VII | X | XIV
All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned!
- The most notorious moment was spoiled by a typo. In the pit of despair, Cloud screams out, begging Sephiroth for a justification, berating him for what he did — all this with no small amount of self-hatred, as he had been possessed previously by Sephiroth to kill Aerith himself and only failed to do so because his True Companions called him back. It's incredibly moving until Jenova answers, "Beacause, you are... a puppet." Final Fantasy VII has a Good Bad Translation to start with, but the sheer mood of the scene this is in makes that tiny 'a' jar more than it should.
- Aerith's entire death scene is full of narm, except for the music and the part where the two people in your party besides Cloud pay their last respects to Aerith (right after defeating Jenova LIFE). From impossible sword movement to the pathetic animation to Cloud's nonsensical dialogue, it's all narm, all the time. And right after she's stabbed, the materia falls out of her hair and proceeds to bounce around for a good twenty seconds, and its momentum changes for no reason...
- In that scene, if the player has Vincent in the party in the earliest PC versions, he will do a little dance due to glitchy programming. (The Steam version fixed it.)
- (Un)intentional hilarity oft occurs when a new player attempts to buttonmash Cloud out of the mind control; this invariably results in a great deal of SD pixel hip-thrusting. When Cloud is holding his sword at groin-level... well. And Vincent sucker-punches Cloud with his metal gauntlet to stop the SD pixel hip-thrusting. After seeing Vincent, Mr. Stoic Angsty-for-a-reason, do that, it's virtually impossible to take Aerith's death seriously with tears of laughter rolling down your cheeks.
- The Bloodless Carnage note and gross inconsistency between what does and doesn't kill someone adds to the potential fun and confusion for those who were casually flipping through the story. "So, is she really dead? Are we going on a quest to revive her now? Oh, they just chucked her into the lifestream, and she's not in the party menu screen any more. Guess she's dead." Was probably not the reaction Square was going for.
- When you have to get the submarine for the Huge Materia chase from Junon, you can screw up once and end up having to go for a red submarine instead. The guards are much more lax on this submarine compared to the grey one, and when Cloud encounters a mere guard dog, you can opt to threaten to dognap it to scare it off instead of doing a whole fight. Thus you get to see Cloud of all people shout this:"Shinra dog!! I'm gonna dognap you!!"
- Even on the first submarine, once you clear the control room Cloud suddenly just starts doing a funny little dance as an attempt to highlight that he's got a bit of claustrophobia and motion sickness being in the vessel. And the moment the whole submarine starts to move because a party member accidentally hit the wrong button, Cloud immediately gets over his sickness simply by saying it does feel better to drive than ride.
- Tifa and Scarlet getting into a slap fight. It's just an utterly silly moment that comes completely out of nowhere and spoils the tension of the scene.
- For gamers who have been spoiled by all the high end graphics of today and forgotten how crappy old 3D games looked, the scene is likely to leave you with a good chuckle. Hard to feel sympathetic or sad when the characters all look like this
◊.- The scene in which Mideel is destroyed and then Tifa and the BSDOD-ing Cloud fall into the Lifestream is depicted similarly. It's just as hilariously awkward to see a tiny Tifa running around and pushing Cloud's wheelchair with the most comical Oh, Crap! face possible.
- And when they DO use proper character models, if Tifa's there, expect highly distracting Jiggle Physics from her.
- The abstraction of video game mechanics reaches its zenith with the fight against the Emerald Weapon, where you shift from traversing the underwater trenches with a submarine to your party inexplicably fighting at the bottom of the ocean on-foot, and an Exact Time to Failure where somehow they can hold their breath for precisely ten minutes doing this unless you specifically use the single Materia in the game to circumvent it. Not even debuffs occur, they just suffer Critical Existence Failure the instant that timer expires. Forget Tidus, our cast apparently have partially-functioning gills.
- Super Nova, International version. Sephiroth does destroy the Solar System in the original Japanese version (it's harder to see because the explosion happens so far away); but for the International Version, they not only redid the attack to have much better animation, but they also made the attack incredibly over-the-top, showing the destruction of several planets (with their names in case you don't know what Jupiter looks like), with the Sun being a whopping two feet in front of our heroes before going Super Nova. Oh, and he for some reason decides to spare Mars, Uranus, and Neptune. Making things even worse, while Super Nova can actually kill in the original Japanese release, in the international version it is a Percent Damage Attack— it will never directly kill the party. And it can MISS. A Supernova can miss, despite being two feet from the faces of the party. Convection, Schmonvection at its most Narmful. There is also the fact that Sephiroth can cast it multiple times. Planets reproduce by binary fission in the Final Fantasy VII universe, or so it would seem. Even if you take the destruction of the Solar System as a metaphor, the animation is still way too long for what is effectively an overglorified Demi spell.
- After Cloud comes out of his Heroic BSoD, he gives a speech to his party, and while it's pretty incoherent, the translation pulls itself together for his genuinely inspiring final lines — "I'm... Cloud. The master of my own illusionary world. But I won't live in an illusion any more. I'm going to live my life without pretending." Tifa immediately pipes up — "You're sure messed up, Cloud!" Some friend she is.
- Right before the climax, Cloud tries to give a rousing speech to his party. What does he tell them? "Let's mosey." Certainly intentional, because Cid makes fun of him for not sounding enough like a man.
- "Rate hike! Rate hike! Tra, la, la!" accompanied by a kangaroo impersonation does convey that Palmer is an idiot, but we're probably not supposed to laugh in the middle of a tense plot-advancing scene with our heroes in an air vent spying on the enemy's top brass.
- The burning of Nibelheim is a dramatic scene, that would probably have been a lot more had it not featured a man who looked like Frank Sidebottom. Adding to that, in the previous scene where Cloud confronts Sephiroth in the basement, and Sephiroth gives Cloud a whole "The Reason You Suck" Speech, the impact of what he's said is rather deadened when Sephiroth says he's going to "see [his] mother", and leaves. Although he's probably meant to be running, Sephiroth's running animation (coupled with the strange camera angle) instead makes him look like he's skipping out of the room.
- Sephiroth's last action before running from the Shinra mansion's library? He freakin' chucks a materia at Cloud, then front-flips and flies out of there like Superman! The most badass, menacing, threatening character in the game... committing a meaningless act of violence that would fit right in during elementary school recess. Even better, Cloud, a Super-Soldier extraordinaire, is brought to a knee by the impact with a measly materia, as if he got beaned in the gut by a baseball.
- Leading up to this scene, the town is filled with cloaked strangers mumbling about a "reunion". When the party meets Sephiroth, he asks whether they've come "to participate in the Reunion". Cloud finally loses it. "I don't even know what a reunion is!"
- "Finish... Sephiroth... off...". Try saying that three times fast.
