The Mysteries and Truths of Final Fantasy VII

(Note: this article contains massive spoilers)

Final Fantasy VII is a legend. It is frequently cited as one of the best games of all-time, and its reputation is well deserved.

That it still holds up 17 years later is a testament in itself, but it's hard to describe just how incredible it was back when it first came out. For comparison, here's a clip of a fairly well-respected game that came out on the same system eight months after Final Fantasy VII,





And here's Final Fantasy VII,



And that's only to speak of the aesthetics. But I'm here now to speak about the story, which is equally renowned.

Except nobody seems to get it.

Seriously, Final Fantasy VII seems to be among the most misunderstood stories out there, right below holy texts. Granted, this is based on my own experiences, and if you know all this already feel free to skip this article or smile and nod. I've just had this conversation so many times I feel it's worth writing down.

So, here's a quick quiz on some major plot points:

1. Who/what were the black-caped men?
2. Was Cloud in SOLDIER?
3. Who/what was it that the party is chasing from the Shinra building throughout most of the game?
4. What exactly is a "Sephiroth clone"?
5. Why do you find Nebelheim intact when you see it burned in the flashbacks?
6. Who was Sephiroth's mother?
7. Were either Sephiroth or Jenova Ancients?
8. Why is Sephiroth's body frozen in the northern crater, yet you see him throughout the game?
9. Who was that voice in Cloud's head throughout the game? (this one)
10. What is the significance of what happens in the Lifestream scene at Mideel?

Highlight for the answers:

1. They were the "Sephiroth clones." They were branded with tattoos by Hojo, as he does with all his experiments. Well, the successful ones....
2. No. He set out to join, but never made it. However, Zack was. (See #10)
3. Jenova. Sephiroth was never at the Shinra HQ during the game. Jenova broke free and took on his form, upon being summoned by him.
4. They're the residents of Nebelheim put through a more intensive version of the SOLDIER program (bathed in mako and injected with Jenova cells) by Hojo. They're not actually 'clones' at all, and weren't even meant to emulate Sephiroth, but instead to test the Reunion theory. This is partially a translation error, and partially that there's no actual word for something like this.
5. It was rebuilt by Shinra, who actually hired employees to live there and pretend nothing happened. Note that you also find an awful lot of its original inhabitants still there... (See #4)
6. Lucrecia. Sephiroth was told by Hojo that Jenova was his mother, but in fact he was injected with Jenova cells while in the womb. Lucrecia's womb.
7. No. Jenova is actually an alien space horror. She was found imprisoned underground and mistaken for an Ancient, and Sephiroth a human injected with her cells in-utero.
8. That's where he's been all game. Everything else you see of him before the final battle is Jenova, acting under his telepathic commands. (See #3)
9. That's his original self. (See #10)
10. This question was a bit vague. What's important was that you knew that Cloud wasn't who he thought he was, and this is when he realized that and managed to separate his own memories from those of others'.

Why is the game so confusing? Why have I met so many people who think they understand it but don't really? Well, it's because the game lies to you. A lot. Well, technically it doesn't lie to you. You're just a witness assuming what you see is true.

More specifically, the party is lied to, lies themselves, comes to a number of false conclusions, and your primary source of information throughout the game has a massive identity crisis and doesn't even know it. 

For example, #3 above, the party concludes that Sephiroth broke into the Shinra building and stole Jenova's body. Seems logical. After all, the blood trail leads right to the president's dead body with Sephiroth's sword in his back. You later discover that Sephiroth has been in the northern crater the whole time, and you were chasing a shapeshifting Jenova, sans-head, acting as Sephiroth's avatar. Kind of makes sense why each Jenova fight happens after the party encounters "Sephiroth", who promptly vanishes after the battle is over, no? 

But the biggest sleight-of-hand the game pulls is with Cloud and his memories. Particularly the Kalm flashback. In this extended sequence, Cloud tells the party who Sephiroth is and what happened to him, as well as much of his own past. What he says about Sephiroth is all true. However, what he says about himself is totally confused with another character, Zack. And that is because Cloud has himself totally confused with Zack.

Here's what actually happened to Cloud: 

He grew up in Nebelheim with Tifa. Idolizing Sephiroth, he decides to set out for Midgar and join SOLDIER. However, he never makes it, and instead becomes a regular Shinra soldier (no caps). He is sent with first-class SOLDIERs Sephiroth and Zack on their mission to investigate the Nebelheim reactor. In the course of this mission, Sephiroth goes mad and burns down the town. Zack tries to stop Sephiroth, but is cut down, as is Tifa. Cloud comes in and, through some miracle of desperation, manages to throw a deranged Sephiroth into the Lifestream at the base of the reactor. After this, Shinra comes in to clean up the mess. Hojo takes Zack and Cloud and makes them 'Sephiroth clones' to test the Reunion theory (this is where Cloud gets the 'mako eyes' characteristic of SOLDIER, even though he never was one). Zack was a first-class SOLDIER, and was strong enough to resist the treatment. Cloud, however, was not. He got mako poisoning and became a blubbering mess. Zack never gave up on him, though, and took Cloud with him as he escaped all the way to Midgar, where they were finally caught. Zack was killed, and Cloud, still a blubbering mess, was left for dead. He takes up Zack's sword, and the next thing we know of him, he's up and presumably perfectly functional again, acting as a mercenary for some eco-terrorists - except he's combined Zack's identity into his own. The main character goes through the majority of the story believing he's his dead best friend.

Exactly how this happened is the one piece of the puzzle that is not handed to you. It can be pieced together through knowledge of what Jenova is, what mako poisoning is, and the themes of the game, but is never explicitly told in-game. Jenova has the ability to adopt the forms and memories of other creatures it comes in contact with. Mako poisoning is when the collective memories within the Lifestream overwhelm a person's individuality and they lose themselves. What happened is that the Jenova cells in Cloud's body absorbed the memories of Zack and Tifa and created a 'hybrid' persona of the three. This is the Cloud we see throughout most of the game, and explains why he has memories that only those other characters should have. And this confused Tifa to all shit.

See, Tifa never got mako poisoning, nor was injected with Jenova cells. She remembered everything. This makes her the first in a series of Final Fantasy characters (Irvine, Vanille, the entire cast of X except Tidus) to know what was really going on, but keep it secret from the rest of the party for some reason or another. In Tifa's case, it was because she was confused and scared. Playing through the game again with this knowledge, you can see that she tries to speak up a few times but stops, and it puts a lot of her dialogue in a very different context. 

However, even Tifa makes a mistake at one point. She corrects Cloud in the Lifestream saying that Cloud never came to Nebelheim that day five years ago. Twist! Except, double twist, yes, he actually did. He was just wearing a mask so she didn't recognize him. He was ashamed that he never able to join SOLDIER. This is explained about 10-minutes later as part of the same sequence.

Most of the information above that's not derived from context can be found in the following parts of the game (some links are segmented):

• The Kalm Flashback
• The Reunion
• The Lifestream
• The Shinra basement flashback
• Records in the Nebelheim and the Shinra Mansion
• Vincent's sidequest
• Professor Gast's recordings

Yet, the only reason I argue these points with such authority is because they're given in much more certain terms in the FFVII Ultimania Omega, a Japanese-only strategy guide containing extra story information directly from the game creators. It also answers some questions not explicitly answered in the game, such as the exact power dynamic between Sephiroth and Jenova. As one who appreciates artistic ambiguity and the debates that can arise from it, there's a part of me that dislikes that this information is out there. But at the same time, it serves as a base of authority when justifying other virtues of the story. The vast majority of this is all there in the game, but it's easy to miss. Put right next to each other, it can seem so obvious, but it's how it's interweaved with the rest of the game that makes it what it is.

The lies are so prominent while the truths are so subtle. I'm only covering particular segments of the plot in this post, but the tendency for this exists elsewhere in the game as well. You can't really blame people for being confused. Supposedly, the English localization used more ambiguous language as well, further confusing the issue.

The game messes with your schemata. We all have expectations of how a story is structured and presented, built from years of experience, and even genetics. When someone gives an hour-long exposition, under the premise of answering questions that have been on your mind all game and setting the path for where you will go, you tend not to question it with the same critical mind you would that enticing offer a Nigerian prince made you by email. It screws with your paradigm of how a 'reveal' works.

We're so used to everything we see in a story being true, everything the characters say. When someone lies to another character, there's usually a tell for the audience to know. Twists and unreliable narrators are a thing, but characters' becoming outright mislead and the story going along with it, and then not giving particularly blatant 'hey, you were misled' scenes (mostly for the audience's sake) are exceedingly rare. At the moment, I can think of only two other series that do it, and just like FFVII, I love them and have found others who hate them for this reason. Even that first one is more forgiving with its reveals.

But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Perhaps it's just poor communication, and this all could have gotten across more effectively. Certainly, it limits the mass-appeal of the story, but what does it do for it as a work of art? Some of we "artsy"-types tend to like this complicated stuff for its own sake, but there's actually a powerful elements of subversion, theming, and more here. I could write entire articles on this, the mystery it promotes, the rewarding of those who invest into the game and its story, the debates you can have because of it, and the immortality that gives a piece, but I'll just discuss our protagonist here.

You're introduced to Cloud at the beginning of the game, and he immediately takes on the role of expert. He leads the party, as the archetypical hero, through thick and thin. Except that's not who Cloud was. That's who Zack was. Zack, who survived both the SOLDIER program and the Reunion experiments, who carried a comatose co-subject across the world, never giving up hope on him, ready to share his dream. The real Cloud, while virtuous, was fragile. He was scared. He failed to become a SOLDIER. He succumbed to mako poisoning, the condition in which weak wills are overwhelmed, twice. To say nothing of what Sephiroth makes him do.

At the end of the game, Cloud finally becomes a hero in his own right. But throughout all that comes before, he never knows what he's saying is false. You, as the player, are essentially treated to the same path of confusion that Cloud is. You, like Cloud, believe you are that protagonist. But you're not. The true hero of the story was dead before the game even started. And you have taken on his identity.