Not that there's any agreement on whether popular opinion of the game skews towards love or hate -- depending on whom you ask, it's either unjustly criticized or sickeningly overrated. The latter argument tends to dominate the medium's intelligentsia, while those who stand by the game are typecast as base mouth-breathers and mawkish fanboys too deluded with adolescent power fantasies to know better. Sadly, not much has attested to the contrary, because very few people know how to defend the game. Those who attempt to justify the FMV, or even the plot, just fall into the same trap as those who deride them: contrary to appearances (and apparently unknown even to the architects of the recursive, masturbatory mess known as "Compilation of Final Fantasy VII"), the game is not about any of those things.
The plot, for all it's scrutinized, is unimportant as it bears the technical definition of the word: the practical sequence of events. That Cloud and company sabotage a reactor or two, find out Sephiroth is alive, chase his apparition around for a disc, accidentally hand him a world-ending bauble of Armageddon, chase Shinra around for another disc, watch a cannon fire at the entrance to the last dungeon, and finally journey to the center of the earth is largely unremarkable -- as are the smaller acts in between the main points, however closely you wish to look. This being an RPG, a genre whose appeal is particularly dependent on its stories, that might sound like a death sentence. But there's more to narrative than plot alone, and that's why I can still say FFVII tells an original, poignant story.
The game is set in a world which, from the very beginning, is in the stranglehold of a single malevolent entity. But it's not a nondescript evil king or emperor, nor is it even a vengeful elf or Machiavellian politico. In fact, it's a company -- Shin-Ra Electric Power -- implicitly supported by its customers, who are afforded convenience, mobility, and an overall greater quality of life by its goods and services. But its global status represents the moral of capitalism brought to its ultimate, terrifying destination: every patron of something as standard as electricity is its customer, if not its employee. Having risen to prominence as a weapons manufacturer during the last war, it now supersedes government and commands its own private army. It's a completely self-sustaining behemoth, and even having achieved a majority market share of the world, the executives running it hunger for expansion.
The beginning of the game takes place in Midgar, an immense metropolis and Shinra's center of power -- but specifically Midgar's bottom half, the remnants of eight communities that existed before Shinra took over and erected a city-wide superstructure based on a circular plate. The rich moved onto the upper side, living luxuriously above the earth, while the lower level became a ghetto for the poor. This bleak setting is emblematic of Shinra's iniquity beyond mere business, and appropriately, it's also the most detailed location in the game. The urban decay is vivid, replete with crime, pollution, and shady, disagreeable characters; Barret's radical insurgent cell comprises Shinra's most obvious opposition, but their sense of social unrest extends throughout the ordinary citizenry. The remaining inhabitants of the slums are not only those who were too poor to move, but also people too prideful to abandon their homes. Yet Shinra would rob them even of that identity, phasing the names of the old towns out of use in favor of numbered "Sectors." Sequestered by high walls, scrap metal, and the plate itself, people can't even tell night from day, and it's as intuitive as it is documented that going long periods in darkness is a likely path towards depression. Then there's Aerith, who holds the ability to speak with the spirits of the deceased. But she can barely hear them over the ambient noise of the city, and besides the fact that Shinra wants to place her in a cage for study, she yearns to escape to the outside world so she can finally converse with her ancestors -- and even commune with the planet itself.
As the game's first chapter closes, Shinra inducts a new president, who promises to coerce the population more directly using a shroud of fear rather than finance. Unfortunately, no sooner does this happen than that pesky plot starts to pick up, and the corporate warlords are steadily phased out of the main conflict in favor of an overpowered Adonis with a sword. But while the plot has little merit unto itself, it serves a vital utility in providing a vehicle to convey the game's themes. And it does this by pulling you along through the lands beyond Midgar.
At first, the locales seem to regress to RPG tropes: a nondescript village, a Chocobo depot, and a cave. But those that follow possess a common quality that consistently ties back to the game's other, increasingly passive narrative: the inescapable influence of Shinra. Fort Condor is a mountain outpost built in earthen tunnels beneath one of the company's Mako reactors, where a powerful gob of magic rock has congealed in a miracle of nature, like diamonds from coal. Of course, Shinra wants to seize it, as well as drive the locals and nesting condors out of their homes while they're at it, spurring skirmishes with the native resistance that are ongoing throughout the game. Junon, like Midgar, has been segregated into two layers -- the top level a vain military base where goose-stepping zealots march the streets, and the bottom a darkened, polluted vestige of a once-prosperous fishing community. North Corel, likewise, is home to the survivors of a coal-mining town that Shinra burned to the ground to monopolize the region's fuel economy. The town's ruins now serve as a junkyard and prison at the foot of the Gold Saucer, an extravagant, towering theme park whose only purpose is to amuse the privileged. Nibelheim nurtures its facade as an innocent mountain settlement, hiding the fact that Shinra uses its remote location to host horrific human experiments. Wutai and Rocket Town are both burdened by disgrace: one is a nation of proud tradition, reduced to an exotic tourist trap since losing the war to Shinra's weaponry; the other literally lives in the shadow of a failed space launch, languishing in remorse since Shinra has all but abandoned the program. Cosmo Canyon is one of the few places reserved from Shinra's presence, but here is revealed the true function of the power source their reactors sap and refine, and Barret's environmentalist ranting from the early game fully crystallizes: by drawing from the continuum of souls flowing through the planet, Shinra will inevitably exhaust that which gives all things life, reducing the planet to a brittle, desolate rock.
If you aren't distracted by whether Sephiroth is the son of a space witch or Cloud might be his clone or whatever, it's plain to see that a business is still the greatest threat the world faces. While Meteor might destroy it in seven days, Shinra is destroying it, right this second, from a universal scale down to individual lives. Thoroughly.
This is the real story FFVII has to tell, and it's not reliant on text boxes, but reflected in the world design itself. More than a pattern of inns and dungeons, nearly every area contributes to central themes of corporate exploitation, jingoism, social segregation, paranoia, ecologism, Shinto-derived animism, human rights, genocide, and estrangement from one's own surroundings. True, the treatment of these subjects might not be as deep as in the greatest literature, but how many other games, even more than ten years later, even attempt to address themes external to the melodrama of their principal cast -- applicable beyond the mechanical process of stripping bare the villain's machinations, rescuing that girl, and celebrating the all-purpose "power of humanity"? There are certainly some (Suikoden poses moral quandaries viewed from shifting perspectives, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask undertakes the conflicted attitudes of a populace as the end of their world approaches), but they're few and far between. FFVII might not have matured the medium in effect, but hell if it didn't try.
