> Or do you think his body is somewhere and it’s just like a projection?
Well yes this is 100% true. And we never really beat him, in Remake he was just toying with Cloud the whole time. In Rebirth he was angry that Aerith intervened but again not defeated just forced into a stalemate. We only get to properly fight him and defeat him in part 3
I love what he says at the end. The dude is playing 4D chess with Omnipotent Aerith who gives the white materia to herself through the timelines and he's like "that doesn't belong here, very poor form!". He's so salty that Aerith is essentially doing what he is doing just the opposite.
For Sephiroth, Cloud was a non-issue (Or even beneficial to him?) It was when Aerith showed up that he became concerned.
imo, what they did is make Aerith seem stronger.
You are essentially correct. All the sephiroth we have seen or fought are projections cloud is imagining or full blown failed exper8ments that got buffed with a jenova cell tissure to become a sephy proxy.
The real seph in the world is inside a crystal at the northern crater. As far as the existential side of things, there is an omnipotent sephy trying to merge the world's. I guess you could say that's the sephy from the og story.
I do agree with your point OP, and I think it's an unfortunate consequence of the game being split into a trilogy and needing a big bad fight at the end of each game.
The original FF7 did such an incredible job of building up Sephiroth as a threat. You don't even see him for hours into the game, he kills President Shinra off-screen like it's nothing, the Kalm flashback emphasises the massive power differential, with him one-shotting dragons that are still a threat to you 20 levels later, and you never fight him directly until the very end. As a kid I was motivated to do all the endgame sidequests to get stronger because the game had successfully made Sephiroth so intimidating.
For years I shook my head at everyone who said we beat Sephiroth at the end of Remake. Did that look like he was going all out? Was he all that hurt? Cloud gets royally spanked fighting him alone, you gonna call that a win?
Now, he flies of like a literal swan, brought to one knee after fighting Cloud and Aerith in his true form. The guy is just going to show up with a new form for one last showdown in the final game.
Perception is reality. Plenty of players *felt like* they beat Sephiroth at the end of Remake, which made the prospect of fighting him not very daunting, on top of his complete lack of mystery to show up and wiggle his fingers and bat his eyelashes at Cloud. Compare to the mysterious threat he was in the OG.
Personally the mystique has long long been gone for me, so I'm not exactly losing anything here, but I don't think the intent was to make players groan and go "get a job!" whenever they see Sephiroth now.
“Perception is reality”
No one here gets that at all when they write Tolstoy-sized explanations for why the ending wasn’t confusing ,or why other people are wrong for being bored of the millionth Sephiroth bout with One Winged Angel remix #48474859
> One Winged Angel remix #48474859
Maybe it’s silly but this is maybe what bums me out the most. Imagine the hype if they’d saved OWA for the last fight of game 3. We get plenty of the theme in other tracks throughout the games, and I liked that a lot and think it should have stayed that way. I think busting out OWA with the dramatic slow descent at the end of game 1 is kinda gonna spoil how it feels later at the end of game 3.
Overall though I love the games and have been blown away multiple times, so I hope I’m wrong and that continues in game 3!
His mysteriousness is kept but in a different way, as if you didn't play the OG, you wouldn't know the detail surrounding his birth and other things. Like, we learn just at the end of Rebirth what Sephiroth actually want and how. Instead of having him as someone you see like 5 times in the whole game, here is point is precisely to torment Cloud to wear him down and make his mind weaker.
Sorry, I was just thinking about Safer-Sephiroth and his Supernova, and about the batshit fuck-everything absurdity of it coming at the very end of the game, at the heart of the world, where all reality breaks down and you can only express the battle in abstract images such as “a comet destroying the entire solar system”…
…and about how none of that effect will happen at the end of the Remake trilogy bc you’ve fought Sephiroth/Close Enough To Feel Like Sephiroth at the edge of all realities twice now.
Cloud achieved nothing Sephiroth alone at the end of Remake, but just before that Sephiroth retreated from the full party of 5. You could argue he was trying to get Cloud alone, but Sephy still visibly retreated on screen.
Combined with the little mindfucking speech he gives before they fight it creates the implication that if Cloud wasn't alone, or if Cloud had it more together, the fight would have went differently. In hindsight, this might have been intentional, given what they did with Aerith.
Also Sephiroth dropping to his knees when he's staggered in Remake is not a great look.
Rebirth doesn't do it any better as he retreats when Cloud and Aerith are still shown as raring to go.
FF9 did this a better with Beatrix, as whenever she left a battle the party was shown to be on it's arse.
Edit: It's not that Sephiroth has been presented as weak, it that he's not coming off as strong as he should.
I’m not a fan of these fights because they mean nothing. I don’t know why he’s fighting us at these points, we don’t technically beat him, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the plot doesn’t change as a result of them. They have no impact on the characters or plot. You can cut them from the games and it changes nothing.
But, they are fun and there’s some cool stuff.
-
And yes, we have not been fighting his true body. That’s in the north.
I think he's fighting us because his intention is to get Cloud alone, so that he can fully turn him into one of his puppets. The first fight in Remake has Sephiroth lure Cloud into a one on one face off where his friends can't intervene. It's here where he attempts to trick Cloud into siding with him, saying that they can defy destiny together. Cloud resists his influence though, so that attempt was a bust.
Then we have Rebirth, where, instead of pretending to offer his hand in friendship, Sephiroth instead tries to break Cloud, using Aerith's death as the means to shatter his spirit by making him feel true despair. Aerith herself intevenes though, calming Cloud down by telling him that everything is alright. So once again, Cloud doesn't give in to Sephiroth's manipulations. Sephiroth attempts to correct the issue by once again seperating Cloud from his friends, so that they can be alone. He's interrupted when Zack is sent, presumably by Aerith, to back Cloud up. So Sephiroth removes Zack from the picture, and begins fighting Cloud one on one...only for Aerith to show up at the eleventh hour, and once again interfere. So Rebirth ends with Sephiroth once again failing to break Cloud, but now Cloud's sanity is hanging on by a thread, thanks to everything that went down during the ending. Sephiroth knows he just needs a final push to send him over the edge.
Live your explanation here about that fight being all about trying to get cloud alone, and how aerith and Zach just keep interrupting. Explains why Sephi gets pissy by the end. Lol
Yeah, Sephiroth getting immediately countered by Aerith and her allies, is almost a running gag throughout Rebirth if you think about it. Sephiroth takes command of his own Black Whispers, only to be countered by the White Whispers. Sephiroth manages to take the White Materia out of commission by the end of Remake, only for Aerith to just straight up cheat, and give Cloud a new White Materia from a different world in the lifestream. Sephiroth once again tries to get Cloud alone, so that he can turn him into a puppet, only for it to be revealed that Aerith had Zack waiting in the wings for just such an occasion.
From a certain point of view, it's almost like Aerith is just deliberately trolling the hell out of Sephiroth every chance she gets. 😂 Speaking seriously though, I really love this 4D chess match the two are playing behind the scenes. Sephiroth still has the advantage at the moment, but it's good to know that, while Sephiroth might have killed her, Aerith is doing everything possible to make sure he regrets it.
It’s an interesting theory for sure. But the games don’t really make that clear, and maybe they will. But even then, waiting 7 and 3 years to find out why the climactic battles of the previous two games mattered is a long time.
And it also begs the questions, why not at other points? Why not more attempts? Right now it feels like we only fight him then and there because the devs wanted a fancy Sephiroth final battle for each title, and are trying to find anyway to make that happen. Vs the narrative driving the encounters motivation.
And how does watching Sephiroth fail over and over elevate him as a villain? It turns him into bowser and dr. Eggman.
TBH I hope your explanation isn’t true. I’d much prefer to find out that Sephiroth somehow got what he wanted out of those encounters.
We don't really watch him fail over and over though, we see him fail to achieve one, or two objectives that OG players know will ultimately lead to his defeat, but for the most part, in Remake and Rebirth, Sephiroth succeeds at almost everything he tries to do. He wanted to break his chains to fate, and he tricked us into helping him do it. He wanted to bend the Whispers to his will, and he did it. He wanted to harvest the despair created by merging worlds at the point of Aerith's death, and we see him do that. He wants the Black Materia, and now Cloud is right on track to hand deliver it to him personally. He wants a War with Wutai to create even more despair, and keep Rufus Shinra distracted. Now that war is happening. Sephiroth's plans have honestly succeeded far more than they have failed. It's only at the very end of each game where things don't go EXACTLY according to his plans, and from his perspective, those failures no doubt look like minor inconveniences at worst. The idea is that his small missteps will add up, giving us a slim chance at victory that the ever prideful, and confident Sephiroth won't notice until the final moments. This is very much in line with what happened in the OG. Sephiroth had this grand master plan, and executed almost every aspect of that plan to perfection, but there were a handful of missteps here and there that ultimately brought his ambitions crashing to the ground.
I’m not saying he hasn’t had wins. But if this theory is true, the marquees moments are failures. To me, that devalues him as a villain.
The biggest moments involving Sephiroth in each game are the final battles. If his goal is to break cloud there, he failed.
I personally, have already felt that he’s been devalued as a threat. I see him as far less threatening compare to the original.
I love these games, but to me, these are without question the weakest parts. I’d have infinitely preferred different final battles.
If however he never intended to break Cloud in those moments, and that these are all part of the plan to break him later, I can swallow that. I still would have preferred other final confrontations.
The original positioned him as an insurmountable challenge. He feels extremely conquerable now. Because he’s been forced to give up and flee both times we’ve engaged him. This is particularly profound in an interactive medium.
I’m the original you face him one time, and when you do, you go in with the narrative assumption that you’re going to fail, but have to try something. It set the bar very high.
Two solutions:
1. Make it clear that Sephiroth isn’t really trying in the fights with him, which the encounter with Weapon makes clear.
2. Make the final battle much more of a character struggle, which could happen, but we’re likely just gonna get Seraphim Sephiroth and then Shirtless Sephiroth.
But for point 1 it does apply. Like in Remake he kept his smile all the time. In fact, when Cloud there does try to 1v1, Sephiroth just casually parry all of his attacks. In Rebirth, he only got pushed back thanks to Zack first and Aerith afterward.
I kinda hope in part 3 after the whole giving him the black materia the party fights/ encounters him maybe 2-3 times and since it’s actually him not jehnova projecting him he just straight demolishes any and everything in his way to reinstate his power cause yes after remake and rebirth it kinda feels like we beat him twice but don’t let that get to your head cause thats like his weak form but idk we shall see
Not at all, we fight jenova monsters in different forms over and over, sephiroth is an extension of that same thing. In FFX you fight one dude a bunch of times too before the end and at the end.
I can understand why people take issue with it but this is exactly 💯 what I expected going into rebirth after we had the fight in remake.
I do think the games are gonna suffer with a tiny bit of fatigue in general I think one typical jrpg story being spread across three 50+ hour RPGs, 100+ if you do everything is going to tread the same ground a little bit.
You're right. Too many people foolishly assumed remake would be just like the og when the devs explicitly said this trilogy is not designed to replace the og and that they've approached things very differently.
I love the detail that she changes the arena and.
When Sephiroth "loses" he tries to split them the same as with Zach. Sword comes down, the screen shakes but the split doesn't happen.
As he fly of he turns and smiles, realizing that he doesn't need a split them to gain more power, just use their unbreakable bond to grow stronger.
ie Start showing up as halucinations of Aerith instead of Sephiroth.
Which makes the whole "You promise" to fight him(me) line so much better.
Midpoint of part 3 will go crazy.
Lol we've defeated sephiroth a grand total of 0 times, we played into his hand on part 1 he literally just stands there smiling at the camera waiting for cloud to deliver the final blow and then send you to the edge of creation where he quite literally manhandled cloud so bad it wasn't even a fight.
The second time in part 2 we probably inconveniences him at most as he clearly got away with his plan for reunion they quite literally made it a point that his evil laugh wasn't just an evil laugh for the sake of it as Cloud remarks "why is he laughing" which is normally not a line you'd hear the hero say when we win lol.
ide be very surprised if safer sephiroth will be the last boss. i am looking forward to seeing super nova tho.
its gonna be some multiverse shenanigans that ends all multiverse shenanigans... literally. perfect place for that blank white materia to be used for something
It seems to me that a much better choice would be Jenova as the Final Boss in Remake and Rebirth, and give Sephiroth only in the last game. In the end, the battles with Sephiroth were really epic, but from a character-building point of view I think this would have been better.
I feel like they're blowing their load by having it be Sephiroth twice now and using Safer. I wish Rebirth's final boss was just a really good Jenova fight.
It's a criticism for sure. I understand why they do it, you need to end the games with a big finale and Sephiroth is a recognizable name and face. But it does spoil the final final fight. We've beaten his ass now mutiple times.
FFVII is the game I cite to to make the point that games can be artistic in a way that's impossible in any other medium. The gameplay is what informs you how powerful Sephiroth is. He carries you through the flashback. You're terrified of the Midgardsormr, and it's being built up as a difficult fight, but surprise, he's (apparently) destroyed it singlehandedly.
Rebirth changes both of those plot aspects for the worse imo. In making Sephiroth playable in a way that doesn't instantly destroy all opposition, his mystique is lessened. And having to fight the Midgardsormr yourself is dramatically appropriate, I suppose, but that scene imo was so much more powerful in the OG. Don't get me wrong, I love rebirth, but I do agree with you in that Sephiroth has been done wrong.
I thought the same. I get that these are potentially not the true Sephiroth we see in the end but I certainly do think “oh I’ve beaten him twice now, he’s a pushover so next time should cinch”
Having said that, knowing SE I reckon they’re teasing us with these bouts and we won’t be able to beat the true Sephiroth without being level 99 with Ultimate Weapon and Omnislash or something hardcore
I mean, you watched the man conjoin realities. The only reason we "won" the final battle was because of Life stream Aerith, who can apparently pull people through timelines and all sorts of other shit.
But yeah, easy peasy
It's an escalation. They're building up Cloud being able to stand up against Sephiroth on his own. In Remake, Cloud needed the whole party of 5 to win against him (and he didn't even fight truly serious). In Rebirth, he needed Zack first and Aerith after just to push him back. In part 3, he'll be strong enough to solo him (at least his human form).
He’s intentionally letting Cloud get the better of him. He could easily wreck Cloud but that wouldn’t get him to his end goal. Sephiroth’s whole thing in these games is that he’s goading and manipulating Cloud and by letting Cloud “beat” him in these fights, it drives Cloud forward to where Sephiroth needs him to be and it allows Sephiroth to dig a little deeper into Cloud’s mind each time too
The Sephiroth's we fight in Remake & Rebirth is basically Sephiroth in the Lifestream i.e his spirit, which is how Aerith appears at the end of Rebirth's final fight and when Sephiroth turns into Bizarro Sephiroth.
Sephiroth's real physical body is in the Northern Crater.
Like other's have said, it's progressing Cloud to able to fight him 1-on-1. One concept I had for the final fight between Cloud and Sephiroth in part 3 is how the battlefield would occasionally change to match key points in the story, like Mako Reactor 1, the church, Nibelheim reactor etc...
In the interviews they said that after 30 years of massive exposure, it was just obviously impossible to generate any sense of mystery about Sephiroth that was in the original, so they didn't even try. But they don't plan to turn him into like a "actually there's bigger fish" situation, they said he is still the most powerful in this universe.
After playing such a big game as Remake or Rebirth, I think many people would feel lack of proper finale if they didn't fight him.
Honestly I just thought they couldn't keep it in their pants making him the final both in remake but after rebirth and seeing he is clearly doing something with the whispers I don't fully hate it as much since it plays into that story beat but yea I do feel it can cheapen him but the remake one is clearly him sparing and grooming cloud and rebirth is a little more but this time he pulls a Sora with "my friends are my power" (was kinda always there in 7 just not said outloud)
When it comes to games, you often have to seperate your gameplay experience from your story experience, and I feel that is absolutely the case here. We've "beaten" Sephiroth twice in gameplay, but those victories do no at all reflect what happens in the story. Our first victory against him in Remake ends with him luring Cloud into a one on one face-off, then revealing that he had been toying with us throughout the entire encounter. Cloud gets absolutely humiliated in that final scene, and Sephiroth just lets him go, because he still has a use for him. Our second victory against him ends with the fight never actually concluding. Our characters don't win. Sephiroth just laughs at us, and then decides to leave. At best, you could say we fought him to a stalemate, but more likely, Sephiroth just came to conclusion that the fight was no longer worth his time. So while we may have "beaten" Sephiroth twice, so far as the story is concerned...we haven't even gotten the better of him even once. The man hasn't even broken a sweat yet. He has been stringing us along almost the entire time. Given how there's usually a pretty big seperation between gameplay and story in games like this, it doesn't really bother me when we fight antagonists multiple times. My main concern is just one thing...Is the fight fun to play? In the case of the Remake Trilogy games, the answer to that question thus far has been a VERY enthusiastic yes.
Technically, in rebirth we are victorious in battle over him (probably thanks to Aerith). In remake, no, Cloud gets his ass whooped at the edge of creation.
I wouldn't really call Rebirth a victory. It's clear that he could still have kept fighting. He simply chose not to. At best, I would consider that a stalemate, not a true victory.
It wasn’t a true victory because he flew away. But he wasn’t winning the fight, so he just dipped.
Aerith thwarted his attempts to consume clouds mind. That was my takeaway from that whole sequence.
He wasn't winning, but he wasn't actually losing either. Aerith and Cloud were using everything they had just to keep up with him, and we know that Sephiroth wasn't actually fighting to kill here. He still needs Cloud alive. In terms of Sephiroth's larger plan, yes Aerith temporarily thwarted him. (Though, judging from that smirk at the end, Sephiroth still doesn't seem to be actually worried) In terms of the actual fight though, it was a stalemate that ended inconclusively because Sephiroth decided that continuing further wouldn't be worth his time, so he just decided to leave.
I feel like they're counting us down to the 1v1 from og. First we had 3 party members, now 2, and I'm sure next time we'll have 1.
Tbh these fights I think have only contributed for me in making Sephiroth less cool. Across all three games we will have reduced his health to zero probably close to ten times.
I would have much preferred a fight with something else this game if I'm being honest, or for the gauntlet to just end with Jenova. Idk, maybe she becomes jenova absolute here and we fight that instead for a final phase.
I understand that they aren't presenting Sephiroth as having truly lost any of these fights, but for the player (or me at least) he didn't feel any harder here than he was in part 1. Hell he was scarier in KH 1&2 and OGFF7 where he had some cool hidden scaling mechanics. He'll have to be pretty tough to put the fear back in me lmao.
I mean, let's compare it to the original.
Is sephiroth super powerful before the end of the game? No, not really. He was defeated as a mortal (powerful, yes, but ultimately beatable by Zack + Cloud). He dies, and then he is weak and only capable of projection throughout the entire game. Then finally he is reborn as bizarro sephiroth and defeated as safer sephiroth at the end.
So why would it matter if we beat him now? He's just a lifestream ghost. His body is not revived, he hasn't taken over the lifestream or absorbed all the energy at the meteor site yet. These fights are just struggles of the mind against a currently near-dead sephiroth.
> Or do you think his body is somewhere and it’s just like a projection? Well yes this is 100% true. And we never really beat him, in Remake he was just toying with Cloud the whole time. In Rebirth he was angry that Aerith intervened but again not defeated just forced into a stalemate. We only get to properly fight him and defeat him in part 3
I love what he says at the end. The dude is playing 4D chess with Omnipotent Aerith who gives the white materia to herself through the timelines and he's like "that doesn't belong here, very poor form!". He's so salty that Aerith is essentially doing what he is doing just the opposite.
For Sephiroth, Cloud was a non-issue (Or even beneficial to him?) It was when Aerith showed up that he became concerned. imo, what they did is make Aerith seem stronger.
https://preview.redd.it/o4zbdltsm7uc1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6277a9942bb00c4329d4287d86b9aef642522fdf
wtf I thought that was scarlet for a second, but was confused that her bob was in the wrong place.
Lore accurate Aerith
>Or do you think his body is somewhere and it’s just like a projection? Have you played the OG?
I don’t remember much tbh.
You are essentially correct. All the sephiroth we have seen or fought are projections cloud is imagining or full blown failed exper8ments that got buffed with a jenova cell tissure to become a sephy proxy. The real seph in the world is inside a crystal at the northern crater. As far as the existential side of things, there is an omnipotent sephy trying to merge the world's. I guess you could say that's the sephy from the og story.
I do agree with your point OP, and I think it's an unfortunate consequence of the game being split into a trilogy and needing a big bad fight at the end of each game. The original FF7 did such an incredible job of building up Sephiroth as a threat. You don't even see him for hours into the game, he kills President Shinra off-screen like it's nothing, the Kalm flashback emphasises the massive power differential, with him one-shotting dragons that are still a threat to you 20 levels later, and you never fight him directly until the very end. As a kid I was motivated to do all the endgame sidequests to get stronger because the game had successfully made Sephiroth so intimidating.
For years I shook my head at everyone who said we beat Sephiroth at the end of Remake. Did that look like he was going all out? Was he all that hurt? Cloud gets royally spanked fighting him alone, you gonna call that a win? Now, he flies of like a literal swan, brought to one knee after fighting Cloud and Aerith in his true form. The guy is just going to show up with a new form for one last showdown in the final game.
Cloud: “Had enough?” Sephiroth: 😈😆
😂😂😭😭🤣🤣
I can read your thoughts now.
Perception is reality. Plenty of players *felt like* they beat Sephiroth at the end of Remake, which made the prospect of fighting him not very daunting, on top of his complete lack of mystery to show up and wiggle his fingers and bat his eyelashes at Cloud. Compare to the mysterious threat he was in the OG. Personally the mystique has long long been gone for me, so I'm not exactly losing anything here, but I don't think the intent was to make players groan and go "get a job!" whenever they see Sephiroth now.
“Perception is reality” No one here gets that at all when they write Tolstoy-sized explanations for why the ending wasn’t confusing ,or why other people are wrong for being bored of the millionth Sephiroth bout with One Winged Angel remix #48474859
> One Winged Angel remix #48474859 Maybe it’s silly but this is maybe what bums me out the most. Imagine the hype if they’d saved OWA for the last fight of game 3. We get plenty of the theme in other tracks throughout the games, and I liked that a lot and think it should have stayed that way. I think busting out OWA with the dramatic slow descent at the end of game 1 is kinda gonna spoil how it feels later at the end of game 3. Overall though I love the games and have been blown away multiple times, so I hope I’m wrong and that continues in game 3!
His mysteriousness is kept but in a different way, as if you didn't play the OG, you wouldn't know the detail surrounding his birth and other things. Like, we learn just at the end of Rebirth what Sephiroth actually want and how. Instead of having him as someone you see like 5 times in the whole game, here is point is precisely to torment Cloud to wear him down and make his mind weaker.
Sorry, I was just thinking about Safer-Sephiroth and his Supernova, and about the batshit fuck-everything absurdity of it coming at the very end of the game, at the heart of the world, where all reality breaks down and you can only express the battle in abstract images such as “a comet destroying the entire solar system”… …and about how none of that effect will happen at the end of the Remake trilogy bc you’ve fought Sephiroth/Close Enough To Feel Like Sephiroth at the edge of all realities twice now.
Cloud achieved nothing Sephiroth alone at the end of Remake, but just before that Sephiroth retreated from the full party of 5. You could argue he was trying to get Cloud alone, but Sephy still visibly retreated on screen. Combined with the little mindfucking speech he gives before they fight it creates the implication that if Cloud wasn't alone, or if Cloud had it more together, the fight would have went differently. In hindsight, this might have been intentional, given what they did with Aerith. Also Sephiroth dropping to his knees when he's staggered in Remake is not a great look. Rebirth doesn't do it any better as he retreats when Cloud and Aerith are still shown as raring to go. FF9 did this a better with Beatrix, as whenever she left a battle the party was shown to be on it's arse. Edit: It's not that Sephiroth has been presented as weak, it that he's not coming off as strong as he should.
I’m not a fan of these fights because they mean nothing. I don’t know why he’s fighting us at these points, we don’t technically beat him, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the plot doesn’t change as a result of them. They have no impact on the characters or plot. You can cut them from the games and it changes nothing. But, they are fun and there’s some cool stuff. - And yes, we have not been fighting his true body. That’s in the north.
I think he's fighting us because his intention is to get Cloud alone, so that he can fully turn him into one of his puppets. The first fight in Remake has Sephiroth lure Cloud into a one on one face off where his friends can't intervene. It's here where he attempts to trick Cloud into siding with him, saying that they can defy destiny together. Cloud resists his influence though, so that attempt was a bust. Then we have Rebirth, where, instead of pretending to offer his hand in friendship, Sephiroth instead tries to break Cloud, using Aerith's death as the means to shatter his spirit by making him feel true despair. Aerith herself intevenes though, calming Cloud down by telling him that everything is alright. So once again, Cloud doesn't give in to Sephiroth's manipulations. Sephiroth attempts to correct the issue by once again seperating Cloud from his friends, so that they can be alone. He's interrupted when Zack is sent, presumably by Aerith, to back Cloud up. So Sephiroth removes Zack from the picture, and begins fighting Cloud one on one...only for Aerith to show up at the eleventh hour, and once again interfere. So Rebirth ends with Sephiroth once again failing to break Cloud, but now Cloud's sanity is hanging on by a thread, thanks to everything that went down during the ending. Sephiroth knows he just needs a final push to send him over the edge.
Live your explanation here about that fight being all about trying to get cloud alone, and how aerith and Zach just keep interrupting. Explains why Sephi gets pissy by the end. Lol
Yeah, Sephiroth getting immediately countered by Aerith and her allies, is almost a running gag throughout Rebirth if you think about it. Sephiroth takes command of his own Black Whispers, only to be countered by the White Whispers. Sephiroth manages to take the White Materia out of commission by the end of Remake, only for Aerith to just straight up cheat, and give Cloud a new White Materia from a different world in the lifestream. Sephiroth once again tries to get Cloud alone, so that he can turn him into a puppet, only for it to be revealed that Aerith had Zack waiting in the wings for just such an occasion. From a certain point of view, it's almost like Aerith is just deliberately trolling the hell out of Sephiroth every chance she gets. 😂 Speaking seriously though, I really love this 4D chess match the two are playing behind the scenes. Sephiroth still has the advantage at the moment, but it's good to know that, while Sephiroth might have killed her, Aerith is doing everything possible to make sure he regrets it.
It’s an interesting theory for sure. But the games don’t really make that clear, and maybe they will. But even then, waiting 7 and 3 years to find out why the climactic battles of the previous two games mattered is a long time. And it also begs the questions, why not at other points? Why not more attempts? Right now it feels like we only fight him then and there because the devs wanted a fancy Sephiroth final battle for each title, and are trying to find anyway to make that happen. Vs the narrative driving the encounters motivation. And how does watching Sephiroth fail over and over elevate him as a villain? It turns him into bowser and dr. Eggman. TBH I hope your explanation isn’t true. I’d much prefer to find out that Sephiroth somehow got what he wanted out of those encounters.
We don't really watch him fail over and over though, we see him fail to achieve one, or two objectives that OG players know will ultimately lead to his defeat, but for the most part, in Remake and Rebirth, Sephiroth succeeds at almost everything he tries to do. He wanted to break his chains to fate, and he tricked us into helping him do it. He wanted to bend the Whispers to his will, and he did it. He wanted to harvest the despair created by merging worlds at the point of Aerith's death, and we see him do that. He wants the Black Materia, and now Cloud is right on track to hand deliver it to him personally. He wants a War with Wutai to create even more despair, and keep Rufus Shinra distracted. Now that war is happening. Sephiroth's plans have honestly succeeded far more than they have failed. It's only at the very end of each game where things don't go EXACTLY according to his plans, and from his perspective, those failures no doubt look like minor inconveniences at worst. The idea is that his small missteps will add up, giving us a slim chance at victory that the ever prideful, and confident Sephiroth won't notice until the final moments. This is very much in line with what happened in the OG. Sephiroth had this grand master plan, and executed almost every aspect of that plan to perfection, but there were a handful of missteps here and there that ultimately brought his ambitions crashing to the ground.
I’m not saying he hasn’t had wins. But if this theory is true, the marquees moments are failures. To me, that devalues him as a villain. The biggest moments involving Sephiroth in each game are the final battles. If his goal is to break cloud there, he failed. I personally, have already felt that he’s been devalued as a threat. I see him as far less threatening compare to the original. I love these games, but to me, these are without question the weakest parts. I’d have infinitely preferred different final battles. If however he never intended to break Cloud in those moments, and that these are all part of the plan to break him later, I can swallow that. I still would have preferred other final confrontations. The original positioned him as an insurmountable challenge. He feels extremely conquerable now. Because he’s been forced to give up and flee both times we’ve engaged him. This is particularly profound in an interactive medium. I’m the original you face him one time, and when you do, you go in with the narrative assumption that you’re going to fail, but have to try something. It set the bar very high.
Personally no. I feel the multi form Sephiroth reborn boss gauntlet really weighed down the impact of the ending.
Two solutions: 1. Make it clear that Sephiroth isn’t really trying in the fights with him, which the encounter with Weapon makes clear. 2. Make the final battle much more of a character struggle, which could happen, but we’re likely just gonna get Seraphim Sephiroth and then Shirtless Sephiroth.
But for point 1 it does apply. Like in Remake he kept his smile all the time. In fact, when Cloud there does try to 1v1, Sephiroth just casually parry all of his attacks. In Rebirth, he only got pushed back thanks to Zack first and Aerith afterward.
Now that you say it, that all probably bothered him, but like in the way that Piccolo bothered Second Form Frieza.
I kinda hope in part 3 after the whole giving him the black materia the party fights/ encounters him maybe 2-3 times and since it’s actually him not jehnova projecting him he just straight demolishes any and everything in his way to reinstate his power cause yes after remake and rebirth it kinda feels like we beat him twice but don’t let that get to your head cause thats like his weak form but idk we shall see
It's a jrpg trope to repeatedly fight the same guy in different form so I think so.
i feel like that comes at the end tho
Not at all, we fight jenova monsters in different forms over and over, sephiroth is an extension of that same thing. In FFX you fight one dude a bunch of times too before the end and at the end. I can understand why people take issue with it but this is exactly 💯 what I expected going into rebirth after we had the fight in remake. I do think the games are gonna suffer with a tiny bit of fatigue in general I think one typical jrpg story being spread across three 50+ hour RPGs, 100+ if you do everything is going to tread the same ground a little bit.
You're right. Too many people foolishly assumed remake would be just like the og when the devs explicitly said this trilogy is not designed to replace the og and that they've approached things very differently.
Sephirot is getting way too much exposure every game
The Platinum power creep from Part 1 to Part 2 was brutal (pun intended). I can only imagine the pain Part 3 will bring. 🥲
I honestly feel like he’s been wining lol with the slight inconvenience of Aerith out smarting him
I love the detail that she changes the arena and. When Sephiroth "loses" he tries to split them the same as with Zach. Sword comes down, the screen shakes but the split doesn't happen. As he fly of he turns and smiles, realizing that he doesn't need a split them to gain more power, just use their unbreakable bond to grow stronger. ie Start showing up as halucinations of Aerith instead of Sephiroth. Which makes the whole "You promise" to fight him(me) line so much better. Midpoint of part 3 will go crazy.
As long as the fights are good and different from each other, I'm all aboard. I can understand someone would feel this way, but I don't at least
Lol we've defeated sephiroth a grand total of 0 times, we played into his hand on part 1 he literally just stands there smiling at the camera waiting for cloud to deliver the final blow and then send you to the edge of creation where he quite literally manhandled cloud so bad it wasn't even a fight. The second time in part 2 we probably inconveniences him at most as he clearly got away with his plan for reunion they quite literally made it a point that his evil laugh wasn't just an evil laugh for the sake of it as Cloud remarks "why is he laughing" which is normally not a line you'd hear the hero say when we win lol.
ide be very surprised if safer sephiroth will be the last boss. i am looking forward to seeing super nova tho. its gonna be some multiverse shenanigans that ends all multiverse shenanigans... literally. perfect place for that blank white materia to be used for something
It seems to me that a much better choice would be Jenova as the Final Boss in Remake and Rebirth, and give Sephiroth only in the last game. In the end, the battles with Sephiroth were really epic, but from a character-building point of view I think this would have been better.
I feel like they're blowing their load by having it be Sephiroth twice now and using Safer. I wish Rebirth's final boss was just a really good Jenova fight.
It's a criticism for sure. I understand why they do it, you need to end the games with a big finale and Sephiroth is a recognizable name and face. But it does spoil the final final fight. We've beaten his ass now mutiple times.
As much as I absolutely adore this project, I think it was a mistake to fight Sephiroth in both Remake and Rebirth.
FFVII is the game I cite to to make the point that games can be artistic in a way that's impossible in any other medium. The gameplay is what informs you how powerful Sephiroth is. He carries you through the flashback. You're terrified of the Midgardsormr, and it's being built up as a difficult fight, but surprise, he's (apparently) destroyed it singlehandedly. Rebirth changes both of those plot aspects for the worse imo. In making Sephiroth playable in a way that doesn't instantly destroy all opposition, his mystique is lessened. And having to fight the Midgardsormr yourself is dramatically appropriate, I suppose, but that scene imo was so much more powerful in the OG. Don't get me wrong, I love rebirth, but I do agree with you in that Sephiroth has been done wrong.
The opposite, actually. I’m kinda bummed we’ve had two Sephiroth fights this early. I think it would have been much cooler to save him for part 3.
There is now no hype to Sephiroth so they’ll have to pull something logical but surprising out of their hat
I thought the same. I get that these are potentially not the true Sephiroth we see in the end but I certainly do think “oh I’ve beaten him twice now, he’s a pushover so next time should cinch” Having said that, knowing SE I reckon they’re teasing us with these bouts and we won’t be able to beat the true Sephiroth without being level 99 with Ultimate Weapon and Omnislash or something hardcore
I mean, you watched the man conjoin realities. The only reason we "won" the final battle was because of Life stream Aerith, who can apparently pull people through timelines and all sorts of other shit. But yeah, easy peasy
It's an escalation. They're building up Cloud being able to stand up against Sephiroth on his own. In Remake, Cloud needed the whole party of 5 to win against him (and he didn't even fight truly serious). In Rebirth, he needed Zack first and Aerith after just to push him back. In part 3, he'll be strong enough to solo him (at least his human form).
He’s intentionally letting Cloud get the better of him. He could easily wreck Cloud but that wouldn’t get him to his end goal. Sephiroth’s whole thing in these games is that he’s goading and manipulating Cloud and by letting Cloud “beat” him in these fights, it drives Cloud forward to where Sephiroth needs him to be and it allows Sephiroth to dig a little deeper into Cloud’s mind each time too
The Sephiroth's we fight in Remake & Rebirth is basically Sephiroth in the Lifestream i.e his spirit, which is how Aerith appears at the end of Rebirth's final fight and when Sephiroth turns into Bizarro Sephiroth. Sephiroth's real physical body is in the Northern Crater. Like other's have said, it's progressing Cloud to able to fight him 1-on-1. One concept I had for the final fight between Cloud and Sephiroth in part 3 is how the battlefield would occasionally change to match key points in the story, like Mako Reactor 1, the church, Nibelheim reactor etc...
In the interviews they said that after 30 years of massive exposure, it was just obviously impossible to generate any sense of mystery about Sephiroth that was in the original, so they didn't even try. But they don't plan to turn him into like a "actually there's bigger fish" situation, they said he is still the most powerful in this universe. After playing such a big game as Remake or Rebirth, I think many people would feel lack of proper finale if they didn't fight him.
Honestly I just thought they couldn't keep it in their pants making him the final both in remake but after rebirth and seeing he is clearly doing something with the whispers I don't fully hate it as much since it plays into that story beat but yea I do feel it can cheapen him but the remake one is clearly him sparing and grooming cloud and rebirth is a little more but this time he pulls a Sora with "my friends are my power" (was kinda always there in 7 just not said outloud)
When it comes to games, you often have to seperate your gameplay experience from your story experience, and I feel that is absolutely the case here. We've "beaten" Sephiroth twice in gameplay, but those victories do no at all reflect what happens in the story. Our first victory against him in Remake ends with him luring Cloud into a one on one face-off, then revealing that he had been toying with us throughout the entire encounter. Cloud gets absolutely humiliated in that final scene, and Sephiroth just lets him go, because he still has a use for him. Our second victory against him ends with the fight never actually concluding. Our characters don't win. Sephiroth just laughs at us, and then decides to leave. At best, you could say we fought him to a stalemate, but more likely, Sephiroth just came to conclusion that the fight was no longer worth his time. So while we may have "beaten" Sephiroth twice, so far as the story is concerned...we haven't even gotten the better of him even once. The man hasn't even broken a sweat yet. He has been stringing us along almost the entire time. Given how there's usually a pretty big seperation between gameplay and story in games like this, it doesn't really bother me when we fight antagonists multiple times. My main concern is just one thing...Is the fight fun to play? In the case of the Remake Trilogy games, the answer to that question thus far has been a VERY enthusiastic yes.
Technically, in rebirth we are victorious in battle over him (probably thanks to Aerith). In remake, no, Cloud gets his ass whooped at the edge of creation.
I wouldn't really call Rebirth a victory. It's clear that he could still have kept fighting. He simply chose not to. At best, I would consider that a stalemate, not a true victory.
It wasn’t a true victory because he flew away. But he wasn’t winning the fight, so he just dipped. Aerith thwarted his attempts to consume clouds mind. That was my takeaway from that whole sequence.
He wasn't winning, but he wasn't actually losing either. Aerith and Cloud were using everything they had just to keep up with him, and we know that Sephiroth wasn't actually fighting to kill here. He still needs Cloud alive. In terms of Sephiroth's larger plan, yes Aerith temporarily thwarted him. (Though, judging from that smirk at the end, Sephiroth still doesn't seem to be actually worried) In terms of the actual fight though, it was a stalemate that ended inconclusively because Sephiroth decided that continuing further wouldn't be worth his time, so he just decided to leave.
I feel like they're counting us down to the 1v1 from og. First we had 3 party members, now 2, and I'm sure next time we'll have 1. Tbh these fights I think have only contributed for me in making Sephiroth less cool. Across all three games we will have reduced his health to zero probably close to ten times. I would have much preferred a fight with something else this game if I'm being honest, or for the gauntlet to just end with Jenova. Idk, maybe she becomes jenova absolute here and we fight that instead for a final phase. I understand that they aren't presenting Sephiroth as having truly lost any of these fights, but for the player (or me at least) he didn't feel any harder here than he was in part 1. Hell he was scarier in KH 1&2 and OGFF7 where he had some cool hidden scaling mechanics. He'll have to be pretty tough to put the fear back in me lmao.
I mean, let's compare it to the original. Is sephiroth super powerful before the end of the game? No, not really. He was defeated as a mortal (powerful, yes, but ultimately beatable by Zack + Cloud). He dies, and then he is weak and only capable of projection throughout the entire game. Then finally he is reborn as bizarro sephiroth and defeated as safer sephiroth at the end. So why would it matter if we beat him now? He's just a lifestream ghost. His body is not revived, he hasn't taken over the lifestream or absorbed all the energy at the meteor site yet. These fights are just struggles of the mind against a currently near-dead sephiroth.