*Megalovania intensifies*
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
*Megalovania intensifies*
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No o_oAnd now for the more important question;
did you also get the ribbon you missed on the way back?
(Getting the Icicle Inn lore only required reloading a save from outside the town, heading in, getting the scene and then closing the game, whereas getting the Ribbon would have required doing a solid chunk of the dungeon all over again.)
Sure, shoot.
The thing I'm not happy about is having to reload and backtrack
The fact that they are some of the most important lore scene in the game and are missable only adds insult to injury!My typical 'build' for Cloud includes both Cover and Counter Attack, so that Cloud both uses his fairly considerable HP to tank hits for other party members, but also gets more chance to proc retaliatory strikes every turn. Even at these fairly low Materia levels (Counter Attack only has like a 20% chance to trigger at lv 1), it's solid enough to feel nice to have, and hopefully we'll get to 'actually gameplay-impactful' by the endgame. I sometimes swap in a Cover on another character when I want them to grind Limit, like I did it with Yuffie for most of this update, although at this stage Yuffie has already unlocked her LB3, so her only factor for gaining new LBs is "kill X enemies yourself," and then we can take care of Tifa, and I expect my endgame party to be some variation on Cloud + Tifa/Yuffie/Vincent, pick two out of three. Probably Tifa/Yuffie just because as much as I love his monster form, losing control of a character for the entire fight once their LB triggers is a bit of a bummer gameplay-wise, but I'll keep Vincent around.
I will most likely make a special post for it rather than tuck it in at the start of the next update (which will be particularly plot-heavy) as a mini-update/Intermission, so look forward to that, assuming people haven't already tagged you in the Spoilers thread to tell you all about it.
Pain. Agony, even. Suffering, if you will.
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Think positive - instead of just "wear best item by far", you'll need to think about your gear!
This plus long ranged materia's a fine physical build.
So!
First, you'll need to buy an item called Mimett Green, from the chocobo farm.
Second, there will be a town called Mideel. Inside, you'll find a white chocobo. Give it the green, scratch it behind it ears, and the materia will be yours.
Have I mentioned he won't be there forever?
Second, there will be a town called Mideel. Inside, you'll find a white chocobo. Give it the green, scratch it behind it ears, and the materia will be yours.
Have I mentioned he won't be there forever?
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Completionism is how you stumble on that sort of hidden stuff - I like to keep at least one of every single item I ever stumble across in an RPG, if at all possible, just to have the full inventory, so if something requires me to have at hand an item that it was possible to buy to be activated, I will have one copy of it along. And of course checking anything that looks like it can be interacted with, although that habit took me a bit to learn.
Don't forget the ever important "literally anything happened in the plot? Time to talk to every NPC in the game again so I don't miss any dialogue!"
Or, to go Even Further Beyond, reloading the game every time there's a party member quip or interaction so you can change your party and listen to every single possible party dialogue!
Thank god I played Paper Mario on emulators at some point so I could just savestate and switch party members.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Oh, I didn't forgot - FFVIII taught me to do that so compulsively it's innate now.
You think a few scenes of missed lore in FFVII are bad? In FFVIII a sufficient lack of use of the game's "talk with everybody three times after every new cutscene" feature can make the plot downright incomprehensible. Not helped by the fact that a number of cutscenes can be triggered by going in the wrong place before having spoken with everybody, or things like a same area having different conversation that can be triggered in it, as well as some scenes only taking place based on party composition... FFVIII is a nightmare in terms of missable conversations. Although it does feels rewarding to see how what appears to be random chatter or just a strangely colored background can turn out to be foreshadowing plot stuff that'll happen hours later or provides key context for character beats that would otherwise appear to come out of nowhere.
But we should probably hold back on discussing FFVIII until the thread gets there - which isn't going to happen anytime soon.
MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
So a question Omi.
Do you find this better or worse than the missable lore surrounding Shadow?
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Which is funny, this feels like final dungeon territory.
Levels are a bit lower than usual (Omi mentioned the mid-40s), but yeah The Northern Crater really feels like the point everything's been building up to for a while. You'd absolutely think it was close to the endgame if there hadn't been "swap from Disk 1 to Disk 2 of 3" barely an hour or two ago.
So instead, it's FAKEOUT FINAL DUNGEON TIME BABY, WE JUMPING IN THE CRATER TO THE UNDERGROUND KINGDOM OF THE DWARVES LORE GONNA GET FUNKY SIX MORE WORLD MAPS NEW FINAL FANTASY RECORD
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Yeah, the fact the games are split into multiple disks really makes a number on any chance of the Playstation titles managing to fool the player into believing the games are ending midway through. Not that any Final Fantasy before them ever truly managed that, but at least when FFIV, FFV and FFVI all made their own attempts, it was believable (to various degrees) that the end might be nigh. The Playstation trilogy, for all of its many other strengths, really can't pull that off at all.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Disc 3 is just the Commentary track and Making Of documentary
Disc 3 is all of the minigames collected separately for ease of access. There is the final FMV as well that provides some additional context for the grand mysteries of the game as well as a sequel hook, but you can't see it until you win every minigame with a perfect score.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hilariously, I think Omi is overlevelled for this point in the game, which is why getting LBs is giving him trouble.
Speaking of:
You've got your LB mechanics mixed up, I think: The first one of a level is the one that unlocks by kills, the 2nd is the one that unlocks by using the first LB of that level.
Yuffie's 2nd 3rd level limit break, Doom of the Living, is absolutely worth grinding for, FYI. (And so is her 2-2 one, Bloodfest). Doom of the Living is one of the strongest attacks in the game, and Bloodfest is no slouch either given how fast L2 LBs charge compared to 3s or 4s.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not sure what would be an appropriate measure to judge such a subjective answer, but I've already written 2.5k words on the Icicle Inn House scene and am still going, so you can draw your own conclusions from that, I think.
There's an obvious solution to this: gratuitously switch to Disk 2 early (the obvious point being when leaving Midgar), Disk 3 just recently, then Disk 1 again later after Disk 3.
The writers heard you grumbling about the plot/gameplay ratio and seemingly took it a little personally.
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Speaking of missable content, during my very first FF7 playthrough I walked directly past Fort Phoenix and Gongaga because I didn't even realize they were "towns."
Final Fantasy VII, Intermission: Icicle Inn Lore
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
SO APPARENTLY THERE'S A WHOLE MAJOR PLOT CUTSCENE I HAVE MISSED.
And how did I miss it, you ask?
So, in Icicle Inn, there's this house:
It's got suspiciously technological equipment and a downstairs level with a bed with monitoring equipment on it. I thought 'huh, that's interesting,' pressed [OK] at the environment a couple of times, one of them did a clicking noise, I assumed it was like that tent with machinery in Wall Market that had machinery in it and ended up completely without purpose, I went downstairs, found a Turbo Ether, and then shrugged off the whole thing as meant to mostly just be mysterious and hint at whatever and contain a valuable item and I moved on.
Turns out! It was more than that! I just hadn't clicked on the right computer!
You see, if you approach this specific computer and interact with it, then it opens a list of videos to watch.
My frustration aside, this isn't, like… A buried secret that requires a guide. But it does require the audience to have internalized that the static, pre-rendered background are sometimes treated as real material objects that can be interacted with, even as most of the time they're just decor. Like, do you know how much inert machinery and computers you can't interact with I've been through at this point in the game? How many libraries whose books can't be read (except sometimes they can)? You just have to… Absorb that everything that looks like it might be something that you can interact with should be tried, even as it doesn't work 99% of the time, and it's an extremely different design sensibility from modern gaming, which typically focuses on making interactive items stand out visibly or at the very least makes them individual objects within the environment, rather than part of a single background texture.
With that said, we've found it now. So what's on these videos?
Well…
The first one is titled "The Original Crisis."
…so, remember Professor Gast?
The dialogue boxes in these scenes do not mention the characters by name, but considering that we know of one character who made breakthroughs regarding Jenova and the Ancients, was considered wise enough by the Cosmo Elders to entrust with knowledge, and eventually saw the errors of his ways and realized he'd made a great mistake with Jenova before disappearing and his work being retrieved by Hojo, I feel pretty confident this is Gast, rather than some random Shinra lab employee who Gordon Freeman'd it. Now, this could be while Ifalna was in Shinra captivity, but considering how this looks much more like a house with a bunch of high-tech equipment in it than a containment cell and it's at the far end of the world, I'm going to bank on 'they're both currently on the run.'
Gast(?) asks Ifalna about her ancestors, the Cetra.
Ifalna: "2000 years ago, our ancestors, the Cetra, heard the cries of the Planet. The first ones to discover the Planet's wound were the Cetra at the Knowlespole."
Gast: "Tell us, Ifalna… Where is the land called the 'Knowlespole'?"
Ifalna: "Knowlespole refers to this area. The Cetra then began a Planet-reading."
Gast: "Ifalna, what exactly does a Planet-reading entail?"
Ifalna: "...I can't explain it very well, but it's like having a conversation with the Planet… It said something fell from the sky making a large wound."
Ifalna: "Thousands of Cetra pulled together, trying to heal the Planet… But, due to the severity of the wound, it was only able to heal itself over many years."
Gast: "Do the Ancients, rather, the Cetra, have special powers to heal the Planet?"
Ifalna: "No, it's not that kind of power. The life force of all living things on the Planet becomes the energy. The Cetra tried desperately to cultivate the land so as to not diminish the needed energy…"
Gast: "Hmm, even here so close to the North Cave, the snow never melts. Is that because the Planet's energy is gathered here to heal its injury?"
Ifalna: [She bows her hand with her hands joined in an expression of sorrow.] "Yes, the energy that was needed to heal the Planet withered away the land… then the Planet… The Planet tried to persuade the Cetra to leave the Knowlespole, but…"
Gast: "Ifalna… Let's take a break."
Okay! This is only the first part of this dialogue but already we've learned so much.
The first remark that I want to make is… 2000 years is a lot on the scale of human civilization, but on an ecological scale it's nothing, right? The K-T extinction, also caused by a meteor, was an event that lasted… Scientists aren't sure, but the lower-range estimates given are like "a thousand years" to "ten thousand years" (the upper ranges are in the millions of years); that's the timeline of things dying and going extinct, before any recovery occurs! That we went from 'the Cetra are the dominant species on the planet' to 'humanity rules the world with a technological civilization' in 2000 years is pretty impressive recovery, and it's probably down to the way the Planet mitigated the 'wound' dealt by the meteor with spiritual energy. There's a paradox, of course, in that in so doing it withered the land, weakened the world everywhere, but a weakened world is not 'total ecosystem collapse as ash chokes the sky and firestorms burn down every forest.'
Second…
We've seen, at the end of the last update, the site of the crater; the swirling spiritual energy gathered there; the scabbed-over injury around the point of impact; the Planet is still healing.
That means that…
I've talked about the 'small world' problem, and that's always going to be there just by necessity of how FF7 works, its limitations as a game, the story it wants to tell, and all that; its world is always going to somewhat implausible and something you just have to accept. With that said.
We've talked before about how the world of FF7 feels… underpopulated to an extent, with few major polities, where humanity, though having reached advanced modern technology, lives (outside of Midgar) mostly in small settlements separated by vast stretches of land, in a world without highways or transcontinental railways and with some, but not much transoceanic ship travel. A small humanity, living in small places, with thin connective tissue between them. And amid all this, a faded, decayed world - and some of it, the most dramatic manifestation, of course, due to Shinra; the characteristic Mako Wastes, the polluted waters, all that stuff which immediately surrounds their most exploited areas.
But… The rest of the world isn't that much more vibrant. Most of the map is flat plains and brown earthen wastes. The forests are small, and not particularly lush. The mountains are almost universally near-barren peaks, rather than the vivid environment they can be in real life. There's no snow biome outside of the north pole, which is very specifically the place where all the spiritual energy is gathering, and neither are there sandy deserts; even the jungle around Bone Village seem grey-ish. It had not occurred to me to make note of it because I was attributing it all to the new hardware of the PSX and the new style of graphics limiting the color palette artists had to work with, but the whole world is washed out. And we could put it all on Shinra, for sure, but it reaches out so far beyond the immediate wastelands caused by the Reactors, and it's so universal it would probably have been commented on if the Planet as a whole was much healthier decades ago, wasn't it?
But… No. This is the world humanity has grown up in. This is the world that followed the meteor impact. It has always been like this, for two thousand years. For two thousand years, the Planet has been gathering its energy from all over the world to heal the wound dealt by the impact. As life returns to the Planet, to the Lifestream, the Lifestream gathers in one place, to repair the damage. Little of it remains to return to the land, to grow forests, to make heat or cold, to stir the sky with complex weather systems, to keep the oceans churning with life.
This has always been a weak and faded world. Humanity has always grown in a universe where it took large amounts of land to sustain the tiniest villages, where most land was not 'wilderness' but arid steppe, where the population grew only slowly, never exploding into massive demographic waves even with the advent of modernization, because human souls, new human lives are also born of spiritual energy.
The Forgotten City built close to the wound, in the North - as Ifalna describes it, the Ancients did not have the power to directly heal the Planet, only to listen to its voice. Rather, their best efforts to help it heal were to simply… Tend to it. Nurture life. Grow plants, till the soil, keep water flowing, nurture a balanced ecosystem, maybe? To just be good gardeners, so as to stave off the diminishing of energy, so as to give the Planet more spiritual power to heal itself. The precise opposite of what Shinra has been doing, but the thing is, the Ancients' tending to the Planet was not some golden age of plenty and harmony, it was merely trying to make the best of a bad situation, whereas Shinra promises an actual golden age, no matter how short-lived and self-destructive.
No wonder the lure of Midgar is so powerful, when this is what it pulled humanity from towards an age of false plenty. But even its downfall will not bring back an age of harmony with a healthy and bountiful nature, because there is no such age to return to. Bringing down Shinra would put an end to the spread of the Mako Wastes, would give the Planet more of its energy back to heal itself, but only to return to this weak, struggling, crippled world, for as long as it takes the Planet to finally heal from the wound of two thousand years ago.
That's… a lot.
Now, if you've paid attention, you might have noticed something odd; Ifalna talks about the Ancients gathering to try and heal the Planet and all that, which means the Ancients survived the impact, and for the most part managed to endure the decay of the Planet following it. So… why are they all dead? Well…
Ifalna: "I'm all right…"
Ifalna: "When the Cetra… were preparing to part with the land they loved… That's when it appeared!"
Ifalna: "It looked like… our… our dead mothers… and our dead brothers. Showing us the specters of their past."
Gast: "Who is the person that appeared at the North Cave? I haven't any idea."
Ifalna: "That's when the one who injured the Planet… Or the 'crisis from the sky,' as we call it, came."
Ifalna: "It first approached as a friend, deceived them, and then finally… Gave them the virus. The Cetra were attacked by the virus and went mad… transforming into monsters."
Ifalna: "Then, just as it had at the Knowlespole. It approached other Cetra clans… and infected them with… the virus."
Gast: [Puts a hand on her shoulder.] "You don't look well… Let's call it a day."
What an oddly physically affectionate gesture.
Okay. Okay okay okay.
Some of this is just confirming stuff that I'd concluded/inferred from prior information but making it explicit so it's nice to know that I'm not running on mistaken speculation: The meteor was Jenova, the thing that came from outer space and put an end to the reign of the Ancients. We… should probably take it as meaning that my whole read about the Ancients being space travelers was wrong; either this wasn't meant to be the reader's takeaway from Sephiroth's first big monologue at all and the wording just got me spun around, or it was but it was just part of Gast's initial mistaken conclusions that stemmed from mistaking the Ancients and Jenova for the same species.
Sad. I liked the Ancient Aliens. It could still be that the Ancients and Jenova are two separate species of space travelers that arrived one after another, but it seems like a stretch, especially when the Cetra had such a clear metaphysical connection to the Planet.
More than that, though…
We now know how the Ancients were wiped out. It wasn't the impact itself. It was Jenova's direct action - she didn't crash into the Planet then stay buried for two thousand years, she took active action to take over the world. And how did she do that? By infecting the local dominant species and turning them into Jenova-entities, spreading like a virus.
Jenova waged an actual war against a low-population species of empathetic mages, probably the most perfect prey for it. And though Ifalna speaks of a 'virus,' I think, given the information we have so far, that the 'virus' and 'Jenova cells' are one and the same - the phenomenon we've seen manifesting repeatedly in which an organ of Jenova, or an individual infected by Jenova, turns into a Jenova-entity, ties it all together. Whatever the fuck Hojo, or Gast before running away, or whoever else at Shinra, did to create Jenova-cell-based super soldiers and Sephiroth Copies and whatnot, they were actively restarting the process of planetary takeover which the Ancients barely managed to stop two thousand years ago while dying out as a species. They were kicking the wasps' nest, only the wasps were ichneumons ready to plant their eggs in as many hosts as possible, and they actively provided it with dedicated hosts and receivers.
And the fact that Jenova appeared as loved ones, "deceived" the Cetra, suggests a high degree of psychological manipulation, of warping perception, culminating in contamination…
This definitely seems to lean in the direction of Jenova being the one with agency over Sephiroth, rather than the opposite; Sephiroth has a prime target, pretty much unintentionally designed for maximum vulnerability to her influence, who based his initial psychotic break on false, outdated data, and only grasped the truth already in Jenova's clutches, already primed to understand new information through the lens that validated advancing Jenova's agenda. At the same time…
Jenova as she is presented here seems less a being with human intelligence and human connection and more something like John Carpenter's The Thing; an entity capable of emulating language, emulating human behavior and psychology, but all of it fundamentally empty mimicry, merely gestures performed by the alien agency behind them that doesn't think in any way a human could. And, if that's the case, then I think Sephiroth might exist at a strange and unique juncture - simultaneously the human being with agency and the puppet of an alien intelligence, the line between the two utterly blurred.
And Cloud, of course, is like a zombie bite victim in the middle stages of infection, his agency already partially overwritten yet still trying to carry on in spite of it.
If this is true, then Cloud is pretty much fucked. Because that means that Jenova/Sephiroth doesn't have a single, static backdoor which Cloud can learn to resist, but instead an active infection that is only going to get worse as the mother entity exerts further influence on him.
Well.
…that was just the first video of four, by the way.
So let's slot in the second one! Titled, simply and in awkward English, "What is 'Weapon'?"
Gast: "Ifalna, can you comment on the thing called 'Weapon'?"
Ifalna: "Yes, Professor. The one the Professor mistook for a Cetra… was named Jenova. That is 'the crisis from the sky.'"
Ifalna: "The Planet knew it had to destroy the 'crisis from the sky'... You see, as long as Jenova exists, the Planet will never be able to fully heal itself."
Gast: "Back then, Weapon was a weapon the Planet produced by its own will?"
Ifalna: "Yes, but… There is no record of Weapon ever being used. A small number of the surviving Cetra defeated Jenova and confined it."
Ifalna: "The Planet produced Weapon… But it was no longer necessary to use it."
Gast: "So, Weapon no longer exists on this Planet?"
Ifalna: "Weapon cannot vanish. …It remains asleep somewhere on the Planet. Even though Jenova is confined, it could come back to life at some point…"
Ifalna: "The Planet has not healed itself yet. It's keeping watch on Jenova."
Gast: "Where is Weapon?"
Ifalna: "I don't know… I can't hear the voice of the Planet well… Times… have changed. The Planet… is probably watching this situation closely."
[Here, Ifalna seems to start crying, and Gast turns away from her, his knees bending like he is being overcome with some emotion.]
Gast: "...Thank you, Ifalna, that will be all for today…"
Okay.
So, the whole 'Weapon' deal is awkwardly phrased even more than SOLDIER was, and it's leading to a potential confusion. Checking the Retranslated mod, they instead use the term the Weapons. Plural. 'The Planet bore the Weapons, but they were no longer needed,' and so on; the Weapons are clearly several entities, and they are named that way (using the English term in the original Japanese) because they were the weapons the Planet meant to use against a threat.
There must have been some terrible cost or risk to using the Weapon, because while Ifalna tells us that the Cetra were able to 'defeat and confine' Jenova, temporarily ending the crisis, she also tells us that the Planet won't be able to fully heal until Jenova is destroyed. Which means that the Planet made an active decision to look at what the Cetra had managed, at its own crippling injury, and to say 'good enough' rather than unleash the Weapons.
Which seems to suggest the Weapons themselves might have been an apocalyptic threat. Entities capable of such destruction that life, or at least higher life, might not have survived their deployment, leaving only the Planet and a surfeit of spiritual energy generated from widespread death to reintegrate and slowly start the cycle of life anew from scratch. The Planet looked at the choice between wiping out the Cetra and killing Jenova at the same time, or allowing Jenova to remain as a crippling injury within itself but allowing the surviving Cetra to go on, and picked the latter.
A gesture of kindness, from an entity that's been so far characterized as simultaneously nurturing and also awesomely deadly. And one that left Jenova dormant, waiting for the chance Shinra gave it.
Jenova, therefore, is the secret wound at the heart of the Planet that had to be addressed. The world cannot heal until she is destroyed, and the Planet does not have the power to destroy her itself, which means humanity and all life can never flourish until they themselves destroy Jenova.
I… where does that leave humanity, actually?
It's unclear if Ifalna was a personal witness to the events she describes - we know Aerith isn't biologically immortal (or at least Hojo believed so), and although she uses 'we' in the original translation when talking of the Cetra of that age, she uses 'they' in the retranslation. I think it's unlikely she's been a wandering immortal this whole time, but then… Where did she come from? How is she the last Ancient? Were both her Parents the previous last two Ancients and then died? Because if Ifalna is born of normal biological descent over two thousand years and is still a Cetra with all the capabilities thereof, and humanity aren't, then that means humanity aren't some… weakened descendants of the surviving Cetra of the Jenova era? So where did humanity come from?
The interstellar travel theory is alive and well, the Cetra were the original inhabitants of the Planet then nearly all died fighting Jenova and humanity arrived later as interstellar travelers who settled the now-nearly uninhabited Planet, the fading of the memory of the Cetra is a metaphor for how settler people rewrite their history to imagine the land they took was empty and virginal and not populated by natives they displaced
The use of the term 'Weapon' to describe these terrible instruments of the Planet's salvation is interesting. It calls to mind, what else, the Ultima Weapon, from Final Fantasy VI; the use of the term 'Weapon' to describe some kaiju-like entity of pure destruction built for some ambivalent or dangerous purposes is an interesting one to pick up, especially knowing as an FFXIV player that it'll be picked up again in the game for its own line of 'Weapons' as giant biomechanical piloted monsters.
…
I gotta say we've kind of completely lost the plot of the initial environmentalist themes and the whole thing around capitalism, industrialism and big corporations. In much the same way that VI transitioned from a pretty sober look at the evils of fascism and industrialism into a killer clown who wants to destroy the world, VII has now fully moved on from the perils of Mako exploitation and the double-edged sword of human prosperity at long-term cost to life itself that Shinra is offering onto an alien parasite whose presence is preventing the Planet from healing and which threatens to take it over by using magic illusions to infect humanity with a monster virus.
I knew this was bound to happen with Sephiroth taking the spotlight at some point, but that's the thing; this isn't Sephiroth, not as such, it's not the pretty white-haired boy hijacking the whole environmentalist theme, it comes earlier than that, with the whole concept of Alien Threat Jenova, and would still exist even without his involvement.
It's… striking.
Two more videos.
First off, if you've been feeling watching this that Gast was kind of physically affectionate towards Ifalna and she didn't seem to mind, well, yes, and you won't be surprised by what comes next! Because the third option in the interaction box is labeled 'Confidential', and once opened, it reads…
…yeah, Ifalna and Gast eventually struck up a romance, and that romance became physical, until they had a baby together.
Ifalna: "What are you doing, Profess- I mean, honey?"
Gast: "Oh, I'm thinking of taping it on video. But, the video's not working right…"
Ifalna: "What are you going to tape? Is there still something I haven't mentioned?"
Gast: "No, that's not it. I'm going to record my beautiful daughter."
[At this point, I completely lose track of who is talking; the dialogue boxes don't have names and they don't stay at consistent places on the screen.]
Voice: "And when she's sleeping, her face… looks like an angel."
Voice: "First, we have to figure out her name. We can take the video later!"
Voice: "I've already decided! If it's a girl, then it'll be Aerith. That's that!"
Voice: "You are SO selfish! But Aerith is a good name!"
Voice: "Hee hee… it's a good name, considering it came out of that forgetful head of yours!"
Voice: "Right!? Oh, the video tape…"
[Video ends.]
I think what happened here is that Gast is the one who picked the name. I'm not sure what significance it had. There's not much to mine there, it's a straightforward scene of two parents of a newborn all abuzz with young love and excitement. It's…
The game made a very deliberate choice to kill Aerith, and then immediately send us to Icicle Inn as the next step on our journey, where this whole scene awaits us. I played in the 'wrong order,' so I am reading this after a lot of other plot developments, but if you're doing it 'correctly,' then this is effectively the first major plot beat that follows Aerith's death.
She, who did not remember her father, who barely remember where she grew up - she'll never see these tapes. She'll never see the face of her father or hear his voice. And by such a narrow margin. By the distance of a single dungeon.
We arrived there just a little too late.
Or else she died a little too early.
…
The last tape is titled "Daughter's Record: 20th day after birth." Aerith is not even a month old, still a baby. It opens simply, with Aerith gently chiding Gast for once again turning on the cameras to film his happy family, and him saying he can't help it, it's their lovely daughter, and he wants to capture all her childhood on video tape.
Interestingly, it's Ifalna, the sweet and wise Cetra, who says that if he keeps doting on her like that, she won't grow up to be strong. "Aerith is different from the other children. I wonder what dangers await her?" It's such a brief, yet fascinating look at Ifalna's own anxieties - there's a reason she lives inside this high-tech cabin in a remote town at the end of the world, after all, isn't there? A reason she is the last Ancient. There must have been pain, loss, trauma in her background, and her first thought for her daughter is a harsh one, that she can't be coddled, that she needs strength.
Gast exclaims to never say that, that he will protect them no matter what, and Ifalna is reassured, but, well.
We already know he failed.
There's a knock on the door.
Ifalna: "I'll send them away."
Gast: "Yes, at once!! Who the devil?"
[Ifalna approaches the door.]
Ifalna: "It, it's them!!"
[She backs away from the door as it is opened, and Shinra troops barge in.]
As the soldiers file in, guns at the ready, a voice cackles, gloating about having finally found Ifalna, and then correcting itself by referring to her as her species' name, rather than her actual name.
You get no points for guessing who that is.
Just in case you had doubts that this was in fact Professor Gast.
Hojo, barely any less greasy than he is today, but with mildly improved hair at the very least, strides in, high on the thrill of victory, and in Hojo-like fashion, declares he spent a lot of effort searching for the two of them, for two years (noting this for timeline purposes, not sure if it matters) and how much he's been wanting 'this new sample.'
At first I assume he means Ifalna, but from Gast's outraged reaction of 'Do you mean Aerith?' and Gast complimenting them on their choice of names, it's clear Hojo was in fact talking about Aerith and knew about her existence. So… He's been looking for them for two years, but he already knew about their 20-days old daughter? What? Yeah, this doesn't really quite fit for me, but it doesn't matter much.
Gast, clearly refusing to grasp the nature of the situation he's in, dramatically declares that he is 'severing all ties to Shinra' and tells Hojo to leave. Ifalna, who is much savvier and understands what the combined presence of Shinra's most amoral scientist and the armed men he's brought with him means, throws herself to her knees to beg for Hojo to just take her and leave her daughter alone.
Hojo, who has not a single fiber of morality, or compassion, or human kindness in his heart, flatly denies her, seeing he needs both of them for his experiment, then turns to address Gast again, because Gast is the only person in this scene that he acknowledges as a person with agency who is worth engaging intellectually with.
Hojo: "You understand, don't you, Professor Gast? We can change the future of the Planet!"
Gast: "Don't worry, Ifalna. I'll take care of this!"
Hojo: "Please don't put up a fight. I don't want any harm to come to my precious sample."
Hojo: "Hmm? What a funny looking camera. Guard! Destroy it!"
The guard turns to the camera, and fires - shooting out the lens, but not the recording system. Everything that follows happens in the dark.
Gast attempts some kind of last stand, from the sound of it knocking out one of the soldiers and telling his daughters to run, only for a gunshot to ring out. Whatever Gast attempted as an act of defiance, it doesn't work. He is shot down, and Ifalna and Aerith are dragged away by the soldiers. Hojo, audibly gloating, picks through the tapes, noticing their labels and thanking the Professor for the 'mountain of treasure.'
End footage. That was the last tape.
…
Hojo really is a piece of shit, but of course we already knew that, but it's more than that. The first time Sephiroth mockingly described Hojo as "An inexperienced man assigned to take over the work of a great scientist." And that is what he is, but not only. Everything that Hojo is today, he owes to Gast. Finding Jenova. The research on the Ancients. Judging from the timeline - Aerith is 22 and was born just now, Sephiroth is around 30 - Sephiroth had already been created at this time. All the things Ifalna told Gast that he put on tape and that Hojo based further research on, of course. But it goes beyond that.
Aerith is Gast's daughter. Aerith, that Hojo studied and experimented on from the time she was a child to when Ifalna managed to escape into Sector 5, Aerith whom Hojo sought again for years and abducted as an adult to experiment on again, Aerith exists because of Gast.
Hojo is literally nothing without this man. He's playing with the toys left by his predecessor, walking in his shadow, trying to make some grand new breakthrough that will establish him as 'better than,' and forever failing, forever only basing his fumblings on something someone already set out for him to exploit and not even doing that good a job of it.
In the end he's even indirectly responsible for the awakening of Jenova and the threat of Meteor.
The world might die because this one man couldn't handle the specter of his own incompetence.
Also he's evil and killed Aerith's dad but that's just par for the course.
…
So that's the Icicle Inn Lore.
It's so much to just put in a missable location. Granted, not that missable! If I had clicked just a little to the right the first time around we wouldn't be here right now! But I did miss it. And other players did, evidently! That's… frustrating, because this is so important to both the backstory of the world and Aerith's own origin. It has the identity of her father in it!
It's kinda pissing me off, honestly. But, ah, well. So it is.
…
Okay, one last thing. Going a little out there here, bear with me.
A horror masterpiece.
I am going to assume that I am far from the first to draw a direct comparison between Final Fantasy VII and John Carpenter's The Thing.
The parallels are pretty obvious. A hostile, shapeshifting life form has crash-landed in the Arctic, where it laid dormant for ages until human investigation uncovered it. It uses deceit to approach humans by turning itself into familiar faces, then infects them with its own matter, which causes them to become the Thing itself; it operates by hiding itself among others and, when detected or threatened, twists itself in the form of horrible monsters, which are not only dire physical threats but also further vectors of infection. It seems to me very likely that The Thing was at least featured among the inspirations of the FFVII devs, and if not, what wonderful convergent evolution that is!
…
There's a scene in the movie where the main characters stumble upon the alien in the process of consuming/duplicating/manifesting a copy of one of their team members. It's fantastic practical-effects body horror, but something about it has always struck me.
When the scientists stumble upon the horrible monster halfway through taking on the shape of their colleague, that monster is currently incapacitated by the process and so cannot fight them off, but also is so obviously inhuman that it cannot ever hope to deceive them. This is the first and only honest confrontation between the humans and the Thing. And… what does it do?
It stares at them emotionlessly, then opens its mouth into a low scream. Then they set it on fire, and it sits and waits to burn.
There's no attempt at communication. No plea, no gloating, no expression of loss or regret, no spite. It's as if the things it's watching, the humans it's interacting with, they're just… Objects within its awareness. Things which have trapped it like I might wedge my foot between two rocks. There is no communication value between them. No information to extent. No warning or threat or even attempt at extracting knowledge from them, even with human vocal cords and a shapeshifted human brain. It is as intelligent, more intelligent than a human being, capable of perfect mimicry, and yet… it is so fundamentally different from us than human communication is, to it, only a tool for deceit. Mouth noises you make to trigger specific behavior or ward off attention, like one might say "shoo shoo" to a cat.
Only we anthropomorphize cats a lot of the time, and we give them pet names and tell them about our day. The Thing doesn't even do that.
The Thing doesn't even anthropomorphize us. Not even as much as we might a funny-looking rock.
Why am I bringing that up?
In that scene, at least one of the men who are burning the Thing-man alive is himself a Thing-imposter. It's burning itself. It's watching itself die.
The last time I brought up this scene in a conversation (wholly unrelated to FFVII at the time), someone made the suggestion that the reason why the Thing is simultaneously so alien, so unrelenting in not relating to or communicating with us, yet also so flawlessly effective at copying us, mimicking us, deceiving us, is the same reason the infected show surprise or shock or fear when confronted with the creature, why they aren't perfectly effective at collaborating with one another, why one of the Thing-people dies of a heart attack at an inconvenient time for it.
The Thing is running a human brain in emulation.
That is to say, in order to infiltrate human beings, the Thing takes the biomass and data of a person it's consumed, and produces a perfect replica of that person which is also the Thing. That replica operates with a fully functional brain, it thinks it's a person, but it's not even an 'infected' in the sense that someone possessed by a demon is; it's a temporary hallucination that thinks it's real, existing only for the necessary purpose of moving among other humans like it's a human being, just like it's heart exists for the purpose of keeping its body moving, just like its vocal cords exist for the purpose of emitting the mouth-noises that keep the other obstacles away. A brain that thinks itself human and will be terminated, reabsorbed, recreated as is needed, merely a function, a temporary appendage like any slimy rubber tentacle.
...
So let's get back to Sephiroth.
I think, more than Sephiroth being under the influence of Jenova, Sephiroth is Jenova. And Jenova is Sephiroth.
Sephiroth exists, still, in a sense. His soul exists, a 'traveler in the Lifestream,' flying and teleporting and taking over bodies and whatnot. Sephiroth has wants and beliefs and opinions and desires and he loves his mom very much and he wants to take over the world and all that. He is a distinct person with distinct goals.
But that person is an emulation. It's useful for Sephiroth to exist as an autonomous agent who goes around and makes dramatic speeches and stabs people and gloats at others' failings, but ultimately what that person is is a bunch of source code rearranged and edited over five years since the Nibelheim Incident, when Sephiroth had very different beliefs about his own nature, Jenova's, the Ancients,' humanity's, and different goals, and today, when he has seamlessly transitioned into doing what he is doing now despite having in the process acquired the knowledge that he was wrong about every point of detail of what he found out five years ago, that humanity didn't betray the Ancients, the Ancients weren't seeking a specific place as a Promised Land, Jenova isn't even the heir to the Planet, and none of it matters because Jenova's influence has so thoroughly affected him that he has integrated all these facts into his understanding of the world in a way that would never contradict the overriding directive of "fulfill Jenova's plan for planetary takeover."
It's different from being "mind controlled" in the sense of there being a hostile influence that is puppeteering your emotions and behavior. If you killed Jenova right now, Sephiroth wouldn't suddenly shake off the fog and go "What… have I done?" He would still be as he is, only now extremely mad at you for killing his mom. Sephiroth as he is now is truly and authentically himself. He believes everything he believes, and does exactly what he wants to do.
But that himself that he is, has been carefully edited and constructed by Jenova over five years, and now that he's perfect, she's running him like you run a piece of software. Not a finger-puppet, not Jenova wearing a Sephiroth mask, not Sephiroth under some active vibes affecting the way he thinks, but neither Sephiroth as a pure free agent who came to think the way he does absent any external influence.
He is well and truly himself.
And what he is is Jenova's perfect construct.
Or I'm wrong about all of this. But it's a compelling idea, don't you think?
Thanks for reading.
Next Time: Back on track.
And how did I miss it, you ask?
So, in Icicle Inn, there's this house:
It's got suspiciously technological equipment and a downstairs level with a bed with monitoring equipment on it. I thought 'huh, that's interesting,' pressed [OK] at the environment a couple of times, one of them did a clicking noise, I assumed it was like that tent with machinery in Wall Market that had machinery in it and ended up completely without purpose, I went downstairs, found a Turbo Ether, and then shrugged off the whole thing as meant to mostly just be mysterious and hint at whatever and contain a valuable item and I moved on.
Turns out! It was more than that! I just hadn't clicked on the right computer!
You see, if you approach this specific computer and interact with it, then it opens a list of videos to watch.
My frustration aside, this isn't, like… A buried secret that requires a guide. But it does require the audience to have internalized that the static, pre-rendered background are sometimes treated as real material objects that can be interacted with, even as most of the time they're just decor. Like, do you know how much inert machinery and computers you can't interact with I've been through at this point in the game? How many libraries whose books can't be read (except sometimes they can)? You just have to… Absorb that everything that looks like it might be something that you can interact with should be tried, even as it doesn't work 99% of the time, and it's an extremely different design sensibility from modern gaming, which typically focuses on making interactive items stand out visibly or at the very least makes them individual objects within the environment, rather than part of a single background texture.
With that said, we've found it now. So what's on these videos?
Well…
The first one is titled "The Original Crisis."
…so, remember Professor Gast?
The dialogue boxes in these scenes do not mention the characters by name, but considering that we know of one character who made breakthroughs regarding Jenova and the Ancients, was considered wise enough by the Cosmo Elders to entrust with knowledge, and eventually saw the errors of his ways and realized he'd made a great mistake with Jenova before disappearing and his work being retrieved by Hojo, I feel pretty confident this is Gast, rather than some random Shinra lab employee who Gordon Freeman'd it. Now, this could be while Ifalna was in Shinra captivity, but considering how this looks much more like a house with a bunch of high-tech equipment in it than a containment cell and it's at the far end of the world, I'm going to bank on 'they're both currently on the run.'
Gast(?) asks Ifalna about her ancestors, the Cetra.
Ifalna: "2000 years ago, our ancestors, the Cetra, heard the cries of the Planet. The first ones to discover the Planet's wound were the Cetra at the Knowlespole."
Gast: "Tell us, Ifalna… Where is the land called the 'Knowlespole'?"
Ifalna: "Knowlespole refers to this area. The Cetra then began a Planet-reading."
Gast: "Ifalna, what exactly does a Planet-reading entail?"
Ifalna: "...I can't explain it very well, but it's like having a conversation with the Planet… It said something fell from the sky making a large wound."
Ifalna: "Thousands of Cetra pulled together, trying to heal the Planet… But, due to the severity of the wound, it was only able to heal itself over many years."
Gast: "Do the Ancients, rather, the Cetra, have special powers to heal the Planet?"
Ifalna: "No, it's not that kind of power. The life force of all living things on the Planet becomes the energy. The Cetra tried desperately to cultivate the land so as to not diminish the needed energy…"
Gast: "Hmm, even here so close to the North Cave, the snow never melts. Is that because the Planet's energy is gathered here to heal its injury?"
Ifalna: [She bows her hand with her hands joined in an expression of sorrow.] "Yes, the energy that was needed to heal the Planet withered away the land… then the Planet… The Planet tried to persuade the Cetra to leave the Knowlespole, but…"
Gast: "Ifalna… Let's take a break."
Okay! This is only the first part of this dialogue but already we've learned so much.
The first remark that I want to make is… 2000 years is a lot on the scale of human civilization, but on an ecological scale it's nothing, right? The K-T extinction, also caused by a meteor, was an event that lasted… Scientists aren't sure, but the lower-range estimates given are like "a thousand years" to "ten thousand years" (the upper ranges are in the millions of years); that's the timeline of things dying and going extinct, before any recovery occurs! That we went from 'the Cetra are the dominant species on the planet' to 'humanity rules the world with a technological civilization' in 2000 years is pretty impressive recovery, and it's probably down to the way the Planet mitigated the 'wound' dealt by the meteor with spiritual energy. There's a paradox, of course, in that in so doing it withered the land, weakened the world everywhere, but a weakened world is not 'total ecosystem collapse as ash chokes the sky and firestorms burn down every forest.'
Second…
We've seen, at the end of the last update, the site of the crater; the swirling spiritual energy gathered there; the scabbed-over injury around the point of impact; the Planet is still healing.
That means that…
I've talked about the 'small world' problem, and that's always going to be there just by necessity of how FF7 works, its limitations as a game, the story it wants to tell, and all that; its world is always going to somewhat implausible and something you just have to accept. With that said.
We've talked before about how the world of FF7 feels… underpopulated to an extent, with few major polities, where humanity, though having reached advanced modern technology, lives (outside of Midgar) mostly in small settlements separated by vast stretches of land, in a world without highways or transcontinental railways and with some, but not much transoceanic ship travel. A small humanity, living in small places, with thin connective tissue between them. And amid all this, a faded, decayed world - and some of it, the most dramatic manifestation, of course, due to Shinra; the characteristic Mako Wastes, the polluted waters, all that stuff which immediately surrounds their most exploited areas.
But… The rest of the world isn't that much more vibrant. Most of the map is flat plains and brown earthen wastes. The forests are small, and not particularly lush. The mountains are almost universally near-barren peaks, rather than the vivid environment they can be in real life. There's no snow biome outside of the north pole, which is very specifically the place where all the spiritual energy is gathering, and neither are there sandy deserts; even the jungle around Bone Village seem grey-ish. It had not occurred to me to make note of it because I was attributing it all to the new hardware of the PSX and the new style of graphics limiting the color palette artists had to work with, but the whole world is washed out. And we could put it all on Shinra, for sure, but it reaches out so far beyond the immediate wastelands caused by the Reactors, and it's so universal it would probably have been commented on if the Planet as a whole was much healthier decades ago, wasn't it?
But… No. This is the world humanity has grown up in. This is the world that followed the meteor impact. It has always been like this, for two thousand years. For two thousand years, the Planet has been gathering its energy from all over the world to heal the wound dealt by the impact. As life returns to the Planet, to the Lifestream, the Lifestream gathers in one place, to repair the damage. Little of it remains to return to the land, to grow forests, to make heat or cold, to stir the sky with complex weather systems, to keep the oceans churning with life.
This has always been a weak and faded world. Humanity has always grown in a universe where it took large amounts of land to sustain the tiniest villages, where most land was not 'wilderness' but arid steppe, where the population grew only slowly, never exploding into massive demographic waves even with the advent of modernization, because human souls, new human lives are also born of spiritual energy.
The Forgotten City built close to the wound, in the North - as Ifalna describes it, the Ancients did not have the power to directly heal the Planet, only to listen to its voice. Rather, their best efforts to help it heal were to simply… Tend to it. Nurture life. Grow plants, till the soil, keep water flowing, nurture a balanced ecosystem, maybe? To just be good gardeners, so as to stave off the diminishing of energy, so as to give the Planet more spiritual power to heal itself. The precise opposite of what Shinra has been doing, but the thing is, the Ancients' tending to the Planet was not some golden age of plenty and harmony, it was merely trying to make the best of a bad situation, whereas Shinra promises an actual golden age, no matter how short-lived and self-destructive.
No wonder the lure of Midgar is so powerful, when this is what it pulled humanity from towards an age of false plenty. But even its downfall will not bring back an age of harmony with a healthy and bountiful nature, because there is no such age to return to. Bringing down Shinra would put an end to the spread of the Mako Wastes, would give the Planet more of its energy back to heal itself, but only to return to this weak, struggling, crippled world, for as long as it takes the Planet to finally heal from the wound of two thousand years ago.
That's… a lot.
Now, if you've paid attention, you might have noticed something odd; Ifalna talks about the Ancients gathering to try and heal the Planet and all that, which means the Ancients survived the impact, and for the most part managed to endure the decay of the Planet following it. So… why are they all dead? Well…
Ifalna: "I'm all right…"
Ifalna: "When the Cetra… were preparing to part with the land they loved… That's when it appeared!"
Ifalna: "It looked like… our… our dead mothers… and our dead brothers. Showing us the specters of their past."
Gast: "Who is the person that appeared at the North Cave? I haven't any idea."
Ifalna: "That's when the one who injured the Planet… Or the 'crisis from the sky,' as we call it, came."
Ifalna: "It first approached as a friend, deceived them, and then finally… Gave them the virus. The Cetra were attacked by the virus and went mad… transforming into monsters."
Ifalna: "Then, just as it had at the Knowlespole. It approached other Cetra clans… and infected them with… the virus."
Gast: [Puts a hand on her shoulder.] "You don't look well… Let's call it a day."
What an oddly physically affectionate gesture.
Okay. Okay okay okay.
Some of this is just confirming stuff that I'd concluded/inferred from prior information but making it explicit so it's nice to know that I'm not running on mistaken speculation: The meteor was Jenova, the thing that came from outer space and put an end to the reign of the Ancients. We… should probably take it as meaning that my whole read about the Ancients being space travelers was wrong; either this wasn't meant to be the reader's takeaway from Sephiroth's first big monologue at all and the wording just got me spun around, or it was but it was just part of Gast's initial mistaken conclusions that stemmed from mistaking the Ancients and Jenova for the same species.
Sad. I liked the Ancient Aliens. It could still be that the Ancients and Jenova are two separate species of space travelers that arrived one after another, but it seems like a stretch, especially when the Cetra had such a clear metaphysical connection to the Planet.
More than that, though…
We now know how the Ancients were wiped out. It wasn't the impact itself. It was Jenova's direct action - she didn't crash into the Planet then stay buried for two thousand years, she took active action to take over the world. And how did she do that? By infecting the local dominant species and turning them into Jenova-entities, spreading like a virus.
Jenova waged an actual war against a low-population species of empathetic mages, probably the most perfect prey for it. And though Ifalna speaks of a 'virus,' I think, given the information we have so far, that the 'virus' and 'Jenova cells' are one and the same - the phenomenon we've seen manifesting repeatedly in which an organ of Jenova, or an individual infected by Jenova, turns into a Jenova-entity, ties it all together. Whatever the fuck Hojo, or Gast before running away, or whoever else at Shinra, did to create Jenova-cell-based super soldiers and Sephiroth Copies and whatnot, they were actively restarting the process of planetary takeover which the Ancients barely managed to stop two thousand years ago while dying out as a species. They were kicking the wasps' nest, only the wasps were ichneumons ready to plant their eggs in as many hosts as possible, and they actively provided it with dedicated hosts and receivers.
And the fact that Jenova appeared as loved ones, "deceived" the Cetra, suggests a high degree of psychological manipulation, of warping perception, culminating in contamination…
This definitely seems to lean in the direction of Jenova being the one with agency over Sephiroth, rather than the opposite; Sephiroth has a prime target, pretty much unintentionally designed for maximum vulnerability to her influence, who based his initial psychotic break on false, outdated data, and only grasped the truth already in Jenova's clutches, already primed to understand new information through the lens that validated advancing Jenova's agenda. At the same time…
Jenova as she is presented here seems less a being with human intelligence and human connection and more something like John Carpenter's The Thing; an entity capable of emulating language, emulating human behavior and psychology, but all of it fundamentally empty mimicry, merely gestures performed by the alien agency behind them that doesn't think in any way a human could. And, if that's the case, then I think Sephiroth might exist at a strange and unique juncture - simultaneously the human being with agency and the puppet of an alien intelligence, the line between the two utterly blurred.
And Cloud, of course, is like a zombie bite victim in the middle stages of infection, his agency already partially overwritten yet still trying to carry on in spite of it.
If this is true, then Cloud is pretty much fucked. Because that means that Jenova/Sephiroth doesn't have a single, static backdoor which Cloud can learn to resist, but instead an active infection that is only going to get worse as the mother entity exerts further influence on him.
Well.
…that was just the first video of four, by the way.
So let's slot in the second one! Titled, simply and in awkward English, "What is 'Weapon'?"
Gast: "Ifalna, can you comment on the thing called 'Weapon'?"
Ifalna: "Yes, Professor. The one the Professor mistook for a Cetra… was named Jenova. That is 'the crisis from the sky.'"
Ifalna: "The Planet knew it had to destroy the 'crisis from the sky'... You see, as long as Jenova exists, the Planet will never be able to fully heal itself."
Gast: "Back then, Weapon was a weapon the Planet produced by its own will?"
Ifalna: "Yes, but… There is no record of Weapon ever being used. A small number of the surviving Cetra defeated Jenova and confined it."
Ifalna: "The Planet produced Weapon… But it was no longer necessary to use it."
Gast: "So, Weapon no longer exists on this Planet?"
Ifalna: "Weapon cannot vanish. …It remains asleep somewhere on the Planet. Even though Jenova is confined, it could come back to life at some point…"
Ifalna: "The Planet has not healed itself yet. It's keeping watch on Jenova."
Gast: "Where is Weapon?"
Ifalna: "I don't know… I can't hear the voice of the Planet well… Times… have changed. The Planet… is probably watching this situation closely."
[Here, Ifalna seems to start crying, and Gast turns away from her, his knees bending like he is being overcome with some emotion.]
Gast: "...Thank you, Ifalna, that will be all for today…"
Okay.
So, the whole 'Weapon' deal is awkwardly phrased even more than SOLDIER was, and it's leading to a potential confusion. Checking the Retranslated mod, they instead use the term the Weapons. Plural. 'The Planet bore the Weapons, but they were no longer needed,' and so on; the Weapons are clearly several entities, and they are named that way (using the English term in the original Japanese) because they were the weapons the Planet meant to use against a threat.
There must have been some terrible cost or risk to using the Weapon, because while Ifalna tells us that the Cetra were able to 'defeat and confine' Jenova, temporarily ending the crisis, she also tells us that the Planet won't be able to fully heal until Jenova is destroyed. Which means that the Planet made an active decision to look at what the Cetra had managed, at its own crippling injury, and to say 'good enough' rather than unleash the Weapons.
Which seems to suggest the Weapons themselves might have been an apocalyptic threat. Entities capable of such destruction that life, or at least higher life, might not have survived their deployment, leaving only the Planet and a surfeit of spiritual energy generated from widespread death to reintegrate and slowly start the cycle of life anew from scratch. The Planet looked at the choice between wiping out the Cetra and killing Jenova at the same time, or allowing Jenova to remain as a crippling injury within itself but allowing the surviving Cetra to go on, and picked the latter.
A gesture of kindness, from an entity that's been so far characterized as simultaneously nurturing and also awesomely deadly. And one that left Jenova dormant, waiting for the chance Shinra gave it.
Jenova, therefore, is the secret wound at the heart of the Planet that had to be addressed. The world cannot heal until she is destroyed, and the Planet does not have the power to destroy her itself, which means humanity and all life can never flourish until they themselves destroy Jenova.
I… where does that leave humanity, actually?
It's unclear if Ifalna was a personal witness to the events she describes - we know Aerith isn't biologically immortal (or at least Hojo believed so), and although she uses 'we' in the original translation when talking of the Cetra of that age, she uses 'they' in the retranslation. I think it's unlikely she's been a wandering immortal this whole time, but then… Where did she come from? How is she the last Ancient? Were both her Parents the previous last two Ancients and then died? Because if Ifalna is born of normal biological descent over two thousand years and is still a Cetra with all the capabilities thereof, and humanity aren't, then that means humanity aren't some… weakened descendants of the surviving Cetra of the Jenova era? So where did humanity come from?
The use of the term 'Weapon' to describe these terrible instruments of the Planet's salvation is interesting. It calls to mind, what else, the Ultima Weapon, from Final Fantasy VI; the use of the term 'Weapon' to describe some kaiju-like entity of pure destruction built for some ambivalent or dangerous purposes is an interesting one to pick up, especially knowing as an FFXIV player that it'll be picked up again in the game for its own line of 'Weapons' as giant biomechanical piloted monsters.
…
I gotta say we've kind of completely lost the plot of the initial environmentalist themes and the whole thing around capitalism, industrialism and big corporations. In much the same way that VI transitioned from a pretty sober look at the evils of fascism and industrialism into a killer clown who wants to destroy the world, VII has now fully moved on from the perils of Mako exploitation and the double-edged sword of human prosperity at long-term cost to life itself that Shinra is offering onto an alien parasite whose presence is preventing the Planet from healing and which threatens to take it over by using magic illusions to infect humanity with a monster virus.
I knew this was bound to happen with Sephiroth taking the spotlight at some point, but that's the thing; this isn't Sephiroth, not as such, it's not the pretty white-haired boy hijacking the whole environmentalist theme, it comes earlier than that, with the whole concept of Alien Threat Jenova, and would still exist even without his involvement.
It's… striking.
Two more videos.
First off, if you've been feeling watching this that Gast was kind of physically affectionate towards Ifalna and she didn't seem to mind, well, yes, and you won't be surprised by what comes next! Because the third option in the interaction box is labeled 'Confidential', and once opened, it reads…
…yeah, Ifalna and Gast eventually struck up a romance, and that romance became physical, until they had a baby together.
Ifalna: "What are you doing, Profess- I mean, honey?"
Gast: "Oh, I'm thinking of taping it on video. But, the video's not working right…"
Ifalna: "What are you going to tape? Is there still something I haven't mentioned?"
Gast: "No, that's not it. I'm going to record my beautiful daughter."
[At this point, I completely lose track of who is talking; the dialogue boxes don't have names and they don't stay at consistent places on the screen.]
Voice: "And when she's sleeping, her face… looks like an angel."
Voice: "First, we have to figure out her name. We can take the video later!"
Voice: "I've already decided! If it's a girl, then it'll be Aerith. That's that!"
Voice: "You are SO selfish! But Aerith is a good name!"
Voice: "Hee hee… it's a good name, considering it came out of that forgetful head of yours!"
Voice: "Right!? Oh, the video tape…"
[Video ends.]
I think what happened here is that Gast is the one who picked the name. I'm not sure what significance it had. There's not much to mine there, it's a straightforward scene of two parents of a newborn all abuzz with young love and excitement. It's…
The game made a very deliberate choice to kill Aerith, and then immediately send us to Icicle Inn as the next step on our journey, where this whole scene awaits us. I played in the 'wrong order,' so I am reading this after a lot of other plot developments, but if you're doing it 'correctly,' then this is effectively the first major plot beat that follows Aerith's death.
She, who did not remember her father, who barely remember where she grew up - she'll never see these tapes. She'll never see the face of her father or hear his voice. And by such a narrow margin. By the distance of a single dungeon.
We arrived there just a little too late.
Or else she died a little too early.
…
The last tape is titled "Daughter's Record: 20th day after birth." Aerith is not even a month old, still a baby. It opens simply, with Aerith gently chiding Gast for once again turning on the cameras to film his happy family, and him saying he can't help it, it's their lovely daughter, and he wants to capture all her childhood on video tape.
Interestingly, it's Ifalna, the sweet and wise Cetra, who says that if he keeps doting on her like that, she won't grow up to be strong. "Aerith is different from the other children. I wonder what dangers await her?" It's such a brief, yet fascinating look at Ifalna's own anxieties - there's a reason she lives inside this high-tech cabin in a remote town at the end of the world, after all, isn't there? A reason she is the last Ancient. There must have been pain, loss, trauma in her background, and her first thought for her daughter is a harsh one, that she can't be coddled, that she needs strength.
Gast exclaims to never say that, that he will protect them no matter what, and Ifalna is reassured, but, well.
We already know he failed.
There's a knock on the door.
Ifalna: "I'll send them away."
Gast: "Yes, at once!! Who the devil?"
[Ifalna approaches the door.]
Ifalna: "It, it's them!!"
[She backs away from the door as it is opened, and Shinra troops barge in.]
As the soldiers file in, guns at the ready, a voice cackles, gloating about having finally found Ifalna, and then correcting itself by referring to her as her species' name, rather than her actual name.
You get no points for guessing who that is.
Just in case you had doubts that this was in fact Professor Gast.
Hojo, barely any less greasy than he is today, but with mildly improved hair at the very least, strides in, high on the thrill of victory, and in Hojo-like fashion, declares he spent a lot of effort searching for the two of them, for two years (noting this for timeline purposes, not sure if it matters) and how much he's been wanting 'this new sample.'
At first I assume he means Ifalna, but from Gast's outraged reaction of 'Do you mean Aerith?' and Gast complimenting them on their choice of names, it's clear Hojo was in fact talking about Aerith and knew about her existence. So… He's been looking for them for two years, but he already knew about their 20-days old daughter? What? Yeah, this doesn't really quite fit for me, but it doesn't matter much.
Gast, clearly refusing to grasp the nature of the situation he's in, dramatically declares that he is 'severing all ties to Shinra' and tells Hojo to leave. Ifalna, who is much savvier and understands what the combined presence of Shinra's most amoral scientist and the armed men he's brought with him means, throws herself to her knees to beg for Hojo to just take her and leave her daughter alone.
Hojo, who has not a single fiber of morality, or compassion, or human kindness in his heart, flatly denies her, seeing he needs both of them for his experiment, then turns to address Gast again, because Gast is the only person in this scene that he acknowledges as a person with agency who is worth engaging intellectually with.
Hojo: "You understand, don't you, Professor Gast? We can change the future of the Planet!"
Gast: "Don't worry, Ifalna. I'll take care of this!"
Hojo: "Please don't put up a fight. I don't want any harm to come to my precious sample."
Hojo: "Hmm? What a funny looking camera. Guard! Destroy it!"
The guard turns to the camera, and fires - shooting out the lens, but not the recording system. Everything that follows happens in the dark.
Gast attempts some kind of last stand, from the sound of it knocking out one of the soldiers and telling his daughters to run, only for a gunshot to ring out. Whatever Gast attempted as an act of defiance, it doesn't work. He is shot down, and Ifalna and Aerith are dragged away by the soldiers. Hojo, audibly gloating, picks through the tapes, noticing their labels and thanking the Professor for the 'mountain of treasure.'
End footage. That was the last tape.
…
Hojo really is a piece of shit, but of course we already knew that, but it's more than that. The first time Sephiroth mockingly described Hojo as "An inexperienced man assigned to take over the work of a great scientist." And that is what he is, but not only. Everything that Hojo is today, he owes to Gast. Finding Jenova. The research on the Ancients. Judging from the timeline - Aerith is 22 and was born just now, Sephiroth is around 30 - Sephiroth had already been created at this time. All the things Ifalna told Gast that he put on tape and that Hojo based further research on, of course. But it goes beyond that.
Aerith is Gast's daughter. Aerith, that Hojo studied and experimented on from the time she was a child to when Ifalna managed to escape into Sector 5, Aerith whom Hojo sought again for years and abducted as an adult to experiment on again, Aerith exists because of Gast.
Hojo is literally nothing without this man. He's playing with the toys left by his predecessor, walking in his shadow, trying to make some grand new breakthrough that will establish him as 'better than,' and forever failing, forever only basing his fumblings on something someone already set out for him to exploit and not even doing that good a job of it.
In the end he's even indirectly responsible for the awakening of Jenova and the threat of Meteor.
The world might die because this one man couldn't handle the specter of his own incompetence.
Also he's evil and killed Aerith's dad but that's just par for the course.
…
So that's the Icicle Inn Lore.
It's so much to just put in a missable location. Granted, not that missable! If I had clicked just a little to the right the first time around we wouldn't be here right now! But I did miss it. And other players did, evidently! That's… frustrating, because this is so important to both the backstory of the world and Aerith's own origin. It has the identity of her father in it!
It's kinda pissing me off, honestly. But, ah, well. So it is.
…
Okay, one last thing. Going a little out there here, bear with me.
A horror masterpiece.
I am going to assume that I am far from the first to draw a direct comparison between Final Fantasy VII and John Carpenter's The Thing.
The parallels are pretty obvious. A hostile, shapeshifting life form has crash-landed in the Arctic, where it laid dormant for ages until human investigation uncovered it. It uses deceit to approach humans by turning itself into familiar faces, then infects them with its own matter, which causes them to become the Thing itself; it operates by hiding itself among others and, when detected or threatened, twists itself in the form of horrible monsters, which are not only dire physical threats but also further vectors of infection. It seems to me very likely that The Thing was at least featured among the inspirations of the FFVII devs, and if not, what wonderful convergent evolution that is!
…
There's a scene in the movie where the main characters stumble upon the alien in the process of consuming/duplicating/manifesting a copy of one of their team members. It's fantastic practical-effects body horror, but something about it has always struck me.
When the scientists stumble upon the horrible monster halfway through taking on the shape of their colleague, that monster is currently incapacitated by the process and so cannot fight them off, but also is so obviously inhuman that it cannot ever hope to deceive them. This is the first and only honest confrontation between the humans and the Thing. And… what does it do?
It stares at them emotionlessly, then opens its mouth into a low scream. Then they set it on fire, and it sits and waits to burn.
There's no attempt at communication. No plea, no gloating, no expression of loss or regret, no spite. It's as if the things it's watching, the humans it's interacting with, they're just… Objects within its awareness. Things which have trapped it like I might wedge my foot between two rocks. There is no communication value between them. No information to extent. No warning or threat or even attempt at extracting knowledge from them, even with human vocal cords and a shapeshifted human brain. It is as intelligent, more intelligent than a human being, capable of perfect mimicry, and yet… it is so fundamentally different from us than human communication is, to it, only a tool for deceit. Mouth noises you make to trigger specific behavior or ward off attention, like one might say "shoo shoo" to a cat.
Only we anthropomorphize cats a lot of the time, and we give them pet names and tell them about our day. The Thing doesn't even do that.
The Thing doesn't even anthropomorphize us. Not even as much as we might a funny-looking rock.
Why am I bringing that up?
In that scene, at least one of the men who are burning the Thing-man alive is himself a Thing-imposter. It's burning itself. It's watching itself die.
The last time I brought up this scene in a conversation (wholly unrelated to FFVII at the time), someone made the suggestion that the reason why the Thing is simultaneously so alien, so unrelenting in not relating to or communicating with us, yet also so flawlessly effective at copying us, mimicking us, deceiving us, is the same reason the infected show surprise or shock or fear when confronted with the creature, why they aren't perfectly effective at collaborating with one another, why one of the Thing-people dies of a heart attack at an inconvenient time for it.
The Thing is running a human brain in emulation.
That is to say, in order to infiltrate human beings, the Thing takes the biomass and data of a person it's consumed, and produces a perfect replica of that person which is also the Thing. That replica operates with a fully functional brain, it thinks it's a person, but it's not even an 'infected' in the sense that someone possessed by a demon is; it's a temporary hallucination that thinks it's real, existing only for the necessary purpose of moving among other humans like it's a human being, just like it's heart exists for the purpose of keeping its body moving, just like its vocal cords exist for the purpose of emitting the mouth-noises that keep the other obstacles away. A brain that thinks itself human and will be terminated, reabsorbed, recreated as is needed, merely a function, a temporary appendage like any slimy rubber tentacle.
...
So let's get back to Sephiroth.
I think, more than Sephiroth being under the influence of Jenova, Sephiroth is Jenova. And Jenova is Sephiroth.
Sephiroth exists, still, in a sense. His soul exists, a 'traveler in the Lifestream,' flying and teleporting and taking over bodies and whatnot. Sephiroth has wants and beliefs and opinions and desires and he loves his mom very much and he wants to take over the world and all that. He is a distinct person with distinct goals.
But that person is an emulation. It's useful for Sephiroth to exist as an autonomous agent who goes around and makes dramatic speeches and stabs people and gloats at others' failings, but ultimately what that person is is a bunch of source code rearranged and edited over five years since the Nibelheim Incident, when Sephiroth had very different beliefs about his own nature, Jenova's, the Ancients,' humanity's, and different goals, and today, when he has seamlessly transitioned into doing what he is doing now despite having in the process acquired the knowledge that he was wrong about every point of detail of what he found out five years ago, that humanity didn't betray the Ancients, the Ancients weren't seeking a specific place as a Promised Land, Jenova isn't even the heir to the Planet, and none of it matters because Jenova's influence has so thoroughly affected him that he has integrated all these facts into his understanding of the world in a way that would never contradict the overriding directive of "fulfill Jenova's plan for planetary takeover."
It's different from being "mind controlled" in the sense of there being a hostile influence that is puppeteering your emotions and behavior. If you killed Jenova right now, Sephiroth wouldn't suddenly shake off the fog and go "What… have I done?" He would still be as he is, only now extremely mad at you for killing his mom. Sephiroth as he is now is truly and authentically himself. He believes everything he believes, and does exactly what he wants to do.
But that himself that he is, has been carefully edited and constructed by Jenova over five years, and now that he's perfect, she's running him like you run a piece of software. Not a finger-puppet, not Jenova wearing a Sephiroth mask, not Sephiroth under some active vibes affecting the way he thinks, but neither Sephiroth as a pure free agent who came to think the way he does absent any external influence.
He is well and truly himself.
And what he is is Jenova's perfect construct.
Or I'm wrong about all of this. But it's a compelling idea, don't you think?
Thanks for reading.
Next Time: Back on track.
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Some translations put WEAPON in all caps, like SOLDIER, and I think that gets the point across more or less the same. Also, it looks cooler.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Nothing says that Hojo and co had to break down the door the literal second they tracked down Gast and Ifalna. Just as likely that he found them, put them under surveillance for a minute just to scope out the situation, then learned about Aerith. Considering the man's entire scientific ethos boils down to trying to create the new Reese's Peanut Butter Cups by smashing together whatever bullshit he finds lying around, Gast and Ifalna having a child together would've activated his almonds and then some.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh hey, I called it! I think it was back after the... ship fight? Where Jenova's tentacle fell off of Sephiroth and grew into a boss? Yeah, Sephiroth/Jenova has been The Thing for me since then.
Also Hojo is, as ever, a useless piece of shit. I bet he never even did anything useful with the SOLDIER project, either, that was all inherited stuff he never improved on. He's not a scientist, he's a sadist with a science-aesthetic fetish.
Also Hojo is, as ever, a useless piece of shit. I bet he never even did anything useful with the SOLDIER project, either, that was all inherited stuff he never improved on. He's not a scientist, he's a sadist with a science-aesthetic fetish.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Completely unrelated to anything but the last post, @Omicron, you might like to read Peter Watts' description of events from the Thing's perspective.
- Location
- Spain
Cloud is not much different from that poor snow woman, i would say.
I hope Alexander was worth it.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Pour one out for the poor overworked translator who was so far gone at this point that he was not capable of recognizing that "Noruzuporu" was an Engrish attempt at transliterating the English words "North Pole" into katakana rather than a fantasy name
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
So, this is why the Black Materia exists.
Do you remember what Materia are? What magic actually is? That's right, they're manifestations of the Planet's memories. A memory of fire becomes real to burn your enemies, memories of heroes of yore spring back to life to fight in your place, memories of skills held by warriors can be reborn in your own hands, hell the Enemy Skill Materia literally remembers the abilities of the monsters you encounter. Green, red, yellow, even purple and blue - it's all just memory, manifested and crystallized in places where the Lifestream draws near to the surface, memories so powerful that tiny mortals can recreate them by just holding one of these funny little rocks.
So, then, what happens when the Planet has an extremely traumatic memory of a meteor impacting it and causing a grievous wound that, even after 2000 years, has not healed? It manifests as a pitch-black Materia. And the Cetra...what the fuck are they going to do with it? What even can they do? Destroying it won't do any good, it'd just return back to the planet and resurface elsewhere, where anyone can get it and unwittingly blow up the planet trying to use it in ignorance. They don't have the power to destroy the memories of the Planet when the best they can do is just talk to it.
So they do the best thing they can. They seal it away in a safe location...but since this would have been either during or shortly after the whole JENOVA shitshow, they understand that they might need it. If JENOVA returns, blowing a second hole in the planet might be a better result than letting that monster from outer space devour the world. Thus, they leave a contingency - if things are desperate, desperate enough that someone will willingly sacrifice themselves to unseal the Black Materia, then it will still be possible to use that dread power against the enemies of the Planet.
And then that all backfired, and now JENOVA - via Sephiroth - has the Black Materia. Whoops.
Do you remember what Materia are? What magic actually is? That's right, they're manifestations of the Planet's memories. A memory of fire becomes real to burn your enemies, memories of heroes of yore spring back to life to fight in your place, memories of skills held by warriors can be reborn in your own hands, hell the Enemy Skill Materia literally remembers the abilities of the monsters you encounter. Green, red, yellow, even purple and blue - it's all just memory, manifested and crystallized in places where the Lifestream draws near to the surface, memories so powerful that tiny mortals can recreate them by just holding one of these funny little rocks.
So, then, what happens when the Planet has an extremely traumatic memory of a meteor impacting it and causing a grievous wound that, even after 2000 years, has not healed? It manifests as a pitch-black Materia. And the Cetra...what the fuck are they going to do with it? What even can they do? Destroying it won't do any good, it'd just return back to the planet and resurface elsewhere, where anyone can get it and unwittingly blow up the planet trying to use it in ignorance. They don't have the power to destroy the memories of the Planet when the best they can do is just talk to it.
So they do the best thing they can. They seal it away in a safe location...but since this would have been either during or shortly after the whole JENOVA shitshow, they understand that they might need it. If JENOVA returns, blowing a second hole in the planet might be a better result than letting that monster from outer space devour the world. Thus, they leave a contingency - if things are desperate, desperate enough that someone will willingly sacrifice themselves to unseal the Black Materia, then it will still be possible to use that dread power against the enemies of the Planet.
And then that all backfired, and now JENOVA - via Sephiroth - has the Black Materia. Whoops.
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