Is Sephiroth actually a good villain?

Ok? Thats also a pretty common villain element generally speaking.

He's just a generic Edgy McEdgerton villain with an oversized katana.

Things Sephiroth did well:
>unmatched warrior badass
>fucked up his old boss
>charismatic
>had a good side to him
>didn't directly participate in the story on a low level, you just followed his trail of carnage

Things Sephiroth did poorly:
>all the Jenova shit
>didn't have a very interesting reason for trying to blow up the world
>wasn't that great whenever he did directly participate in the story

Honestly, his whole existence is pretty much designed around building hype.

Mama's boy/10

They're both soldiers who got a dose of super mojo, it made them unable to connect with others in a regular manner.

Kefka jumped in with his eyes wide open if I'm remembering correctly but Sephiroth got the space juice while in the womb.

Basing a villain off of him how?

And I'm going to vote that he isn't a very good villain.
His motivation(s) is all over the place, his backstory isn't too impressive and his personality isn't really anything special (and is inconsistent between the original game and the later material).

I also really don't like his relationship to Cloud. It's hard to explain but I feel like the writers are under the impression that there's more between them then there actual is.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the final boss fight is the first time he and Cloud actually meet.

I thought the jenova shit was pretty good. Really cool and weird and creepy.

I really liked FF7's world in general.

I always liked how he was this guy Cloud initially looked up to in a hero-worship kind of way, but it was kind of on a personal level. Lots of people respected him, but Cloud saw him as his own personal childhood wish, except he failed to get anywhere even near Sephiroth's level.

That was the first time they met face to face, at least for Sephiroth to see Cloud's face as he was always sporting that helmet when Zack and Sephiroth were investigating the reactor.

See, the thing is though, their whole back story and reasons for things are pretty different though. Yes, in a general sense they both go batshit insane and want to destroy the world but thats kind of a shallow analysis. Also I thought kefka was like a jester or something. Its been a while.

This. Tactics had some great characters.

IIRC, the thing with the "Sephiroth clones" in the bulky robes throughout the later part of the game was a last-minute change to the story that threw a LOT of things out of whack. That alteration may be the origin of Sephiroth's inconsistencies.

Also
>the final boss fight is the first time he and Cloud actually meet.
Dude, even ignoring anything about Zach's memories and SOLDIER and all that stuff, you seem to be forgetting what is possibly one of the most iconic scenes in JRPG history.

Shinra and the Turks were great.

>Ff7 is just the one most pleb 90s kids played first.
What does it mean when FF8 was my first?

But in totally different ways. Kefka finds all life meaningless and as such should be destroyed because all things are going to break and die so he might as well just end it all. His core theme revolves are nihilistic philosophy. Sephiroth, on the other hand, mistakenly believed Jenova was one of the ancients and that the world was taken from "his people". He was going to wipe humanity from the planet because they were destroying it with industry and ruining nature and shit. That's why he wanted to become one with the life stream and "save" the planet. His philosophy is that of most eco-terrorist.

There are similarities but there core values and motivations are different and follow the themes of their respective games. FF6 being about the characters finding meaning in life and a reason to keep fighting, FF7 is about the relationship humanity has with the earth.

In the scope of final fantasy games in general, final fantasy 7 doesn't stop being good just because it's "overrated" by people.

Things can be good even if they are popular and you get nerd cred for being contrarian teenagers about it.

>Is Sephiroth actually a good villain?
Yes, for a couple of reasons, but mostly they involve his personal connections to the main character and his internal stuff rather than much of what he directly did. Sephiroth is a dark apex of Cloud's ideal self-image, powerful, confident, self-possessed. Cloud emulates the pre-villainous Sephiroth, the cool war hero who casually strides into town and takes over, and even villainous Sephiroth has a lot of the character traits Cloud seeks to emulate.

And it turns out the heroic image Sephiroth projects is a fabrication. Sephiroth is a crack pot barely holding it together, full of doubt, and when he discovers evidence about the doubt he'd had over his life, the man has a full blown mental break down that leads to murder and chaos.

Sephiroth is a classic fallen paladin, whose internal strength and ideals were built on a flimsy foundation that collapsed under mental weakness and 'divine' revelation. Self-image collapsing before reality, revealing a person's 'true' character - that's kind of the point of Cloud's journey in FF7 as well.

I don't really give a shit what happened in the spin-offs. The original game Sephiroth is a pretty interesting guy.

Was Sephiroth ever really a villain beyond going loco on Nibelheim?
Or was it Jenova making use of Sephiroth's form the entire time?

This. Comparing them is like saying The Joker and The Penguin are the same.

At some point you're just saying forks and knives are the same thing because they're made of metal. Maybe stop trying so hard to be cunts about everything.

Every FF villain goes from "iffy" to "good"

So go for it OP.

That question honestly sum up the best part about him for me.

Sephiroth isn't really a misguided, racist eco terrorist, he's basically a puppet of Jenova. That's just how the Jenova induced "Fuck everything, eat the planet" urges manifested.

Sephiroth was always a willing puppet to whoever the 'higher power' was. First it was Shinra, then it was Jenova. Sephiroth was a soldier looking for a worthy cause, because without a cause to fight for he was empty inside.

See I always got the impression Kefka was always kind of fucked in the head because of belief that everyhing is meanigless and it escalated. Sephiroth was once a good dude but he learned too much dark shit and thats what fcked him up. Even on that really simple level without much analysis the two are pretty different. But the idea that sephiroth was shit clone of kefka is such a prevailing one. Kefkas whole core motivation of nihilism totally contradicts sephiroth.

>I don't really give a shit what happened in the spin-offs. The original game Sephiroth is a pretty interesting guy.
The same can be said for Cloud. To this day, I have no fucking clue why SquEnix decided to re-characterize Cloud as a mopey emo fuckwit when literally the only time he's listless in the original game is when he's catatonic and stuck in a wheelchair.

Did the writers confuse Squall and Cloud?

/r/ing the side-by-side comparison of FFVII's Cloud and KH's/AC's/"modern" Cloud.

Jenova is The Thing so I don't think there's an appreciable difference between the two.

I don't know if Sephiroth was ever a good guy. Not directly a dick when he could help it, maybe, but he was still a Shinra super soldier, strongarming communities and oppressing anyone who stands up to them.

I mean I don't think its a coincidence that he returns from the fantasy Vietnam War and immediately finds another war to fight.

Been a while since I've played VI so I might confuse a shit load of lore but it seemed to me that Kefka was the only "decent" result the empire got injecting espers juice into a human, the empire wanted more super soldiers even though they had all this magitek shit already and they searched for more esper to turn into paste to inject into their subjects.

Kefka's mind was litteraly fucked as the espers inside him wanted out and made a mess of the place. Since whatever remained of the man wanted a moment of peace he taped into the latent power and leveled the world or something. Before just doing that he did all that shit like poisoning a whole city or declaring war, because he found it funny.

Sephiroth is a Lovecraft protagonist, specifically the guy from Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Kefka is a school shooter.

I still remember the scene in I think shinra HQ as youre trying to leave or climb up or something, and at some point you see jenova which was kinda fucked already, but then shit goes down and the music changes and you see the gore splatter and a trail of blood and carnage Sephiroth leaves behind as you continue. That was a real moment for me in games where I was legit freaked as a kid. FF7 had a lot of moments like that for me.

A lot of Sephiroth's "consume the planet just like mommy" was stuff added in advent children. In the original game (I've never played crisis core) his motives were most about obtaining the promised land, which to him was a planet without humans to fuck it up.

>I have no fucking clue why SquEnix decided to re-characterize Cloud as a mopey emo fuckwit when literally the only time he's listless in the original game is when he's catatonic and stuck in a wheelchair.
Fan interpretation memed itself into canon. People forgot that disc 1 Cloud's cold mercenary attitude was a front for a scared kid with huge and almost literal mental scars, and that his personal journey was about overcoming his insecurities about who he really is as a person, rather than what his anxiety and ego wishes he was.

His motives were, sure, but his actions were feeding Jenova. At best, it was a self-delusion induced by space AIDS.

>but it seemed to me that Kefka was the only "decent" result the empire got injecting espers juice into a human,
Celes was part of the same experiment.

Cloud was imo the most psychologically complex FF protagonist. It's a shame he got emo'ed in the spin off material.

Jenova is a mindless eating machine, because of Sephiroth's birth conditions he was basically a part of the Jenova hive mind but with more thoughts than just "hungry... Eat". Sephiroth was in control of all the Jenova pieces because he was the only part of the network, so to speak, that had an ego and higher level cognition.

Celeste was half Esperanto half human... the Empire was just using her as a weapon after they found her when the esters closed their world off.

Cloud was a country bumpkin who ran off to join the corporate super soldier program and washed out into a rank and file nobody. His rank and file nobody squad ended up assigned to a special mission which ended with Sephiroth destroying everything in sight. Shinra's resident crazy scientist took all the survivors and dosed the shit out of them with magic and Jenova bits, resulting in Cloud's mind being fucked in more ways than one. His bestest buddy saved his ass and dragged him to the city, where he fell in with a childhood friend and her eco-terrorist cell. Because this jogged memories of his promise to join the super soldiers, his personality at that point was a jumbled mess of what he thought a super soldier should act like and what his best friend acted like. Snarky and tryhard. When he actually gets most of his mind back, he becomes far less confident in himself, and pretty much only stays on because he is provably capable thanks to magic radiation poisoning giving him extra strength.
He spends too much time at the arcade and raises and races livestock as a hobby.

No, that was Terra

Celes was part of the same magic warrior program as Kefka

By the way. Fucking auto correct. Esper*

...

Is this going to devolve into defending Pathfinder's honor?

Sephiroth casts Meteor so it will hit the big fuck off hole in the northern continent and he plans to sit in the middle of that planetary wound be immersed in life force energy that the planet would use to heal itself
Absorbing all that power would make him unto a god and he wants to hang out with his alien mom

True, that's a fair point

>That alteration may be the origin of Sephiroth's inconsistencies.

I've looked into the development of FF7's story and it's crazy how much it changed over time (often suddenly and for no apparent reason).
Originally, it was going to take place in New York City in the near future and Sephiroth was basically Wesker from Resident Evil but Square changed it because they were afraid he was too similar to Kefka.
I also suspect someone in the staff was a big fan of Berserk and wanted to add some Griffith-ness to Sephiroth.

But more to the point: originally Sephiroth was only going to appear twice in the game: the flashback and the final boss. Jenovah was supposed to be the one doing all the villain work while she was tracking-down Sephiroth's corpse. She was also supposed to be the one who kills Aerith.

They switched Jenovah for Sephiroth (and his clones) at the last minute to the point where they didn't even have time to change some of the dialogue to account for the change.

>you seem to be forgetting what is possibly one of the most iconic scenes in JRPG history.
Are you talking about Aerith's death because that wasn't THE Sephiroth. And it's ambiguous as to whether that thing was controlled by Sephiroth, Jenovah or both.

Woops. Man its been too long since I played that game. The revamp can't get here soon enough.

This is correct, the only thing I would add is that kefka was the one who beta tested the program which is why he became so fucked up.

The Advent Children Cloud had some reason at least. Geostigma was a disease directly caused by him defeating Sephiroth, killed thousands and he too was infected by it. I see why he'd be depressed then. Otherwise, they have little reason for his depression.

I wish Jenova was my mom!

7 is okay. It's just not the best one. Not even top 5.

But that was Jenova, not Sephiroth. Every time you encounter Sephiroth in the game, it's the shapeshifting Jenova taking his form, except in the crater itself - and considering he fell with her head, and IIRC said head wasn't in the giant crystal he was encased in, it's quite likely even the endgame Sephiroth wasn't actually Sephiroth - or at least, not entirely him

>New York City

Somebody loved this idea and that's why we have Parasite Eve.

Cloud was an alright guy. His entire game was about him coming to grips that he's not the classic hero. He didn't become SOLDIER, he didn't get the girls, that was all Zack. Crisis Core actually did his characterization decently. Clould's character development was realizing all that & coming to grips with that.

Who would have thought massed exposure to lifestream infused Jenova cells would be so bad :^)

In hindsight, I'm still surprised that people don't complain so much about Cloud being a farcry of his FF7 self.

>he didn't get the girls
He got best girl

Barrett

A lot of gamers are more familiar with him from Kingdom Hearts and Advent Children than the original game itself.

If you make the villan nothing like him in apperance and don't use any obvious refrences to him it could work.

That sucks. Even his crisis core self was closer to his ff7 self.

With all the shit in the remake, I'm glad that Barret and the AVALANCHErs look badass. Wedge is exactly the sort of dumpy weirdo who deserves a grenade launcher.

He was a punk bitch in CC that was a failure at everything, and in AC, was in/directly responsible for a world wide plague.

Wasnt really about who actually did it. Just the atmosphere

They used the assets built instead of scrapping them, the main theme of Parasite Eve came from a book.

Overall, Sephiroth was more compelling just because of his relation with Cloud, Cloud's dreams & aspirations & not just himself. He's one of those villains who need connections with the hero to work.

I'm betting that's due to most people's first real experience with Cloud being one of the emo spinoffs. I personally came around too late to play FFVII when it was fresh, so the first Cloud I knew was the one in Kingdom Hearts that raided Vincent's wardrobe. It wasn't until much later that I found an old copy of FFVII for cheap, played it, and realized a) Cloud doesn't actually dress like a vampire and b) Cloud is actually not an emo.

Seriously, it's obvious that they wanted to use Vincent, why didn't they use Vincent? He's dark. He's broody. He's emo as FUCK. They fucking dressed Cloud LIKE Vincent, SO WHY NOT JUST USE VINCENT?

He kinda was a failure at everything. Didn't make a soldier, his family died, etc

>his family died
Man, that was not his fault.

This.
He wasn't emo, he was a tryhard who wanted to be the cool hero guy/protag.
I wager it came across a lot better in Japanese because there is a strong pop cultural element of the stoic swordsman ideal in manga.
Hey, he beat Sephiroth!
Twic-, no, THREE times! Zack couldn't do it once!
>and it's the only thing Cloud has ever accomplished

Vincent has a gun.

People seem to forget Cloud's subconsciousness where it's revealed that he was actually much closer to the bubbling sidekick than the main hero. The real hero Zack died & he's traumatized enough to believe he's Zack & with all the Jenova cells, he's practically already a SOLDIER too. It's like if Noct died mid-game, Prompto somehow inherited his powers & was mentally fucked enough to start thinking he was the Lucian prince,

And a claw.

Reminder that Gilgamesh will never get his own game where he travels the multiverse looking for weapons and Bartz.

>Reminder that Gilgamesh will never get his own game where he travels the multiverse looking for weapons and Bantz
Goddammit, I saw that first.

Yeah, but they ADDED a gun to Leon/Squall. The Gunblade doesn't gun; pulling the trigger sets the sword vibrating at stupidly-high frequencies to slice through shit. First scene he's in in KH has him "firing" out of it and pointing it at Sora. Yes, they are spells, not bullets, but the same can be done for Vincent's gun and have it "shoot" fireballs, icicles, etc.

Enough off-topic ranting, sorry.

He might be fun if done properly, but prepare for one player to catch on and roast you endlessly/start bitching about it.

If anyone catches, have a backup way to change the character.

who the fuck is noct lmao

FF15

Sephiroth might have been a good villian if that one piece of shit never voiced him and we got the voice actor of Johan Liebert from Monster to voice him, making him sound similar to his Kingdom hearts 1 fight voice actor who had the tone down but not the voice, but sounded good on the Playstation 2 due to sound quality in Kingdom Hearts 1and better to that of his "we couldn't afford the cunt who ruined Sephiroth for all time, including his I'm going to see mother quote, including the camerca angle scene."

He was supposed to sound more young and likable, before he lost his mind and went with a "holier than thou" attitude with his lifesteam Oedipus Jenova crap. Instead we got a villian who ammounted to "totally not going to be the bad guy, guize!" levels of saturday morning cartoon levels of cringe.

Best boy is here

You are a memeloving cuck, learn Japanese and stop worrying about autistic shit like who voices them.

what about Weapons?

If you run him the way he has been fetishized by the game's fanbae, then no, he'd make a horrible, angsty and utterly cliche villian.

HOWEVER:
If you'd use him like he was portrayed in the actual game, then he could make a rather decent villain.
When it comes down to it, Sephiroth was never the main villain of FF7. Jenova was.
Sephiroth was a corpse, reanimated and controlled by an eldritch intelligence on par with The Thing. A world eating parasite, traveling the universe on the corpses of the worlds it devoured. He really was only the main goon at best.

That reveal alone could make his eye rolling edginess worth it.

Weren't the "clones" not actual clones, but people who (like cloud) had jenova cells infuse in them?
I distinctively remember them seeking out the crater and sacrificing themselves to reunite jenova.

But then again, I didnt play the english version and I heard that there were some horrible mistranslations in the american localization

>They switched Jenovah for Sephiroth (and his clones) at the last minute to the point where they didn't even have time to change some of the dialogue to account for the change.

No they didn't. Up until at least the crater (where you see him encased in that big crystal) it's all Jenova all the time.

As long as you want to make an overly cliched villain then sure - and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's purposeful, see pic related.

If you want to make it serious, at this point Sephiroth's so played out that it would be hard to make him a good base for a character without selectively ignoring parts of 7's bloated universe

I wanna fug jenova

you know what's a bloated universe? Real life. We take inspiration from it all the time

You got me wrong, I really love it, but after playing/watching through more than half of it's installments, it's really hard to take it absolutely serious

Any FF villian once the Playstation Age started is an instant no.

He's super meh. You need a villain that's more awesome, like mother fucking GARLAND.
>Up and said fuck it one day and kidnapped a Princess, because he could
>Gets beaten by a group of heroes, but doesn't die
>Uses the power of four demons to travel back in time
>Uses left over power to create said Four Demons, and empower them to and his now future self to the past to become him
>Smashes enough stuff to become embodiment of Chaos, also becoming immortal
>Wields shapeshifting weapon to knock everyone down
>His initial purpose was just to kidnap a princess, which then turned to revenge, and eventually his inevitable godhood
>Beats the shit out of Lightning a bit later on for shits n giggles