Discussion YMMV / FinalFantasyVII

Edit Request: Id like to have these parts added:

• Catharsis Factor:
  • As anticlimatic (and shocking) as it is to have President Shinra abruptly killed off by Sephiroth early on, its also very fitting that he faced such an abrupt, undignified end, as he was a complete slimeball who was perfectly willing to suck the planets life force dry for his own gain and gave the order to murder the entire population of Sector 7 in an attempt to bring down AVALANCHE.
  • After directly causing everything bad that happens throughout the game, destroying countless lives with ambitions to take more, and going out of his way to be as remorseless, repulsive and despicable of a human being as possible, the battle against Professor Hojo/Helletic Hojo in Midgar which results in his well-earned defeat and DEATH is immensely satisfying. Doubly so if you fight him with Vincent in your party, as Hojo being brought down by a man whose life (and the life of his former lover) he personally ruined and used as a personal guinea pig is a truly delicious case of "What goes around comes around". The tie-in novel The Girl Who Travels the Planet retroactively added an extra cherry on top of all this by revealing that due to his cruel experiments and all around lack of humanity, his soul can never enter the Lifestream.
• Common Knowledge: There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding the games plot points, lore and characterization, which often stems from the games poor 1997 localization. See here for further details. Some of the more egregious examples include the following:
  • Sephiroth is commonly interpreted by western players as being an unhinged, obsessive killer...except its more complicated than that, which was much more clear in the Japanese version of the game. A major plot point got lost in translation, in that the Japanese script portrayed Sephiroth with a markedly different role and motivations compared to the impression that many English-speaking players were left with. In the original Japanese, Jenova was actually the Big Bad, a Puppeteer Parasite infecting and manipulating Sephiroth. This is why Sephiroth finally sprouts additional limbs and a more alien form in the final battle, which was also supposed to be about removing the Jenova parasite from Sephiroth himself. The latter, incidentally, spends almost the entire game in the Whirlwind maze at the Northern cave, having merged with Jenova's head after Cloud threw the pair of them into the Lifestream at Nibelheim. The "Sephiroth" whom the heroes spend the entirety of Disc 1 pursuing and who does all of the stuff that we remember him for, like the murder of Aerith? That was all Jenova, a Shapeshifter taking on the physical appearance of Sephiroth and trying to unite the various parts of itself at the Northern Crater and kill off the one Ancient who could weaponise Holy Materia to bring it down. During the game's climax, Sephiroth's persona is at the forefront, but it's Jenova's instinct that lives on through him, driving him to destroy. There is a taste of this when the game takes all control away from the player before Aerith's death, only leaving the commands to try and strike her down as Cloud. This is because Shinra injects Jenova cells into its prospective soldiers before then regulating them with Mako, but Cloud's body never took to the treatment—hence the headaches and blackouts. Likewise, the various "clones" encountered throughout the game are actually the former residents of Nibelheim, injected with both Jenova's and Sephiroth's cells and then exposed to Mako energy in an attempt to create duplicates of the latter, though they all failed due to scientific malpractice. Jenova however, keeps trying to control and guide them (including Cloud and the "fake" Sephiroth) towards the Northern Cave so that it can be 'whole' again, thus clarifying that the voice in Cloud's head was Jenova the entire time. All of this is spelled out far more explicitly in the original Japanese text. While this plot point is more or less retained in the English localization, it is barely even noticeable because it's resigned to only two sentences, with Cloud even saying "I'll explain later" only to never do so. Consequently, many if not most English-speaking players were left with the impression that Sephiroth was simply an unhinged sociopath with a God complex whose sole motivation was to destroy the world out of spite, and that Jenova and the various clones seen throughout the game were merely unexplained "tools" in *his* overall plan. Knowing Jenova's true role as the main villain manipulating both Cloud and Sephiroth makes for a far more satisfying ending in every respect when Aerith uses the power of the Lifestream to repel Meteor, alongside the fact that Cloud defeats both Jenova and Sephiroth to protect the Planet. This plot point is further confounded by the fact that Square Enix themselves came out and rejected it in the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega, insisting that Sephiroth was the one in control the entire time, of both himself and Jenova. This only raises more questions than it answers and has many accusing Square Enix of simply making it up in order to appease Sephiroth’s fanbase.
  • Final Fantasy VII is often thought of as one of the games that started the "Killing God" concept in JRPGs. Except Sephiroth isn't a god - and neither is Jenova. They are closer to the Gnostic Demiurge (A figure perceived to be god but not) if anything - Jenova actually has more in common with the monster from The Thing (1982) or Who Goes There? than a god. The fact that Sephiroth's second form is the Trope Namer for One-Winged Angel (complete with Ominous Latin Chanting) and obvious Christian Imagery does help lead to this misconception.
  • Cloud's characterization as "emo" is largely due to the perception that he was. In the game proper, Cloud was a cocky punk who grew into a confident leader at the game's end, and that's after realizing that said "cocky punk" attitude was more of Zack's behavior that Cloud had imprinted onto his own memories. And while Cloud does have some moments of angst in the game (namely about how Sephiroth burned down Cloud's hometown and killed his parents, something anyone would rightly be upset about), the worst of it is after a massive Mind Rape in the Northern Crater that leaves him stuck in a wheelchair, babbling incoherently. And even then, after Tifa helps him snap out of it with a Battle in the Center of the Mind, Cloud stops angsting about everything and focuses on defeating Sephiroth to save the world.
  • Tifa is known as having Gag Boobs and the Most Common Superpower...which is mostly thanks to fan art that depicted her with huge boobs. While Tifa is indeed busty, how big her breasts are in official depictions varies quite significantly Depending on the Artist. For example, her Advent Children design◊ shows her without gag boobs. Even in the original game, her breast size was wildly inconsistent between her field model◊, her combat model◊, her FMV sequence model◊, and even her concept art.
  • You'll often hear people say Aerith is a Hooker with a Heart of Gold (or Compensated Dater) and that this was hidden behind subtext involving flowers. There is absolutely no evidence to back up this idea. She sells flowers, it's really that simple.
  • Everyone knows that Aerith was Incorruptible Pure Pureness while Tifa was a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but a lot of people forget that Tifa was actually quite a Shrinking Violet, and that Aerith once threatened to rip off a mob boss's balls if he didn't talk. This is largely due to a combo of the original games bad english translation removing a lot of her original nuances (Aerith's dialogue was more tomboyish and rough in the Japanese version, while the 1997 translation makes her come off as more playful and cutesy) and the flanderization of Aerith's character over the years. She's lost a lot of her edge and instead become Cloud's innocent Lost Lenore who died a matyr's death. On Tifa's side, she's a Ms. Fanservice who is best known for punching things, so common knowledge is that she's more Hot-Blooded and snappy than she actually is.
  • Contrary to the popular consensus, Cloud and Tifa were not childhood friends when they were growing up in Nibelheim. Both admit at various points throughout the game that they didn't know each other very well at the time, with Cloud having been a loner with a crush on Tifa from afar but who was not a part of her circle of friends, while Tifa didn't pay much attention to Cloud until he invited her out to the water tower and explained that he was leaving to join SOLDIER. The confusion stems from the fact that the Japanese word for "childhood friend" (「幼馴染み」osananajimi) more closely translates to "someone whom you just so happen to have known since childhood," without necessarily implying any close interpersonal connection.
• Signature Scene: The game has many of them, some of them being among the most iconic imagery in video game history.
  • The opening FMV, where a extended starfield fades to Aerith looking at magic sparks coming out of a pipe, followed by a slow zoom out from her to a massive Cyberpunk city, and then back to a train arriving at a station.
  • Cloud crossdressing to infiltrate Don Corneos mansion and save Tifa.
  • The destruction of Sector 7 by Shinra.
  • The scene where AVALANCHE tries to infiltrate Shinra HQ and get captured, only to be freed and then find the place littered with corpses, including the body of President Shinra. Its at that point that the cast and players realize the storys real Big Bad (Sephiroth) is someone far more sinister.
  • The Shinra HQ escape sequence/motorcycle chase.
  • The flashback to Sephiroths descent into madness and subsequent destruction of Nibelheim. Special mention goes to the eerie shot of him standing among the flames with a Psychotic Smirk on his face before walking off into them.
  • The death of Aerith by Sephiroths (actually Jenovas) hand.
  • Clouds mental breakdown in the Northern Crater, and the Omega, Ultima, Ruby and Emerald Weapons being released by Sephiroth.
  • Tifa and Cloud falling into the Lifestream, and the reveal that Cloud was never really part of SOLDIER and was actually remembering things from the point of view of his late friend Zack.
  • The final battle against Safer Sephiroth, particularly the part where Cloud kills him with the Omnislash attack.
  • Knights of the Round and Supernova, mostly due to how insanely long they are.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Zigzagged. The game kicks off with a action packed bombing mission and gives you the meat of the core gameplay off the bat, but it'll take you anywhere between 6 to 8 hours on your first playthrough just to complete the initial Midgar story arc, with the real story of the game (along with access from the massive open world) picking up from there after Sephiroth becomes the true Big Bad by killing President Shinra, with AVALANCHE escaping from Shinra HQ and Midgar afterward. And to put it in perspective just how long of a game this is, the entire prologue doesn't even take up one third of the time it takes to complete the games first disc (of three)!
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In general, the animation in the games FM Vs has not aged gracefully at all in the decades following its release. It was Squares first attempt at CG animation, and it shows. The higher resolution character models have noticable seams in their joints (as they were made out of NURBS models instead of box-modeling them like todays meshes), the characters have poor body mechanics and have no sense of weight in their movement at all, and have stiff, dead-eyed expressions throughout the whole experience. In the opening cutscene when Aerith rises, you can tell the animator just had her float up from the (off-screen) ground because her (non-existent) legs dont bend properly. The scenes that mix in-game models with FMV footage tend to be really dodgy too, with the falling bridge scene from Clouds flashback of climbing Mt. Nibel being a good example of this. Fortunately, Square quickly stepped up their animation game considerably for the sequels and onward.
  • Cutscenes in the game also tend to randomly shift between looking like the low-poly in-game models and the higher quality models of the FM Vs Needless to say, its pretty jarring. As if this werent bad enough already, half of these movies render the characters with realistic proportions, whereas their field models use, by contrast, a Super-Deformed style. So you see Cloud randomly shift between his short, low-polygonal field model with Popeye arms and cube-shaped hands and his detailed CGI rendition that actually matches his character artwork in the middle of cutscenes.
• That One Achievement: The 2019 ports add the "Coming Up All Nines" Achievement/Trophy, which requires the player to collect 99,999,999 Gil. Even if you use every exploit in the book, it is an agonizingly long grind to get even close to that number.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: With that said and done, some of the FM Vs still manage to be effective to this day, such as the haunting scenes where Sephiroth destroys Nibelheim, kills Aerith, Cloud letting Aerith's body drift away into the waters of the Forgotten City, the Weapons being unleashed from the Northern Crater, the Sapphire Weapons assault on Junon, and many of the cinematics in the finale, such as the Holy and Lifestream finally repelling Meteor from the planet.

Edited by Prinzenick

Hilarious in Hindsight: Wedge is part of a group with another character named Jessie. In the Final Fantasy VII Remake, Wedge will be voiced by Walter Jones, who played Badger on Breaking Bad, who was friends with another character named Jessie. Even better, that Jessie was played by Aaron Paul, who would go on to play another Final Fantasy character.

It's been years, can we take the edit lock off now?

Should JENOVA herself be added to Complete Monster (not sure offhand if Complete Monster is just for people or can be applied to actual monsters, too)? Mostly since it's implied her shtick is to come to a planet, destroy it and then move on. At one point I think Ifalna mentions that JENOVA had made the Cetra sick and essentially committed genocide against them for trying to stop her.

Edited by zoopyDoopy

Base Breaker needs to be renamed Base-Breaking Character.

Something.

Edit request: Designated Villain entry should be changed to Designated Evil. The entry speaks about act when the trope is about person ans Shinra had more than enough on-screen villainy to move them away from "designated" teritory. The entry itself would rather qualify as Informed Wrongness if it wasn't for the fact that Materia are basically crystalised souls and memories of the Cetra, which makes not wanting them destroyed like that understandable in normal circumstances. It's not like Cloud's group just didn't want few shiny stones destroyed just because they're pretty, and Shinra damaging the Lifestream was reason behind Shinra-Avalanche conflict in the first place. Of course Meteor was going to destroy the world so any idea that might work is good so it qualifies as Designated Evil.

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Requesting an edit: the Player Punch entry states that Sephiroth killed Aerith near the end of the game, which is untrue; it happens right at the end of disc 1, roughly one-third or halfway into the game.

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I'd like to add this or have it added under Broken Base:

• Some people blame 7 for being the start of the series downfall- although 13 gets more flack for it, this did start the series tradition of being more anime-like and having long cutscenes. Others counter that yes, while it did codify a lot of the tropes that would be used poorly in future games (Again, namely 13), this was a game ahead of its time.
• The announcement at E3 2015 that the game would be getting a HD remastering for the PS 4, after nearly a solid decade of suspicions. Although the overwhelming response was positive (Gametrailer's... reaction, for lack of a better word, becoming memetic within seconds of being shown), some have commented that, partially due to Hype Backlash, and partially because of the above note that the game can be seen as the beginning of Japanese RP Gs becoming more linear, that the game doesn't deserve a remastering.

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The YMMV needs to be proofread, there are quite a number of typos.

Oh look I mispeled somethink. Hide / Show Replies

This needs an edit:

• Matryoshka Object: Slightly inverted. The Black Materia Plot Coupon is contained within the Temple of the Ancients. When the party goes in and discovers it, they discover it is actually a replica of the real thing, and the real

Normally I'd just make a request in the Forum to get it edited, but I don't know for sure what it needs to be edited to (not that far in the game) and I know it's bad form to make a request without knowing precisely what edits to make. Based off the trope, I assume that it needs "Black Materia is inside the replica" added to end, but I'm not 100% sure.

Edited by Larkmarn Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

After staff discussion, this was determined to be needing help for being Zero Context Examples, plus as written Sephiroth is redundant with the Launcher of a Thousand Ships note above. If/when the entry can be rewritten to give some meat to the examples, it can be re-added to the page.

• Memetic Sex God: Zack, Reno and Sephiroth. In Sephiroth's case, if you can think of a character, he has probably been paired with her/him in fanfic.

Can someone please reopen the page? I need to change something. Namely, it was not Word of God that Sephiroth was in control of Jenova, it's actually closer to Shrug of God. I mean, Dissidia 012's museum bio for Sephiroth for FFVII also indicated that Sephiroth to some extent was controlled by Jenova (It referred to him as "an agent of Jenova's will" upon his return), and even some lines from the game would indicate that Sephiroth was to some degree under Jenova's control (mentioning frequently that her plans of ramming Meteor into the Planet are nearing a success as if Jenova was the one who came up with the plan).

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