before, and its influence can still be heard today.
- Cry Cute - Kadaj
- CPR Clean Pretty Reliable
- Cyberpunk With A Chance Of Rain - Midgar always has dark skies, even above the plate.
- Dark And Troubled Past - Lots of people in this game. Sephiroth would qualify, but Aerith takes the prize for a traumatic upbringing. Her father is killed by Shinra while she's a newborn, she grows up in the prisons of Shinra headquarters for seven years with Tseng as the only person who shows her sympathy. Her mother makes a Heroic Sacrifice to give her freedom, though even after THAT she is still constantly under watch by the Turks. One can only wonder why she'd warm up to a guy from SOLDIER after all of that.
- Defeat Means Friendship - Beating up that Mysterious Ninja allows you to recruit her into your party.
- But only if you give the right (apathetic) answers to her questions. Failure just means she steals cash from you, but it's a lot of cash!
- She also tricks you with a fake save point and takes you money if you check it out.
- Derelict Graveyard - Of trains.
- Die For Our Ship - Loads of it - some people even took the game's most infamous scene as a literal example of this trope.
- Disc One Final Dungeon (Northern Continent)
- Even earlier then that, the assault on Shinra HQ.
- Distant Finale - The cut to 500 years later after the credits, which caused some confusion (among other things, it convinced some players that Meteor and Holy wiped out all the humans), but at least showed that Red XIII lived up to his promise to live for 500 years.
- Doesnt Like Guns - Sephiroth
- Doomed Hometown - Nibelheim for Cloud and Tifa, Midgar's sector 7 slums and Corel for Barret)
- Draco In Leather Pants - Sephiroth appears to have surpassed many of the other characters in popularity across the Final Fantasy fandom because he's so damn "bish". Never mind that he, you know, almost destroyed an entire planet and has numerous innocent deaths and pointless bloody rampages in his past.
- In Crisis Core, he is presented as far more likable and understandable, though that was a prequel set before Sephiroth snapped in Nibelheim and became a homicidal maniac. This makes sense, as there had to be some reason that Cloud and Zack idolized Sephiroth before he went psycho. Advent Children, made by the same creative staff as Crisis Core, still portrayed him as an unrepentant psychopath manipulating clones and spreading terminal disease from beyond the grave.
- Note that a lot of his fangirls actually see him in more of a Woobie Destroyer of Worlds way due to his Freudian Excuse and obvious mental illness. This doesn't stop him from being a Draco, though.
- Dressed To Kill - The Turks, with the exception of Reno. While the rest of the Turks wear their blue suits clean, pressed, and neat, Reno wears his like he just woke up from a drunken one-night-stand.
- Dressing As The Enemy - The Junon infiltration sequence.
- Drunk On The Dark Side: - Sephiroth, Hojo
- Dude Looks Like A Lady - Lampshaded early in the game when Cloud has to crossdress to get into Don Corneo's mansion. Depending on how much the player worked, it's even possible for him to picked over Aerith and Tifa as Corneo's future bride. Foe Yay and Squick don't even begin to describe it.
- Thankfully, we don't get to see the nasty as Cloud drops the disguise and both Tifa and Aerith storm in to commence with the interrogation. Thank our lucky stars.
- Duel Boss - Barret and Dyne, Yuffie and the Pagoda, and of course, Cloud and Sephiroth.
- Eldritch Abomination: Jenova, who really isn't evil so much as hungry and looking for lunch. Unfortunately, that lunch just happens to be the life energy of planets.
- Ensemble Darkhorse: - Vincent. So much that he even got his own spinoff game.
- Rufus Shinra as well. There's a reason he came back for Advent Children.
- Don't forget Kadaj, Yazoo & Loz, who were only filler versions of Sephiroth yet have enormous popularity; Kadaj even got his own Play Arts figurine.
- The Turks as well, especially Reno.
- And Zack Fair who was even popular before Crisis Core.
- Excuse Me Coming Through: In the Advent Children movie this trope occurs during the chase through the streets of Midgar.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Sephiroth was rather fond of his extraterrestrial destroyer-of-all-things holy "mother" although she wasn't technically his real mother.
- Kadaj is really obsessed with his mother, though its likely even he doesn't know why.
- Eviler Than Thou - Sephiroth and Shinra
- Fail Polish - Reno was not originally designed as the prettyboy he is in FFAC and later installations.
- Fake Memories - Hey, remember the Nibelheim flashback sequence you poured about 2 hours into? Yeah, it didn't actually happen that way, and Tifa's got some 'splaining to do.
- Fantastic Aesop - If we ever find a way to tap into the energy of the Earth, we'll heed the lessons of this game and not suck it out. We'll stick to coal instead.
- Fate Worse Than Death Instead of being left for dead after Sephiroth completely devastated them, Zack and Cloud are experimented on for four years by Hojo before Zack manages to break them out. Cloud is left a vegetable from being used as a test subject, and while he got better, his already weak mental state was completely shattered and he had self-induced Amnesia to cope with the events.
- Meanwhile, Sephiroth spent five years frozen in mako, conscious but unable to move.
- Also, the Compilation reveals, Jenova cells left Lucrecia unable to die. She went and froze herself in crystal instead, but may still be conscious.
- Fetish Fuel - Men in leather. Men in suits. Men in uniforms. Men who shapeshift. A very "talented" heroine. Materia that ought to be used for the other use.
- Final Exam Boss - During the final battle with Sephiroth you can switch your party members.
- Five Bad Band - Rufus & The Turks
- Flanderization - While many people seem to forget that Cloud spent most of Final Fantasy VII one step away from a complete mental breakdown anyway (and spent a large section of the game in a coma from mental stress), he still has a habit of becoming more and more mopey with each successive spin-off.
- Friendship Moment - The flashback in disc 3
- Foe Yay - Infamously Cloud and Sephiroth
- "On your knees. I want you to beg for forgiveness."
- Foil - More in the Compilation than the original game, itself. In Crisis Core, Genesis is cultured and well-versed in literature, and Zack makes it clear that he doesn't have the patience to try to understand him. In Dirge of Cerberus, all of the Tsviets have something in common with Vincent, but the most notable is Azul, with his giant cannon (contrasting Vincent's typical choice of a handgun) and ability to transform into an enormous monster.
- For Doom The Bell Tolls: "Those Chosen By The Planet" song
- For Science - Although Hojo ostensibly works for Shinra, he pretty much admits that this is the only reason for his horrific experiments.
- Fridge Brilliance - Advent Children's Bahamut SIN battle is gratuitously stylish and action-packed, mainly due to the ridiculous lengths the party has to go to to land basic hits. Then you realize that, looking at the series's gigantic and dangerous boss monsters, most boss battles must actually be like this.
- Fridge Logic: Vincent and Lucrecia are fairly young and attractive in the flashbacks in Dirgeof Cerberus. Professor Hojo, interestingly enough, appears to be far older than both of them, despite the fact that he should be around the same age. To put it in perspective, he is almost identical to his Crisis Core incarnation, which takes place decades later. Perhaps related to Beauty Equals Goodness.
- So Aerith dies...and you're carrying about 1000 Phoenix Downs...
- Gaiden Game - Dirge of Cerberus, Crisis Core, and Before Crisis.
- Gainax Ending - Up until the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII came out and clarified it, this game had an extremely confusing ending sequence that left many people wondering whether the world was destroyed at the end of the game or not. The length of time between the Compilation and the original game's release led to many decrying Square for "retconning" this.
- Gainaxing - Tifa, in cutscenes.
- Game Breaker: Too many to name. Among other things, with the right Materia combination, it was possible to throw yourself into a loop of Knights of the Round until whatever you were facing was dead. This includes the final boss. And the Bonus Bosses. And Batman.
- Also, it is worth noting that it is possible for Cloud to mime his own Omnislash, thus another loop of death for whatever you were facing.
- Gameplay And Story Segregation - Aerith's death is the most prominent, though hardly the first like this in the series.
- There's also Red XIII's father, Seto, who was petrified. And for some reason, no one thought to use a Soft on him...
- One I've never seen mentioned, yet no less egregious: Elena was promoted to the Turks as a replacement for Reno, who was in recovery from the injuries Cloud and his gang gave him on the pillar. Reno couldn't have been injured too badly, since he ran from the battle. Hasn't ShinRa heard of potions, and don't they know that a night at the inn fixes everything?
- At least he earns some badass points by not giving in to the pain while escaping; otherwise he'd have end up as a street pizza Midgar special.
- Gas Chamber - Tifa gets placed into one near the end of Disc 2. Given that it has a control switch to shut off its gas inside the chamber, its design is...suboptimal.
- Gateless Ghetto - Midgar. Despite being a massive city with a large amount of buildings, you only explore Slum Sectors Four, Five, Six, and Seven, a few alleyways on the upper city, the Sector One and Five Reactors, and the Shinra Tower. It's not actually very much when you explore through it.
- Green Aesop - A major plot-point of the game is the conflict between nature and industrialization. Midgar is polluted and dark, and it's surrounded by an expanse of post-apocalyptic style wasteland, Lower Junon had it's waters poisoned from the city above, and Corel was torched to the ground in an attack by Shinra. Most of the Shinra leaders are all sick, greedy, and incredibly powerful, who's Mako Reactors both pollute the environment and suck out the planet's life force itself. There's only two members of the corporation who really aren't too bad. Reeve feels sympathy and is responsible for taking care of those who live in Midgar, and Palmer is just incompetent and cowardly and only causes minor inconveniences for Cloud and company. Those two end up getting spared. Rufus ends up getting critically injured, and everybody else gets killed.
- It's subverted, though. Mako is so awful that the plotline suggests that North Corel's coal burning is a more environmentally friendly idea, and for certain reasons that might qualify as Hilarious In Hindsight.
- Go Mad From The Revelation - Sephiroth discovers he is another product of Shinra's bioengineering. Let's just say he doesn't take the news well.
- Green Rocks - Materia; most of it is actually green.
- Goldfish Poop Gang - The Turks. They oppose Cloud if ordered to, but under other circumstances are perfectly willing to live and let live. By Advent Children they're basically allies, and they get their own game in Before Crisis. And they have an awesome theme tune.
- Guest Star Party Member - Sephiroth, during the "Young Cloud" flashback sequence.
Practically invincible, and can chop anything in two with his BFS.
- The Gwen Stacy - If it weren't for Gwen Stacy coming 32 years before, Aerith would probably have named this trope.
- Hell Is That Noise - Some of the music is used to good effect. "Those Chosen By The Planet," with its bassline simulating a heartbeat, stands out.
- Heroes Prefer Swords - Cloud and Zack.
- Heroic BSOD - Cloud has issues.
- Heroic Sacrifice - Horrifically subverted by Aerith's death, but played straight by Cait Sith, who sacrifices himself to let the heroes escape the Temple of the Ancients - But because he's a remotely controlled robot, he comes right back not ten minutes later.
- Perhaps the biggest twist of the knife is that Cait Sith's sacrifice comes right before Aerith's death. Since Cait Sith's is treated as no big deal, the real death of Aerith is that much more shocking.
- Zack Fair also gets one at the end of Crisis Core (You Should Know This Already), but his is supremely more awesome than any other, since he gets to massacre an entire army on his own before finally being killed (and he knew it would happen, so...).
- Somewhat of a RetCon since in the original game, Zack runs off screen for only a few seconds before he is shot dead by a total of three Shinra soldiers, rather than an army like in Crisis Core.
- High Octane Nightmare Fuel - The various encounters with Jenova, any scenes that include the songs "Trail of Blood" and "Those Chosen by the Planet", Yin-Yang, Who Am I, ect.
- Geostigma is nasty enough in the original release of Advent Children; Advent Children Complete, and the "On The Way To A Smile" OAV, make its terminal stage (and corpses affected with it) absolutely terrifying.
- Plus the fact that Materia is essentially the souls of everything you've killed over the course of the game.
- Materia is a natural byproduct that appears in areas rich in lifestream, but mako is basically a spiritual Human Resources to power your light bulb.
- Highly Visible Ninja - Yuffie.
- Hollywood Nerd - Every female scientist in the franchise.
- How Do You Like Them Apples - Genesis and his Banora apple in Crisis Core.
- I Just Want To Be Badass - Cloud Strife is a deconstruction of this.
- I Knew It: The unnamed aquatic WEAPON that attacks Junon at the start of Disc 2 was dubbed the Sapphire WEAPON by fans and was later confirmed to be true by Word Of God.
- Improbable Weapon User - Cait Sith's megaphones and Red XIII's headpieces. They somehow boost attack, though they aren't used directly.
- Inevitable Tournament
- Infinity Plus One Sword - Every character save Aerith has an ultimate weapon that has eight linked Materia slots and provides additional combat benefits. For instance, Cloud's Ultima Weapon and Cait Sith's HP Shout gain strength when their HP is high.
- Aerith gets hers much earlier (for obvious reasons), but it has only seven linked Materia Slots.
- The downside is that these weapons have zero materia growth, but by the time you get most of them, your Materia won't have much growing left to do anyway.
- In addition to the obvious power of the various Infinity Plus One Swords, they all have some trick to maxing out damage. Cloud's Ultima Weapon does more damage if his HP is high. Barret's Missing Score does more damage based on how much mastered materia he has equipped on it. Tifa's Premium Heart does more damage if limit gauge is high. And so on.
- Intellectual Animal - Red XIII
- Interface Spoiler - The stores sell weapons for party members you haven't discovered yet, or may never get at all.
- It Got Worse - part of the Gainax Ending. Meteor is here, but "Holy," the spell Aerith conjured to protect the Planet, has also arrived to counter it. However, Bugenhagen told us (30-40 hours ago) that Holy protects the Planet from anything threatening it-and we mean "anything". Which is why Holy allies with Meteor and starts tearing up. (Fortunately, Aerith has a Big Damn Heroes moment already planned.)
- It Was His Sled - Aerith dies.
- I Want My Beloved To Be Happy - Vincent, almost word for word
- Jerk With A Heart Of Gold - Cid. Now sit down and drink your goddamn TEA.
- Kaiju - The Weapons.
- Karma Houdini - Rufus
- Debatable, considering he nearly gets killed by the one WEAPON, then gets Geostigma, and spends the rest of the Compilation as The Atoner.
- Palmer also survives the game, but because he's so inconsequential he never appears again in either the sequels or prequels.
- Kill Sat - Barret's "Satellite Beam" Level 3 Limit Break
- Kill The Cutie - Do we need to say it again? *
Aerith dies.
- Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear - During the Nibelheim flashback, it's possible for Cloud to sneak into Tifa's house and rifle through her drawers and find "orthopaedic underwear." This sequence is happening under the framing device that Cloud is actually narrating everything he does in the flashback to his companions, and Tifa buts in at this point and yells at him for revealing this. Then again, this never actually happened, so Tifa is knowingly getting upset over a completely false memory.
- Large Ham: Several, including Barret and a few of Shin Ra's higher-up employees.
- Last Of His Kind - Aerith is last of the Ancients.
- Lens Flare - Advent Children. And how.
- It's also used in the game. Remember the Mount Nibel scenes?
- Let Them Die Happy - Kadaj's death
- Limit Break - The originals!
- Not quite — Final Fantasy VI had one per character, since they randomly replaced an attack roughly 1 out of 20 attacks, and only when your character was in critical HP. They weren't actually called Limit Breaks; in fact, they were never referred to in the manual at all, and were only given a passing mention in the game itself.
- Littlest Cancer Patient - And How! The Hundreds, possibly thousands of children battling Geostigma around the world in Advent Children.
- Losing The Team Spirit: Aerith's death, of course
- Love It Or Hate It: Many Final Fantasy fans love it for it being their "first RPG", bringing the RPG genre into the mainstream, or for other reasons. Other Final Fantasy fans hate it for ruining the franchise by making it popular, or drastically changing some of the traditions the Final Fantasy series kept.
- Mac Guffin Delivery Service - Cloud, under Sephiroth's control, does this multiple times during the plot.
- Mad Scientist - Hojo, oh god Hojo.
- Magitek - Mako power
- Malevolent Architecture - Only an asshole like President Shinra would design a city with built-in self-destruct mechanisms (the "Emergency Plate Release System") tucked away beneath everyones' feet.
- Mama Bear - Tifa in Advent Children Complete.
- May Contain Evil - Shin Ra's mako reactors.
- Matchmaker Crush - Though competing for Aerith's affection for Cloud, Tifa likes Cloud more when he shows concern for Aerith. Go figure.
- Your Mileage May Vary, you can interpret it as Tifa appreciating the fact that Cloud actually cares about anyone at all, and in the Wall Market mission, that he remembered to rescue a girl from getting raped. Aerith, on the other hand, loses affection for Cloud when he shows concern for Tifa if put in the exact same situation.
- Meaningful Name - Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockheart, and Cid Highwind. Then there's the painfully obvious theme naming (Sephiroth, Jenova = Sephirot, Jehovah).
- Mega Corp - Shinra Inc.
- Memetic Mutation - "Advent Children is the BEST CUTSCENE EVER!!"
- Mind Screw - thanks in part to the Blind Idiot Translation.
- Mood Whiplash - A non-plot related example, also due to translation issues: "Beacause you're a puppet."
- There's a little bit of this considering the next thing you do after Aerith dies is go snowboarding.
- More Dakka - Barret's "Ungarmax" Level 3 Limit Break. Also what Shinra does to the Mako Cannon near the end of Disc 2.
- Mordor - Midgar. A large expance of polluted wasteland surrounds the city, and the closer you get to the city limits, the greyer and gloomier the sky and colors become. Inside the city, the sky is often incredibly dark and depressing, and this can all be connected to the Mako Reacors and the fallout and smog they generate. Junon isn't much better, as the waters nearby are lifeless, discolored, and dark due to the abundant pollution.
- Most Wonderful Sound - Ultima spell.
- Muscles Are Meaningless - Tifa
- My Death Is Just The Beginning - Both Aerith and Sephiroth pull this off, furthering their own objectives by returning to The Lifestream after their deaths. By merging with the Lifestream, Aerith was able to directly control Holy and passively aid her allies (as seen in Advent Children), while Sephiroth was able to reach out and infect people with Geostigma in an effort to eventually corrupt the Lifestream.
- Mysterious Waif - Aerith
- Nakama - Cloud originally viewed Zack as his closest friend, but that grows to encompass all of AVALANCHE as he begins to open himself up.
- Mythology Gag: Like all the other Final Fantasy games, there are several. Among others, Cid isn't the first dragoon named "Highwind".
- No Biochemical Barriers - Jenova, an alien lifeform from who-knows-where, can infect humanoids without a problem. Hojo also seems to think that he can breed Aerith and Red XIII, though his concept of "breeding" seems to be "let the big hairy monster claw her to death" if the scene in the game is any indication.
- On the other hand, this can move into Nightmare Fuel very fast depending on if you've run across animal/human relation sites on the internet. Would you like some brain bleach to go with that Squick?
- No Export For You - Before Crisis, particularly annoying because it's almost universally agreed by reviewers to be the highest quality cell phone game of all time.
- Then again, its plotline is really boring...
- Not Quite Dead - Several individuals supposedly killed in the original game are retconned back to life in the sequels.
- The Obi Wrong: Though Barret is the leader of AVALANCHE and is giving Cloud orders, circumstances force him under Cloud's leadership instead.
- Older Than They Look: Vincent and Lucrecia are around sixty, but thanks to Body Horror experiments and hibernation, they look as though they're still late-twenties, with Lucrecia looking about the same age as her own son. Shelke is the same age as Yuffie, but her body is locked at nine years old after her Super Soldier treatment.
- Ominous Latin Chanting "Estuans interius, ira vehementi, Sephiroth! Noli manere, manere in memoria, nole manere, manere in memoria, Sephiroth!"
- Omnicidal Maniac - Sephiroth's plan involves leveling the planet with a massive meteorite.
- One Nation Under Copyright - The Shinra Electric Power Company.
- Only One Name - Many characters have been given last (or first) names by way of Retcon, but a few notable exceptions till remain: Professor Hojo, President Shinra, Scarlet, Heidegger, Palmer, Tseng, Rude, Reno, and Elena.
- Optional Party Member - Yuffie, Vincent
- Our Giants Are Bigger - The WEAPONS. The Ultima WEAPON alone is shown to be at least three times the size of the Highwind.
- Outswing The Fireball - during the escape from Sector 7.
- Overly Long Fighting Animation - All of the summons. One Winged Angel!Sephiroth's ultimate attack, "Supernova", takes this beyond ridiculous levels.
- Painting The Fourth Wall: Done in Advent Children, right after Tifa (seemingly) defeats Loz, the classic Final Fantsy victory chime starts playing. However a few seconds later it is revealed to coming from Loz's cellphone.
- Party In My Pocket: Lampshaded when Cloud tries to stop Cait Sith from joining the party.
- Pieta Plagiarism
- Player Punch: Walk with the Planet, Aerith.
- Plotline Death: Say it with us: Aerith.
- Pointless Doomsday Device - Seriously, why would the Cetra, friends to all living things, create a materia designed to destroy the world that that birthed them?
- There is naturally occurring Materia, to be fair, but it's never said whether the Black Materia came about this way, or much at all about its creation, come to that.
- The Black Materia may have been created as a last resort for the King of vermin, like Jenova.
- Porting Disaster - The PC port of FFVII, unless you had one of the very few graphics cards with all the necessary technical features. Thought to be fair while the music quality was terrible, it had a much better English translation compared to the Playstation version.
- So beloved is the game that there are literally dozens of patches created to make the game run correctly on modern systems.
- Powers As Programs - Materia.
- Power Perversion Potential - Materia like Transform, Manipulate, and Time. Not to mention Sephiroth and Vincent's shapeshifting abilities.
- Pow Zap Wham Cam - Used in Junon and Shin-Ra Mansion.
- Precision Guided Boomerang - Yuffie's entire contribution to Advent Children is having a flashy shuriken to throw around.
- In one of Advent Children Complete's altered scenes Cloud throws two of his swords as boomerangs. One comes back quite soon. The other one he catches about 10 seconds later, still in mid-flight, using the sword he was already holding. The laws of physics wept, before getting kicked to the curb.
- Pre Meeting - Cloud meeting the flower girl.
- Product Placement - The Panasonic P900i V cellphone in Advent Children.
- Psychopathic Manchild - Kadaj, though he is rather young. And Loz, who fits the description a little better.
- Psycho Prototype - Sephiroth, of course.
- Redemption Demotion - Rude and Reno, who were actually competent in FF 7, are reduced to comic relief in FFAC now that they've had their Heel Face Turn. Then again, they still put up a good fight against Loz and Yazoo.
- Redemption In The Rain - Kadaj gets this. Loz and Yazoo just get blown up in the rain.
- Relationship Values - Though most people either end up with Tifa or Aerith, it's possible to get either Barret or Yuffie to accompany Cloud on the Gold Saucer date.
- Role Playing Game
- Rule Of Cool - Advent Children. Every. Single. Fight scene. The production team even admitted that this was the only rule they followed in making the movie.
- Save Scumming - Chocobo breeding. Even if you've got all the qualities and colors set up right, there's still random chance in getting any of them to have the right gender.
- Scary Black Man - Barret.
- Scenery Gorn - Welcome to Midgar. It sucks and we're going to spend a lot of time showing you.
- The Scrappy - Cait Sith and Yuffie.
- Scripted Battle - The final battle.
- Seinfeld Is Unfunny - The game created, popularized, or deconstructed many RPG tropes and conventions that see popular (over)use today, but people who weren't there to experience the game at launch tend to see it as a dated Cliche Storm.
- Sequential Boss - Sephiroth and Hojo.
- Sequelitis - A common complaint regarding the Compilation titles, particularly Dirge Of Cerberus.
- Shifting Sand Land - The Corel Prison.
- Ship Tease - Although, at least in recent years, the game itself certainly complicates matters, not least by including possible date sequences with Aerith, Tifa, Yuffie... and Barret.
- Ship To Ship Combat - The game came out in 1997. Twelve years later, there are still websites, forums, and furious debates dedicated to saying Cloud should be with Aerith rather than Tifa.
- Shout Out - Biggs and Wedge.
- Also, the motorcycle sequence.
- Also, the Type-D magma-diver equipment in the Gold Saucer trophy room.
- Shin-Ra Mansion, Vincent, and Lucretia. Someone at Squeenix obviously has a fondness for Edgar Allan Poe. There's a monster with a giant bladed pendulum for a lower body that swings from a chain in the mansion. Both Vincent and Lucretia are essentially Buried Alive and have a bad case of Love Hurts, tropes that Poe was fond of. Vincent was named after Vincent Price, who was in just about every movie ever based on one of Edgar Allen Poe's works.
- The Loveless posters in the opening movie.
- Sephiroth's Out Of The Inferno scene may well be a tribute to a certain scene from The Usual Suspects. There are certain similarities to both Keyser Söze and Sephiroth in these scenes, since they both end up being really evil afterwards.
- Vincent's Hellmasker transformation wears a hockey mask and wields a chainsaw. It's even a developer shoutout to Edgar from FFVI.
- In Wutai, you can obtain the Yoshiyuki katana for cloud , which powers up when both of your allies are dead.
- Single Stroke Battle - Odin.
- Slap On The Wrist Nuke - Many a summon, and Sephiroth's solar system shattering attack.
- Soap Opera Disease/Incurable Cough Of Death Geostigma. A Genetic disease born of Sephiroth's hatred after dissolving into the lifestream but not dissipating. In Advent Children Complete, Vincent basically describes it as Magical AIDS.
- Sorting Algorithm Of Deadness - Kind of a weird one.
- Tseng—slashed to hell and left for dead: survived.
- Rufus—standing at ground zero as an energy blast from a 500ft tall monster explodes in his face: survived.
- Palmer—hit by a truck: survived.
- Aerith—impaled on a ridiculously long katana: dead.
- Scarlet & Heidegger—riding in a stupidly-named Giant Mecha as it blows up: hilariously dead.
- Hojo—injected Jenova cells into his body and utterly thrashed by the protagonists: Oh shi-
- Socketed Equipment
- Spell My Name With An S - You could probably power several continents with the sheer energy spent on debating whether to use "Aerith" or "Aeris". As of recent releases (such as Crisis Core and Kingdom Hearts), "Aerith" has become the canon spelling.
- Sphere Of Power - In this case, Materia.
- Spirit Advisor - Aerith in Advent Children and Zack as well in Advent Children Complete.
- Sprite Polygon Mix - Square's first foray into this style of gaming.
- Squick - Hojo trying to breed Aerith and Red XIII.
- Staff Chick - Aerith
- Starfish Character - Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo each represent different aspects of Sephiroth. Don't ask how Kadaj alone managed to turn back into Sephiroth...
- All three of them were originally going to turn back into Sephiroth but the producers decided it would look too Narmy.
- Sticks To The Back - Cloud's BFS.
- Almost certainly due to graphical limitations at the time; Advent Children shows quite clearly that he uses a sheath/holster.
- Working from Crisis Core, SOLDIER troops are fitted with Magnetic holsters for their swords. you can see the magnet plate on the back.
- And yet, with a magnet strong enough to hold up a BFS, SOLDIER backs do not stick to the seemingly all-metal walls of the Shin Ra Building. Or anything else metal.
- Maybe it's an electro-magnet with a built in proximity sensor for the sword?
- If the magnetic holster is calibrated to be just a little more powerful than what is required to hold a sword on their back (most swords weigh 5 pounds or less, though it can be argued these aren't normal swords), then it wouldn't have nearly enough power to hold a full-grown man to the wall. Once they were an inch or two away from the wall, since magnets lose strength exponentially with distance, they wouldn't even feel a tug.
- Still The Leader
- Storming The Castle
- Swiss Army Appendage - Barret.
- Swiss Army Weapon - Barret and Yuffie, during a couple of their Limit Breaks with certain weapons...
- Tear Jerker - You know the scene.
- Tech Points - Materia have a separate EXP scale to the characters. To complicate things, some equipment offers double or even triple Materia growth.
- Technicolor Death
- The Battle Didnt Count - Usually happens whenever a Shinra exec. is fought, but it's most visible at the end of Disc Three if you chose to fight Rude, Reno, and Elena rather than just let them walk. They survive anyway and even go on to Heel Face Turn in the later instalments of the Compilation, so just go ahead and kick their asses for the hell of it, it doesn't really count and you can steal some pretty sweet equipment from them that would otherwise be Lost Forever.
- That One Level - Climbing the Gaea Cliffs to reach the Northern Crater.
- That One Sidequest - Most people will be sent into shiverfits just by mentioning the Emerald Weapon.
- There Are No Therapists - Emotionally disturbed mercenary? Petty thief? Serial bomber? Body Horror victim? Multiple victims of kidnapping and Parental Abandonment? Nope, no problems here!
- Thirty Second Blackout - Firing the Sister Ray.
- Together In Death - Aerith and Zack.
- Those Two Guys - Biggs and Wedge of AVALANCHE. Throw Jessie in, and they become Those Two Guys And A Girl. Later Rude, Reno, and Elena fill that role. Reno and Rude by them selves are a good example in The Movie.
- Transformation Trauma - Vincent.
- Trauma Conga Line - Holy crap, Denzel. The "On The Way To A Smile" novella and OAV spares him no suffering.
- Let's not forget the other novellas for Barret, Yuffie, and Red XIII.
- And, of course, Cloud himself.
- Tykebomb - Sephiroth and Kadaj.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change - The bike, snowboarding and submarine battle sequences. These are eventually unlocked as minigames in the Gold Saucer.) Also Fort Condor.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment - Sephiroth's sword Masamune is explicitly stated to be a weapon only he can use. At one point, the team sees the sword sticking out of the corpse of President Shinra, but they don't take it, presumably for this reason. In the Last Order anime's recreation of the Nibelheim scene, Tifa attempts to use this weapon to slash Sephiroth and fails for this reason, though this was not present in Crisis Core's version of the same scene.
- To be more accurate, we don't see the scene in Crisis Core. Whether this is due to Retcon (putting it after Zack gets his ass kicked but before Cloud shows up), or just because the developers weren't paying attention is up for debate.
- Uncle Tomfoolery: Why no Squaresoft, not all black people are like Mr. T
sadly.
- Urban Legend Of Zelda - An ever-rumored quest to bring back Aerith. Discussed in more detail on the Heroic Sacrifice entry.
- Vasquez Always Dies: Played straight or inverted, depending on your prespective
- Vice City: Midgar. The Wall Market is a really sleazy red-lights district owned by a wealthy pervert, and muggers can be encountered in Sector 5. Other than that, crime isn't really encountered.
- Video Game 3D Leap
- Welcome Back Traitor - Yuffie, Cait Sith. The latter is practically the poster child and could have been the Trope Namer were it not for all the other strange characteristics making it impossible to determine just which one we'd be talking about by name drop alone, despite the time span between betrayal and redemption being so short that it might be less "welcome back" and more "actually never even left."
- What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic - Jehovah is the Hebrew God and Sephirot is the attributes God can manifest through. It is no coincidence the antagonists are Jenova and Sephiroth respectively.
- Cloud baptizing the children in Advent Children.
- What The Hell Hero - Cloud gets called out on his morally dubious actions more than once during the game.
- The first occurrence is even 30 minutes into the game.
- And later, Cait Sith calls out the rest of our heroes for their eco-terrorist bombings at the beginning of the game, which caused a couple hundred deaths according to him.
- White Haired Pretty Boy - Lots of 'em.
- Wrestler In All Of Us - Tifa's "Meteodrive" limit break. Rather than a martial arts attack like her other moves, it's a pro wrestling suplex. (Sheer drop brainbuster, to be precise)
- You Are Number Six - Red XIII
- You Blockhead - It turns out Cid's assistant isn't as responsible for his crushed dream as he thought.
- You Should Know This Already
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