Tag Archives: Final fantasy 7

Final Fantasy VII – They are coming back.

Last week, I came across the following trailer on my Facebook wall and, at first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is something that I had dreamed about ever since Sony came up with Playstation 3, and it will finally become a reality, after almost 20 years.

Now I have a confession to make.  Final Fantasy VII is one of my favorite games of all times, and certainly my favorite amongst all of the Final Fantasy games (with Final Fantasy X coming close second).

I still remember the first time I played it. I had just graduated from high school and started my first year in college along with three of my high school friends. We were extremely busy with studies and all of us also worked part time to pay for school, but we had a rule: we always met on Saturday nights to spend time together. Since we were broke college students, we rarely went out. We met at my place instead, because I was the only one who had moved out of my parents’ house at that time. I was also the only one to own a Playstation.

We would play table top RPG games or watch TV, or just talk about the books we read, things we did during the week. And sometimes we would play games. I remember that I picked up Final Fantasy VII in a second hand game store in 1998 almost as an afterthought. I had never heard of the Final Fantasy series before, or never played a JRPG game. It was cheap and we had ran out of games to play on Saturday nights, so into the bag it went.

Needless to say that we were hooked from the very first Saturday night, my friends and I. I don’t think any other game had managed to absorb us so completely before (and very few did after). We would spend the whole evening playing, then the rest of the week talking about it and discussing boss strategies, best places to level those pesky materia, which equipment was best for which character and so on and so forth. We spend a lot of wonderful hours together drinking tea or wine when we could afford it, eating whatever we could cook and discovering the wonderfully complex story of Cloud and company…

I have played many games since then, and I have replayed Final Fantasy VII several times as well and it never gets boring. I love the world. I love the story this game tells. I love all the characters, even if I’m not a very big fan of Cloud. And I will always be grateful to Squaresoft for creating the most wonderful antagonist of all times – Sephiroth. I even wrote a whole blog post about him about a year ago, if you want to check it out.

So when I think about this game, I think about wonderfully detailed characters and an amazing plot, but also hours of laughter and good times I spent with my best friends. So yes, I’m excited about FF7 coming back, even if my friends are a continent away now and living their own lives. I can’t wait to play it. I’ll even buy a PS4 just for that.

But I am also a bit scared of this new take on a game I love, because Square Enix announced that it wouldn’t just be a remastering of the original game, but a remake. Remake means new vision. Remake means telling the story in a different way and often changing it to fit this new vision. What if I start playing this new Final Fantasy VII and absolutely hate what they’ve done with the story? Would it taint my love for the characters and the story of the original as well? So I will be waiting for this release with an equal part of excitement and fear, and hope for the best… and wish that I could gather all of my friends around my PS4 and TV one more time and share this game with them like in the good old times.

The importance of a good antagonist – Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII

A good plot is driven by conflict, and there what better than an antagonist thwarting our protagonist at every turn to escalate that conflict until it has us turning page after page at 4am in the morning because we just need to know what’s going to happen next? And then we feel like zombies at work because we only managed maybe two hours of sleep…

However, the more I read, the more I discover that good antagonists (ha, talk about an oxymoron there!) are hard to come by. Most often, we are presented with a cookie cut villain with absolutely no depth or character, and who does evil because hey he is evil. Or the antagonist is so bland that he or she gets lost in the light of the protagonist’s awesomeness who manages to thwart his evil plans almost effortlessly. Sometimes they are somewhere in the middle: you can see that they are there to drive the conflict, but no real effort had been done to make them interesting and tridimensional. That’s why whey I come across a story with a better than average antagonist, it tends to stay with me for a long time.

So for this post, I thought I would share with out what I think is one of the best antagonists I have ever seen in a book / movie / video game. And, strangely enough, he doesn’t come from the written page, but from the screen of a video game. Back in 1997 (good god, almost 20 years ago, time does fly), I picked up my first ever Final Fantasy game. It was Final Fantasy VII and I still think it’s the best game of the franchise (Final Fantasy X comes a close second, but will never dethrone it for me). It had managed to create a rich and complex world and told a compelling story with interesting characters. But what makes this story so awesome is the presence of the main antagonist – Sephiroth.

Sephiroth

Part of what makes Sephiroth so awesome is that he is present throughout the game, even if we don’t see him at all until we are about a third of the way through. But we hear about him: he is a hero, a famous General, the greatest SOLDIER in the history of SHINRA, the monster that burned Nibelheim, presumed dead, but rumors of his sightings spread all over the continent. He is shrouded in mystery, his past a secret, the reason why he went mad and decided to burn a whole town unknown. During the length of the game, we are one step behind him, walking in his footsteps and seeing the ripple effect of his actions.

This build up is so expertly done that by the time we actually see him in Cloud’s flashback, Sephiroth is a figure extremely hard to forget. I must admit that the game designers went all out when they created his model: he is a head taller than anyone else in the game, clad in black and with long silver hair. But perhaps the most memorable detail about him is Masamune – the extremely long katana that he wields one-handed, as if it was a feather, not a huge damn sword.

Sephiroth
Sephiroth

What makes him such a good antagonist though is not his looks or the mystery surrounding him, but the fact that the creators of the game put a lot of thought into his character and his background story. The player uncovers different facets of this story during the game. And during all that time, we can’t help but admire Sephiroth’s might, feel sorry for him when we discover certain painful details about his upbringing, and hate him after that fateful episode in the City of the Ancients, but never ever are we indifferent to what he does or what he is.

The game developers managed to create a character who has such a gravitational pull that the whole story revolves around him. This makes the protagonist’s journey and personal growth even more meaningful, and the last battle, where Cloud manages to finally defeat Sephiroth, feels like a real, but very bitter-sweet victory. And this, for me, is the true mark of a good story and a good antagonist.

And before I leave you to ponder about this, let me show you a small example of how the game developers manage to show just how much more powerful than the protagonist Sephiroth is. At one point, your party wanders into a marsh they need to cross and is attacked by a giant snake, the Midgard Zolom. If you are anything like me and haven’t read the walkthrough (I never do unless I’m absolutely stuck), you will get stomped to the ground in all kinds of new and painful ways by that snake. So you go back to the previous area, you kill generic monsters and level up as much as you can, you stock up on potions and go back to face the snake. When you defeat it this time, it feels like a real accomplishment. Then you cross the marsh and just before going into the next area, you are greeted with this sight:

 

Snake skewer, anyone?
Snake skewer, anyone?

Yep. It took you a party of three to kill your snake and you threw everything you had at it, and Sephiroth just single-handedly skewered it on a tree and didn’t even break a sweat.