Sephiroth is Alive?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 04:28-06:00

"Where's its fucking head? The whole thing's stupid."
"I'll talk as much as you want later, miss."
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
"Who you callin' Mr. Barret? That don't sound right!"

FF7's overworld theme is the best in the series. Felt the need to get that out of the way.

One of things that I think is pretty brilliant about the way the first act of FF7 is set up is the misdirection that's put into it. If you're someone who played the NES/SNES games and figured that eventually, in spite of the fancy new futuristic setting, FF7 would eventually start conforming to previous conventions, then maybe eventually getting out of Midgar and roaming around the overworld wasn't that much of a surprise. Its easy to imagine, though, someone going into the game completely blind finding it completely plausible that the game takes place entirely within the city of Midgar. The city would certainly be big enough. Similarly, even though every once in a while you get vague mentions of some guy named Sephiroth, the beginning of the game seemingly makes it perfectly clear that the object of the game is to thwart the schemes of the Shinra corporation within their own reactors and their own headquarters, and that the game's main antagonist is President Shinra and his gawdy red suit. All of this gets turned on its head, when, surprise, President Shinra gets killed, not by anyone in your party, but by Sephiroth. Rufus, the President's son, and the rest of Shinra certainly hang around for the rest of the game, but the main focus of the story shifts tremendously after you get out of Midgar. In some ways, Final Fantasy VII is a pretty simplistic "good saves the world from evil" story, but on another level, its pretty unique in the way it keeps the player guessing in where its going.

Right now I'm saved on the world map right outside of Kalm. Going to save the big long exposition setting up all of Sephiroth's backstory until next time. I ran into a little bit of an issue fighting whatever the hell the boss is that chases you down after the motorcycle pursuit minigame. Not thinking, I had an Elemental-Poison materia combination on Cloud's weapon (with no other attack magic), thus making him unable to hit the (non-living) tank type of thing. So he was completely useless for the entire battle. Still managed to win though. Crisis averted. Elemental-Poision isn't even that good of a combination, I realize now. I was confusing Elemental with Added Effect, which you get much later in the game. With Elemental, the enemy has to have a vulnerability to the Poison element in order for it to do anything, something that I don't believe applies to a lot of enemies in the game. With Added Effect, on the other hand, anything that isn't specifically immune to the Poison status effect (where their HP drains every turn) has a chance to have Poison inflicted on it every hit.

Oh yeah, and this section of the game has my absolute favorite line from Barrett. Cloud realizes that Jenova is being stored in the Shinra building, which pretty much induces a seizure in him. We the player can only imagine what the hell is going on with this grotesque creature and what Cloud's connection is to it. Meanwhile, Barrett just looks in and says, "Where's its @#&@# head? The whole thing's stupid!"