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Trivia / Final Fantasy VII

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  • Ascended Fanon: Sephiroth's signature black wing never appeared in the original game. While he is the original "One-Winged Angel", and sports a black wing in his final form, he never had any wings in his human form. Said wing made its first appearance in Kingdom Hearts. It seems to have proven popular with (most of) the fanbase, though, since it appeared in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and pretty much every game Sephiroth's made a cameo in since.
  • Beam Me Up, Scotty!: Sephiroth's final form was never called "One Winged Angel". The name of the track playing during the boss fight was. The final form is referred to as Safer Sephiroth by the game's in-battle tip bar. This may be a bit of poor translation, as Sephiroth's final form resembles an angel, or "seraph." His name could also be a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for "book," "sefer," given Sephiroth's name coming from Kabbalah.
  • Breakthrough Hit: If Final Fantasy made Square a big name in Japan, this game made Square a big name all over the world. It also served as Tetsuya Nomura's breakthrough.
  • Defictionalization: In 2014, Square Enix started up a subsidiary company to explore the potential applications and development of "cloud" gaming platforms. They named it "Shinra Technologies, Inc." The real-life company even uses a variant of the in-universe Shinra logo.
  • Development Gag: Ace Chocobo racer Joe is most likely named after a cut character known as "Hot-Blooded Detective Joe", who was a major character in an earlier version of the story.
  • Dueling Works:
  • Fan Translation: There have been several attempts from fans to bring the translation of the game up to par with modern Final Fantasy translations as well as make the text much clearer than before. This is one example.
  • Fountain of Expies:
    • Sephiroth is one of the Trope Codifiers of the White Hair, Black Heart character type, and has numerous Expies in Square-Enix titles alone.
    • Cloud Strife has been imitated so many times that JRPG protagonists in general have been stereotyped as angsty, amnesiac Bishōnen with Anime Hair and impractical swords. In fact, almost every subsequent Final Fantasy protagonist that came after this game is either directly based off of Cloud or is an intentional aversion of his character.
  • Killer App:
    • This is the game that elevated the PlayStation into a must-have console and cemented Sony as a major player in the gaming world.
    • Final Fantasy VII is regularly pointed to as the game which led discs to replace cartridges as the preferred format for console game developers.
    • Prior to the game's release, JRPGs often performed poorly in western markets and many game companies, including Square themselves, regularly avoided localizing them. The runaway success of VII greatly vitalized the genre's popularity worldwide.
  • Moved to the Next Console: Development for the game originally started on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but was postponed in favor of working on Chrono Trigger. Once that game was released, Square revisited the project on the Nintendo 64, until frustrations with Nintendo's use of cartridges on the system (rather than the more capable Compact Disc format) combined with longstanding issues with the company's licensing and censorship policies motivated the developers to shift focus to the PlayStation, on which it would ultimately release.
  • Multi-Disc Work: Final Fantasy VII is split into three discs on the PS1. The first PC port of the game was split into four.
  • Network to the Rescue: Not only did Sony help cover the costs for the game, but they also handled the North American distribution (Square didn't have an American distributor at the time, having previously relied on Nintendo for that department).
  • No Dub for You: When Last Order was finally released in North America and Europe in the collector's edition of Advent Children, it was subtitled only. This is ironic, since Last Order is traditionally animated while Advent Children is CG, which is much harder to dub due to the more detailed lip movements resulting in Lip Lock.
  • 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, even as of The New '10s. There may yet be hope now that Square has ported two cellphone projects to other platforms explicitly to ensure Western release, but this one remains a curious omission.
  • The Other Darrin:
  • Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
    • There has been a rumor persisting among fans ever since the game first released, which states that the reason Aerith dies at the end of the first part and the player is never able to bring her back is due to Hironobu Sakaguchi's mom passing away during the game's development, which caused him to want to portray that sense of loss in the game's narrative. While Sakaguchi's mother did die during the production of a mainline Final Fantasy game, it was during development of Final Fantasy III, not VII. This event did indeed have an influence on that particular game's narrative, but Aerith's death in VII was completely unrelated. Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura wanted to have a main character die during the course of the game since very early in development, with the intention of having the rest of the cast have to deal with their loss, and Aerith was eventually chosen for this part. Sakaguchi was not really involved with the writing on Final Fantasy VII.
    • Naturally, after it was announced that the game would be a PlayStation exclusive, there were persistent rumors among Nintendo loyalists that the game would eventually be ported to the Nintendo 64. In fact, throughout pretty much the entirety of The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, gaming forums were regularly flooded with fake previews, videos, etc. for the Nintendo 64 version of FF7. This was all despite Square repeatedly stating that a Nintendo 64 version would've been literally impossible to make, due to the system's cartridge unit. Plus, at this time Square and Nintendo were on very bad terms, due to the latter company's censorship policies, choice of cartridges rather than CD's for the N64, etc. Leading Square to not release anything on a Nintendo console until 2003, by which point the N64/Playstation era of console gaming was long gone.
  • Reality Subtext: There are some circulating rumors that the reasoning for Zack's anti-climatic death in the original compared to a valiant Last Stand in Crisis Core was because the mother of Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the series, died during the game's production. This in turn made him pursue "human deaths", meaning no Last Stands or any parting words. Keep in mind that despite what many people think, Sakaguchi did not actually direct or do much writing for the game. This was, however, stated by the actual director Yoshinori Kitase, to be the intent behind Aerith's death.
  • Referenced by...:
    • Ark has a chase scene where the two leads hijacks a gigantic mecha resembling the Guard Scorpion.
    • In Wrestle Wrestle Spoony is discussing all the moves done in a match, and then starts naming moves in this game, like Omnislash and Knights of the Round.
    • In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, the Partnership Towers dungeon is basically one big reference to this game’s Shinra Headquarters, including the option to skip part of it by taking the stairs.
    • In the piviv version of Chapter 11 of What If I Know Too Many Reasons I Can Be Strong?, Tanjiro kills Nakime the same way Sephiroth does to Aerith. Doma tells him afterward, "[she] will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry... or get angry... What about me... what are I supposed to do? What about my pain?".
    • A Skylit Drive makes a bunch of references to Final Fantasy in general in their music, but they seem particularly fond of VII and X. To note, their second album Wires...and the Concept of Breathing has song titles such as Knights of the Round, and This Isn't The End referencing the summon and a line from Aerith respectively. But All it Takes For Your Dreams to Come True takes the cake. The entire song is about the events of the game and the title is taken from a speech Rufus delivers to Cloud during their showdown in Disc One:
    “All it takes for your dreams to come true is a little money.”
    • There's a metalcore band called Aerith. They released a song in 2020 called For The Fallen, which is about the relationship between Aerith and Zack. The cover art is flowers with a buster sword.
    • Veil of Maya has a song called Aeris.
    • The songs Masamune and Ragnarok by Periphery were both named after weapons used by Sephiroth and Cloud, respectively.
    • The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV: In cutscenes, Crow will sometimes say Cloud's famous line "Let's mosey" when it's time to get moving.
    • Destroy All Humankind. They Can't Be Regenerated.: FF7 is mentioned constantly throughout the manga, as the game indirectly introduced Hajime and Kurushima to Magic: The Gathering and inspired them to pick the sorcerer names Cloud and Zack.
    • Summer Time Rendering: Masahito discusses his love for JRPGs with Shinpei, in particular FF7 and its upcoming remake. Winds up being thematically relevant immediately afterwards when it's revealed that Hiruko and Shide are very similar to JENOVA and Sephiroth in origin and motivation respectively as well as the fact that Shadow Ushio is killed by Shide in a very similar manner to Aerith.
  • Sequel in Another Medium: The game received a direct sequel in the form of an animated film, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, not to mention the various sequels and prequels, one of which was an anime short titled Before Crisis.
  • Shout-Out: Loveless is named after My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus. You can actually see the band's name on one of the posters for it in an FMV.
  • Throw It In!: The battle against JENOVA Life following Aerith's death was not supposed to play Aerith's theme. However, because of a bug, the typical JENOVA music didn't play and Aerith's theme continued playing, and the developers liked it so much, it was programmed in more intentionally.
  • Trolling Creator: Square revealed in December 2014 that the game would finally come to the PS4, only to reveal (to the disappointment of everyone watching) that it was simply the PC version being ported. Then in E3 2015, the actual remake was finally unveiled to the public - and they revealed it had also been in the works for eighteen months. Dammit Square.
  • Urban Legend of Zelda:
    • Rumors abounded for years about ways to bring Aerith back from the dead. One of the most popular back in the day stated that you could retrieve the White Materia from the pool in the ancient city and use it to revive her. Another popular rumor says that if you were really mean to Aerith but nice to Tifa, then Tifa would die instead. Before the days of the internet and data mining, rumors like this caught a lot of traction. Also not helping is that if you go back to the Sector 7 church (after getting the Midgar key) where you met Aerith, you can see her 'ghost' make a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance above the flowerbed.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The infamous Ted Woolsey was approached about translating VII into English, but he left Square and struck out on his own. In an interview 10 years after the fact, he wryly noted that this was right before Square really blew up, and all the employees bought stock.
    • Despite being one of the defining games of the PS1 era, it was originally intended to be released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and later the Nintendo 64. Square had a long-standing relationship with Nintendo, but it went sour after Square grew frustrated with Nintendo's censorship policies, their decision to scrap the SNES CD-ROM, and especially their steadfast refusal to switch from cartridges to CD technology with the N64. This has since come full-circle with the rerelease on the cartridge-based Nintendo Switch.
    • Square also considered developing the game for the Sega Saturn and Microsoft Windows (onto which it would later be ported); had they picked the Saturn, it would've never seen release in the United States thanks to Bernie Stolar's fierce anti-RPG bias in his management of the console's US presence.
    • The earliest SNES-oriented drafts of the game kept up the 2D sprite art of previous titles, fitting the limitations of the console. When the project shifted focus to the N64, Square were stuck between whether to keep the 2D approach or shift to a riskier polygonal 3D direction; they ultimately chose the latter.
    • Before becoming the Final Fantasy VII that everyone now knows, the game underwent two rejected proposals:
      • According to legend (referenced extensively online, but apparently missing magazine scans/transcriptions of those interviews), Hironobu Sakaguchi's original pitch for Final Fantasy VII was a Detective Drama taking place in modern-day New York City. Obviously, these segments were incorporated into the first few hours of the game, followed by a more traditional RPG world (Overworld Not to Scale) once the party leaves Midgar. Eventually, Sakaguchi had his way and got his NYC gumshoe plot made in the form of Parasite Eve, starring a gender-flipped Cloud, to boot.
      • More well-known, however, is that Square employee Tetsuya Takahashi made a proposal for Final Fantasy VII that consisted of an ambitious, sprawling story set spanning ten thousand years, featured heavy religious symbolism from Gnosticism, and got more psychological than Final Fantasy VII did, taking influence from the works of Jung and Freud. It was rejected by Square for being too dark even by the standards of Final Fantasy, but was allowed to be developed as its own thing - Xenogears.
    • Cloud turning out be a copy of the original Cloud, who would occasionally speak through him. In the final product, Sephiroth is lying about Cloud's clone origins, whereas he was originally planned to have been telling the truth.
    • At the end of Disc 2, if Cloud's affection points with Tifa are high enough, the two of them will spend the night together underneath the Highwind, with the implication that they had sex. This was toned down significantly from what was originally planned: the game would have cut to a scene of Cloud and Tifa exiting the Chocobo Stable, looking disheveled and nervously looking around to see if anyone had spotted them.
    • Red XIII had an entire subplot based around him cut from the game. He was going to have his own Quirky Miniboss Squad of feline clones created by Hojo who would routinely fight the party.
    • Yuffie also had a major character-based subplot cut from the game due to time constraints, in which she was a former SOLDIER hired by Shinra to kill Sephiroth & Cloud. She was also intended to be 25 years old, nine years older than she turned out to be in the final game.
    • Aerith's death was originally supposed to happen at the Northern Crater instead of the Lost City.
    • Believe it or not, a significant chunk of the Honeybee Inn was left on the cutting room floor. Probably because the final product was already pushing things.
    • Sephiroth and Aerith being former lovers, or possibly brother and sister.
    • Most interesting is the idea that "Jenova" would be the term for a certain aspect of humans which, when "awakened" with Mako, endows them magical abilities. (Again, this was later incorporated into Parasite Eve with its power-hungry mitochondria.) Sephiroth's "Jenova" powers would be heightened, and his madness caused by over-exposure to Mako. In other words, Sephiroth could have ended up being a substitute for Kefka.
    • Sephiroth was at one point meant to be a Child by Rape, with his conception and the subsequent experiments being an explicit case of Medical Rape and Impregnate. The final product made the story more ambiguous, with the Compilation eventually revealing that his mother, Lucrecia, was a willing participant.
    • In Kalm, you can find the Peacemaker, a weapon for Vincent, long before the player actually meets him in Nibelhiem. Usually, the player doesn't find new weapons for a character until at least the first town after recruitment. This has led some to believe that the player was supposed to encounter Vincent much earlier in the game.
      • Early concepts of Vincent had him wielding a scythe instead of a handgun. His profession changed from horror researcher to chemist, to Film Noir-style detective who heavily resembled Agent Fox Mulder, and finally the ex-Turk turned undead gunslinger we know today. The detective plot would have kept him, the party, and even the player in the dark about his shapeshifting powers. His various forms would carry over into the Field maps and cutscenes.
      • Vincent has a lot of WCHB entries, mainly because his character is half-finished. Both he and Yuffie were supposed to be mandatory party members, but deadlines got in the way, so they were made optional instead. While Yuffie at least got some subplots, Vincent's arc was mostly left out, leaving just a few story snippets behind i.e. the parts which shed light on Sephiroth's origins. It's possible this is why his stats are so low; as mentioned above, his arc was supposed to revolve around awakening his powers.
    • A plan which was discarded very late in development involved the Midgar air raid towards the end of Disc 2. When the party parachutes from the airship into the city, anyone you did not pick for your main party would have been killed off in the ensuing chaos. The dev team decided that this was a little bit too bleak and scrapped the idea.
    • Jenova originally had a different battle theme, which would later be reused as the Final Boss theme of Final Fantasy VIII: "The Extreme". Additionally, Edea from the same game was originally intended and designed for Final Fantasy VII, possibly as a humanoid (or Cetra) version of Jenova. Edea's battle theme even has bits of VII's overworld theme in it.
    • Aerith originally was not supposed to die, and was implemented at Nomura's suggestion. This decision was made very early in development, when Cloud, Aerith, and Barret were the only party members to have been designed.
    • The party members were all originally supposed to have official job titles listed, as had been the case in Final Fantasy IV. For example, Tifa was listed as a Shooter (as in the martial art shootfighting), while Aerith was labeled a Geomancer.
    • Angel Studios (Now Rockstar San Diego) originally wanted to port this game to the Nintendo 64 before they went with Resident Evil 2.
    • Aerith was originally conceived as a Geomancer back when VII had a job system; remnants of this can still be seen in her Cetra heritage and her Limit Breaks that manifest as drawing power from the earth.

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