A Visual Identity Crisis — And It Works
Final Fantasy VII opens with a trick. A sweeping CGI camera pulls away from the city of Midgar — bleak, industrial, unmistakably Japanese science fiction — and slams you into a pixelated train station where a purple blob named Cloud hops off a rail car. Thirty seconds in and you've already experienced two completely different visual languages. Then a random battle hits, the screen shatters again, and now Cloud stands tall with anatomically proportioned limbs, giant sword slung over his shoulder, looking nothing like the blocky goof you were just controlling.
Three graphical styles in under five minutes. It shouldn't work. The pre-rendered backgrounds are gorgeous — Midgar's slums drip with graffiti and rust, the reactors hum with intricately animated pipes and gears. But then your characters look like Duplo figures with mitten hands walking across these paintings. Dialogue scenes play out between bobble-headed sprites with maybe four frames of animation. Cloud shrugs when he talks. Barret flails his gun-arm and cusses through a localization filter that somehow makes him funnier.
The thing is, once you stop fighting it, this visual dissonance becomes part of Final Fantasy VII's charm. Watching a little blocky dude curse the world, fire his weapon, and leap off a cliff is objectively hilarious — even when the script is dead serious about suicide and eco-terrorism. The inconsistent localization adds another layer of accidental comedy. "This guy are sick" became a meme for a reason. But here's what catches you off guard: those same childish sprites can hit you in the gut when the music shifts and the scene demands it. I've played this game three times across three decades, and the emotional beats still land despite — maybe because of — the visual absurdity.
Cloud Strife: The Clown Who Breaks Your Heart
Cloud is one of the strangest protagonists in RPG history. He introduces himself as a cold mercenary — "I'm just here to get paid" — and then the game immediately starts using him as a prop for comedy. He dresses in drag to infiltrate a crime lord's mansion. He enters a squatting competition against gym rats. He jockeys a chocobo race in a carnival that feels ripped from Willy Wonka. For the first half of the game, he's essentially a straight man being dragged through increasingly ridiculous situations while maintaining his stoic act.
But that act is the point. Cloud's vagueness isn't lazy writing — it's misdirection. The mystery of who Cloud actually is, what happened to him before the game started, and why his memories don't quite add up forms the psychological backbone of the entire story. When that mystery unravels in the Northern Crater sequence, the payoff is devastating precisely because you've spent twenty hours watching this guy do silly things and thinking you understood him. You didn't. Nobody did. Not even Cloud.
The supporting cast operates on a simpler level, but Nomura's character designs do the heavy lifting. Tifa with her spiked knuckles and red work boots. Red XIII, a talking lion wearing tribal feathers. Yuffie, the shrimpy self-proclaimed ninja who steals your Materia if you let her. Cid, the chain-smoking pilot with crushed dreams and a vocabulary to match. They're mouthpieces, mostly — vehicles for encouragement and comic relief. But the game earns their emotional moments by letting you spend forty hours fighting alongside them first. When they cheer Cloud on during his darkest moment, it works because you've been there too.
The Materia System — Simple, Brilliant, Addictive
Final Fantasy VII's combat runs on the Active Time Battle system inherited from its predecessors, but the real genius is in the Materia. Colored orbs that slot into your weapons and armor, granting spells, abilities, and passive effects. Fire. Ice. Steal. Cover. Nothing complicated on the surface. But then you discover the linked slots.
Pair an 'All' Materia with 'Restore' and suddenly you're healing the entire party in one cast. Link 'Elemental' with 'Fire' on your weapon and every sword swing does bonus burn damage. Chain 'Final Attack' with 'Phoenix' and your character auto-revives when killed. The combinations scale from practical to broken, and experimenting with them is genuinely fun in a way that most JRPG equipment systems aren't. There's a childlike imagination to it — what if I put THIS with THAT? — that mirrors the game's overall tone perfectly.
The trade-off is that characters become functionally identical. Anyone can be your healer. Anyone can be your black mage. Tifa can cast Ultima just as easily as she can punch a dragon. Some players hate this — it erases class identity. But I think it fits Cloud's story. These people aren't defined by what they do in battle. They're defined by why they're fighting. The Materia system lets you focus on the characters you like without being punished for it. Pick your favorites. Play with their identities. The game doesn't care about min-maxing. Neither should you.
Uematsu's Score — The Real Narrator
If there's one element that holds Final Fantasy VII together despite its visual chaos and tonal whiplash, it's Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack. The man composed over sixty tracks for this game, and not a single one feels phoned in. The overworld theme swells with a kind of adventurous melancholy that I've never heard another composer replicate. The battle theme hits hard enough to keep random encounters from becoming tedious across fifty hours. And then there's "Aerith's Theme," which does more emotional work in four minutes than most games accomplish in their entire runtime.
Uematsu understood something about Final Fantasy VII that the graphics couldn't always communicate: when to be playful and when to be devastating. The Gold Saucer bounces with carnival energy. Costa del Sol is pure vacation vibes. But the Shinra headquarters at night, when you're sneaking through empty corridors and finding blood trails — that score is pure dread. The music tells you how to feel before the visuals or text do, and it's never wrong.
Sephiroth — A Villain Built on a Number
For a game packed with comedy, Final Fantasy VII never once treats Sephiroth as a joke. He shows up in a flashback and the tone shifts immediately — demonic pipe organs screaming through the PlayStation's MIDI sound chip, your party rendered suddenly tiny and weak by comparison. And then the game does something brilliant with its combat screen.
In that flashback, Cloud hits a monster for maybe 64 damage. Sephiroth, standing beside him, swings once and does thousands. That damage number — just a digit on screen — tells you everything about the power gap between your hero and the man who will haunt the rest of your journey. No cutscene exposition needed. No villain monologue. A four-digit number does it. For a game that depends on visual variety to create its world, it's the simplest visual trick that sets the most chilling tone.
After that, Sephiroth exists mostly as a ghost. Blood trails. Impaled monsters. Cryptic messages about a "reunion." He pops in and out, never staying long enough to become familiar, always leaving questions — mostly about Cloud. Their relationship is the dark engine that drives the plot forward, and it works because the game earns every reveal. Nothing is handed to you. You piece it together alongside Cloud, and when the truth finally lands, it hits both of you equally hard.
The Midgar Problem — And Why It Doesn't Matter
Ask any Final Fantasy VII fan and they'll tell you: Midgar is the best part. The opening five hours in that reactor-powered dystopia are so tightly paced, so visually distinct, so narratively propulsive, that the rest of the game can feel loose by comparison. Once you hit the world map, the structure opens up and the pacing stumbles. There are detours that feel mandatory but add nothing. The Temple of the Ancients drags. Fort Condor is a tower defense minigame that nobody asked for.
But here's the thing — Final Fantasy VII is not a tight game, and it's not trying to be. It's a road trip. The whole point is that Cloud and company's quest takes them across an entire planet, through beaches, snow fields, ancient forests, and underwater reactors. Some stops are better than others. Some are downright weird. The game asks you to go with it, to roll with the tonal shifts, to let the pacing breathe. And when it works — when you reach the Gold Saucer for the first time, or Cosmo Canyon's bonfire scene, or the final descent into the Northern Crater — it creates moments that no amount of tight scripting could replicate.
Death, Friendship, and What Final Fantasy VII Is Actually About
Strip away the eco-terrorism plot, the corporate villainy, the genetic experimentation — Final Fantasy VII is a game about loneliness and what saves you from it. Cloud and Sephiroth are two sides of the same coin. Both are products of Shinra's science. Both have fractured identities. Both are searching for something real in a world built on lies. The difference is who surrounds them. Sephiroth finds a monster and calls it mother. Cloud finds friends and lets them pull him back from the edge.
That's why the love triangle works — not because of romance, but because it represents Cloud's capacity to connect despite everything working against it. Aerith sees through his act. Tifa knows the truth behind it. Between them, they anchor a man who is literally falling apart, and the game's most famous scene — that scene — hits as hard as it does because it removes one of those anchors permanently. No Phoenix Down fixes that. The game knows it. You know it. And for the rest of the journey, that absence reshapes everything.
What surrounds these two characters and the world they inhabit is an overwhelming theme of robbed humanity. Brought about by science, greed, and corruption, the emptiness of Final Fantasy VII is remedied by its frequent sparks of humor — but ultimately hints at a looming loneliness, laughing in the face of eventual destruction. While one man loses himself clinging to a monster for acceptance, the other must look to friendship. And though the game's characters really aren't much more than mouthpieces for encouragement, their cheering punctures something primal and warm. Something worth hearing in a game well worth playing.
Does Final Fantasy VII Hold Up in 2026?
Yes. With caveats. The graphics are objectively ugly outside of the pre-rendered backgrounds, which remain gorgeous. The translation is rough. Some side content hasn't aged well — the Honey Bee Inn sequence in particular, though Remake handled that with more grace. The difficulty is almost non-existent if you engage with the Materia system at all.
But the things that made Final Fantasy VII special in 1997 — the tonal bravery, the musical genius, the willingness to be simultaneously goofy and devastating, the Sephiroth reveal, that death — none of those things have diminished. If anything, playing it after experiencing Rebirth's expanded retelling adds new dimensions to scenes you thought you'd memorized. The original is leaner, meaner, and funnier than its remakes. It trusts you more. It explains less. And it still understands something that many modern JRPGs forget: the best stories aren't the ones that tell you how to feel. They're the ones that set the music, paint the backdrop, and let you figure it out yourself.
All images are official screenshots from Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy VII © Square Enix. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Originally published July 2016. Last updated March 2026.