Nightmare Fuel / Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

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Action-packed Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth may be, but there are still moments where dreams will be anything but sweet.

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In General

• In the previous game, Cloud is occasionally haunted by Sephiroth's visions, but mostly manages to get through. In this game, he is haunted by Sephiroth's visions damn near constantly, which affects his mental state and possibly foreshadows his eventual breakdown (if the original game is any indication).

Chapter 1: Fall of a Hero

• The original Sanity Slippage of Sephiroth is now put into uncomfortably close detail here, seeing a relative Nice Guy descend into bone-chilling madness at realizing what he is. His voice effectively loses all inflection once he finally snaps past the breaking point, and at this point the world is changed forever.
  • Similarly, most of the destruction of Nibelheim is off-screened in both games, but when Cloud arrives on Sephiroth's trail, here he's presented by horrified, traumatized citizens, people he likely knew as they're screaming in terror about their dead loved ones or wanting to run as far as humanly possible. The few citizens that tried to hold up Sephiroth? Sliced down mercilessly before he decapitates the town mayor with a mere flick of the wrist, like he moved a pen rather than a BFS through a man's spine and neck. No average human on the Planet stands a chance and he pretty much rubs it in Cloud's face.
• The release of the Makonoid was something of a Jump Scare in the original game and a lingering bout of horror as to what Hojo had done. Whereas Crisis Core skipped over such a release, this game shows it again — letting out a person horrifically mutated by Mako stumble out onto the ground where they can't even seem to tell what's around them, writhing and moaning in a suffering existence. Sephiroth stabbing it was a Mercy Kill.

Chapter 5: Blood in the Water

• During their cruise trip to Costa del Sol.
  • The party gets to see the black-robed men turn into mutated beings after coming into contact with monsters attacking the ship. It gets even worse when Hojo witnesses the transformation and decides to take advantage of the chaos rather than send aid.
  • What might be the most unsettling thing is that the Sephiroth clones don't even attempt to resist the process, with the only reaction being unearthly moans.
  • Hojo meanwhile is ecstatic at seeing the footage, like a kid with a new toy, and literally has clones lined up to be sacrificed in order to watch the process in person in the next chapter. The desecration and mutation is something he takes delight in.
• The new version of Jenova's theme for the Jenova Emergent fight is downright eerie with an ethereal choir singing the main melody at parts.

Chapter 7: Those Left Behind

• After seeing some Sephiroth Clones mindlessly walk off a bridge, Cloud very nearly does the same. Barret has to drag him back to snap him out of it, and he's left in a semi-catatonic state for some time afterwards.

Chapter 8: All That Glitters

• The flashback of the destruction of North Corel, which ends with Scarlet shooting Barret and Dyne while giving an Evil Laugh with a crazed look on her face.

Chapter 9: The Planet Stirs

• At the Gongaga reactor, Shinra shows off their latest mutated horrors, in the form of Was Once a Man creatures that were infused with plant and fungal life to turn them into hybrid monsters, requiring to Kill It with Fire because otherwise they'll resurrect. Following that, the boys face off the boss Specimen H1024, another one of Hojo's experiments that wouldn't look out of place from Resident Evil with its multiple limbs and long tongue from the head on one of its extra arms.
• During the showdown in the Gongaga reactor, Cloud inhales some of the mako vapor and collapses. When he comes to, he sees Tifa under attack by Scarlet and a group of Shinra troopers and runs to help, but sees a hallucination of Sephiroth. Cloud proceeds to shift into Sephiroth's iconic sword stance (except right-handed) and absolutely annihilates the Shinra platoon. Worse, when Tifa tries to get him to stop, he doesn't immediately snap out of it. With Sephiroth's voice whispering in his ear, he accuses her of being Jenova and advances threateningly, forcing her to fall into the pool of mako below when he attempts to swing at her. It isn't until she's swallowed by the Weapon that he realizes what he's done.
  • Cloud's body language really drives home the subtle horror of the scene. His fighting style shifts radically to a more casual, one-handed style. He smugly leans out of the way of some bullets with a smirk on his face, and at one point he swaps the sword to his left hand to impale a trooper mid-air. When advancing on Tifa, he's staggering forward like a zombie with a dazed expression on his face, dragging the sword behind him.

Chapter 10: Watcher of the Vale

• The Caves of the Gi and the Gi Tribe Village are nightmarish hellscapes that the party traverse as part of Red XIII's trial... and then the entryway to the latter is shown to be gone and the Cave of the Gi is replaced by a short tunnel, adding to the surreal nature of the arc.
• The fate of the Gi Tribe, barred from the Lifestream due to being extraterrestrials and damned to persist after death as vengeful spirits. Yuffie thinks it sounds awesome, but Barret is horrified.

Chapter 11: The Long Shadow of Shinra

• What's worse than Cloud not remembering the past properly? Cloud's mind not putting two and two together and making up new memories to ensure he doesn't accept the truth. Cloud thinking Zack was the soldier who drowned in the river will likely make it much more difficult for Tifa to break the truth to him in the future, especially now that Aerith is gone and unable to soothe the process as she and Tifa likely planned to.
• Upon returning to Nibelheim in the present, Cloud ends up quoting Sephiroth's speech on the mako spring word for word, as if it were his own thoughts on the matter. The camera cut briefly shows Tifa making a terrified expression behind Cloud's back, as his stoic demeanor is developing into a full-on Sephiroth autopilot (which fully comes to bear at the Temple of the Ancients in Chapter 13).
• Hojo's Lack of Empathy is somehow dialed up from the original. When the party encounters his AI hologram guide in the manor, he states that nothing of value is left in the manor and gives the group the safe code as a means of escape from an underground facility. This contrasts the original where the safe code was part of the mini game to unlock Vincent, with Hojo leaving a note explicitly setting up a 'game' to help the player find him. Hojo has either forgotten or doesn't care about Vincent's presence in the manor, where Vincent himself is still guarding some of its files. Worse still, the manor also has paintings of Hojo and Lucrecia, his wife - and there is likely still some of her research left behind there - which he has also grouped as having no value. The only part of the manor he indicates interest in is an experiment he sics on the party as a boss fight. The only concession he gives to caring about the location where the JENOVA Project took place (i.e. he had a child, lost his wife and shot and experimented on a former employee) is telling the player the facility has a place in his heart, and to leave it in the condition they found it in.
• Shinra Manor itself is full of this, probably having the highest concentration of Hojo's experiments still trapped underground. Rebirth manages to make it worse from the original, too - as if it wasn't enough that Hojo has experiments he left behind in the manor, there is yet another underground floor leading to a combat simulator. Worse still, Vincent explains that countless victims died in combat trials and were never mourned but he doesn't specify when this happened, but either possibility is unnerving - either he saw it happen while working as Hojo's bodyguard, or afterwards when he himself was experimented on.
• Inside Shinra Manor is a room where Hojo keeps a few samples of S(ephiroth) cells, hair, and blood. This is already incredibly disturbing for those who remember who Hojo is to Sephiroth. Worse, just entering the room is enough to send Cloud into a Jenova-induced mental freakout, stumbling towards the containers muttering, "Nearly there." If this is how badly he reacts to just a few S cells, one can only imagine how bad it'll get when he gets near the Northern Crater.
• Vincent's transformation into Galian Beast goes full horror movie, with the worst of it offscreen and displayed in silhouette instead. The party then have to fight Galian beast (with some implied chaos abilities at the end) and it's only Cait Sith/Reeve who seems to put together how he ended up like this.

Chapter 12: A Golden Key

• Zack learning from Marlene the identity of the person who wants to kill Aerith. His reaction says it all.
  Zack: Of all the people...

Chapter 13: Where Angels Fear to Tread

• While going through the Temple of the Ancients, Cloud begins acting much colder and more sociopathic. He casually kills a Shinra 2-C SOLDIER begging for his life while Barret and Tifa look on in horror, then later attempts to do the same to a helpless Elena. Once you reach the Black Materia chamber, you can hear him quietly chuckling as he stands in front of the platform that it's on - and when he picks it up he has a truly unsettling smile, so fixated on the materia that he becomes unaware of his surroundings as the Temple starts to shake. Things get even worse when Sephiroth takes the Black Materia for himself before passing it onto Cloud as a smug display of his control. It's clear that Cloud is fully Sephiroth's puppet at this point, as he completely ignores Tifa's attempts to hold him back. Aerith is able to grab the Black Materia and run, but the player is forced to control Cloud as he pursues her, alternating between pleading with her and quietly laughing. It's intensely creepy to see the normally stoic Cloud act this way.
  • His behaviour towards the party is a mix of this and tearjerking - he becomes impatient and even cruel towards them. As well as pushing Tifa away when she tries to stop him handing over the Black Materia, he earlier ignores Aerith's attempts to comfort a party traumatised by their individual trials and coldly asks if she's finished when she's done. In fights if another party member falls and control switches to Cloud, he will also express annoyance and impatience instead of his usual concern. The longer the chapter goes on the more frightening his single-minded determination becomes. When the party gets split up and Aerith wonders if the others are all right, Red comments they will be...as long as Cloud can hold it together. It's a pretty scary position for the party, too, since they're on the clock and don't want to lose Cloud to degradation or Sephiroth's control.
  • To drive home how close Cloud is to losing himself, during final ascent to the Black Materia pedestal as well as the gauntlet run to escape from the collapsing Temple the player doesn't control Cloud, they control Aerith instead.
• During Red XIII's trial, we see when Hojo branded Red with his XIII tattoo, and Hojo laughing maniacally as Red screams in pain.
• During Cloud's trial he kills one of the Black Robed men, then turns and declares he's nothing like Sephiroth despite mounting evidence to the contrary. All the party can do is try in vain to reassure him.
• After defeating the Demon Gate, Barret and Yuffie are cheering, but Cloud holds the Buster Sword in a right-hand version of Sephiroth's usual stance of sword held to head-level while coldly demanding "Let me through" at the barely alive Demon Gate, right before jumping on to its head and stabbing it several times until it dissipates back into the Lifestream. After killing the Demon Gate, he starts wildly bashing the final door as the others look on uncomfortably, staggering in much like the Black-robes after the door falls to pieces.
  • The Demon Gate boss itself. It reduces the size of the room so small in an attempt to crush the party that the player will be right up against the boss by the end of it.
• Sephiroth gets his hands on the Black Materia, in due part to Barret accidentally giving it to him on a silver platter, and then when everyone else's backs are turned... he gives it back to Cloud, because he knows Cloud will come for him at the Northern Crater and deliver it directly anyway, and wants to see how Cloud will handle the responsibility of holding the Artifact of Doom. Given Cloud's mental instability and Sephiroth's increasingly high stranglehold on his mind, he just turned Cloud into a proverbial ticking time bomb and revels in it.
• The section where Cloud chases after Aerith, fantasy setting aside, would not be out of place in a slasher film. From the immensely creepy tone Cloud uses, the slow chase, and the utter fear Aerith displays as she frantically tries to get some distance. And why does Sephiroth do it? Because he can. It's also clear that not only are Aerith and Tifa terrified of how Cloud is acting, but terrified for him as well, seeing someone they greatly care for under Sephiroth's thrall.

Chapter 14: End of the World

• Sensing Aerith's consciousness within an offshoot of Zack's timeline, Sephiroth ominously sends down black feathers along with a verbal threat during her date with Cloud, letting her know that he's coming.
• After the dream sequence Cloud wakes up in the original timeline and the others comment they thought they'd lost him entirely. We don't see how it looked from their perspective but Cloud must have been in a really bad way after he and Aerith fell.
• The entirety of Aerith's death is a lot more unnerving than the original because of how it's both the same yet different: Cloud actually blocks the fated impalement at first, only for everything to distort with Sephiroth's Masamune suddenly being caked with blood as Aerith collapses. Cloud seemingly sees himself giving the mournful speech of the original game and yet holds a very awake and alive Aerith in his arms as he calms down.. to which the rest of the party runs up, seeing a blood-pooled dead Aerith with Sephiroth being responsible as they immediately lose their shit. The extra cherry on top is Tifa approaching, and due to her connection to the Lifestream, she sees both and clearly has no idea how to mentally process this amidst her horror.
  • Sephiroth is so petty towards Cloud that he outright flicks the blade at him, flinging Aerith's blood onto Cloud just to piss him off for the sake of it and trying to get him as angry as possible.
  • The ending goes on to show that to everyone else, Aerith is Killed Off for Real, but to Cloud, she's still present and everything. It doesn't show how the rest of the party may have reacted to the fact that Cloud seemingly has been aloof to her passing, but it strongly implies that either Cloud is losing his grip on reality so hard that he's shut out her death like he did with remembering Zack, or his messing with fate and distorting the worlds has led to him seeing the deceased (or possibly living in another timeline) Aerith where no others can, and it's intentionally ambiguous as to which is the case.
• While Sephiroth shows Cloud the multiverse, the planet shrieks. This causes Cloud pain, but Sephiroth claims the planet is crying out in rapture and ecstasy with a really happy look on his face. When Cloud protests that it is screaming, Sephiroth sighs and says Cloud doesn't understand him yet. This calls back to how Aerith said in Remake that Sephiroth cannot hear the planet crying in pain. Then Sephiroth shows Cloud a vision of himself as just another Sephiroth Clone.
• The ending possibly shows Cloud's mental breakdown beginning in earnest, with him taking the Black Materia out of his pocket and equipping it to his Buster Sword without hesitation after another glitching headache. While the game ends on a bittersweet note, he's clearly about to spiral.
  • The Black Materia itself distorts the Buster Sword when this happens, creating a physical effect that looks almost like it digitized it, altering the weapon's very nature. This is very distinct because nothing does that effect in the entire rest of both games, intentionally working to create an uneasy feeling that the very weapon he inherited is now some level of corrupted.
• Cloud talks about the tear in the sky he sees as something to ignore, that it's merely an illusion. It then cuts to Barret and the other's perspectives where they just see an ordinary blue sky. Barret's agitation is practically radiating off of him as he looks to the tight-lipped Tifa holding her peace on the matter, and you can tell without him even having to say anything that he firmly believes Cloud has mentally lost it to some degree after everything they've been through. But bereft of any other leads or options, he still gives leadership to Cloud, albeit begrudgingly and clearly no longer very trusting of the SOLDIER.
• The final meeting between Rufus and "Glenn Lodbrok" - who is actually a JENOVA clone being controlled by Sephiroth, and who masterminded the entire war with Wutai in order to distract Shinra Inc. from trying to fight Sephiroth. Not only that, but Rufus begins to have his own mental break as a result, emptying his gun into the body of the clone until he's out of ammo.