Final Fantasy VII, Finale: Part 1/3
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII.
It's time.
The whole team has gathered. We are standing over a hole into the core of the very Planet itself. Everything is bathed in the glow of the Lifestream. Within that beating heart of the world, Sephiroth is waiting.
Ooooh, that's where that's from!
Glad to have that cleared up.
Cid berates Cloud for giving out these last orders 'like a wimp,' instead of saying something cool like 'Move out!' This is very funny, considering how much of Cloud's character arc has been about moving on from the need to use 'cool' as an armor for his trauma and feelings, but Cloud does comply and say 'Move out!' and everyone nods. It's a funny bit.
Then, there is some kind of noise off-screen, and everyone turns to the side, looking at something we can't see. Everyone says stuff like 'They're coming!' and 'there's so many of them!'
This is like that time Cloud referred to Sephiroth as having 'flunkies' all over again. The implication seems to be that Sephiroth has a horde of monsters under his control that are now bearing down on the group to stop them from reaching their master, which hasn't really been how Sephiroth has operated at any point in the game. He always uses the personal touch, even when it involves bodyjacking Copies and using mind control to make Cloud do his bidding or personally dropping Jenova fragments onto people; he's never shown any inclination to command monster hordes from a remote position (someone else has, though; we'll get to that).
Nonetheless, the group decides that Cloud should go ahead with two party members while the other five stay behind to hold back the monsters, and will 'catch up' once they've dealt with them - as far as excuses to split the party it's a decent one.
…I'll get into it more later on, but this question of whether Sephiroth actually has minions brings up the fact that he's kind of got a Kefka issue going on, where Sephiroth as an antagonist spends the entire third act just sitting in histower cave doing absolutely nothing while the protagonists run around preparing for the final battle. VII gets away with it a lot better than VI did so far because it has Shinra as an antagonist to deal with during that sequence, but it's masking the issue, rather than solving it; Sephiroth is just completely passive from the moment he summons Meteor to now.
Anyway, we grab Tifa and Yuffie, Cloud turns to everyone and says "All of you! Later!", and we jump into the Lifestream.
I don't think Cloud's earlier line about this being the center of the planet was hyperbole. I think we genuinely are at the core of the Planet, with the cascade of spiritual energy around us and gravity being loose enough that rocks can float around. Which would tie in reasonably enough with the whole 'FF7's world is teeny tiny.'
We actually can run into random encounters during this bit, which is why I can't quite say that the point of no return is on the last screen 'before the final boss,' even though for all intents and purposes this is true. We just run into a couple of Iron Men and a Zombie Dragon on the way; this is the only place Iron Men can be encountered. Once they're dealt with, we land on a larger chunk of rocks, one composed of… Whatever the technical term is for these mineral formations that are composed entirely of rectangular solids. They wonder where they are, but before they can get an answer, however, something emerges from around the floating crystal - an old monster, in a new form.
Jenova.
Specifically, JENOVA-SYNTHESIS. A floating spheroid (which is actually hollow and open at the back, with a heart like organ behind those flared sides). A humanoid female torso protrudes as its 'face,' though it seems to lack an actual head (there is a V-shaped 'mask' mounted on its neck, but it looks noticeably different from a human face). It also has a gaping hole in the 'belly' part of its torso - the same as the headless torso in the Jenova Containment Chamber had, without the cable plugged into it.
I think it's pretty safe to say that we have finally found the headless torso Sephiroth retrieved from Shinra HQ (whether by stealing it in one of his Copy-bodies or by possessing it and piloting it out, there's been some argument about that), forming the strongest Jenova entity yet in order to stop us from approaching Sephiroth's own body, whom I can only assume has at some point either formed out of or fused with the Jenova head.
It's kind of frustrating how vague the details of the physical movement and location of the various Jenova components get, considering how much emphasis the game puts on them, having multiple scenes and reveals of Jenova components escaping components, Sephiroth tearing off the head, people wondering why the corpse is headless, and so on. I mean, it's been suggested in this thread that the Sephiroth we spent all of Act 1 running after was the headless body, which we killed after it turned into Jenova-DEATH, and that seems perfectly plausible to me… But also this new Jenova entity showed up that literally has the headless torso from the tank plastered onto it? And where did the head go? Because I really doubt it was intended to just be a plot thread for Advent Children to pick up
I'm going to with 'Synthesis is the headless body and Sephiroth's true body is a fusion of his original body and Jenova's head' but honestly I don't think that's necessarily even the most likely option, just the one that I vibe with right now.
Anyway, as a boss fight Synthesis is a status effect attacker that we have little trouble with, and she is soon destroyed, destroying the last of the 'pure' Jenova entity.
The platform scatters, leaving our characters to fall through the Lifestream, into the core of the Earth. A great white light swallows everything, and then Cloud emerges floating in the darkness, in front of a great light.
It looks like the force of the Holy spell has been contained somehow, encased in a kind of coral-like growth which I suspect may be organic Jenova matter forcibly containing its power.
The Lifestream here is so dense that we're not seeing the green glowing water with its lively glow anymore, but merely a deep, dense, green sea on all sides of us - although this may have as much to do with Sephiroth's power over it than the density of the Mako.
As for how the rest of the party got teleported with us… Who knows. Magic, whatever.
Before they can fully take stock of their surroundings, everyone is lifted into the air, dangling helplessly in the grip of zero-G. A flash of light, and he is here.
Sephiroth.
Or… is it?
Though Cloud calls out his name, Sephiroth makes no sign of recognition. Instead, his power pulses, as if unconsciously, a wave of force that knocks everyone back through the air.
Cid shouts that he can't control his own body, and everyone is suddenly pulled in as if by gravity towards Sephiroth, only to be knocked back again by another pulse of light. It's clear that Sephiroth is toying with them, showing how absolute his power is by tossing them around without so much as lifting a finger.
The game is struggling to fully convey the intensity of what is happening with its limited models, so it has the characters shout about it, with Nanaki saying that his legs and tail are about to be ripped apart, Cait Sith crying that Sephiroth is 'way out of our league,' and Yuffie saying she doesn't know if she can't go on. He's not just tossing them around, he's using telekinesis or gravity manipulation to exert immense pressure on the characters, threatening to literally tear them apart, while they can do nothing but float helplessly out of reach (I mean, Barret has a gun, which you'd think would come up, but oh well).
However, there is one whose resolve is strong enough to power through the pain and focus on what matters.
Cloud looks at this light, Aerith's prayer, the salvation of the planet, and powers through the pain.
The Holy Materia is right there within their reach. Aerith's last prayer to the Planet.
There's just this asshole standing in their way.
No trouble at all.
This time, however, we are not asked to make one party, but two. It's time for the old B Team of Barret, Vincent and Nanaki to ride again. Both parties attempt to rush Sephiroth, but again he knocks them away with a pulse of light, but they are undeterred.
Tifa: "...We're not gonna lose! Aerith is here… Everyone is here… Cloud is here with us! There's still a lot for us to do… I'm not giving up!"
Barret: "Not only Aerith… Holy is the prayer of AVALANCHE… Of Marlene and Dyne… And everyone on the Planet!"
Cloud: "Aerith's memories… Our memories… We came… to tell you… our memories… Come Planet! Show us your answer! And Sephiroth!! To the settling of everything!!"
This is it.
Sephiroth.
Maybe?
We are following in the tradition of Neo Exdeath and the Tower of the Gods here, with a version of Sephiroth that is an amalgam of multiple bodies growing out of one another, grotesque bulging proportions, an unseemly beast more than an angel of death. I've never seen this design before; I've seen Sephiroth's human form plenty of times, of course, and the "single black-feathered wing" form he has in Advent Children that I am suspecting won't appear in this game, and I've seen Sephiroth's final form at least once before, enough to have a vague recollection of it - but this form? Never, for some reason.
A better view of the full model.
This is "Bizarro-Sephiroth." A fitting name, as this is truly a bizarre arrangement of flesh, a grotesque mutation of his original self.
It's also wrong. One last weird error from the original translator's final rush to finish the game. In Japanese, his name is Rebirth Sephiroth.
You know. Because he died five years ago and his true body has spent the following years in a weird Materia cocoon, during which his spirit declared his intent to be reborn as a god, and now he's finally come out, emerging as an inhuman monster of vast power.
Bizarro Sephiroth is… confusing.
When he appears, we receive the following message:
"Think about the sequence of the 5 targets and beat them! If a part dies, change to a different party." And indeed, the target selection reveals that Sephiroth is made up of six individual components, creatively named Bizarro-Sephiroth A, B, C, D, E and F. They represent the Core, Body, Head, and 'Magic', with Core and Magic split in two? Maybe? The Core is invincible while the Magic limbs are alive, so we have to do things in order and…
Look, I don't know. After finishing the game, I went up to the wiki to figure out what the fuck was going on in this battle and I don't know. It says stuff about needing to switch between parties because parties affect one side and the game suggested I should change parties during the fight but also the limbs I destroy keep coming back and it's completely unclear which is which because the limbs are only labeled by letters in the targeting menu but referred to by their function in the UI informing me of which are destroyed and which have regenerated and…
Look.
I don't need to understand any of that. I just need to throw Ultima* at my problem until everything dies all at once, clearing the path to the Core.
*Where 'Ultima' stands in for whatever high-tier multi-hitting or high-damage magic I have on hand.
I do, at one point, switch parties (we're given the option whenever one of the limbs is destroyed):
Vincent, Red and Barret have whatever Materia I had lying around, my weakest stuff really, but it doesn't matter. They can just power through on weapon attack power alone until I swap parties again.
Bizarro does have some impressive attacks, like this Stigma which blasts the screen with fire and light, dealing… Less than a thousand damage apiece and missing Cloud entirely.
The bottom line is you don't need to understand enemy mechanics if you have overwhelming brute force. Bizarro Sephiroth falls.
And now…
It's time for the true final form of the most legendary Final Fantasy antagonist.
Safer Sephiroth - where 'Safer' refers to Sepher, the Hebrew word for 'Book,' apparently; Sephiroth has this whole kabbalistic angle, after all.
We are continuing directly in the line established by Kefka (and it's truly remarkable how much Sephiroth draws from the mad jester, while diverging in many ways and doing its own thing; Sephiroth isn't a reheated Kefka or anything, but the two share a much closer connection than they do to Exdeath or Golbez or whoever), with Sephiroth taking on very clear angelic attributes and fighting us in a heavenly vista directly inspired by Renaissance paintings of Paradise and Gustave Doré's engravings of the Divine Comedy, recognizable by that vision of heaven as concentric circles of clouds rising to a pure light.
Kefka for comparison. Granted, using a Pixel Remaster screenshot is somewhat unfair.
In this, it is both a better and worse take on the same concept. Compared to the lush composition of VI's Kefka, where the whole scene with background and boss sprite really does feel like a Renaissance painting (or perhaps, rather, a Baroque one), FF7 is struggling against the limitations of its early 3D, low-poly graphics. On the other hand, the full-sized models of the characters, the fact that everyone is moving, that the camera takes on dramatic and dynamic angles throughout the action and the clouds are moving, gives the picture that feeling of aliveness that the 2D sprites can't capture, being beautiful still pictures but still pictures nonetheless. And finally, Kefka is 'just' an angel - there's power in directly subverting imagery by having literally an angel with a slasher smile and clown makeup, but Sephiroth is truly an inhuman presence. Not just a winged humanoid, but his legs are gone, replaced by a cloud out of which come six wings, his right arm has been replaced by another, different wing of a dark color, a double halo shines above his head. It's a really cool design, one that's more creative than Kefka's, even if it loses some of its direct simplicity.
And then, of course, there is the music. Sephiroth's actual theme, within the context of the game, is Those Chosen By The Planet. This piece is 'merely' his final boss music. But in every Final Fantasy VII spin-off and reference since the original game, this has become Sephiroth's theme, because it is so iconic, so powerful, a masterpiece of composition: One-Winged Angel.
And that's where everything breaks.
Let me tell you a horror story.
As you have no doubt surmised by now, I don't have much of a musical ear. I have done some occasional commentary on the FF7 soundtrack, like talking about the perfect use of Trail of Blood in the Shinra Building, or Aerith's theme in her death scene, or how I love the Cosmo Canyon theme, but it hasn't been much, and I know it must be particularly disappointing to those of you who'd have loved more musical commentary, especially as I believe FF7's OST is particularly well regarded even among Uematsu's already prestigious works. But ultimately, while I've enjoyed FF7's OST well enough, it didn't blow my mind or anything, and I just chalked that up to the fact that I just… don't really have a musical ear, especially for arrangements that don't have vocals.
At some point early in this playthrough, I read somewhere that a difference between the 1997 PSX and the original 1998 PC port of the game was that, for some ungodly reason having to do with sound compression(?) or typical PC hardware limitations of the time(?), the PC port had substituted the original soundtrack with bad MIDI conversions. That was brought up in the thread, in fact; not only that, but it was joked about several times, because it was an old problem that had been fixed by a patch at least a decade ago. I found it a funny historical artifact to hear about and paid it no further mind.
So.
Here is One-Winged Angel, Nobuo Uematsu's masterpiece, the crowning musical piece of Final Fantasy VII, the perfect final boss theme, with its ominous choirs.
Here is the version of One-Winged Angel that I got on my own actual playthrough.
I am not sure how to describe it other than with the word 'massacre.' In fact, I totally lack the words to convey just how wrong this is, so I'm going to call on my friend @mothematics's expertise as an actual trained musician:
Thanks, borb.
So yeah. For whatever reason, the Steam version of FF7 I got is broken. Unpatched. Looking up stuff online, all my sound trouble with the music randomly going off during FMVs is consistent with having obtained an unpatched version of the 2012 Steam port of the 1998 PC port. Which should not have happened. Is this 7th Heaven's fault? Is it a regioning issue with French Steam? I don't know, and I may never know.
And in turn, this means that long before One-Winged Angel, the entire soundtrack has been the Bad One. It only took until now for me to notice because One-Winged Angel is the only piece that I had heard before and which I knew to have vocals which are absent in my version, and that's when I put 2 and 2 together.
So.
This revelation does cast something of a shadow on this climactic battle.
What I find amazing, though, is that we actually predicted this a month ago, on accident.
So. Congrats on your No-Prize, Fluffles. Apollo granted you the gift of prophecy on that day.
Anyway, I suppose we have to actually talk about the fight as a fight.
MAYBE IT'S A DREAM, MAYBE NOTHING ELSE IS REAL, BUT IT WOULDN'T MEAN A THING IF I TOLD YOU HOW I FEEL-
It's good. Sephiroth is capable of using self-buffing with Shell, to Dispel our buffs or debuffs inflicted on him, and delivers powerful attacks such as Shadow Flare, 'Pale Horse' (a massive beam attack, the Biblical name of which I approve of) and Break. At one point, he rises through the sky, becoming a long-range opponent.
Pale Horse.
But of course, most impressive of all of Sephiroth's moves is Super Nova.
Screenshots will not do it justice. You need a video clip.
Sephiroth summons a meteor from outside the galaxy, which enters the solar system, passes by all the planets, obliterates Pluto, smashes away Saturn's rings, punches a hole through Jupiter's core, then enters the Sun, causing a chain reaction which obliterates the solar system, engulfing the earth and killing us all.
So of course it deals percentage-based damage and cannot kill anyone.
There is. A lot to unpack there.
First of all, I think this may be the first attack that is explicitly non-diegetic in the entire series so far. Almost every attack animation in the games so far has been something which could, in some fashion or another, have happened in the fiction of the setting. But not this one. The solar system obviously hasn't exploded, seeing as we're all standing there continuing to fight. So… what is it?
I think it's just a vision of the ultimate apocalypse which Sephiroth could bring about. In many ways, Super Nova's narrative directly evokes the history of Jenova's arrival on the Planet, a foreign intruder arriving as a Meteor, striking home and causing about the end of the world, only scaled up to a total annihilation of life rather than takeover by John Carpenter's The Thing. Sephiroth is showing everyone a vision of apocalypse, of absolute, star-destroying power, of the futility of their efforts, and the reason this is percentage-based damage is because it's not actually directly hurting everyone - it's attacking their souls, their spirit, their resolve. Driving them to the brink of despair, but it can't actually kill them, merely drive them to their knees where they either manage to stand up and affirm their resolve or perish unable to bring up the courage to defend against the next attack.
It's consistent with Remake and Advent Children Sephiroth showing visions of apocalypse and promising to offer people Despair, at the very least.
But speaking of Super Nova, the game is doing something really interesting by naming all the planets as the meteor crosses or destroys them and giving them the name of our real-world planets. We've seen in Bugenhagen's observatory that FF7's solar system is identical to ours, but this is a step beyond, literally naming the planets as Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn, as if saying: "This is your world that Sephiroth is destroying, player."
Which means…
That's right.
It's time for one last hurrah from the CETRA Planetary Colonization theory.
BECAUSE WHAT IF THIS ISN'T A VISION OF THE FUTURE, BUT A MEMORY?
What if Sephiroth is showing Cloud and the others a sight pulled from the genetic memory of Jenova? We know Jenova is a star traveler of some kind, a parasitic entity that came from the sky in a meteor. It stands to reason this is not the first world it destroys. So what if the first world it destroyed was Earth? After all, the Planet is only ever referred to as such, 'the Planet,' not as 'Earth,' even though as we've just seen the game is not afraid to label the other planets as Mercury and Jupiter, which is a peculiar choice. Is it not possible that this is because the Mercury we see in this attack is not any of the planet in the Planet's solar system, but rather our Mercury, destroyed long ago? Is it not possible that Jenova first destroyed the Earth, and that seeing the threat come ahead of time but helpless to fight it, Earth's humanity sent out a colony ship into the stars, before being destroyed? And now, thousands of years later, the humanity that has forgotten its own origin is caught up to by the evil that has been chasing after it all this time.
Well, probably not. But the space for wondering exists.
…
In a way it's interesting that Sephiroth shows us a vision of the total annihilation of the world by solar explosion, because… That doesn't fit his motives?
When talking about him in a modern media context, Sephiroth is often described as 'omnicidal' or as wanting to destroy the world. But that's not truly his goal, is it? Sephiroth is not planning to wipe out humanity, humanity is merely collateral damage of his plan to become God. Everyone is going to die when Meteor hits the Planet, but he doesn't really care about that; he's having Meteor strike the Planet in order to engineer a complex plan to absorb the power of the Lifestream. He doesn't seem to give a shit if humanity lives or dies. But if the sun exploded, he wouldn't be God anymore, he'd be space dust, or depending on how powerful he is exactly, a lonely spaceborn entity drifting across the void.
…
But I don't think Sephiroth really has goals anymore.
Here's the thing: Sephiroth's last line of dialogue, in the entire game, was "Come on. The Black Materia…" all the way back in the first confrontation at the Northern Crater. That was at the beginning of Disc 2, in Update 25, twelve updates and twenty hours ago. Since then, Sephiroth hasn't spoken a single word, except for the words Cloud remembers in the flashback to what truly happened in Nibelheim. He hasn't spoken even now. He greeted everyone for the final confrontation with waves of telekinetic power while standing around floating, never saying a word or even looking at them. There is a dummied out line of dialogue meant for the start of the Safer Sephiroth fight (pretty generic stuff), but it's been cut from the game. And maybe it was cut for a boring technical reason! But maybe it was cut because it didn't fit the intent between the writing of the character, even if the writers later changed their minds.
And sure, most of that is because we haven't met Sephiroth since then, but - again, this is the same issue VI had. Only I said earlier that VII was better about it because Shinra masked Sephiroth's absence from the plot, but this is where I pull a hat trick and reveal that VI was actually better about it: Kefka, after all, got a final speech against the protagonists, expositing about his motivation and worldview and being challenged by everyone! It was one of the best parts of the game! Sephiroth… doesn't have that. He's gone from the plot (even though we know he can astral project into places and talk to people as a ghost), and when he reenters it, he does so without a word.
Sephiroth has been silent since the moment he was handed the Black Materia by Cloud. As if he had said all that he needed to say, and there was no longer any purpose for him to speak.
There are two possible interpretations of this, to me: One is that it's simply bad writing or the writers running out of time. I understand that the writers of FF7 try to zig when you expect them to zag and to avoid certain clichés of the genre (and oh boy will this be relevant later), and 'the villain's final monologue' is one such cliché, but, like… Not a single spoken line from your final antagonist in the twenty or so hours since we last met him? Even after he summons Meteor to doom the world? Even when confronting him at the heart of the Planet? Does he truly have nothing to say to Cloud? That's just… Not good. It's missing something.
The other is that Sephiroth's consciousness has served his usefulness, and we're no longer looking at him anymore.
Later statements by writers and canonical sequels notwithstanding, I think this is the original game's final answer to the Jenova/Sephiroth dilemma. Sephiroth was a useful construct, a convenient tool for Jenova as long as he was able to manipulate Cloud, but once the Black Materia was obtained and Meteor summoned, he only served as a body for Jenova to inhabit. Jenova is promising the destruction of the world because, once she has absorbed the power of the Planet, she will be free to once again roam the stars, finding her next target, her next world to devour. And Jenova isn't speaking, because she is an alien intelligence to whom humans are nothing - not opponents, not interlocutors, just component parts awaiting processing.
Sephiroth remains, within Jenova. We'll see him again, very soon. But here? In this fight? I don't think that's Sephiroth. I think that's his mother.
…
Super Nova is not just Sephiroth's ultimate attack. It's also his doom. Paradoxically, in trying to drive everyone to despair, he also enables them to reaffirm their ultimate resolve, and find the power to go beyond his power. Because an attack that deals 15/16 of a character's total HP in damage, to everyone, is an attack that also triggers everyone's Limit Break.
It's like poetry. Game design, man.
Fitting as that would be, Cloud's Omnislash isn't the final blow. At somewhere above 2k damage per attack, it deals around 30k damage, a significant chunk of Sephiroth's HP, but Sephiroth survives to reveal that there's one more thing he borrowed from Kefka: Heartless Angel.
It takes the form of the same cherub that brings characters back to life when casting Life, sprinkling purple light onto the character - a sort of Inverted FullLife, which appropriately leaves everyone it hits at 1 HP, but misses Yuffie.
And to the funniest character in the game goes the final blow.
Yuffie's Doom of the Living is only a LB3. It functions similarly to Omnislash, hitting the enemy 15 times, but unlike Omnislash it deals less damage per individual hit than her basic attack. Because Yuffie is designed as a mage and has low Strength, that means she only deals 500-700 damage per hit. I use it instead of her LB4, All Creation, because 15 times ~600 is still around 9,999 damage, give or take, which means it can actually deal more damage than All Creation, which is a single hit and thus can never deal more than 9,999. Because it is a multihit attack, if you were to max out Yuffie's stats so she deals 9,999 damage per hit, it would be a better Limit Break than even Omnislash, dealing equal damage but charging up faster. In a normal playthrough, though, it's theoretically better than All Creation, but not that much better. You're not really going to be playing Yuffie suboptimally by just having her fire off the giant laser.
In any case, north of 10k damage is enough to destroy what remains of Sephiroth's health.
The would-be god unravels, disintegrating, the fragments of his perfect body disappearing into the skies he somehow conjured, a Heaven of his own making to sit in. There's a great flash of light, and it's over - everyone is back at the edge of the well leading to the core of the planet.
How much of this final battle was real, taking place in a physical location against a physical opponent? How much of it was a battle thought on a metaphysical, spiritual level? We know the Lifestream allows souls to connect, to talk to one another in their own mind - did this whole battle take place on such a level, within everyone's souls?
Perhaps it doesn't matter. Physical, spiritual - at the heart of the Lifestream, such concepts blur together. There is no clear line between individuals, only a joined consciousness (there's Neon Genesis Evangelion again).
Cloud: "This is all we could do."
Barret: "Wait! What about Holy? What's gonna happen to the Planet?"
Cloud: "That… I don't know. Isn't the rest up to the Planet?"
Tifa: "...You're right. We've done all that we could do."
Cloud: "All right, everyone. We did our best. That's it."
[Everyone gets up, turns around, and starts to leave.]
This is such a hilariously casual way to follow up the greatest battle for the fate of the planet and all of humanity, my god.
But of course, that's because it's not actually the end. There is one last plot thread dangling, and if you've been following, you might already guess what it is.
We have destroyed all the fragments of Jenova's body, and everyone who was infected with her cells were either killed by us, or died in the Reunion fusing with her/Sephiroth.
Everyone except one person.
There's a flash of white light, and Cloud pauses. Tifa turns around and asks him what's wrong.
Cloud: "He is still… Here."
Cloud grips his head in pain, and once again, his body and mind start to dissociate into two separate figures. Tifa calls out his name, but she can't help him, not here, not now.
Cloud: "He's… Laughing…"
And then, Cloud's soul is ripped from his body.
Cut for image count.
It's time.
The whole team has gathered. We are standing over a hole into the core of the very Planet itself. Everything is bathed in the glow of the Lifestream. Within that beating heart of the world, Sephiroth is waiting.
Ooooh, that's where that's from!
Glad to have that cleared up.
Cid berates Cloud for giving out these last orders 'like a wimp,' instead of saying something cool like 'Move out!' This is very funny, considering how much of Cloud's character arc has been about moving on from the need to use 'cool' as an armor for his trauma and feelings, but Cloud does comply and say 'Move out!' and everyone nods. It's a funny bit.
Then, there is some kind of noise off-screen, and everyone turns to the side, looking at something we can't see. Everyone says stuff like 'They're coming!' and 'there's so many of them!'
This is like that time Cloud referred to Sephiroth as having 'flunkies' all over again. The implication seems to be that Sephiroth has a horde of monsters under his control that are now bearing down on the group to stop them from reaching their master, which hasn't really been how Sephiroth has operated at any point in the game. He always uses the personal touch, even when it involves bodyjacking Copies and using mind control to make Cloud do his bidding or personally dropping Jenova fragments onto people; he's never shown any inclination to command monster hordes from a remote position (someone else has, though; we'll get to that).
Nonetheless, the group decides that Cloud should go ahead with two party members while the other five stay behind to hold back the monsters, and will 'catch up' once they've dealt with them - as far as excuses to split the party it's a decent one.
…I'll get into it more later on, but this question of whether Sephiroth actually has minions brings up the fact that he's kind of got a Kefka issue going on, where Sephiroth as an antagonist spends the entire third act just sitting in his
Anyway, we grab Tifa and Yuffie, Cloud turns to everyone and says "All of you! Later!", and we jump into the Lifestream.
I don't think Cloud's earlier line about this being the center of the planet was hyperbole. I think we genuinely are at the core of the Planet, with the cascade of spiritual energy around us and gravity being loose enough that rocks can float around. Which would tie in reasonably enough with the whole 'FF7's world is teeny tiny.'
We actually can run into random encounters during this bit, which is why I can't quite say that the point of no return is on the last screen 'before the final boss,' even though for all intents and purposes this is true. We just run into a couple of Iron Men and a Zombie Dragon on the way; this is the only place Iron Men can be encountered. Once they're dealt with, we land on a larger chunk of rocks, one composed of… Whatever the technical term is for these mineral formations that are composed entirely of rectangular solids. They wonder where they are, but before they can get an answer, however, something emerges from around the floating crystal - an old monster, in a new form.
Jenova.
Specifically, JENOVA-SYNTHESIS. A floating spheroid (which is actually hollow and open at the back, with a heart like organ behind those flared sides). A humanoid female torso protrudes as its 'face,' though it seems to lack an actual head (there is a V-shaped 'mask' mounted on its neck, but it looks noticeably different from a human face). It also has a gaping hole in the 'belly' part of its torso - the same as the headless torso in the Jenova Containment Chamber had, without the cable plugged into it.
I think it's pretty safe to say that we have finally found the headless torso Sephiroth retrieved from Shinra HQ (whether by stealing it in one of his Copy-bodies or by possessing it and piloting it out, there's been some argument about that), forming the strongest Jenova entity yet in order to stop us from approaching Sephiroth's own body, whom I can only assume has at some point either formed out of or fused with the Jenova head.
It's kind of frustrating how vague the details of the physical movement and location of the various Jenova components get, considering how much emphasis the game puts on them, having multiple scenes and reveals of Jenova components escaping components, Sephiroth tearing off the head, people wondering why the corpse is headless, and so on. I mean, it's been suggested in this thread that the Sephiroth we spent all of Act 1 running after was the headless body, which we killed after it turned into Jenova-DEATH, and that seems perfectly plausible to me… But also this new Jenova entity showed up that literally has the headless torso from the tank plastered onto it? And where did the head go? Because I really doubt it was intended to just be a plot thread for Advent Children to pick up
I'm going to with 'Synthesis is the headless body and Sephiroth's true body is a fusion of his original body and Jenova's head' but honestly I don't think that's necessarily even the most likely option, just the one that I vibe with right now.
Anyway, as a boss fight Synthesis is a status effect attacker that we have little trouble with, and she is soon destroyed, destroying the last of the 'pure' Jenova entity.
The platform scatters, leaving our characters to fall through the Lifestream, into the core of the Earth. A great white light swallows everything, and then Cloud emerges floating in the darkness, in front of a great light.
It looks like the force of the Holy spell has been contained somehow, encased in a kind of coral-like growth which I suspect may be organic Jenova matter forcibly containing its power.
The Lifestream here is so dense that we're not seeing the green glowing water with its lively glow anymore, but merely a deep, dense, green sea on all sides of us - although this may have as much to do with Sephiroth's power over it than the density of the Mako.
As for how the rest of the party got teleported with us… Who knows. Magic, whatever.
Before they can fully take stock of their surroundings, everyone is lifted into the air, dangling helplessly in the grip of zero-G. A flash of light, and he is here.
Sephiroth.
Or… is it?
Though Cloud calls out his name, Sephiroth makes no sign of recognition. Instead, his power pulses, as if unconsciously, a wave of force that knocks everyone back through the air.
Cid shouts that he can't control his own body, and everyone is suddenly pulled in as if by gravity towards Sephiroth, only to be knocked back again by another pulse of light. It's clear that Sephiroth is toying with them, showing how absolute his power is by tossing them around without so much as lifting a finger.
The game is struggling to fully convey the intensity of what is happening with its limited models, so it has the characters shout about it, with Nanaki saying that his legs and tail are about to be ripped apart, Cait Sith crying that Sephiroth is 'way out of our league,' and Yuffie saying she doesn't know if she can't go on. He's not just tossing them around, he's using telekinesis or gravity manipulation to exert immense pressure on the characters, threatening to literally tear them apart, while they can do nothing but float helplessly out of reach (I mean, Barret has a gun, which you'd think would come up, but oh well).
However, there is one whose resolve is strong enough to power through the pain and focus on what matters.
Cloud looks at this light, Aerith's prayer, the salvation of the planet, and powers through the pain.
The Holy Materia is right there within their reach. Aerith's last prayer to the Planet.
There's just this asshole standing in their way.
No trouble at all.
This time, however, we are not asked to make one party, but two. It's time for the old B Team of Barret, Vincent and Nanaki to ride again. Both parties attempt to rush Sephiroth, but again he knocks them away with a pulse of light, but they are undeterred.
Tifa: "...We're not gonna lose! Aerith is here… Everyone is here… Cloud is here with us! There's still a lot for us to do… I'm not giving up!"
Barret: "Not only Aerith… Holy is the prayer of AVALANCHE… Of Marlene and Dyne… And everyone on the Planet!"
Cloud: "Aerith's memories… Our memories… We came… to tell you… our memories… Come Planet! Show us your answer! And Sephiroth!! To the settling of everything!!"
This is it.
Sephiroth.
Maybe?
We are following in the tradition of Neo Exdeath and the Tower of the Gods here, with a version of Sephiroth that is an amalgam of multiple bodies growing out of one another, grotesque bulging proportions, an unseemly beast more than an angel of death. I've never seen this design before; I've seen Sephiroth's human form plenty of times, of course, and the "single black-feathered wing" form he has in Advent Children that I am suspecting won't appear in this game, and I've seen Sephiroth's final form at least once before, enough to have a vague recollection of it - but this form? Never, for some reason.
A better view of the full model.
This is "Bizarro-Sephiroth." A fitting name, as this is truly a bizarre arrangement of flesh, a grotesque mutation of his original self.
It's also wrong. One last weird error from the original translator's final rush to finish the game. In Japanese, his name is Rebirth Sephiroth.
You know. Because he died five years ago and his true body has spent the following years in a weird Materia cocoon, during which his spirit declared his intent to be reborn as a god, and now he's finally come out, emerging as an inhuman monster of vast power.
Bizarro Sephiroth is… confusing.
When he appears, we receive the following message:
"Think about the sequence of the 5 targets and beat them! If a part dies, change to a different party." And indeed, the target selection reveals that Sephiroth is made up of six individual components, creatively named Bizarro-Sephiroth A, B, C, D, E and F. They represent the Core, Body, Head, and 'Magic', with Core and Magic split in two? Maybe? The Core is invincible while the Magic limbs are alive, so we have to do things in order and…
Look, I don't know. After finishing the game, I went up to the wiki to figure out what the fuck was going on in this battle and I don't know. It says stuff about needing to switch between parties because parties affect one side and the game suggested I should change parties during the fight but also the limbs I destroy keep coming back and it's completely unclear which is which because the limbs are only labeled by letters in the targeting menu but referred to by their function in the UI informing me of which are destroyed and which have regenerated and…
Look.
I don't need to understand any of that. I just need to throw Ultima* at my problem until everything dies all at once, clearing the path to the Core.
*Where 'Ultima' stands in for whatever high-tier multi-hitting or high-damage magic I have on hand.
I do, at one point, switch parties (we're given the option whenever one of the limbs is destroyed):
Vincent, Red and Barret have whatever Materia I had lying around, my weakest stuff really, but it doesn't matter. They can just power through on weapon attack power alone until I swap parties again.
Bizarro does have some impressive attacks, like this Stigma which blasts the screen with fire and light, dealing… Less than a thousand damage apiece and missing Cloud entirely.
The bottom line is you don't need to understand enemy mechanics if you have overwhelming brute force. Bizarro Sephiroth falls.
And now…
It's time for the true final form of the most legendary Final Fantasy antagonist.
Safer Sephiroth - where 'Safer' refers to Sepher, the Hebrew word for 'Book,' apparently; Sephiroth has this whole kabbalistic angle, after all.
We are continuing directly in the line established by Kefka (and it's truly remarkable how much Sephiroth draws from the mad jester, while diverging in many ways and doing its own thing; Sephiroth isn't a reheated Kefka or anything, but the two share a much closer connection than they do to Exdeath or Golbez or whoever), with Sephiroth taking on very clear angelic attributes and fighting us in a heavenly vista directly inspired by Renaissance paintings of Paradise and Gustave Doré's engravings of the Divine Comedy, recognizable by that vision of heaven as concentric circles of clouds rising to a pure light.
Kefka for comparison. Granted, using a Pixel Remaster screenshot is somewhat unfair.
In this, it is both a better and worse take on the same concept. Compared to the lush composition of VI's Kefka, where the whole scene with background and boss sprite really does feel like a Renaissance painting (or perhaps, rather, a Baroque one), FF7 is struggling against the limitations of its early 3D, low-poly graphics. On the other hand, the full-sized models of the characters, the fact that everyone is moving, that the camera takes on dramatic and dynamic angles throughout the action and the clouds are moving, gives the picture that feeling of aliveness that the 2D sprites can't capture, being beautiful still pictures but still pictures nonetheless. And finally, Kefka is 'just' an angel - there's power in directly subverting imagery by having literally an angel with a slasher smile and clown makeup, but Sephiroth is truly an inhuman presence. Not just a winged humanoid, but his legs are gone, replaced by a cloud out of which come six wings, his right arm has been replaced by another, different wing of a dark color, a double halo shines above his head. It's a really cool design, one that's more creative than Kefka's, even if it loses some of its direct simplicity.
And then, of course, there is the music. Sephiroth's actual theme, within the context of the game, is Those Chosen By The Planet. This piece is 'merely' his final boss music. But in every Final Fantasy VII spin-off and reference since the original game, this has become Sephiroth's theme, because it is so iconic, so powerful, a masterpiece of composition: One-Winged Angel.
And that's where everything breaks.
Let me tell you a horror story.
As you have no doubt surmised by now, I don't have much of a musical ear. I have done some occasional commentary on the FF7 soundtrack, like talking about the perfect use of Trail of Blood in the Shinra Building, or Aerith's theme in her death scene, or how I love the Cosmo Canyon theme, but it hasn't been much, and I know it must be particularly disappointing to those of you who'd have loved more musical commentary, especially as I believe FF7's OST is particularly well regarded even among Uematsu's already prestigious works. But ultimately, while I've enjoyed FF7's OST well enough, it didn't blow my mind or anything, and I just chalked that up to the fact that I just… don't really have a musical ear, especially for arrangements that don't have vocals.
At some point early in this playthrough, I read somewhere that a difference between the 1997 PSX and the original 1998 PC port of the game was that, for some ungodly reason having to do with sound compression(?) or typical PC hardware limitations of the time(?), the PC port had substituted the original soundtrack with bad MIDI conversions. That was brought up in the thread, in fact; not only that, but it was joked about several times, because it was an old problem that had been fixed by a patch at least a decade ago. I found it a funny historical artifact to hear about and paid it no further mind.
So.
Here is One-Winged Angel, Nobuo Uematsu's masterpiece, the crowning musical piece of Final Fantasy VII, the perfect final boss theme, with its ominous choirs.
Here is the version of One-Winged Angel that I got on my own actual playthrough.
I am not sure how to describe it other than with the word 'massacre.' In fact, I totally lack the words to convey just how wrong this is, so I'm going to call on my friend @mothematics's expertise as an actual trained musician:
Article: Okay. So. I could do this for hours so I'm going to retrisct myself to the opening.
Uematsu's original scoring is iconic for many reasons, it's jarring, dramatic, catchy, distressing. Part of that is that the rhythm is staccato, which means the notes are disconnected, with abrupt beginnings, endings and changes. The timpani (drum) hits terminate sharply, briefly lingering over those almost needle-jab electric hits.
The melody, when it comes in about six seconds in, spikes up and down rapidly, punctuated by what are essentially violin scare chords. It maintains this, then rapidly switches back.
The entire piece goes like this. Even when the runs come in a few bars later, even towards the end, it always maintains this very curt, sharp sense of propulsion and cleanliness to the sounds. It's crisp, clear, doesn't fuck around.
The 2012 version is none of these things.
Immediately, the programmed strings are fuzzy, undramatic, lingering too long, outliving the timpani instead of the other way around. The entire thing is shuffling its feet. When we get the up and down horror notes, the DA du DA du DA du DA du, the notes are entirely connected and not emphasised alternatively like the original is, so it feels flat, like someone dulled your knife and folded it up.
This is five seconds in.
It feels longer.
It's bad.
If you asked me what the single most iconic part of that piece is, I would say immediately it's that hair-raising staccato, and that is just completely gone
Utter failure of an arrangement
I could keep going, like, there's more. There's the bad production choices on the individual sounds that weren't properly modified. There's the bad mixing, beyond even YouTube's compression. There's the utter failure to quantize properly. There's the fact that it over-arranges Uematsu in a clumsy fashion.
It's just... bad
Thanks, borb.
So yeah. For whatever reason, the Steam version of FF7 I got is broken. Unpatched. Looking up stuff online, all my sound trouble with the music randomly going off during FMVs is consistent with having obtained an unpatched version of the 2012 Steam port of the 1998 PC port. Which should not have happened. Is this 7th Heaven's fault? Is it a regioning issue with French Steam? I don't know, and I may never know.
And in turn, this means that long before One-Winged Angel, the entire soundtrack has been the Bad One. It only took until now for me to notice because One-Winged Angel is the only piece that I had heard before and which I knew to have vocals which are absent in my version, and that's when I put 2 and 2 together.
So.
This revelation does cast something of a shadow on this climactic battle.
What I find amazing, though, is that we actually predicted this a month ago, on accident.
So. Congrats on your No-Prize, Fluffles. Apollo granted you the gift of prophecy on that day.
Anyway, I suppose we have to actually talk about the fight as a fight.
MAYBE IT'S A DREAM, MAYBE NOTHING ELSE IS REAL, BUT IT WOULDN'T MEAN A THING IF I TOLD YOU HOW I FEEL-
It's good. Sephiroth is capable of using self-buffing with Shell, to Dispel our buffs or debuffs inflicted on him, and delivers powerful attacks such as Shadow Flare, 'Pale Horse' (a massive beam attack, the Biblical name of which I approve of) and Break. At one point, he rises through the sky, becoming a long-range opponent.
Pale Horse.
But of course, most impressive of all of Sephiroth's moves is Super Nova.
Screenshots will not do it justice. You need a video clip.
Sephiroth summons a meteor from outside the galaxy, which enters the solar system, passes by all the planets, obliterates Pluto, smashes away Saturn's rings, punches a hole through Jupiter's core, then enters the Sun, causing a chain reaction which obliterates the solar system, engulfing the earth and killing us all.
So of course it deals percentage-based damage and cannot kill anyone.
There is. A lot to unpack there.
First of all, I think this may be the first attack that is explicitly non-diegetic in the entire series so far. Almost every attack animation in the games so far has been something which could, in some fashion or another, have happened in the fiction of the setting. But not this one. The solar system obviously hasn't exploded, seeing as we're all standing there continuing to fight. So… what is it?
I think it's just a vision of the ultimate apocalypse which Sephiroth could bring about. In many ways, Super Nova's narrative directly evokes the history of Jenova's arrival on the Planet, a foreign intruder arriving as a Meteor, striking home and causing about the end of the world, only scaled up to a total annihilation of life rather than takeover by John Carpenter's The Thing. Sephiroth is showing everyone a vision of apocalypse, of absolute, star-destroying power, of the futility of their efforts, and the reason this is percentage-based damage is because it's not actually directly hurting everyone - it's attacking their souls, their spirit, their resolve. Driving them to the brink of despair, but it can't actually kill them, merely drive them to their knees where they either manage to stand up and affirm their resolve or perish unable to bring up the courage to defend against the next attack.
It's consistent with Remake and Advent Children Sephiroth showing visions of apocalypse and promising to offer people Despair, at the very least.
But speaking of Super Nova, the game is doing something really interesting by naming all the planets as the meteor crosses or destroys them and giving them the name of our real-world planets. We've seen in Bugenhagen's observatory that FF7's solar system is identical to ours, but this is a step beyond, literally naming the planets as Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn, as if saying: "This is your world that Sephiroth is destroying, player."
Which means…
That's right.
It's time for one last hurrah from the CETRA Planetary Colonization theory.
BECAUSE WHAT IF THIS ISN'T A VISION OF THE FUTURE, BUT A MEMORY?
What if Sephiroth is showing Cloud and the others a sight pulled from the genetic memory of Jenova? We know Jenova is a star traveler of some kind, a parasitic entity that came from the sky in a meteor. It stands to reason this is not the first world it destroys. So what if the first world it destroyed was Earth? After all, the Planet is only ever referred to as such, 'the Planet,' not as 'Earth,' even though as we've just seen the game is not afraid to label the other planets as Mercury and Jupiter, which is a peculiar choice. Is it not possible that this is because the Mercury we see in this attack is not any of the planet in the Planet's solar system, but rather our Mercury, destroyed long ago? Is it not possible that Jenova first destroyed the Earth, and that seeing the threat come ahead of time but helpless to fight it, Earth's humanity sent out a colony ship into the stars, before being destroyed? And now, thousands of years later, the humanity that has forgotten its own origin is caught up to by the evil that has been chasing after it all this time.
Well, probably not. But the space for wondering exists.
…
In a way it's interesting that Sephiroth shows us a vision of the total annihilation of the world by solar explosion, because… That doesn't fit his motives?
When talking about him in a modern media context, Sephiroth is often described as 'omnicidal' or as wanting to destroy the world. But that's not truly his goal, is it? Sephiroth is not planning to wipe out humanity, humanity is merely collateral damage of his plan to become God. Everyone is going to die when Meteor hits the Planet, but he doesn't really care about that; he's having Meteor strike the Planet in order to engineer a complex plan to absorb the power of the Lifestream. He doesn't seem to give a shit if humanity lives or dies. But if the sun exploded, he wouldn't be God anymore, he'd be space dust, or depending on how powerful he is exactly, a lonely spaceborn entity drifting across the void.
…
But I don't think Sephiroth really has goals anymore.
Here's the thing: Sephiroth's last line of dialogue, in the entire game, was "Come on. The Black Materia…" all the way back in the first confrontation at the Northern Crater. That was at the beginning of Disc 2, in Update 25, twelve updates and twenty hours ago. Since then, Sephiroth hasn't spoken a single word, except for the words Cloud remembers in the flashback to what truly happened in Nibelheim. He hasn't spoken even now. He greeted everyone for the final confrontation with waves of telekinetic power while standing around floating, never saying a word or even looking at them. There is a dummied out line of dialogue meant for the start of the Safer Sephiroth fight (pretty generic stuff), but it's been cut from the game. And maybe it was cut for a boring technical reason! But maybe it was cut because it didn't fit the intent between the writing of the character, even if the writers later changed their minds.
And sure, most of that is because we haven't met Sephiroth since then, but - again, this is the same issue VI had. Only I said earlier that VII was better about it because Shinra masked Sephiroth's absence from the plot, but this is where I pull a hat trick and reveal that VI was actually better about it: Kefka, after all, got a final speech against the protagonists, expositing about his motivation and worldview and being challenged by everyone! It was one of the best parts of the game! Sephiroth… doesn't have that. He's gone from the plot (even though we know he can astral project into places and talk to people as a ghost), and when he reenters it, he does so without a word.
Sephiroth has been silent since the moment he was handed the Black Materia by Cloud. As if he had said all that he needed to say, and there was no longer any purpose for him to speak.
There are two possible interpretations of this, to me: One is that it's simply bad writing or the writers running out of time. I understand that the writers of FF7 try to zig when you expect them to zag and to avoid certain clichés of the genre (and oh boy will this be relevant later), and 'the villain's final monologue' is one such cliché, but, like… Not a single spoken line from your final antagonist in the twenty or so hours since we last met him? Even after he summons Meteor to doom the world? Even when confronting him at the heart of the Planet? Does he truly have nothing to say to Cloud? That's just… Not good. It's missing something.
The other is that Sephiroth's consciousness has served his usefulness, and we're no longer looking at him anymore.
Later statements by writers and canonical sequels notwithstanding, I think this is the original game's final answer to the Jenova/Sephiroth dilemma. Sephiroth was a useful construct, a convenient tool for Jenova as long as he was able to manipulate Cloud, but once the Black Materia was obtained and Meteor summoned, he only served as a body for Jenova to inhabit. Jenova is promising the destruction of the world because, once she has absorbed the power of the Planet, she will be free to once again roam the stars, finding her next target, her next world to devour. And Jenova isn't speaking, because she is an alien intelligence to whom humans are nothing - not opponents, not interlocutors, just component parts awaiting processing.
Sephiroth remains, within Jenova. We'll see him again, very soon. But here? In this fight? I don't think that's Sephiroth. I think that's his mother.
…
Super Nova is not just Sephiroth's ultimate attack. It's also his doom. Paradoxically, in trying to drive everyone to despair, he also enables them to reaffirm their ultimate resolve, and find the power to go beyond his power. Because an attack that deals 15/16 of a character's total HP in damage, to everyone, is an attack that also triggers everyone's Limit Break.
It's like poetry. Game design, man.
Fitting as that would be, Cloud's Omnislash isn't the final blow. At somewhere above 2k damage per attack, it deals around 30k damage, a significant chunk of Sephiroth's HP, but Sephiroth survives to reveal that there's one more thing he borrowed from Kefka: Heartless Angel.
It takes the form of the same cherub that brings characters back to life when casting Life, sprinkling purple light onto the character - a sort of Inverted FullLife, which appropriately leaves everyone it hits at 1 HP, but misses Yuffie.
And to the funniest character in the game goes the final blow.
Yuffie's Doom of the Living is only a LB3. It functions similarly to Omnislash, hitting the enemy 15 times, but unlike Omnislash it deals less damage per individual hit than her basic attack. Because Yuffie is designed as a mage and has low Strength, that means she only deals 500-700 damage per hit. I use it instead of her LB4, All Creation, because 15 times ~600 is still around 9,999 damage, give or take, which means it can actually deal more damage than All Creation, which is a single hit and thus can never deal more than 9,999. Because it is a multihit attack, if you were to max out Yuffie's stats so she deals 9,999 damage per hit, it would be a better Limit Break than even Omnislash, dealing equal damage but charging up faster. In a normal playthrough, though, it's theoretically better than All Creation, but not that much better. You're not really going to be playing Yuffie suboptimally by just having her fire off the giant laser.
In any case, north of 10k damage is enough to destroy what remains of Sephiroth's health.
The would-be god unravels, disintegrating, the fragments of his perfect body disappearing into the skies he somehow conjured, a Heaven of his own making to sit in. There's a great flash of light, and it's over - everyone is back at the edge of the well leading to the core of the planet.
How much of this final battle was real, taking place in a physical location against a physical opponent? How much of it was a battle thought on a metaphysical, spiritual level? We know the Lifestream allows souls to connect, to talk to one another in their own mind - did this whole battle take place on such a level, within everyone's souls?
Perhaps it doesn't matter. Physical, spiritual - at the heart of the Lifestream, such concepts blur together. There is no clear line between individuals, only a joined consciousness (there's Neon Genesis Evangelion again).
Cloud: "This is all we could do."
Barret: "Wait! What about Holy? What's gonna happen to the Planet?"
Cloud: "That… I don't know. Isn't the rest up to the Planet?"
Tifa: "...You're right. We've done all that we could do."
Cloud: "All right, everyone. We did our best. That's it."
[Everyone gets up, turns around, and starts to leave.]
This is such a hilariously casual way to follow up the greatest battle for the fate of the planet and all of humanity, my god.
But of course, that's because it's not actually the end. There is one last plot thread dangling, and if you've been following, you might already guess what it is.
We have destroyed all the fragments of Jenova's body, and everyone who was infected with her cells were either killed by us, or died in the Reunion fusing with her/Sephiroth.
Everyone except one person.
There's a flash of white light, and Cloud pauses. Tifa turns around and asks him what's wrong.
Cloud: "He is still… Here."
Cloud grips his head in pain, and once again, his body and mind start to dissociate into two separate figures. Tifa calls out his name, but she can't help him, not here, not now.
Cloud: "He's… Laughing…"
And then, Cloud's soul is ripped from his body.
Cut for image count.
