Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “The Train to the Ruined Chapel”

In the moonlight, the Ring of Isengard looked like a graveyard of unquiet dead. For the ground trembled.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Now the gang’s all here, we’ll work our way to the second boss battle. President Shinra is expecting us at the No. 5 Reactor, and then we meet Aeris on her home ground tending her flowers. In each encounter, we get to hear to a new leitmotif, the same melodic shape recast in wholly musical arrangements. With each, we also get a new take on the theme of memory, which is so powerfully evoked by listening to these tracks twenty years later. 

President Shinra says he can’t be expected to remember every SOLDIER’s name, save that of the great Sephiroth. Remember him?

“He was brilliant. Perhaps too brilliant…”

Aeris, as soon as Cloud regains consciousness, asks if he remembers her, giving her name for the first time. In this instance, you can change the name to whatever you like. Its meaning doesn’t come through clearly in the translation, but the original, “Aerith,” was evidently meant to be a portmanteau of “air” and “earth,” those opposed elements evocative of the totality of the planet. As for Sephiroth, it’s beyond my range to trace the roots of his name in the mystical emanations of God according to Kaballah, but that seems to be the relevant source. The esoteric implications will have to be unpacked by someone more versed in that material than me!

In the President’s ominous allusion to Sephiroth’s brilliance, his renown in war, contrasted with Aeris’ orphanhood, her one apparently ineffectual Materia the only memento she has of her mother, we should note a kind of cultural memory at work as well. In the background of FFVII, as in practically all the popular cultural output of Japan since the Second World War, there is the shadow cast by the atomic bomb. The archetypal example is the first Godzilla, which opens up on the monster rising up out of the sea and killing a boat of fisherman, just as an actual nuclear bombing test by the US in the Pacific did. The reference to nuclear power, a profound source of energy concealed in and then unleashed upon the earth, sets the tone of the game in the green light of the fissure down the alley. The apocalyptic sense of one’s society always being under threat of destruction comes through powerfully and pervasively in anime, too, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Akira. Nor are the Japanese alone in being haunted by that radioactive cast of light: we see it in the intro to The Simpsons, or in the origin story of the Hulk or Doctor Manhattan…

To recur to the problem of names: Before the Shinra security checkpoint on the train, Tifa says that all the towns making up what is now Midgar used to have their own names, although no one remembers that now. The creation of Midgar, concomitant with the exploitation of Mako as an energy source, is recent history in the frame of the narrative–perhaps two to three generations back–and yet the upheaval of such a rapid change has obliterated so much as the names of the places that used to exist there.

In the wake of technological development, cultural memory is lost.

This sort of incredible rupture in the continuity of a people’s memories has analogues beyond Japan’s devastation in WWII. We might see it reflected also in the first industrial revolution, when enclosures of common land and mechanization of labor brought on a similar rapid movement of urbanization, together with a dislocation from the land and its history suffered by the former tenants. Or look at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the geopolitics of East Asia in the Meiji period, translated in terms of the game world into the war with Wutai which left Shinra victorious.

To shift back to the plane of the individual, we see this general upheaval reflected in Cloud’s apparent lack of memory. He seems bizarrely bereft of even very significant, intimate memories with Tifa. He hesitates over the promise, that talismanic promise she’s talking about as if he should know what she means. It triggers, or rather confabulates between them, the flashback scene where they’re in their hometown, talking about going to the city. He promises to rescue her if she’s ever in need, a fairy tale motif we see nearly inverted in the course of the game, as it’s Tifa who comes to Cloud’s rescue as much as he does to hers.

The recovery of this memory is the first hint of that, but we see it too in the next sector of the slums, where a young man who has been exposed to Mako, his eyes shining with that telltale glow, suffers from amnesia and debilitating physical tics, convalescing in his pipe-house. He moans and mutters, his head lolls, articulate speech escapes him (as it evidently did the translators here with Aeris’ garbled dialogue), but the scene conveys eloquently enough that there’s a connection between the unleashing of this energy source like Mako and this loss of memory, whether it’s individual memory or social memory.

The broken NPC speaks to this break, this disjunction that we’ve been at pains to describe. 

There’s an onerous trade-off at play here. As the individual takes on a new role in society, say from villager to SOLDIER, in some respect that individual loses their autonomy, while also becoming part of something larger. In the same way, what once were stand-alone towns have been assimilated to this much larger cultural or social conglomerate of Midgar, brought in literally under its aegis, coordinated around this new center. Given the fact their names disappear as they become part of this larger name, the question is raised by Tifa: how can we appropriately maintain memory of what it once was? Or is it a natural fact of becoming assimilated into something larger and taking on a new role that it destroys one’s initial identity in the service making room for the creation of another? As Aeris warns, illness may well be the outcome. 

The slums’ names are gone, replaced by numbers, like the reactors above them, and like the sick young man in the tube has the number 2 tattooed on his arm. That insistent tension between one’s personal identity and one’s social relations is suddenly revealed as built into the game’s title, “Final Fantasy VII“. What has been lost in the trade-off with greater capabilities, technological or organizational? For Cloud, it is not just the memory of his relationship to Tifa, which will manifest in very interesting ways, but also the fact that their village burned down. The circumstances surrounding that event, including Sephiroth, the mountaintop reactor, and Tifa’s parents–neither of them mentions any of this yet. Just as, with very few exceptions, no Final Fantasy sequel explicitly refers back to its predecessors. 

Cloud himself is on this knife’s edge, between his world-weary pose of knowledge of everything going on, and his evidently limited strength and skills. All the other party members, similarly, will contribute to this very interesting storytelling device where, in parallel with their increasing prowess, they divulge flashbacks or other insights into the mysteries of each of their pasts, which are slowly brought forward through the interplay between the characters.

At this stage, Cloud and Tifa are not saying everything to one another partly because they’re not strong enough yet, but also partly because they’re not often left alone to talk. There’s almost always another person around, other members of AVALANCHE, personalities to navigate–Barrett even plays on that word promise, overhearing it, when he tosses Cloud his fee. We see this pretty strongly, too, in how Jesse starts to get interested in Cloud, asking about Tifa and whether their relationship status is as friends or something else. What the player gets to decide, primarily, is not the overall course of the story, in fact, but how to respond to that relational interplay. For now, what exactly happened back in their hometown remains inaccessible, for all that you are choosing how to interpret these little fragments of past or present relationships as they emerge, shaping what Cloud might think of his companions. 

The driving thread in the game, I’ll argue, is the relationship between Tifa and Cloud.

Obstacles constantly get in their way, just as they get in the way of your party’s progress. When you jump off the train, Barrett jumps off, too, keeping the two from being alone. When you fight the boss, it is physically placed between Tifa and Cloud. The greatest separation Cloud experiences, though, comes next as a literal fall. Highly symbolic, to say the least. Not only does he fall, he plummets through the roof of a church in the slums onto a grassy area that is not supposed to exist, and which is being maintained by a person who is not supposed to exist.

At once, Cloud projects onto Aeris his uppermost concerns: what could the Turks want with Aeris? It must be something to do with SOLDIER, his own great dream. She, in turn, asks for a bodyguard, and as payment offers him a date. It’s a sly piece of wish-fulfillment, but also provides an allegory for the sort of things that get in the way of a real relationship, taking Tifa to represent that hindered reality here. Cloud’s aspirations towards career, his failures in that endeavor as pointed out by his interaction with President Shinra, and then this ideal girl, this impossible creature from another time manifesting a vision of perfection in female form, she potentially stands in the way of the relationship with Tifa as well.

Thus, the fragmentation of Cloud’s memory is further complicated by his need to clear up what exactly he wants in the present, and how Tifa, Aeris, and even Barrett fit into that. To understand who he actually is, rather than identifying simply with SOLDIER, he’ll have to delve into his past. He seems completely unwilling or unable to do so without help. In psychological parlance, he starts off as a de-individuated type, experiences a descent, and finds an Anima figure there confronting him. In order to become a real person, not a Pinocchio but a real individual who can make his own choices, he’s going to have to go through the suffering of seeing his failures in his past and the terrible things that continue to happen along the way. 

The church scene, with the escape necessitated by the arrival of the Turks, is dreamlike, practically incoherent.

If flirtatious and playful, it’s unclear whether Aeris is teasing Cloud or if she’s scared and playing it off. She seems to be making fun instead of showing much concern, considering he’s just fallen hundreds of feet, apparently unharmed. The dialogue remains so general that anybody can identify with Cloud in that moment. It’s the archetypal first interaction between young people, made up of small invitations and questions of personal care, but around this innocence, there are all sorts of shadowy threats.

Leaving the Turks aside for now, the fact that Cloud is sort of a cipher of SOLDIER himself (though later we learn which particular SOLDIER he’s been modeling himself on, namely Zack), it makes me wonder if part of what’s being said here is that the projection between these young people is mutual. If we take as a hypothesis that FFVII is a kind of bildungsroman or case-study of differentiation, showing how one must identify with a role in society in order to function within the group, but then how one must become an individual again or else become cut off from one’s full nature. When Cloud meets Aeris where the flowers bloom in the church, they can’t stay there more than a few moments, wondering who one another might be, before they have to flee over the rooftops, caught up in a larger story. 

In the image of Barrett pulling Tifa away just prior, leaving Cloud to fall as the reactor’s exploding, we’ll see a few significant echoes later. Barrett’s backstory story involves losing his best friend in a similar cliff-hanging situation. We also find out in the playground that Aeris had a previous boyfriend in SOLDIER. Cloud essentially copies everything about him; whether it’s unconscious or conscious doesn’t really matter at this point, because when she looks at him she can’t help but see someone else. In the conversation with her mother-figure back at her house, there’s also the warning, she doesn’t need her feelings hurt again. But upon Cloud’s sneaking out, she’s already there waiting.

Aeris engages in the same battles Cloud does, fights alongside her bodyguard, so she’s also beginning to interject herself into this AVALANCHE world, this conflict against Shinra, for reasons of her own. 

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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