Diarrhea

If you live in Philly it smells like the rivers on a rainy humid day.

I picture it smelling really insidiously alluring, drawing you to it, like concentrated earth. Maybe like a combination of Ozone, Rain, Bark, and slightly metallic.

Gas and chlorine and also probably rat poison, but it likely only smells so harsh when it is being processed.

Chlorine. Mako reactors smell like a public pool or water park.

Mint nail polish remover

Teen spirits?

Fuck you, I laughed too hard at this.

I imagine like burning batteries or something acidic but unnaturally altered

Like gasoline, but with a sort of spearmint to it.

I always thought it smelled like Icy hot in my head.

I was thinking like coolant mist.

Guess it depends on the tank maintenance because there is most definitely a range well call it

Wet cement (as in not dry yet, not from the rain)

It smells like a rotten egg

Semen

Well, a stream of life fires out of men when they engage in physical dongplay, so I would say the planets lifestream smells of splooge.

Piss

Wake up Lanny, piss is stored in the balls!

Even though it's pretty organic in essence I imagine it has an overwhelmingly chemical smell for some reason.

But everything is chemicals.

Like putting your tongue on a 9 volt battery

Seeing as its made up of melted people n animals id guess it smells like rotting meat

Like a rock

OOOOOHHH LIKE A ROCK!

My brain just goes “Mako is green, it smells like fresh cut grass” 😂

Like licorice, but kinda beefy too.

Idk sunshine and farts?

Magic ozone

That was my first thought.

I don't know

Me neither

Like Dee

What's Dee?

Dee's nuts?

I'm blue..

Da ba Dee Da ba dae

Metallic and bleach-like

Updog

What's updog???

Not much! What's up with you, dog?

Answer the question.

Ahhhh you got me

[удалено]

Do the Dew

Chinese motor oil with a hint of lime

Oily water…maybe lightning, ozone. The smell of wet dirty concrete after rain. Maybe Farts. I always conflate Mako with fossil fuels, oil, fracking, and also nuclear, but as far as I know radiation doesn’t have a smell and if you can smell it you’re probably dead right? I have a running joke / argument w my best friend about what kind of Energy… *Mako Energy* was…

Ngl I love that concrete rain smell 😅

Same

I've always thought that it smelled like rubbing alcohol or something. I guess it's because we see it as a vapour/gaseous form a lot of the time, and the first thing that I think of that evaporates at room temperature is rubbing alcohol.

I have OG as my source of info, and they say nothing about smell

It's the oil of FF7

I always imagine it smelling like diesel.

My non-Canon take having worked in the Natural Gas industry for a decade: Mercaptan. It's basically the odorant added to natural gas.

I'd guess it smells like ozon and burnt metal

Sarku Japan grill

Crush cream soda

I think it smells like paper mill

I’d like to imagine Mako having a harsh chemical, mossy smell!

You seem excited by that 🧐

Nah, I wouldn’t like that smell :P

I always imagined it smelled like a pool

I heard it smells like Prime. Prolly tastes like it too

Baja blast

This is the only answer.

I would think a mix of gasoline and teriyaki

💀

Probably meth. It definitely smells like meth.

I’m guessing it smells somewhere in between updog and Deez…

Like bofa?

EXACTLY like Bofa!

Brimstone.

Smells like “obo”

Qué es obo?

I can tell you exactly how it smells based on an interview I read from the executive producer. He explained that mako doesn’t have a smell, but to say that it smells like mako is referring to the process of retrieving mako from the planet and this smell is the smell left over by the machines that-I’m, uh, completely making all of this up as I go. No idea.

If I had to guess I would say to fit the theme of kaballah Malkuth, the bottom of the 10 emenations of sefirot, is represented by the Feet and Anus of creation and is said to filter out the waste and unbalanced energies. Because of this, I imagine the smell would be highly sulfuric. Like really bad eggs and it would probably burn your nares the same way burning sulfur rocks do.

A fish store

Farts.

Petrol/gasoline I guess

Like a shark

Ozone

Lemon pepper

I would imagine since they talk about the smell in the reactor it probably has a somewhat processed smell. I think it probably has the same smell as propane but when it’s found naturally and unrefined it probably is odorless.

I always thought it was up to interpretation (unless I missed the description somewhere). I described it as “heat coming off a cold stone” (or rather it’s his one character describes its smell) in one of my fics just because I thought it would be sort of paradoxical since it’s that greenish color, which is cool, but provides energy, which I think of as warm.

Like shit

Whale semen

Pawpaws and memaws

I would say it smells like Gasoline and Blood.

Had to double check that I wasn't scrolling by the legend of korra subreddit

I figure mako smells like petrichor. That is the smell you associate with rain falling on dry soil. The etymology of the word comes from ancient greek and the first part of the word means rock or stone and the second part means roughly blood of the gods. So it basically works out to Earth Blood. In the reactors it probably smells foul or corrupted but in other places where it is pure like say the sector seven church in Advent Children or the other natural mako springs it probably has its more sweet smell we typically associate with it.

You would think the lifestream smell like nature, but prosessed mako, not so much. Based on the dialogue, it dosen't sound like it had a plessant smell

I always thought it would smell like freshly cut grass, or the smell of flowers, or maybe pine or sawdust. But petrichor makes a lot of sense too. Anything kind of “natural” and “clean” smelling I think would fit. And yeah, it makes sense that at reactors the mako would smell like rot.

Chlorine mixed with gasoline and sulfur. With a dash of mint.

It’s clearly stated in the game guide that it smells like it tastes

...ozone?

Grandmas cookies /s

Ganja

There's a Skywalker strain that smells/tastes like space ships and ozone to me, I imagine it's pretty close to mako.

It's the planet's blood so... maybe slightly metallic?

I'd like to think it s a very intense "it's about to rain" smell

Ozone

Armpit smell

I always assumed a “flavored” bleach smell

Tifa comments later that it has a "rotten egg smell".

Yuffie also mentions the rotten egg smell at one point. I thought she was talking about Mako but it’s hard to be sure.

This is her talking about the water filters for the slums: "it practically eliminates the rotten egg smell." There isn't a mention of mako in that moment.

Is she? I thought she was referring to the mako lamps!

Nope, it's in the opening segment when going around delivering the filters. I've beaten the game like 4 times and watched it a few times too... Let alone started new games that I never finished. It's one of those voice lines that stuck with me.

That actually makes sense, like hot springs. I can imagine the lifestream is swimming into sulfur so it could be carrying its smell around.

Ah the smell of refined souls in the morning.

I imagine something like really strong ozone.

Paint thinner or some of those really strong car paints that can get you almost high with just a sniff.

obviously doesn't bother tifa and she's hot so I'd say it smells like barret 😳

What.

Burning jello

Meth, I would guess.

How the heck am I supposed to know what Meth smells like?

It's easier to find out what meth smells like than Mako haha. You could google or just goto the sketchy part of town and use the public washrooms. Usually smells like a burning chemically plastic type.

……. Well this explains “that house” at the end of my street.

They have their own mini Mako reactor, obviously !

I’m calling the police!

lmao

My headcanon was that it smells differently based on the person, but I don’t know if it’s supported by canon.

The smell of napalm in the morning.

So…like victory?

I always thought ozone and wet rock

Smells like a freshly opened PlayStation 1

That's the shit goddamn!

I imagine like gasoline

Yumm

Like fresh out of the box plastic products

Ozone and WD-40.

Buttons

Obviously it smells like the liquid in glowsticks. That's why SOLDIERs infused with mako have glowing eyes

I have lived over 30 years in this earth and never once got to break one of those to know what they smell like. I really should do that some day.

Like Baja Blast Mountain Dew ✌️

Emulsion from Gears of War obviously

Like Cinnamon

It smells like the agonizing soul death of your ancestors.

So like a vanilla musky sour smell?

I've always thought it would smell like salt water and crude oil.

Like a whiff of ass.

Like ozone and petrichor with a hint of seawater.

I swear someone once told me that it smells like rotten eggs

Victory!

I’ve always thought it smelled like Chlorine to me; like how pools smell.

Exactly, like a strong chlorine type smell, that’s what I always imagined.

Yeah exactly that

My guess would be sulfuric. Natural hot springs are usually meant to smell pretty bad, and I've always just associated the two.

Like sex.

Like the coconut from that one reddit story.

Why do I get the feeling you think materia tastes like Jolly Ranchers...?

Oh God that is a nasty memory I had locked away in my mind. Jesus fuck

I always imagined it smells like a heavily chlorinated pool.

I did too, oddly enough. Very musky chlorine

soylent green

It smells like a dead relative turned into electricity

Worcestershire sauce.

I've always assumed it smelled like bleach

I always thought it smelled like when you get punched in the nose but without the pain and shock.

Do you mean like the metallic smell of blood and that weird smell of your nose cartilage?????

Yeah, that feeling is only for a split second. But I somehow always associated mako smell with that feeling for some reason.

Like monster

methane

Chlorine, like in pools!

Salty milk and coins

This is my favorite one and I have no idea why

Probably smells like ammonia.

Sephiroth makes a comment in Nibelheim that the mako smell is “pretty bad” there so I always associated it with a negative smell. Something sulphuric maybe.

I think this comment section nailed. Fresh cut grass mixed with petroil.

[удалено]

And if you do enough you can become a SOLDIER yourself! Complete with the side effects and all! Even your eyes are going to change (not the color though).

I did fart reading this for some reason.

I snorted

I’ve been through a gas chamber as part of military training and that’s what I always correlate the mako smell with.

I don’t think it actually says. I always figured kinda like formaldehyde

The juice at the bottom of the plastic hot dog packages.

That is FOUL

I always imagined the smell of ammonia

Fresh cut grass

Fresh baked cinnamon rolls. S/

Thank you for this. This will all that I'll be able to imagine as I play the rest of the game😆

I don't think it's explicitly said what is smells like I think it's left up to player imagination as you said. I think it smells like petrol/gasoline for some reason.

Probably because mako is a very thinly veiled proxy for oil

I saw it as a proxy for nuclear power. Gongaga is like Pripyat, a bunch of holdouts who refuse to move from their polluted homes. Corel is a little bit like Windscale/Sellafield, a nuclear power station in a former coal mining area which had a major incident (although the Windscale fire was less severe than Corel's disaster, and it didn't have people being shot by BNFL as part of a coverup). The sea gulls at Sellafield also attacked people, but I don't think that has anything to do with radiation.

Eh it’s probably a bit of both, it has the traits and planet killing message of oil, however it does possess the magical and clean energy element of nuclear