Diese Interpretation wurde vermutlich um 1997 von John Brittenham verfasst. Die ursprüngliche Quelle ist ungewiss, die älteste bekannte Quelle ist hier zu finden.
We are floating through space, our vision constantly shifting examining the stars around us. We hear screaming coming, we look around but we cannot find where the screaming is coming from. What is happening? Suddenly everything goes black. The scene changes. A beautiful girl is facing us, she stands up and begins to walk. We realize that she is in an alleyway. She emerges from the alley and we begin to rise, away from her, revealing a clear shot of the monstrously large city that this girl lives in.
Although this girl doesn’t realize it yet. these screams are the cries of her home world, which is in it’s death throws and she is the only person alive that can stop these screams and save this world. Her name is Aeris (heiress) and she is the last surviving member of an all but extinct race that holds the key to defeating an powerful nemesis which craves nothing less than the very destruction of the planet on which she lives.
Thus, begins Final Fantasy VII, a remarkable RPG that is masterful in all respects of good story telling and manages to move us, even while it confuses us to the point of sheer frustration.
If most of us were asked to describe the story of FFVII in one paragraph (describing it in one sentence would be a run on sentence no matter how hard we tried), we would probably say something like:
„Final Fantasy VII is the story of Cloud, Aeris, and their friends who try and save the world from Sephiroth and the Shinra, who are destroying the Earth. Shinra is doing it by draining out the Earths Lifestream, the lifeblood of the planet which is the energy that all living souls are made of, through its large Mako Reactors. Sephiroth is doing it by summoning a giant meteor that is going to destroy everything, allowing him to converge with this energy and claim if for his own to become a ‚God.‘ Ultimately, the 9 heroes of the game defeat Sephiroth and all the members of Shinra (although Aeris loses her life in the process) and unleash Holy, the ultimate white magic, which is the only thing that can destroy the meteor. It succeeds in doing so but also sucks the humans, who have been doing all this damage, back into the Lifestream, realizing that their existence was a terrible error. This leaves only Nanaki, the teams sentient wolf-like friend, to live out his life propogating his species on the planet and remembering not to repeat past mistakes.“
On the surface, this is a good interpretation of the game. All of this stuff is shown to us throughout the games development. But as Alazlam Durai says in Final Fantasy Tactics: „We also know that what we see with our eyes alone isn’t necessarily the truth…Won’t you join me on a journey for the ‚truth‘?“
In Final Fantasy VII we have an apparent story, that seems to fill all the gaps and create a rather tragic ending for our heroes. But as Bugenhagen says in his first meeting with Cloud, „Well, that is a bad example. Looking up too much makes you lose perspective. When it’s time for this planet to die, you’ll understand that you know absolutely nothing.“ Indeed, Final Fantasy VII also has another story, one that is strewn throughout the game in fragments and arranged in scattered order. A story in which the most crucial revelations come in the places where we are least likely to notice them. It is this story that we will explore in this segment of this FAQ. I will cite the actual text of the game whenever making any sort of point about the story.