Nightmare Fuel / Final Fantasy VII

"It's moving... it's still alive?"

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Oh, Final Fantasy VII. The game that introduced many players to Final Fantasy and to JRPGs as a whole, brings a whole truckload of nightmare-inducing imagery and aspects, with many moments feeling as if they came straight out of a Cosmic Horror or Psychological Thriller story.

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• Up to Don Corneo, the game's had serious moments certainly, but mostly in world-building the threat of Shinra and their corporate greed. Even after escaping from the Wall Market, you mostly had the subtle implication that the Don feeds women to his "pet", but a lot of it was played for comedy. Then the Turks cause the Sector 7 plate to fall, wiping out an entire chunk of the city, killing the rest of AVALANCHE if they weren't already dead by the time of the fall, and nearly killing our main characters in the process. You get to see President Shinra casually watching from above, listening to classical music to highlight the sheer amoral apathy he has for the incident, and the actual scene of the collapse from beneath it as people start trying to flee in panic but have nowhere to go before the inevitable demise as they're crushed flat. One of them just stands there staring at it the whole time. The game's entire tone shifts drastically from this moment onwards, and this is before Sephiroth and Jenova are even hinted at seriously.
  • One blink-and-you'll-miss-it detail is seeing the inside of someone's home as they're watching the news. In moments, the newscaster suddenly looks up as if they're panicking before the broadcast cuts out, implying either the collapse knocked out the signal, or the broadcaster just got crushed with a Gory Discretion Shot.
• The headless Jenova scene. It's hard to see the outline of the figure inside the cryo-tank: It almost looks like her decapitated, armless torso, with its gaping belly wound and eye-nipple, is a severely-deformed face. The creepy music and sound effects didn't help one bit. The image itself is startling but adding the music, heartbeat and beeping noises made it truly memorable.
  Barret: Where's its $#&* &@ head?
  • The scene where the party 'escapes' from the Shinra cell block. You fall asleep in your cell, only to wake up later and find the cell door mysteriously open. You look outside and find the guard has been horribly mutilated. You let your friends out of their cells and you see that everyone on that floor is dead. And the pod holding Jenova has been burst open, leaving a huge bloody trail up to the elevator. You follow it up multiple levels, past scores of dead employees while the creepiest music ever plays. Not to mention that there is no victory theme when you win a battle; just that frigging creepy music. And it ends with President Shinra—the supposed villain up until this point—slumped over, dead, a sword in his back.
    • Even the common encounters you fight at this part are rather grotesque (such as Brain Pod◊, Vargid Police◊ and the Zenene◊.) Fighting these critters alongside the ominous Background Music was positively freakish for younger players. There's also something incredibly unsettling about the fact that, despite all the carnage and bloodshed on the upper floors of the HQ, if you head back downstairs and check the lower floors (you can't actually explore them, since your keycards were confiscated; you can only see them from the stairwells), you can see that everyone else is going on about their business as usual. Blissfully unaware that their boss and many of their co-workers were brutally murdered just a few floors up.
  • The way that the whole Nibelheim Reactor scene is built up is nothing short of terrifying. The red lighting, the organic-looking wires straight out of H. R. Giger, that weird doll/death mask thing. We're led to think that this is Jenova, but then Sephiroth uproots it (causing it to shed Tears of Blood), unveiling the actual creature. Oh, and did we mention her/its external biological system, complete with a seven-chambered HEART? Or the fact that the doll and the room are vaguely shaped the same way, with blood-red tubing connecting its torso to the floor's ventricle-shaped layout?
  • Or how about Jenova∙SYNTHESIS, which is most likely Jenova's true form? A Biological Mash Up which looks vaguely like the torso of a human woman with some sort of weird doll mask for a face (not unlike the effigy covering her in the Nibelheim Reactor), two extremely long, tentacle-like arms that each have three long blade-like claws, a weird purple hairdo and other purple and blue growths that almost resemble the petals of a flower... all of which are attached to a large shell-like body, which conceals a giant heart-like organism exposed to the air. Even the music for it is unsettling, sounding like the standard battle theme twisted into something it shouldn't be.
• The specters of the Gi tribe underneath Cosmo Canyon. See here. It's just A TORSO YOU'RE FIGHTING? (The spine just dangles there...) Happily, Gi Natak is the easiest boss in the game if you have an X Potion, like the one you picked up earlier in that very dungeon. Throw one at Gi Natak and it goes down instantly.
  • Also from Cosmo Canyon, Bugenhagen says that the Planet's death is not very far away. Cloud, his blood running cold, asks how he knows this. Bugenhagen answers matter-of-factly, "I hear the cries of the Planet," and we are treated to a creepy, siren like sound—the actual cries of pain from the Planet. See the scene here, starting at 1:36.
• Say hello to Helletic Hojo.◊ Hojo's third form crosses the Bishōnen Line, so it's not as scary, but his second form wouldn't look out of place in Resident Evil.
  • The same fight has him use the JENOVA battle theme, just to symbolize that he's utterly lost his marbles and is little better now than the world-destroying alien abomination, never mind injecting himself with the cells of said being.
• After traveling with Vincent to the mountain cave where Lucrecia is hiding to hear her out, come back and visit it again.^note If you meet the requirements to unlock Vincent's Limit Break manual and Infinity +1 Sword (Death Penalty), you'll find them here. Nothing happens, not even Background Music; it's one of the few places in the game to have total silence. On top of that, the area is labeled as "???".
• The Gelnika location. All of the "Unknown" monsters are mini-cosmic horrors, one of which vaguely resembles a half-decayed dog head which attacks you with its giant, lolling TONGUE. Another monster which looks like a mass of internal organs attacks you with "Creepy Touch" which gives you "Sadness." The setting is a creepy, grimy, battered plane sunken underwater, with water constantly dripping in the background and areas where murky water is actually pooling up in the lower levels. The whole place could break open and flood at any moment, and its overall appearance is that of a derelict alien ship crash. Add in the enemies here and it comes off like something out of the Alien franchise. The only thing which eases the anxiety is the BGM.
  • This is only made worse if, when you exit the Gelnika into your submarine to go back to the surface, the Emerald Weapon (which swims about in random locations under the ocean) happens to be right there, prompting an immediate surfacing to escape.
• The Sephiroth Clones stand out for being dark, formless blobs who have no distinguishing features whatsoever in a game full of bright polygonal characters, mumbling about Sephiroth and the Reunion. Over the course of Disc 1, the Clones degrade until, near the end of the disc, several of them suddenly keel over and die for positively no reason. And to make matters worse, they block your path, forcing you to try and interact with them, then convulse and then suddenly disappear. Just before this, you also see one of them commit suicide, jumping straight off a sheer cliff before you can reach them.
• Nibelheim. There's something unsettling about the place to begin with, mainly due to the haunting "Anxious Heart" BGM, but then you start talking to the townsfolk, and they all act like Cloud and Tifa are mistaken when they bring up the events of five years ago. It's unsaid, but heavily implied that Shinra covered up Sephiroth's actions by rebuilding and repopulating the town. On top of that, the eeriness is increased upon your first visit, as the town is full of the Sephiroth clones.
  • Even worse, if you go into the house on the lower right where you met two children who repeated each other's words in the flashback, there are two clones, one of whom is noticeably smaller than the other models. When you talk to them, they both simply say "Reunion"...as if they were repeating each other's words. Yep, the game is strongly implying that those kids survived the fire but got turned into clones. And knowing what happens to the clones later on, it just gets worse for those kids-turned-clones.
  • Shinra Mansion, which over looks the village. Not only is the building rather creepy when first visited during Cloud's story, but by the present day, it's filled with all sorts of monsters that are only separated from Nibelheim by the walls of both the grounds and the mansion itself. Even worse is the laboratory located in the basement, where Zack and Cloud are locked up and experimented on for five years.
    • The freaking Yin-Yang, which you fight in the room where Vincent is interred. Not only does it look like a zombie, but anytime it uses an attack, you have to sit there for a minute and watch it twitch in a disturbing fashion. A number of the other Shinra Mansion monsters were also freaky. In the PC version, when you go into battle, the BGM does not change. Now imagine battling Yin-Yang again. At least they were decent enough to include the victory theme after that.
• The One-Winged Angel himself... SEPHIROTH. Every time his theme song played, something horrible happened, like the deaths of civilians, Cloud having one of his trademark breakdowns, Aerith's death, and the infamous smile as he burned Nibelheim to the ground.
  • The Midgar Zolom. While en route to Junon, you have to cross a marsh which is home to a gigantic 100-foot snake which will slaughter your party if you try to cross it on-foot. No biggie, just hop on a chocobo and run across. But on the opposite side of the marsh, you get a cutscene of a Midgar Zolom VIOLENTLY IMPALED◊ on a massive dead tree, with blood streaming down the trunk. The sheer brutality of this is startling. It gets better when you figure out who did it. The giant snake which devours your party like popcorn if you try to fight it? Jenova/Sephiroth spiked it on a tree without breathing hard. This is the sort of adversary you're dealing with.
  • When Sephiroth and Cloud (really Zack) examine the reactor to find out what's wrong with it. "Cloud" comes upon Sephiroth contemplating one of the cryo-pods, and it's clear Sephiroth is starting to get a hint as to the truth about himself (and cracking over it). He gestures to "Cloud" to look inside...only to receive a horrifying image of a former SOLDIER who has been exposed to much higher levels of Mako energy than normal. "Cloud" naively sets Sephiroth on his path when, after Sephiroth talks about the different results from different exposures to Mako, Cloud wonders how Sephiroth is different from these mutated SOLDIERs...just as one of the pods breaks open and spills its (presumably) dying contents out on the floor.
  • The Temple of Ancients, just before he attacks Tseng. You're having some sort of vision of the past, seeing the Turks search the temple, and then Sephiroth shows up, and he looks straight at you. You're not sure if he's just able to see Cloud, or if he can actually see you playing the game. Eek.
  • The context of Safer Sephiroth's opening is a chill all its own. The party confronts Sephiroth at the Northern Crater, and get the Eldritch Abomination palooza of JENOVA Complete and Bizarro Sephiroth giving them hell. After Bizarro's fall, the bombastic boss battle music then fades out as the screen has a prolonged case of nothing as you hear the cries of the Planet again. Then One-Winged Angel starts to play, the battle comes into focus with his final form descending from above in Final Boss, New Dimension scenario, and unlike anything else in the game, lyrics kick into the song effectively boasting about the terror and power of Sephiroth himself. On a blind playthrough, this is going from pretty normal boss fights for this game into something far, far beyond what any player may be expecting.
  • Safer Sephiroth's Limit Break, "Super Nova"—or rather, the expanded Super Nova of the International version. The battlefield shatters away to reveal the depths of outer space, where an asteroid Sephiroth has summoned hurtles towards the Milky Way. It plows through Pluto and Saturn's rings like they're nothing, tears a gaping, destabilizing hole in Jupiter's atmosphere, and sets off the actual Super Nova by impacting the Sun. This expanding sphere of annihilation consumes Mercury and Venus before finally reaching Earth; the nova passes harmlessly by Sephiroth, while there's nothing the party can do but brace themselves. It's very likely that everything up until that last moment is an illusion, but damn.
• The BGM in the very first dungeon, "Mako Reactor." It was so creepy, the Lighter and Softer FF title Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales used it for The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • The Planar Shockwave in the beginning of the game... if you don't make it out of the reactor in time.
• Cloud's random Sephiroth/Jenova-induced freakouts are always unsettling. The high-pitched ring which accompanies each freakout deserves special mention.
  • "Who Am I?" An unsettling tune which plays more than once throughout the venture, and it's usually when Cloud is going bananas. It haunts many a player to this day. It's also a Dark Reprise of the Main Theme.
  • If you enter a certain room in the Honeybee Inn, Cloud encounters... well... himself? What's going on in this scene isn't exactly clear, but the general idea is that Cloud is just fragments of a personality, a Mask of Sanity — which contrasts sharply with the no-nonsense commando you've known up to that point. The brief interaction 'they' have, as well as the music playing in that room, is very, very creepy.
  • The scene with Cloud and Aerith after Cait Sith 'sacrifices' himself at the Temple of the Ancients: After the party obtains the Black Materia, Sephiroth appears, causes Cloud to have a major identity crisis, then manipulates him into handing over the Materia. After Sephiroth leaves, Cloud starts to panic over what he's just done. All the while, Aerith is knelt down next to him, consoling him and telling him that it wasn't his fault. Cloud proceeds to pummel the living crap out of her. He stops only when the third member of the party knocks him out cold.
• The second world map theme after Meteor is summoned. Very discordant and creepy, full of hopelessness. Perfectly encapsulates the feeling of the world. You get no relief from it on the world map until Cloud rejoins the party and you are in the Highwind. Worse still, it's the theme of the Northern Crater when you first reach the summit of Gaea's Cliff. It's almost a symbol of the fact that whatever evil was contained at the Crater, namely the real Sephiroth, has been fully unleashed upon the world.
• The hidden Zack flashback scene after you've cleared Cloud's memories up at Mideel. Seeing what seems to be a goofy, optimistic Nice Guy and someone who saved Cloud's life as a friend get shot and then horribly gunned down on the ground like a dog is probably one of the most violent moments in the entire game. And somehow this is what triggers Cloud's mind starting to overcome his Mako poisoning.. by lifting Zack's Buster Sword and raising his arms to the sky in anguish. All without any music, just to highlight the pointlessness of the tragedy. It's especially jarring if you forgot or didn't know this was how Zack was originally killed off, compared to the equally tragic and desperate way he went out in Crisis Core.
• Emerald Weapon is pretty terrifying by itself. After you get the submarine, you are allowed to explore the bottom of the sea, while navigating, you see a green creature swimming around, which is not too scary due to the super-deformed graphics. However, if you touch it, you are then attacked by a huge Mechanical Abomination in a battlefield composed of an unsettling blue void which, being a Super Boss and all, proceeds to crush your party like bugs (quite literally, as it is one of its attacks). The fact that Emerald looks way more otherworldly than the other Weapons, with a less humanoid design and the fact that you don´t know what the hell is it and what is doing there (you can only see it in a blink and miss cutscene when the Weapons are released) only adds more fuel to the creepiness.

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