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There's been a lot of discussion over the years about the plot of Final Fantasy 7; namely, why is it so completely insane? Maybe it was unfinished; maybe it was censored; maybe the two script writers took turns beating each other over the head with a balpeen hammer prior to their writing sessions. Who knows? At any rate, hypotheses abound, and now I would like to present mine.
When I first played Final Fantasy 7, I admit, I was confused. I didn't understand why the focus of the game shifted so suddenly from busting fascists to chasing some guy to fulfill an insane vendetta of Cloud's. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, hoping the game would present me with a good reason for turning my back on Midgar and forgetting the people there, for letting the deaths of my old comrades slide, for giving up on Rufus.
Well, it didn't.
At the time, I was infuriated. Dropping everything to pursue Sephiroth seemed so arbitrary; I didn't see him as evil so much as totally pathetic. This is the guy I'm supposed to hate: a hollow shell of a man, raised to be a killing machine, dehumanized completely by Hojo's experiments, who maybe, deep down, clings to the vague hope that someday he'll have a chance to be more than ShinRa's golem; hopes that are dashed to pieces when he comes to the realization that he never was human, that he'll never be understood or accepted by humans, that he'll be alone with his agony for the rest of his wasteful life. Then he hears it; a voice in the darkness, calling to him, and at his most vulnerable moment, right when his mind is slipping off the edge, he is offerend a chance for something he thought he would never have: a mother. He's just screwed up enough to accept the creepy love of a parasitic alien, and moreover, to kill for it. For her. For Mother.
What a loser! Sephiroth is everybody's goat, and he's the one I'm supposed to be so angry at, I'll just abandon completely the people I was supposed to protect. He's the one I'm supposed to hate. Not Rufus ShinRa, the smug and strangely familiar Nazi-esque President who wants to 'rule through fear' by staging 'terrorist attacks' on New Y-Er, Sector Seven? Not Hojo, the Mengele wannabe? Not the bloated, war mongering Imperialists, the impotent puppet Mayor, the amoral CIA spooks? No. We're supposed to be sent into a frothing rage over some lame-ass mama's boy just because he happens to tied to an alien's apron strings.
It's ludicrous, if you think about it. Before you even know he's going to try to drain the Planet's lifestream (which is what ShinRa has been doing the entire time anyway), you're supposed to think nothing of ditching Midgar to chase him. And right about the time when you might be wondering about whatever happened to Midgar, Square plays its trump card: Aeris. You're supposed to hate Sephiroth, and there are people who do, because he killed Aeris, and you love Aeris.
I did not love Aeris. I saw her for what she was: a ploy. The depths of Cloud's trauma are revealed to us bit by bit, the game gets darker and darker, but through it all, there's Aeris, shining like a beacon of hope, until the gamer begins to form a sort of dependance on her; how will I stand all this evil without Aeris? Oh, Aeris, isn't Aeris beautiful, isn't she sweet, don't you just love her?
Now we'll kill her.
It's classic manipulation, dependance and deprivation. I have heard middle-school age boys freely admit to crying when Aeris died. Did anyone shed a tear for Jessie? No, because the game did not put her in a position where the gamer would become dependant on her. When Kefka poisoned the waters of Doma castle in Final Fantasy 6, did anyone go, "Oh, my god! He killed Elayne! I hate you!" No, because you didn't even know Elayne. Again, she was not placed in Aeris's position. Neither were any of the people in Midgar, which is why they were ignored for a large portion of the game, despite the fact that AVALANCHE's original mission was to help them and the rest of the Planet by destroying ShinRa, a task the player is quickly distracted from.
Here's a thought: What do you suppose was going on in Midgar during the game? Martial law? Death squads? How many of the people had really been turned against AVALANCHE? Do you think some of them suspected a government plot? What if there were people in Midgar who were continuing AVALANCHE's work, blowing up reactors, fighting the system? None of these issues are ever addressed in Final Fantasy 7, which I think is too bad. The ultimate insult, though, is that the player doesn't get to kill Rufus. That was the whole point in the first place! He's the most loathsome character in the game, perhaps because he is also the most realistic, and yet you don't bother hunting down and castrating him.
If one looks at the Aeris-Sephiroth plot as an elaborate bait and switch to get the player's mind away from Midgar, one is left to wonder: why all that stuff with Midgar in the first place? Why introduce Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, only to kill them and then ignore their lives and deaths as though they never existed? Why introduce Rufus, paint him as being supremely evil, then never let the player finish him off? ShinRa starts off seeming far more significant than merely background for Cloud and Sephiroth; why does it seem to fade out as the game progresses?
It could be seen as simply bad writing, and maybe it is just that. If you want to be paranoid about it, it could be seen as a sort of social experiment: will young people catch Square's emotional manipulation and become angry at the company, or would they play along, hunch down in front of their TVs and curse Sephiroth? Was it a warning, clothed as an incomprehensible game, ala MGS2? Was it a test run for something far more insidious?
The world may never know, and most players will never care. Still, isn't it odd how the game could be seen as...almost prophetic? The terrorist attack, the pursuit of a fabricated enemy who had previously been involved in a war for oil, the insultingly bad grammar...Does any of this sound familiar? At least Sephiroth really did have Weapons of Mass Destruction, but still! I find it interesting that Final Fantasy 7 uses the same head games favored by many governments, and I hope that this essay will encourage others to read more closely, and to read between the lines.
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