John Ellingsworth

Mega-Synopsis of 1997 Squaresoft Classic Final Fantasy VII [Deep breath] There’s this guy Cloud. He used to be a Soldier (capital S to denote a hand-picked regiment of super-mercenaries in the employ of the Shinra corporation), but has recently had a change of heart (at this stage not much explanation given as to why) and joined a rebel group called Avalanche. Barrett, the head of Avalanche, doesn’t love and trust Cloud because he (Cloud) used to be a hired murderer for the organisation that he (Barrett) has sworn to fight and destroy. It’s sort of understandable. To prove himself, Cloud goes with Barrett to sabotage a Mako Reactor (a device which sucks up planetary energy and converts it to electricity, which the sucking up of planet forces is what Avalanche have a problem with). It goes pretty well. They blow up the Reactor. They head off to blow up another. Cloud is along for the ride. They plant the explosives, and everything is fine until they get to the exit, where a gigantic battle robot (The Airbuster) is waiting. Cloud and Co fight and defeat it, but as it malfunctions and explodes, Cloud is thrown from the platform on which he stands and falls into some darkness, through that darkness, through a church roof (???), and into a bed of flowers, which breaks his fall. The flowers belong to a girl in a pink dress (Aeris), who hires Cloud as a bodyguard. The two of them wander a bit and end up in this place called the Wall Market, where Cloud learns that Tifa, one of the Avalanche-members, is somewhere inside the mansion of local rich man Don Corneo. Cloud decides he needs to get in, but the mansion of Don Corneo is locked-tight, and only prostitutes (to be thrown to his unquenchable passion) may be admitted. Cloud drags up, makes it in. Turns out that Tifa is there for reconnaissance. Further turns out that the Don has contacts with Shinra, and he tells Cloud and Co. that the corporation plan to drop the plate on Sector 7 in order to wipe out Avalanche. Some explanation here. Midgar, the city where all this is taking place, has two tiers — the lower is ground-level and dark and swimming in industrial effluent; above it is an enormous metal plate, constituting an executive level, where rich people writhe ecstatically in the sun, breathing huge, wanton mouthfuls of delicious clean air (the bottom-dwellers imagine). Avalanche HQ is on the ground, in Sector 7, the poorest and most slum-like of Sectors. Cutting loose and dropping a segment of the plate on Sector 7 just to stamp out Avalanche is, you’re probably speculating, going to be seen as disproportionate and is hardly the kind of PR to improve Shinra’s already dodgy corporate image — so part 2 of the plan is to blame the whole thing on Avalanche, who have after all been blowing up Reactors that provide the citizenry with cheap, efficient fuel, probably driving up prices and really putting the squeeze on the common man. Anyway so Cloud and Co. must stop Shinra from putting their diabolical two-part plan into action. They rush off to the support structure that grounds in Sector 7 and holds the plate above it, and are just in time to enter a pitched battle between Shinra troops (presumably disposable ones) and members of Avalanche. Cloud and Co. make it to the top, but not in time to prevent Rufus and the Turks (Rufus, the heir to the Shinra throne; the Turks [1], bodyguards/mercenaries/fixers) from disengaging the docking-clamps or whatever and releasing the plate, which commences its slow and devastating slide as Cloud and Co. swing to safety on a handy rope of unknown anchorage. The dust settles, Barrett has a Moment [2], then it’s off to Shinra HQ to mete out lashings of vengeance and coincidentally rescue Aeris who was kidnapped by Rufus and the Turks as they flew off in a helicopter did I mention. The team break inside and fight their way up the many floors of the enormous HQ tower, making it eventually to a Shinra laboratory near the top where a glass window labeled JENOVA is a portal into a containment tank with something truly weird inside, human/alien/machine, plugged into various feeds, suspended in a blue solution. Also in the laboratory is a soulful talking lion called Red XIII [3]. He’s a prisoner, so Cloud and Co. bust him out, but are caught by the Turks and thrown into the Shinra HQ jail. They fall asleep, despondent. They wake and discover the cell door is open and the guards outside are dead. The Shinra lab has been wrecked, Jenova is gone, and a trail of blood leads out and up the buildings floors, Cloud and Co. following this trail unobstructed by the guards (dead) until finally they reach the highest floor, where the President of the Shinra Corporation has been impressively run through, and lies slumped forward, pinned to his own boardroom table by an enormous, curving, ribbon-thin sword that surely has no real world historical precedent. The Avalanche crew flee the building, flee Midgar, and end up in a village called Kalm where Cloud reveals that only one man in the world (one in history) wields a sword like the one recently seen sticking out of the late-President of the Shinra Corporation. That man is (italics to denote drama) Sephiroth. Cue a flashback to Cloud’s Soldier days which shows Cloud and Sephiroth and a few small-s soldiers on a mission to investigate a malfunctioning Mako Reactor, which (somehow) is mutating local wildlife into vicious monsters. They make it to the Reactor, head on inside, and discover a line of gestation-pods containing half-human, half-monster creatures which have been warped by planet/Mako energy. Sephiroth speculates they are a new breed of bioengineered Soldier. He then speculates that maybe he was made the same way, in a test tube, and has a Moment. Sephiroth goes and locks himself in a nearby Shinra Mansion, once the residence of brilliant Shinra scientist Professor Gast, and finds historical and scientific papers that indicate that (a) there used to be this ancient space-race called the Cetra, or Ancients; (b) Shinra dug up a kind of hibernating Ancient, called Jenova, and used her for experiments; (c) Sephiroth was grown from Jenova cells, and is an Ancient, and should rule the world. Sephiroth subsequently has another, much bigger, Moment and sets fire to the village and slaughters just about every human being inside, excepting Cloud and Tifa (who btw is in this flashback because the village where this is taking place happens to be her hometown, and Cloud’s as well, because the two were childhood friends, it happens). At the Mako Reactor, Tifa gets maimed by Sephiroth, Cloud gets in a rage, and S and C face-off in the room where Jenova is being held, the screen cutting back and forth between their twisted, hateful visages. The flashback ends w/ their showdown unresolved; Cloud can’t remember any more. The party decide to follow Sephiroth. They spend quite some time following him; sometimes they even get close. When they eventually catch up with him they find out that he is looking to get ahold of some Black Materia (short version: a magic stone) that will enable him to summon a meteor, referred to always as a proper noun, Meteor, because if he brings it down on the planet then the planet will be wounded and will draw spirit energy (or Mako, whatever) to the wound to heal itself, and Sephiroth plans to suck up all this spirit energy in order to become a god. He gets ahold of the Black Materia, summons Meteor; Aeris, who is an Ancient too btw, the last Ancient, takes off on her own to go to the City of the Ancients with the intention of halting the Meteor and stopping Sephiroth and saving the planet. The rest follow her, lagging behind, and when they make it to the City, Aeris is kneeling in this kind of plaza-thing summoning the counter-power of Holy. Everyone is pretty pleased to see her. Then Sephiroth sails down from above, cloak whipping around him, and runs Aeris right the way through with his impossible sword [4]. S flies off, Cloud and Co. have a weepy Moment, commit Aeris’ body to the waters of an ancient lake, then dry their eyes and start seriously to talk shop and pump themselves up for some Renaissance-intensity bloody and unmerciful vengeance. We are now about halfway through the plot. Knowledge is power and there’s a lot left to exposit, so Cloud and Co. go on a fact-finding mission and discover that Sephiroth is not an Ancient and that Jenova is/was some kind of malignant interstellar evil, which thousands of years ago came to the planet and thousands of years ago was confined but not destroyed by a confederacy of Cetra; discover that Aeris’ father is Professor Gast; discover that actually contrary to previous mention, Gast was noble and kind and it was his treacherous assistant Hojo who started making super-mutants after treacherously and diabolically killing Gast. Armed with knowledge, Cloud and Co. jet off to this place called the North Crater, where everything gets doubly surreal. Cloud is subjected by Sephiroth to an illusion which is a repeat of the Kalm flashback, except this time Cloud’s role is acted out by a guy called Zack and Cloud is nowhere to be seen, Sephiroth’s present-time disembodied voice penetrating the dream/illusion to taunt Cloud and tell him his memories have been implanted and he’s not who he thinks he is; he is nobody. Cloud denies it, although… no! he denies it… although he can’t remember much of his life from before Soldier… but no! he breaks out of the illusion and gets together his crew and they hustle to the centre of the crater where they find a room which is made out of materia (magic stone, remember). Cloud gets possessed by Sephiroth and walks on the materia-roof; a translucent sac drops from the roof with a naked Sephiroth inside. I’m pretty sure that this is the true Sephiroth, who is controlling Cloud, and the other Sephiroth was actually just a clone created by Hojo because the real Sephiroth died five years ago in the malfunctioning Reactor, coming back to life who knows how [5] in this larva-like pod-thing. The materia-room and the larger cavern start to collapse, and Co. w/o Cloud make a run for it, bumping into Rufus and the Turks and Hojo who for their own reasons have all this time been chasing after S as well. With Cloud still inside, the crater collapses and disgorges the Weapons, anime-influenced, semi-intelligent, flying super-beasts generated by the planet in order to protect the planet [6] in times of direst need. The party get put in custody by Rufus and taken for public execution, professedly for the crime of ending the world. They manage to escape and go looking for Cloud, who they eventually find washed up in a peaceful village called Mideel. He is in a wheelchair and cannot speak and has an advanced case of something called Mako poisoning. The team are wondering how to restore him to health when one of the Weapons attacks Mideel and causes a kind of earthquake/rupture that drops Cloud + Tifa into the Lifestream (think of this as the planet’s Mako-circulation system), plunging them also into a kind of over-symbolic dream-world that represents Cloud’s fractured psyche. A tremendous amount of plot happens. Like an hour’s worth of plot. Basically, Cloud isn’t a clone, although he was injected with Jenova cells, and the Kalm flashback isn’t 100% true; there was a guy called Zack, who got killed by Sephiroth, and who was subsequently revenged by Cloud (who was not a Soldier, but a run-of-the-mill, non-elite small-s soldier), who stabbed S w/ Zack’s discarded sword and pushed him off a bridge and killed him. Cloud comes out of the Lifestream, no longer wracked by inner division. Meanwhile Shinra have sent up a rocket [7] to try to shatter or divert Meteor, but nothing doing, a few fragments break off and start to orbit the largest fragment, which actually makes it look a lot meaner, like a cosmic flail. Some plot happens involving a 130 year old floating guru called Bugenhagen, and Cloud and Co. learn that Aeris + Holy will rise up and stop Meteor and save the planet if they can destroy Sephiroth’s latest incarnation. They go and they do this. Aeris + Holy rise up; the world is saved. [And exhale] [1] Blue-suited, cool, their appearance always accompanied by slinky music. It’s not clear why they’re called the Turks – possibly it’s a translation issue. [2] Firing his gun-arm (don’t ask) wildly into the Sector 7 wreckage while screaming the names of the recently crushed. [3] No, really. [4] Quite graphically, although there is no blood. The Aeris death-scene is a bit of a seminal moment in computer gaming, as it was quite rare at the time for a major character, a playable character, to die in the course of the narrative. I think it was double shocking because in FFVII playable characters die all the time in the course of combat, but can be resurrected by an item called a Phoenix Down. There was no way to resurrect Aeris after the running-through. It was as if you, the player, had been given control of the lives of these characters only to have one of them ripped from your hands. It might have been irritating, I suppose for some people it was, but the game primed players by taking over at all the most dramatic moments (the swing from the collapsing plate, Sephiroth burning down the village, etcetera), and rendering them as FMV (which is to say as Full Motion Video, which is to say with massively increased graphical quality), in a way increasing the sense that events were fated, which amplified the ‘epic’ feel of the game. [5] I’m maybe not being crystal clear, but here’s what the most thorough of the Internet synopses has to say: “Now, time for an explanation that you all might need as to this whole Sephiroth explanation, as he's supposed to be dead. You've been facing the only successful clone of Sephiroth thus far, with the tattoo #1 on him. The real Sephiroth is dead, and how, you'll find out later. But, if the real one is dead, then how in God's name are the clones being controlled? This is not really simple to answer, and the game doesn't really ever explain it thoroughly. Basically, though, Sephiroth just has super powers, is what I expect.” [6] Imagine them as like the Captain Planet team, except badass. They seem to protect the planet by laying waste to large population-centres. [7] There’s a whole rocket sub-saga, plus a playable character called Cid, who appears, in various mechanic-type guises, in several FF games.

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