Hello angels and antagonists, my name is TBSkyen,
and… what? Why are you looking at me like
that? OH, the voice. I recently had oral surgery
and can’t currently talk, so I hired someone
who sounds COMPLETELY LIKE ME to read out
the script for this video - say hi!
Dinka: Hello my fellow warriors! My name is Dinka Kay, and I'm here today to voice Skyen!
*sighs in anime*
I mean who else has a husky, deep alpha voice if not this skinny b**** right here?
SIKE!
I'll do my best to voice this video,
but keep in mind that not all of us were gifted with godly vocal cords,
or proper... *distressed Dinka noises*
Proper pronunciation!
So without further ado - let's get started!
*fingerguns suavely*
Let us talk about Final Fantasy 7
and the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and the plot
twist most people missed.
There are three twist villains in Final Fantasy
7. Three times that the game re-defines who
you're up against and what they want. One
of them is obvious, the second is slightly
subtle, and the third one... a lot of people
don’t really notice. This video is about
those twists and what they mean, and about
how the remake handles re-telling plot twists
that most of its audience already know are
coming.
We begin FF7 in Midgar, the iconic dystopian
semi-cyberpunk megacity owned and controlled
by the Shinra corporation, where the poor
live in sunless downtrodden slums while the
middle class and the rich lead lives of relative
plenty in the luxury of the upper plate. Above
it all, towering at the very pinnacle of the
city, at the centre of the rotting pizza,
is the Shinra Headquarters and the office
of its president at the top. As metaphors
for capitalism go, Midgard has never been
particularly subtle.
And it is Shinra, embodied by the person of
President Shinra, who is the first major villain
of the game. We start out as members of the
eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE fighting to
destroy the deadly Mako reactors and our primary
opposition in this goal is the Shinra Corporation's
security forces and colorful cast of executives:
Scarlet, Palmer, Heidegger, Hojo and, of course,
the president himself. If you go into the
game blind, you will see this rogue's gallery
aligned against you and naturally assume,
ah, this game is about beating those guys,
each of them are gonna be major bosses, and
the president is probably gonna be like the
final boss or something.
Of course it doesn't really play out that
way - Midgar is only a 3-5 hour prologue in
a 40-60 hour game. Still Midgar is constructed
very much as its own stand-alone chapter in
the game, complete with its own internal story-arc
for the protagonist Cloud, who goes from disinterested
standoffish mercenary to being emotionally
invested in, and committed to, the fight against
Shinra.
By the end of the Midgar section the party
is captured by Shinra and taken before the
president, who gives a villain speech and
sends the heroes off to jail - the kind of
thing that usually happens before a daring
escape and epic final confrontation. And here
is where Final Fantasy 7 pulls its first little
trick. The party does escape, they are let
out under mysterious circumstances, and follow
a trail of blood through the headquarters,
to the president's office, to find him impaled
on a long katana. Shock twist, the apparent
main villain of the story is dead, and his
killer... is Sephiroth.
Now Sephiroth is mentioned by name exactly
ONCE up to this point, by President Shinra
himself, before leaving the party to fight
the Air Buster. By killing the president,
however, Sephiroth instantly makes himself
the most important character in the plot,
leaving the President's successor, his son
Rufus, to be the boss-fight of Shinra headquarters.
Upon the escape from Midgar, Final Fantasy
7 opens up and demonstrates the scale of its
world as you enter the world map. Then, an
extended flashback sequence unambiguously
establishes Sephiroth as the greatest threat
to the planet in the game's narrative. Rufus
and Shinra are reduced to secondary villains,
often getting the way but also always understood
to be a minor threat compared to Sephiroth's
potentially world-ending schemes.
So, first twist: Sephiroth replaces Shinra
as main villain. But...
Throughout the game you encounter manifestations
of Sephiroth that confront or manipulate the
party. Some of them transform into or drop
slithering tentacles that become boss fights
with JENOVA, and it is she who is the game's
second twist villain.
Jenova is presented initially as Sephiroth's
mother. Humanoid, but monstrous, and Sephiroth
justifies his villainous quest as "taking
the planet back" for his mother, whom he believes
to be an Ancient or a Cetra, an extinct race
of indigenous mystical caretakers of the planet.
Sephiroth plans to summon Meteor to inflict
a tremendous wound on the planet, and then
absorb all the energy of the lifestream and
become a god, cleansing the world of, airquote,
"unworthy" humans.
This is all a lie. Sephiroth's true mother
is a woman named Lucretia, whose womb Hojo
used as a test tube, injecting his own son
with cells from JENOVA to give him incredible
powers. Sephiroth, through trauma, loneliness
and the insidious influence of the JENOVA
cells, goes insane and becomes obsessed with
JENOVA, before Cloud manages to overcome him
and throw him deep into the Lifestream.
Jenova is not an Ancient. She is an extraterrestrial
parasite, an entity that travels from planet
to planet, sucking them dry of life energy
like a tick. She is a space-borne disease,
and like the parasitic Cordyceps fungi that
infect the minds of ants and force them to
climb high into trees to spread spores, JENOVA
cells can control the minds of those they
inhabit. For some subjects, it causes a complete
breakdown, shattering their minds and rendering
them incoherent puppets, and we encounter
these poor souls draped in black cloaks as
they all converge for what Hojo calls the
Reunion. Scattered JENOVA cells, driven by
an urge to reunite and remake JENOVA, congregate
around the most powerful entity infected by
her cells: Sephiroth, who rests in a crystal
in the Northern Crater. Every apparition of
Sephiroth we see throughout the game is either
a Jenova-infected subject transformed into
his likeness, or a magical projection of his
will. Sephiroth himself does not awaken until
Cloud hands him the Black Materia.
Conventional wisdom is that Sephiroth's singular
will overpowers JENOVA and turns her powers
to his benefit... but I disagree. Sephiroth
is lost in his megalomaniacal dreams of godhood,
but his actions serve HER agenda. She wants
to drain the planet dry of energy, like the
parasite she is. That is her entire life-cycle,
it is what she EXISTS to do... And Sephiroth
obliges. Summoning Meteor, draining the Lifestream,
becoming a god, all of this is exactly what
JENOVA wants and what JENOVA does to the planets
she infect.
Sephiroth believes himself a one-winged angel,
but like every other person infected by JENOVA
cells, he is an ant climbing to the highest
branch, to spread the spores of the parasite
that lives within him. Sephiroth died in Nibelheim,
when Cloud impaled him and threw him into
the Lifestream. What emerged in the Northern
Crater after that was JENOVA's will manipulating
a useful puppet.
A puppet. This is Sephiroth's favourite taunt
for Cloud. Just a puppet, a failed Sephiroth
clone, not a real person, not the real Cloud.
The irony is that the real puppet is Sephiroth,
who serves his parasitic mother's every wish,
and Cloud is the one who ultimately manages
to break himself free of the manipulations
of others and realize himself as a complete
person.
Two twists down. What, then, is the third?
The question we need to ask to illuminate
this question is: how did JENOVA come to infect
Sephiroth? JENOVA crashed into the planet
at the Northern Crater two thousand years
in the past; she was defeated by the Cetra,
and sealed in the Crater though the Cetra
nearly died out defending the planet from
this invader. For two millennia she lay dormant
there, harmless and neutralized.
And then, Shinra comes along. Shinra is already
waging colonialist wars and expanding their
control over the planet's human population
through its monopoly on Mako, but it wants
more. It wants the legendary "promised land"
of the Cetra, which they interpret to be an
endless bounty of valuable Mako energy for
them to exploit. So they send research teams
all over the world looking for Ancients, Cetra,
who can lead them there. In that process...
they find Jenova, and mistakenly identify
her as an Ancient. They begin the project
of infusing new subjects with JENOVA cells
in an effort to create a Human-Cetra hybrid
to lead them to the Promised Land, but with
the discovery of Ifalna, the last living Cetra,
and her daughter Aerith, they settle for using
Jenova cells to create super-soldiers. Like
Sephiroth.
It is Shinra who unearth JENOVA. Shinra who
infect the unborn Sephiroth and hundreds of
SOLDIERS with her cells. It is Shinra whose
violence, greed and insatiable need for power
set every catastrophe in Final Fantasy 7 into
motion. They are the root of the issue, the
core of the problem, the first movers of disaster.
JENOVA is essentially Shinra taken to its
logical conclusion - a parasite that drains
its host dry and then moves on to greener
pastures, an ultimate embodiment of narcissitic
self-enrichment at the cost of others. She's
a dark mirror held up to the company's monstrous
hypercapitalism, an utterly unsubtle metaphor
for their true nature.
The third twist is that the villain of Final
Fantasy 7 is, and always has been...
CAPITALISM.
Er, uh, I mean the Shinra Corporation. Obviously
Final Fantasy 7 is not a political game, and
nothing in its story could possibly reflect
on real world issues. It is just a story about
eco-terrorists fighting a global energy monopoly
over the fate of the planet that is being
destroyed by their relentless pursuit of profit,
it is meaningless escapist entertainment and
should never be interpreted by anyone.
Anyway, I think I promised at the start of
all of this that I was going to talk about
the Remake at some point? Well, the problem
that the Remake had to solve... oh boy, actually,
it had a lot of problems to solve, but one
major problem it had is that nobody was ever
going to fall for its first major villain
twist. Everyone who knows anything about Final
Fantasy 7 already knows about Sephiroth, he
is about as iconic a villain as the Final
Fantasy series has. From the moment the game
loads, everyone is waiting for the One Winged
Angel to turn up, fully understanding that
everyone else is necessarily a secondary villain.
The "killing the president" twist is not going
to work again.
But Sephiroth isn't just the villain people
expect, he's the villain they WANT.
Like I said, he is iconic, and a chance to
re-experience the confrontation with him is
a major selling point for the Remake as a
product. Now, I have waxed philosophical about
Sephiroth not being the true villain of the
original thematically, but the fact of the
matter is that for the vast majority of FF7
fans, the villain of the game is Sephiroth,
and to many he is one of the best villains
in gaming history.
All media following Final Fantasy 7 has reinforced
this: he is the final boss in Advent Children,
he is lionized in Crisis Core, he is a major
antagonist in the Dissidia games, and he is
the guy who gets to be Cloud's iconic villain
in his Kingdom Hearts cameos, representing
the "darkness in Cloud's heart."
I can write whatever YouTube videos about
thematic interpretation I want, Sephiroth
as the main antagonist is irreversibly baked
into the legacy of Final Fantasy 7.
So, what does the Remake do about this? Well,
first of all, it doesn't even PRETEND to hide
the Sephiroth twist. Cloud has a terrifying
confrontation with a ghost of Sephiroth manipulating
his mind almost immediately, and he continues
to show up and menace our confused protagonist
throughout the game. The twist at Shinra Headquarters
in Final Fantasy 7 Remake is that we get to
fight JENOVA much sooner than we did in the
original.
But the Remake does do a couple of other interesting
things. Take a look at these scenes from the
game's intro, and pay attention to the music.
That choral line you hear as the Mako reactor
flares, and as Aerith senses something dangerous
in the darkness, is a cutout from Sephiroth's
final boss theme.
The game immediately draws two important connections
here. First, that the Mako reactors sucking
the planet dry are associated with Sephiroth,
who, remember, is trying to do the exact same
thing. And second, it reinforces that that
connection goes both ways: the Shinra corporation
is just one more expression of that same parasitic
drive, that same urge to consume until there
is nothing left. Sephiroth is the embodiment
of malice in F F 7 R, and Shinra are an extension
of who he is as a villain. They are the same
kind of parasite, and the intro tells us so
with a simple music cue.
The second interesting thing the Remake does
is make Sephiroth apparently aware of his
thematic role in the game. I have discussed
the end of the Remake in a separate video,
which you can find in the card up in the corner,
and I will not go over too much of the same
stuff here, but F F 7 R ends with a dreamlike,
poetic confrontation with Sephiroth and the
Watchmen of Fate, spirits that seemingly exist
to ensure that the story of Final Fantasy
7 proceeds according to "destiny" - that things
in the Remake go the same way they did in
the original game.
It is Sephiroth who first cuts a portal through
their barrier, and who seems to be baiting
the party into fighting against those ghosts
of fate alongside him. His dialogue is cryptic
to say the least, but he seems to be aware
that if things proceed according to plan,
if the remake goes the same way the original
does, then he is going to fail. He is going
to be a puppet of fate. And he resents that,
he wants to change fate so that he can win
this time, that seems to be why he is doing
what he is doing.
Now, I have laid out the ways in which I believe
the original game demonstrated that Sephiroth,
in the end, is nothing but a puppet of JENOVA.
An ant spreading her spores. And I have laid
out how I believe both he and JENOVA are ultimately
mere shadows or reflections of the parasitic
greed that animates the game's true villain,
which is capitalism no wait I mean the Shinra
company.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a meta game. It
passes commentary on itself and its own status
as a classic, by redefining what you should
expect from it. Sephiroth, I think, is doing
the same thing. Whatever the original game
tried to say, in the years after Final Fantasy
7, HE became the game's iconic villain, not
Jenova or Shinra. In the F F 7 R ending he
reasserts himself as such. He cuts the strings
of fate, and becomes an independent chaotic
force, the true one-winged angel, the villain
that everyone wants him to be.
And it is the irony of that that made me want
to write this video.
The twist of Final Fantasy 7 used to be that
Sephiroth isn't the true villain.
The twist of Final Fantasy 7 Remake... is
that he IS the true villain.
Anyway that... is all I had to say about that.
I hope the rest of the episodes of the remake
stay weird and meta-aware, and that they do
not cave to the pressure to conform to a more
faithful remake.
Thank you all very much for watching, and
thank you very much to Dinka for providing
the voice for this video.
DINKA: *laughs in segue*
Thank you, Skyen! If you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to like and subscribe!
And if you'd like to check out my REACTS, or hear my takes on the (League of Legends) lore,
I'll leave some links down below so you can go check 'em out!
Thank you again, I hope to see you next time! Bye bye!
