Fixing Final Fantasy 7 and it's Tifa Problem: How I would have done it
Yes I'm touching this Tar-Baby
I know I know, this will be a controversial and highly unpopular article to write or thing to admit but; I don’t much like Final Fantasy 7. I won’t get into all the details why (that’d be several essays), but needless to say it seems to me that this game has several major editorial/literary problems.
The game did not go through its final round of editing apparently, as it faced massive editorial problems, there was squabbling amongst the writers, fights with the pean-counters who interfered quite a bit in the game.
Some staff members felt that FF6 had done a lot right, and that they should just copy the story, others felt gamers to be too smart for this. What resulted was a kind of hodge-podged game and the original writer of the first 6 games quitting mid-game development. So now they had to slap a bandaid on an open wound or so I’ve been told, so that this explains some of the problems the game faces in terms of plotting and characterization.
That said, the music and gameplay was perfect. None can really level any legitimate complaints at this game beyond maybe that of how Materia streamlined too much and the removal of the character classes felt a little disappointing. But the limit-breakers, the use of magic in battle, the visuals and the music are perfect additions to the game-series and are above criticism to my mind.
My complaints though are fairly pointed. All are targeted at a single issue, or better yet three.
Namely it all involves a trio of characters, and they can be listed easily enough; Tifa Lockheart, Sephiroth and Jenova.
The reason these three stick in my craw is how hyped they are and how I’ve never found them particularly interesting. To the contrary, they always bored me, with their motivations seeming either odd or just dull to me.
We’ll start with the problems surrounding Tifa. Early in production she was not supposed to be part of the game, but a suit felt there needed to be in his infinite wisdom, ‘there needs to be fanservice, put some sexy in there’ and so Tifa was born. What’s her personality? Personality, why do we need to sweat that? What’s her character motivation? Eh, we’ll just make it Cloud Strife.
The problem to an extent is that this motivation is already taken in the form of Aerith. Thus, we now have two- no wait Cloud’s motivation is Aerith. So we have three characters focused on romance. You see the problem?
The other trouble is that after the ‘Lifestream’ event we learn that Tifa knew the whole time that Cloud was living a lie, he had not been the SOLDIER guy who returned to their hometown years ago (he was one of the grunts though). She also knew that his memories were all off.
The reason this is a problem is that she lies to him, all so that she might keep him close to her. Much of what went wrong can be placed at her feet, because had she told the truth they could well have diagnosed his issues, he could have had his breakdown earlier when it was more convenient and the heroes could have solved the problems, or placed their lives in the hands of a slightly ‘saner’ leader.
So the problem with Tifa is motivation and behaviour with the latter not adding up as the actions of a good person, or at least not a loyal one.
Number 2 is Sephiroth; his motive is ‘Mommy!’ and that’s all he ever seems to do. Gone are the villains like Exdeath, Chaos and Kefka or Emperor Gesthal, all grand villains with intricate methods and the desire to rule or destroy the world or seize divinity, rather than just pleasing their mother.
Number 3: Jenova. What’s her motivation; to poison and destroy the earth from the inside out, really the Sephiroth we meet in game (not in flashback format) is really Jenova taking on his shape (for the most part). She is in essence a toxin, and this is fascinating but nowhere and at no point does she speak in her own voice. This is frustrating, how could it not be? She is the first full on villainess of the FF series but amounts to little more than a mere ‘footnote’, for a villain screeching ‘MOTHER!’.
Thankfully I have the means to fix all three problems. You can have your ‘sexy’, you can have Jenova in this game without semi-writing her out of the story and you can have Sephiroth.
Okay, to do so we gotta excise Sephiroth’s motivation of wanting to please his supposed mother. Naturally we must recognize that his parents are Vincent Valentine and Lucretia, and that he is ignorant of this fact. And must analyze the home-town flashback part of the game, so he finds out about ‘Jenova’, and concludes he’s her son and vows to do something about this and falls into a dark place mentally.
What does he choose to do? Let’s say he remains the heroic general of the Shinra-Wutai war. How does change things? Well let’s say he doesn’t go up to the abandoned reactor to aid Jenova but to destroy her. He decides that as he loves his people, he shan’t let her live and goes to kill her, but as he goes to do this Jenova plays her own hand against her ‘self-proclaimed’ son.
What of the village massacre? Why not have them all already infected by Jenova, and little more than ‘zombies’ as they had received far more cells than even SOLDIER had, and that what Sephiroth did was to spare them the agonizing transformation of forgetting themselves and becoming monsters.
Back to the Reactor; Zack Fair is deployed, and being injected years prior with her cells same as all those of SOLDIER are, and being possessed by her seeks to do battle. Sephiroth defeats him easily.
Then Jenova deploys her trump-card; Cloud.
Now, in this version of affairs, Sephiroth had come to know Cloud along the way to Nibelheim and had come to regard his semi-guide, grunt with a kind of paternalistic fondness. Why is this a big deal and must be put into the story?
For one simple reason; how could Cloud kill Sephiroth? If he’s as strong as FF7 fans like to make him out to be, how could some rando-grunt win the battle?
My idea is that he couldn’t bring himself to full on fight Cloud, only for Cloud who was possessed to chuck him into the lifestream like in the actual flashback.
There. Now the story has been changed, and now we must get into the next major Sephiroth event in the timeline; namely the Shinra building, the heroes find the door open and it is Tifa who informs Cloud that the door is open. This after she spent a portion of the night seething at Cloud flirting with Aerith.
So she notices the door is open, wakes up Cloud and find the building to have been massacred. This begs the question; why wasn’t Cloud and his buddies also killed? No matter how you look at it, this is a plot-hole.
So to paper over it, we’ll have Sephiroth decide not to kill them, with the former General having awakened from the dead in the hopes of stopping Jenova.
Later when Cloud recounts things, he tells of how Sephiroth went full ‘mommy’ mode and thus misremembers everything. We have here the seeds for the later reveal that Sephiroth has absolutely no intention of harmnig him, and seeks to rescue humanity.
Certainly Sephiroth does kill Aerith. Why? Because he’s in part infected by Jenova cells remember? So that he’s been manipulated by them, and thought it was Tifa that he was killing and not Aerith the last of the Chosen, so that thus he did the opposite of what he truly wanted. Why is this important? Because FFs have a history of convoluted twists.
This is stupid right? Well the reason as said is he’s being manipulated, so that he in the end, ends up drawn into a battle shortly after the killing of Aerith, doing so on the snow-covered mountain where you end up next in the game.
Sephiroth proclaims his desire to save mankind, and protect her from Jenova. This confuses the party who call him a liar, Sephiroth proposes an alliance, they naturally refuse and then he flees after recognizing Tifa only for him to be chased up to the point in the game when Cloud gives over the Black Materia to Sephiroth.
Instead of it being Sephiroth to whom the Black Materia is given, he seeks to intervene and is fought, and beaten.
Crushed at his defeat, as he lies broken and defeated he reveals the truth only for them to tell him he slew Aerith. At which time, horrified as the truth is revealed to him, he perishes and returns to the lifestream broken and defeated.
It is then that as the party leaves to celebrate their victory and to prepare to mourn for Aerith that Tifa grabs the Black Materia, and activates it.
The party is confused, and she reveals herself to be Jenova. That she was always Tifa, and that she infiltrated AVALANCHE in the hopes that she might manipulate them to her purpose, as Shinra wished to use her, but not destroy the planet and Sephiroth sought to check her advance, and thus her goal was to play them all and destroy them all. Keen to access the Lifestream, she hopes to cause enough damage to access it as she has hitherto failed to properly access it for reasons that escape her, so that when the planet will be damaged she’ll draw forth the lifestream and draw it into herself.
Cloud of course vows to stop her, only for her to manipulate him into being her ‘bit-I mean her servant. Phew.
Cloud is mind-controlled for a time but falls into the lifestream like Sephiroth before him, but is rescued from death by Aerith who takes him through his memories instead of Tifa as happens in the game.
Instead of it being Tifa who cares for him, maybe it could be Cait Sith this way he has a role (in the hospital I mean).
Aerith heals his memories and traumas, and Cloud now in control of himself, remembers how Zack and Sephiroth doted on him, realizing how Tifa-Jenova manipulated him vows to destroy Jenova.
Thus we get a villain cast in the mould of sorts of Kefka & Exdeath, except sexy. Heck they could have dressed her now in skimpy outfits to please her fanbase.
Tifa-Jenova could be defeated by Cloud, with it being Sephiroth and Aerith who encourage him, in the hopes that he might win. Cloud beats her in a swordfight (heck give her Sephiroth’s sword) and without Jenova to power it up, the Black Materia fails to hit and dissolves, Shinra which has seen rebellions against it falls apart and the story ends with the Red 13 scene.
So now to get into the reasons why I’ve chosen to ‘fix it’ this way; Tifa as a character is somewhere in the middle in the actual story; she’s supposed to be a ‘lover archetype’ but she’s the loser in the love-triangle so that she is sometimes portrayed as an almost ‘shadow-lover’ archetype.
I’d rather she not be mooning after, and crying about Cloud in following stories without contributing much beyond being a damsel or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with such archetypes, but in such a game it is needless, there’s already Aerith to fulfill such a role and also Yuffie (I think it is, the Ninja-chick).
Besides, why not explore the archetype of the shadow-lover archetype in a different capacity namely that of the black-widow spider and ‘woman scorned’. This would make things far more interesting and fill the game with even more pathos and traditional imagery as you have to an extent Cloud having to choose between good embodied in one female lead and evil in another.
What is more is that this allows for an expansion to other characters’ roles such as Yuffie, why not have her develop a ‘big sister and little sister’ dynamic with Tifa specifically, only to realize that the woman she looked up to never existed. This could lead to some interesting interactions and place her in a position where she faces the same choices.
For Vincent he walks away even more broken about his son, and thus is poised even better for Dirge of Cerberus.
Cid and Barrett…… I don’t know, I mean the latter will feel betrayed then have the auto-American response to just shoot the villain up because of that. Nothing new there.
In terms of Sephiroth it turns him from a villain, into a tragic hero and anti-hero of sorts, one who under other circumstances could have been the hero of the story. He’s turned into the masochist shadow-warrior archetype, even as Cloud starts out that way and journeys towards becoming the lover archetype in his fullness.
In turn, Sephiroth going through an arc could also be interesting, and he could recur in DoC as his spirit seeks to redeem his father from his depression. This could prove interesting and also make it so that Valentine interacts with more than just Lucretia (in terms of characters from his backstory). And it posits him into a similar role of sorts as Aerith, except for Vincent with Hojo put in the villainous role of course for Vincent.
Feel free to disagree, my goal was not to insult or destroy one or another character but rather to plug up plot-holes and to buttress story/character problems. I might ask all readers; how might you have fixed or changed FF7? Do you think it perfect? If so why?
I'm gonna put in a big vote for the FF romances being my favorite part, lol. I actually only recently beat FF7, after playing it back on the original PS1, and I was in tears, just the way I was with FFX, at the ending shot, and not to mention Tifa's beautiful love for Cloud and helping him rearrange himself. That said, I thought Aeris was my favorite, hence the ending really getting to me.
As for Jenova, even this time, I just didn't pay enough attention to explain almost anything about what she was, or did. Haha, that one just went right over me.
Also, finally, this was mind-blowing: I saw a video saying that Cloud had "Pre-Emptive Strike" as a materia in the flashback, so that's how he hit Sephiroth first. And off-guard, I guess.
Wow this seems very serious, fiction writers. This is so much more serious than anything a girl could write, I’m sure 🙄