(upbeat music)
- Hi, my name is Katia.
I am the residential "Final Fantasy VII" mega nerd.
And I'm so excited to tell you about "Final Fantasy VII."
Why it's important, why it's amazing
and why you should probably get into the "Remake."
Spoiler alert, kind of, sort of.
I'm gonna be going through the entire timeline
of "Final Fantasy VII," both the events in game
before and a little bit after.
So if you know anything
about "Final Fantasy VII," you definitely know
that blonde headed guy with the spiky hair
and the big sword, but more than likely, you know,
about that scene of Aeris, the girl in the pink dress
getting stabbed by this long hair dude.
And it's actually super tragic, and you're like. (sighs)
Before we get into all of that,
let's rewind about 2,000 years.
And actually to the ancestors of these two characters.
We have the Cetra who inhabit this planet
and we have Jenova, which is an alien
that crash-lands and wreaks havoc, and as a result,
these Cetra, or later known as Ancients,
hide away Jenova into the earth so that she doesn't cause
any more destruction as far as they can tell.
Two or three decades before the events
of "Final Fantasy VII," a company named Shinra is founded.
And they've started digging into the earth in search
of what's basically called Mako energy.
It's like the life force of the planet.
While they're digging into the planet to find all
of this Mako energy,
they discover this weird alien creature in the earth.
And they mislabel it as an Ancient.
When in reality, it's actually Jenova.
This like terrible alien that wrecked havoc
on the planet like 2,000 years ago, big bad news.
And this is where things get really interesting.
They found this creature,
which they've labeled as an ancient and they start
doing all these experiments and tests.
They start injecting people with the cells
of Jenova and putting Mako into them.
And essentially they stumble across creating really
like powerful human beings and also kind of,
sort of creating monsters.
One of those super soldiers you guys might
know as Sephiroth.
And in this point in time,
he's actually a good guy and everybody looks up
to him and it's basically like,
oh my God is that Sephiroth, can I have his autograph?
And he's got like this long flowing hair and he's got
all these muscles and he's like super duper strong.
So Shinra is in search of all of this cool
Mako energy around the planet.
And they're expanding and they've built up essentially
an army of these super soldiers to protect their assets.
Sephiroth emerges as the super cool guy that everybody
on the planet looks up to,
including little baby Cloud in Nibelheim.
So at the start of "Final Fantasy VII," all you know
about Cloud is that he's ex-SOLDIER and he's actually
in a fight against the Shinra.
But how did we get here?
How does he go from idolizing somebody like
Sephiroth to becoming an ex-SOLDIER
that's fighting Shinra?
I'm here to tell you there are three people that go
to Nibelheim from Shinra.
Cloud as a Grunt.
This guy named Zack, who is a Soldier First Class,
and Sephiroth, and they're there to investigate
all of these monsters that have been popping up
around this town, around this Mako reactor.
And so they go with the help of somebody named
Tifa, which is Cloud's childhood friend.
They check out the Mako reactor and Sephiroth realizes
that Shinra is actually creating these monsters
that they came out to investigate.
So then Sephiroth tries to figure it out, wait,
Shinra's creating monsters?
Like when did this start happening?
- And he realizes the same process
by which these monsters are being created is
actually very analogous to the way
that Sephiroth himself was created.
With infusion of Mako energy and Jenova cells.
And because of all this information coming at him at once,
he literally has a mental breakdown and kills everybody,
completely razing the entire town of Nibelheim.
From there, this guy named Zack who's the soldier
that was also there,
both him and Cloud try to fight Sephiroth.
Zack gets really badly injured in this whole process.
Cloud somehow manages to kill Sephiroth sort of.
And they both get taken in by Shinra and experimented on.
And they try to basically keep these two guys alive.
This is really crucial.
And this leads to the entire existential crisis
to what Cloud goes through because Zack having been
in SOLDIER has been exposed to Mako energy before.
So he's basically incapable of having
what's called Mako poisoning.
Cloud is a civilian, he's never been exposed
to Mako energy, but he has to be exposed
to Mako in order to be fixed during this like big
battle with Sephiroth.
And as a resultk, this poisoning totally messes
his brain up.
He essentially has PTSD.
He's sort of not even conscious and they break out.
Zack drags poor Cloud halfway across the continent
to Midgar in like this big
standoff with Shinra.
In this big standoff with...
(beeping)
In this big standoff with Shinra SOLDIERs
it's really hard to say Shinra SOLDIERs. (laughs)
In this big standoff, Zack protects
Cloud and ends up dying and Cloud in this weird
hazy Mako poisoning sort of mind frame thinks
that he's SOLDIER because he's now
in the SOLDIER garb, and he's taken Zack's sword,
which is that big Buster Sword.
So when he shows up at Midgar, it's his childhood
friend Tifa, who now lives in Midgar, who finds him
and asks him to join in this battle against Shinra.
This is where the game actually finally starts.
But you don't know any of that.
This group of people called AVALANCHE are based
out of Sector 7 in Midgar.
And they're fighting Shinra because they're trying
to protect the planet from all these horrible things
that Shinra is doing,
like sucking literally the lifeblood out of the planet
in order to like keep their computers and TVs on.
Cloud basically gets roped into this fight
against Shinra by his like childhood friend,
because she's worried about him.
And this is a great way for her to keep an eye
on him because she's realizing, huh,
Cloud's talking about all these things in the past
that he couldn't possibly have known
about because he wasn't there, but then he knows about it.
That's super strange.
So that's why Tifa basically not only convinces
his Cloud to join Avalanche, but she also kind of lies
to Cloud and never really accounts for the fact
that keeping this information away from Cloud keeps
him like in the dark about himself.
Which is really messed up.
There's a great deal of like confusion around
who the real bad guy of "Final Fantasy VII" is.
Because you think it's Shinra, right?
'Cause you're like fighting Shinra, you're trying
to protect the planet and then Sephiroth finally appears.
And he actually stabs the president of Shinra.
And at the same time,
that's like weird alien called Jenova had escaped.
And all of this chaos has started happening.
And Cloud desperately wants to track down
Sephiroth 'cause he's like, wait a minute.
he can't just go stabbing people.
We have to go after this guy.
Wait, I thought Sephiroth was dead.
What is he doing alive roaming the planet?
So actually what's going on is
Sephiroth in his crystallized form is somewhere
in like the North Pole.
What we're seeing throughout the entirety of the game
are Jenova cells in the guys.
Or like the appearance of Sephiroth.
So actually this iconic scene of Aeris being stabbed
isn't Sephiroth stabbing her.
It's actually Jenova cells controlled
by Sephiroth who stabs her.
So technically it's still him, right?
Because it's Sephiroth's will,
but it's not his body.
Okay, so why stab this poor girl in the first place?
Well, Aeris is what's called an Ancient.
She's literally the last known Ancient on the planet.
And what that means is that she can talk
to the planet and by essence,
save the world from Sephiroth because she can send
out a prayer to what's called Holy.
To like do some sort of magical thing and save the Earth?
I don't know, they never really talk about it in the game.
We just know that Aerith is like the key to saving
the planet, and then he kills her.
There's a lot of confusion around
how to pronounce Aeris' name.
You could say Arieth and you can say Aeris.
And the reason for that is because it was
translated weird coming
over from Japan to the United States.
Although you do too typically see Aerith written.
And I'm pretty sure Square Enix has officially
declared Aerith as the official way to say it.
But I grew up with the PlayStation one game
where we had Aeris, so I say Aeris.
You can say whatever you want.
I would speculate that the reason
why Sephiroth essentially kills Aeris is 'cause
he recognizes that Aeris is one of the few ways
that he can be defeated.
He probably knows that because he has Jenova cells in him.
And if you have the Jenova cells in you,
then you are also acquiring the information
and the knowledge of Jenova as well.
When Aeris gets stabbed,
not only is Cloud re-invigorated in his pursuit
to go after Sephiroth, you essentially start
going through the game's like backstory
of everyone's different reasons for fighting
for the planet.
And everybody has a unique point of view.
Everybody has a grudge because if they let
Sephiroth do whatever he wants,
he's gonna kill absolutely everything.
And this happens by him summoning this giant thing
out of the sky,
this calamity out of the sky called Meteor.
Which is how we have the logo of the game.
Okay, so basically what happens, Aeris gets stabbed.
All of this (beep) happens.
But the main plot point is they find
out that Sephiroth is still in the Northern Crater.
And eventually they find out even though Aeris died,
her prayer to the planet to protect the planet,
Holy actually went through.
Not only that, but Sephiroth's will is keeping the planet
from letting Holy emerge to protected it
from this gigantic meteor that is hurdling towards them.
The team figures out that if they confront
Sephiroth and stop Sephiroth, they could stop Meteor.
By the end of disc three,
this is pretty much wrapping up the game.
The team realizes that the only way that they could
stop Meteor is to stop Sephiroth.
So they go to Northern Crater and fight him. (sings)
That's the battle of music. (laughs)
So basically, Shinra bad,
Sephiroth pretty bad, Jenova super bad,
Cloud really confused, Aeris good, make sense?
So two things happen when you're in Northern Crater.
You are fighting Jenova or what's left of Jenova.
And you're fighting actually two forms of Sephiroth.
Sephiroth essentially has ascended to like godlike status.
Which is why you see throughout the entire
"Final Fantasy VII" canon that like one winged like
angel thing, that comes from the final final boss.
The One Winged Angel.
And when you defeat Sephiroth, the One Winged Angel,
you actually have this like super cool fight.
It's just Cloud and Sephiroth in their human form.
Everything's stripped down, no extra Kuchaman,
and Cloud gets his limit break
and he's like, (imitates limit break)
and kills Sephiroth for good, for real.
But that's actually not the end of the game.
What really happens is he defeats
Sephiroth and Meteor's still coming.
And they think that actually they failed and all
of this hard work,
everything that they've done was for nothing.
And what actually happens is the life force
and the life stream and Holy start trickling out,
out of the planet and does its best to stop the Meteor.
But Meteor ends up crashing
into Midgar and that, that's it.
We don't know what happens.
You're waiting for the end scene
and like the credits.
And you're like, wait so what happened?
Did we like save the planet?
Did we not?
Like it feels like we did, but it didn't.
And the very, very last story bit that we get
from the first game,
"Final Fantasy VII," this 1997 version is
of these animals running through outskirts of Midgar.
And we see a shot of Midgar and it's totally decimated.
Did humans survive?
We don't know.
"Advent Children" comes out like years later.
And "Advent Children" is what happens right
after Meteor fell.
So we find out in "Advent Children"
that when the planet goes
to protect itself, it actually accidentally poisons
a bunch of people in Midgar.
And from there you have Geostigma.
But let's not even get into that. (laughs)
That's pretty much everything that there is to know
about "Final Fantasy VII."
You should definitely check out the original game
because even though I've told you all of this,
there's all these great little moments
in the characters and the story and there's whole
other games like the prequel,
and "Dirge of Cerberus" and "Crisis Core."
There's so much more to the story than just this.
(tense music)
- Hey guys, Jared here.
Hope you liked that video.
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videos that we have on here.
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