In 1998, Australia’s Official PlayStation Magazine warned that Final Fantasy VII would destroy your commitment to “household cleanliness, personal nutrition and pressing work commitments.” At thirteen, I wasn’t working but they were right. My friend Sami was there the first time I became Cloud Strife and, fuck, it was annoying – he’d played before and was narrating what to do. “Fuck off and let me figure it out,” I thought. We were teenagers, coming of age, and I hadn’t realised how my world was about to expand.
One minute I’m locked in an industrial warren of class warfare and mako reactors, the next I’m ripping along the highway on a superpowered motorcycle. After ten hours, BOOM! I was out. Midgar was behind me, just a prologue. JUST. A. PROLOGUE. An entire planet was waiting to be explored. It started first with chocobos, yellow, then green, black, and blue. I commandeered a dune buggy, then airplanes, airships and submarines. The map just kept getting bigger. By the time I'd logged over 150 hours and finally bred a golden chocobo, I’d explored every corner of gaia, defeated ruby and emerald giants, mastered Knights of the Round materia and defeated Sephiroth.
Nothing brought back the flower girl, though.
As a kid, that first world-expanding moment escaping Midgar would parallel my own shifting horizons. I’d soon get my first job, get a car license, motorcycle license, pilot license. I’d travel the state, the country, then fly and explore overseas. I was getting older and taking advantage of this freedom while I had it.
And, I never returned to Final Fantasy VII. Some memories are too perfect to risk disturbing.
Then comes Remake (2020) and Rebirth (2024). Director Tetsuya Nomura, alongside Naoki Hamaguchi and Motomu Toriyama, understand what FFVII means to those who grew up with it.
A whisper, “we understand,” they say.
“Whispers” are a meta-textual narrative device, introduced early, as narrative expectations in Remake/Rebirth begin to depart from the original. Alternate timelines emerge and mingle, blurring realities. They validate teenage memories while creating opportunities for new experiences. And, crucially, allowing me to reexamine FFVII’s complex themes as an adult.
I’ve lived through “peak oil”, seen the champions of renewable energies rise and fall, the rover landing on Mars and subsequent arguments about whether Earth should be the focus of our preservation rather than a land to escape. I’ve also researched and taught globalisation, the ethics of design, and fostered arguments for and against employing visual rhetoric to foster consumption for commercial gain.
In 2015 Tim Maughan published a three-part series on the complex world of international commerce and ending with an examination of Baotau, China. The article still haunts me. Baotou is a city built on the extraction and refinement of rare earth minerals where a toxic lake, visible from satellites, swells with black sludge. The sludge is a byproduct of supplying the minerals that power our smartphones, entertainment and tech industry. Rare earths aren’t rare, most countries just don’t want to bear the devastation of producing them.
A whisper, “rare earths,” says President Trump.
Closer to home in 2017, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison held aloft a fist-sized lump of black coal in an absurd display of energy politics. Following a black out in South Australia, where strong winds had knocked down power lines, ScoMo was trying to convince Australia it was the fault of renewable energy that my home was without lights. He was wrong, of course.
A whisper, “this is coal, don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”
Now in 2025, simply extending courtesy to a robot might be wasting tens of millions of dollars worth of energy, according to Sam Altman of OpenAI.
A whisper, “the cost of magic is always environmental,” says ChatGPT.
FFVII isn’t just about saving the world, it’s about questioning what the cost is to power it.
I still can’t save the flower girl but this time, somehow, it’s ok.
A whisper, “there’s so much that’s real to fight for.”