Final Fantasy VII is a game about what it means to go up against Sephiroth. In a nutshell that’s it right there. So let’s get to know him better.
Outside Midgar at last, which was functionally our world the entire time we’ve been playing, we see it’s but a small part of the land, a blight on the green meadows. Not taking up much space at all on the world map, it nevertheless occupies a tremendous amount of our attention during the course of the game. And every town in these old RPGs is like that: bigger inside than out. Or like a keyword in a textbook, or a hyperlink in an article; like New York City, or ancient Rome at its height, Midgar is where things happen. Yet what a relief to be out of there for a while! What freedom, getting to save the game anywhere we want. Once that’s done–the communication system, PHS/cell phone, isn’t introduced just yet–we can wander around a bit and relish the world map music, expansive and sweeping, whereas up until then (with poignant exceptions) the soundtrack has tended toward the intense and industrial. The camera pulls back from the city and rotates with our movement, and sooner or later we’ll make our way toward the appropriately-named Kalm, where a memorable little reminiscence sequence takes place.
When we come into that town, we find ourselves in oddly familiar surroundings. Less like a miniature version of Midgar than that model in Shinra HQ, Kalm instead looks quite a bit like the hometown Cloud and Tifa visited in their shared or confabulated memory that played out when we met her at the bar. There’s the same camera angle, the same kind of central water tower, the inn right as you come in and the little ring of houses and shops around the square. The parallel is strongly reinforced as, upon entering the party’s room at the Kalm inn, you’re thrown back into Cloud’s memory of Nibelheim. Do all these towns controlled by Shinra follow the same template now? Are all reflections of a principle of memory or an ideal of tranquility, just that sort of thing we as players are after in returning to these games?
Before heading too far down memory lane, we should note that the townspeople in Kalm are all fairly generic, the music is soothing, the rendering of the interiors atmospheric but understated. We see how it is possible to be perfectly happy with Shinra, situated at a safe distance from the capital’s reactors yet benefiting from the power they generate. Sure, they’re sort of upset at the fact that there are now monsters, but also accepting that with all the safety and power and wealth that Shinra produces, there are going to be problems at times. It’s a complacency I can easily, or a little uneasily, relate to. And if they’re aware President Shinra has just been murdered with a huge sword by the ghost or revenant of the greatest hero of the late wars, they don’t seem too put off by this. His son Rufus has taken over, after all. As far as they’re concerned, nothing has really changed.
As a framework for the interplay between society and the individual as presented here, we might consider a theory formulated and popularized by the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, that there are three fundamental parts to every story, and especially mythologically-inclined stories like Final Fantasy VII. In the first place, we start out in the realm of the known, often represented by the great father: President Shinra, or the office of president or any leadership position, that which would protect the people from anomaly, but which also tends to oppress and ossify. That brings us to the second aspect, the realm of the unknown, that which, no matter how much we try, we can’t possibly comprehend under the given paradigm, and that which produces monsters as well as heroes. The unknown is often represented by feminine imagery, like Tiamat or Kali, or Jenova. Third, then, there’s the hero, the one who ventures out into the unknown to extend the range of the known, or to revive its creative potential. Think Simba from The Lion King, or anyone who gets the Christ-type treatment.
So within that loose framework, as we try and map it onto Final Fantasy VII conceptually, we see some curious features. If our original known territory is the oppressive Shinra regime, and the anomalous monster seems to be Jenova, we are left with at least three viable contenders for the role of son-hero: Rufus, Sephiroth, and Cloud himself. Clearly, all have left the safety of the known, the great father–one is his successor, one’s his killer, and the third is actually seeking the truth about why all this is happening. Thrust out into the unknown world now–though in many ways it’s more peaceful than the city–without shelter, facing battles every few steps, the hero whose adventure we’re following heads towards an inevitable confrontation with the others. The outcome will determine the sort of story we’re involved in telling, and what it has to tell us.
Before long, another couple of important symbolic beings will join the panoply of mythic figurations in this dance between known and unknown. Astride our wild chocobo, “the thing with feathers,” true mascot of the series, though flightless as a giant chicken, we’ll evade the giant serpent, the Midgar Zolom, patrolling the marshes, only to come upon one like it that ran into an even more dangerous enemy. In myths and legends across cultures, the hero who goes into the unknown has to fight the dragon, the winged (sometimes literally, sometimes not) serpent, to save the world, to recover the information the known world needs to expand the domain of its efficacy and beat back the dark:
It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle-earth, beating back the enemies of order…
Each time, the form of the story enacts and instills the habit of progressing the known into the unknown, rather than allowing the unknown to oppressively continue to press in on the known. The tendency towards or away from this movement, expanding or contracting the ring of light around the human campfire, so to speak, might be the fundamental measure for whether a society is on the incline or, inevitably sooner or later, on the decline. Which one Midgar seems to be, we’ve already seen firsthand. But it could be that Cloud’s quest (or Rufus’, or Sephiroth’s) will change that…
The parallel to the journey across the swamp, shortly to be undergone, comes in Kalm, the walled city, in Cloud’s narration of the events in Nibelheim those five years before, when upon approaching the town, his party is immediately faced with a dragon. Fortunately for him, that party is led by Sephiroth himself. When we go back and play through this backstory, his unspeakable power, that mastery no story about him can possibly capture, is conveyed not just in those words spoken by the dead President’s body, burned into many a player’s soul, but by a mixture of gameplay and the characters’ own reflections upon it. Though he’s in your party, you can’t command Sephiroth. No one could, least of all President Shinra. He is the ideal of the young Cloud and of the player alike, the best at everything. When you see his character portrait in the menu screen, he’s literally looking down as if from a great and lonely height, condescending, supercilious. And with good reason: it’s unreal how strong Sephiroth is compared to Cloud then, or at the current point in the game for that matter.
There are a couple ways to think about that. Either that impossible degree of perfection is actually real, in which case he’s something more than a hero–a god, or a monster–or that’s just how he appeared to Cloud at that time. The latter read places the focus squarely on Cloud’s story, and tells us more about his psyche than about the enigma of his idol. We know Cloud looked up to Sephiroth, greatly admired and wanted to be him, from his goodbye to Tifa. Thus his perfection in Cloud’s memory now is an exaggeration, dramatizing for us how he’s insisted all along that the reality of Sephiroth exceeds all stories. It’s a very interesting claim to make as a storyteller, one Giuseppe Mazzotta, the Dante scholar for me, calls the ineffability topos, a way of talking about that which escapes language. In Dante it takes the form of praise of the beloved and the divine, as well as competition with his poetic forebears, blending the worldly and the transcendent, humility and ambition on the poet’s part:
I was within the heaven that receives
more of His light; and I saw things that he
who from that height descends, forgets or cannot speak; for nearing its desired end,
our intellect sinks into an abyss
so deep that memory fails to follow it.Nevertheless, as much as I, within
my mind, could treasure of the holy kingdom
shall now become the matter of my song.-from Paradiso I
The way Cloud describes Sephiroth’s power, the way the game represents his perfection, approaches the zeal of the believer for revelation, the lover for his beloved. The androgynous Masamune-wielder cannot take damage the entire time he’s with you; if enemies even have a chance to attack, they deal zero damage. Even when your party gets as strong as you will ever get, you’ll still take one HP damage. He’s just level 50 at this time, but it’s far beyond your early double digits; he deals some 3200 damage with his basic attack, while Cloud does like 14 at this time, and then in the present you’re proud to do like ten times that. His defense is impregnable, though it’s only a gold bangle, mid-game equipment. All his Materia is linked to All and it’s Mastered: it receives no growth, as good as it gets. His Touph Ring is spelled like it sounds, I guess. Everything makes you doubt, how am I ever going to beat this guy? or even, Is there some way to get him to rejoin my party?
But that’s where the alternative interpretation leaves room for hope. If at the time he’s conflated with Cloud’s ideal self, then the truth is that you might someday transcend him. You can get above level 50, you can do 9999 damage, and much more, with your ultimate weapons and limit breaks, and those will have eight Materia slots for way cooler spells than Sephiroth’s here. Cloud will go as far beyond Sephiroth, in short, as he is represented as being beyond Cloud. To get there, he’ll need to straighten out his story and his mental map. At the moment Cloud mistakenly represents Sephiroth as his ideal self, or that good unknown, that dragon-guarded treasure which pulls us into the next stages of reality, or that story which tells a young person to become better because their hero is so much farther ahead, so that in a Phaedrus-like way you flap your wings. Cloud’s distorted memories will have to be overcome to reveal that he has the potential to surpass his hero, but when he accepts who he is, he will become the true hero.
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite–a pair of winged horses and a charioteer…
-from Plato, Phaedrus
To throw in one more Freudian thing: I don’t know if this is a real joke or just something gross and English-teachery I’m reading into it, but Cloud at this point has just one Materia: it’s purple and it’s Pre-Emptive. The little guy is really looking forward to using it, doing little crunches about how excited he is. Imagine, to be on a mission alongside the great Sephiroth, coming back to his hometown covered in glory. Because what the dragon guards, in this case, is Cloud’s hometown, and the girl next door.
Between the Midgar Zolom and these Nibelheim dragons, Sephiroth has no trouble living up to the hype, but that is not to say he won’t run into another sort of dragon: Jenova. Locked in the reactor, with her wings and red tube-like appendage, she has the aspect of a wyvern or dragon. She is the anomaly giving rise to the dragons and other monsters, the reason Shinra has dispatched these troops there, and yet her importance for Sephiroth goes far beyond any mission. Putting together these powerful monsters that have been appearing with the pods arranged in ranks like offerings to the sealed mother of dragons, the complaints of the townspeople point to a more insidious connection between our heroes and villains, and the source of their power.
By the time Cloud had joined up, the war in Wutai was over. He couldn’t make his name doing Sephiroth-like things, but he took extra jobs whenever possible to prove himself. This is much like Cloud as we see him at the start of the game, imitating Sephiroth-like aloofness, but still taking odd jobs out of a need to perform. To Sephiroth, the dragon is just another day’s work; the truck rattles along, the windshield wipers going–it’s like he’s just going through the motions, the daily commute. Pared to the essentials, the meeting between the world’s great warrior and the scaly green dragon is not even a contest. The only interesting thing about it is the presence of this pointless other person–no Wiglaf beside his Beowulf–and, of course, the consequential discoveries that await in this small town and the mountains around.
They had killed the enemy, courage quelled his life;
that pair of kinsmen, partners in nobility,
had destroyed the foe. So every man should act,
be at hand when needed; but now, for the king,
this would be the last of his many labours
and triumphs in the world.-from Beowulf (Heaney trans.)
It’s actually not very true to the old stories, the way here that dragons are just random enemies. In the mythic tales, there’s generally just one dragon, and the hero will be pushed to his very limit, if he prevails at all, against it. Then again, this is the sort of thing a poet does, taking the old material and making his bid to incorporate it and exceed it–perhaps that’s what the game developers are up to, foisting dragons on us left, right, and center. Creative imitation of this sort goes back to Virgil and each of the major epic poets after him, putting a spin on the existing material, developing it in a language of their own. In that light, we could see this as a bold statement by the developers, to go beyond the normal fantasy motifs. But like so many things in this game, you can’t trust appearances. What is a dragon to Cloud is not really a dragon, in the mythic sense, to Sephiroth. They’re both walking the path of the hero, but it’s not much of a story if there’s no real challenge at stake. This makes Cloud, for all his weakness, the more interesting hero-figure.
But there is that point at which Sephiroth, too, runs into a dragon in Jenova, and experiences a very Cloud-like crisis of identity. One read of this could be as the classic post-traumatic stress disorder, the soldier coming home after a foray into the unknown, only to find the known territory no longer adequate. Rituals would have marked the return, allowing the veteran to deflate himself so that he can come back to society. In Sephiroth’s case, there’s the extreme crisis of identity brought about by the view of the deformed creature tumbling from its container: Was I made as a weapon, was I made into a weapon? Having fought to the apex, defeated the foe and the dragon, what is left to do? What now for me?
The obvious answer to that for me as a teacher is to find someone to teach, someone who I can mentor and train and help to learn from all this. To tell my story, as it seems Cloud would do in Kalm. But Sephiroth is so stoic, so within his own head, that even though Cloud is right there, this little puppy dog begging to be taught and shown cool stuff, he’s so aloof as to ignore that avenue almost completely. He becomes lost in the realm of Jenova, never to return. There is a hint of what Sephiroth might have been, had he been able to connect with others, in what happens when you traverse the caves en route to the reactor. But even there the symbols are ominous: the bridge breaks, everyone falls down, and though there they find the spring of Mako, that ultimate teachable moment, Sephiroth doesn’t have much of the gentle coach in him to rise to it. Certainly part of his allure is inseparable from this gruffness and distance, that he’s not forthcoming with his stories, but what we see in the next sequence takes that a tad bit too far.
What can we expect? At bottom, he’s the son of an archetypal representation of chaos. Rather than hand on his gifts to the next generation, or help them improve theirs, Sephiroth feels with some narrow justification as if he’s mastered life and that he should himself be passed on throughout all generations. In lieu of the path of the hero writ large, as the transmigration of the soul and reincarnation or as in communion sharing the host and its promise of resurrection, he would be all in all. He wants to propagate himself across time, rather than pass on that heroic spirit which he might have embodied. He won’t even let you unequip his Materia.
Where is the master who wants–who needs–to bequeath knowledge to students? It could be I’m just projecting this, since teaching is what I do everyday, but there’s also Zangan the boxer in town visiting his most skilled student, none other than Tifa, who’s come forward to guide everybody up to the reactor. And, of course, there’s Dr. Gast’s haunting presence in the form of his library-lab in the basement of the Shinra mansion. More about that next time.
Thus, the paradox of Sephiroth: if we try to maintain our role as the hero beyond a certain point, we shift roles from hero to villain, to tyrant. We’re now going against nature, against the limited time we’re allotted and the fate or destiny that has placed us in mortality. It’s as if we were attempting to change the rules of the game while we’re in the middle of playing, in order to make the game suitable to ourselves. We see this in great literature, perhaps nowhere quite as clearly as in Shakespeare’s abiding fascination with jealousy–the jealousy of the lover in the sonnets, or a father like Lear, or in the form of envy in Iago or Richard III or Macbeth. To get what they want, they become the total opposite of anything they ever wanted to be. Just so, the same skills which have let Sephiroth perform such great deeds, winning wars and slaying dragons, turn him from hero to tyrant when he uses them against the people who depend on him, in service to his own megalomania.
To understand, as far as mere mortals can hope to, what leads him down that road, we’ll look more closely next time at what he discovers about himself in Nibelheim.
Wesley Schantz (the Bookwarm Mage) coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA. FFVII Myth & Materia comes out of his podcast series with Alexander Schmid and Vincent Reese.
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Sephiroth as a chosen one archetype that let it go to his head is such a great subversion of typical JRPG stories. I think we’re so accustomed to FFVII at this point that we miss stuff like that. Or forget to appreciate it.