/vr/ - Retro Games

After 18 years I've played through FFVII for the third time (first time in my 20s) and I finally understand the game a lot more than I did before. Over those two decades my opinion of the game had moderated due to it being overhyped by some but also underrated by others, but I was too young to understand why its reputation was so mixed – I’ve belatedly realised that Sephiroth is the problem.

Otherwise the plot of FFVII is brilliant: Shinra the megacorporation whose power has superseded the nation-state via globalisation, the environmentalist issues that help to tie a modern setting together with the traditional fantasy world, and the arc of the unreliable narrator-protagonist Cloud Strife (reminiscent of Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland) are all brilliant and deserve credit. However Sephiroth cheapens the whole thing.

In my opinion there are two narrative cop-outs that result in a weakly constructed villain: 1. “… but he was incompetent”, and 2. “… and then he went insane!” Neither of these two make for an interesting villain, they’re cheap character motivations that allow the author to move onto the other features of the villain that they’d prefer to focus on such as their look or their actions. Sephiroth exemplifies this, particularly in a game that was dabbling in FMV sequences for the first time in the series and there was a great desire to have awe-inspiring scenes like pic related (that a cursory Google search shows has produced dozens of fan re-creations). However he is both 1 and 2, and is therefore style over substance – at most the most interesting function he serves in the plot is as one of the two role models for Cloud’s self-illusions to revolve around. Basically Sephiroth’s path can be described thus: