7 Sephiroth Facts You Probably Didn't Know

within the realm of video games Sephiroth stands as one of the most iconic villains ever created but despite his significant notoriety has always been a certain amount of mystery that emanates from Sephiroth as a character this is perhaps typify by the nefarious science experiments conducted by Professor Hojo that brought about his creation within the game but as the narrative of Final Fantasy 7 expanded via the compilation and he also started to appear in various spin-offs in crossover campaigns the mystery and a lure of Sephiroth has only increased needless to say it means there are quite a few pieces of nuanced information floating around about Sephiroth such as why his appearance within the original Kingdom Hearts offered something inherently unique outside of a punishingly difficult boss battle and why his final encounter with cloud in Advent Children represented a complicated logistical challenge that the animation team had to work hard to overcome so my name is Darrell and we're about to run through 7 things about Sephiroth that you probably didn't know with a few other tip bits thrown in for good measure and we're going to kick things off with a rather fascinating story of Sephiroth's creation and the relationship that he was meant to have with Erath even though Final Fantasy 7 saw quite a few changes to the narrative within its earlier days of production Sephiroth was always intended to be the game's main antagonist but that only tells half the story as despite having a clear vision for who Sephiroth walls and what he represented within the game itself significant changes were made to his backstory as the scenario writers continued to refine and adapt the script throughout the game's development they knew that at its core Final Fantasy 7 was going to be a game that would revolve around cloud desperate pursuit of Sephiroth and this would see a slight change to their narrative style unlike some previous games which had foils that would be replaced by a higher power right at the last moment within Final Fantasy 7 they wanted to positioned Sephiroth as the perfect foil for their protagonist this meant he would have a consistent and dominating presence throughout and would also serve as the game's ultimate big bad something the developers believed would make the final battle serve as a much more fitting climax to the game and they were right a prominent part of this build up towards the climactic duel was of course the death of Erath it was a very effective narrative tool that the team used to demonize Sephiroth as a character and it has since become one of the most iconic deaths in videogame history but what's interesting is that the relationship between these two characters could have ended up being rather different had revisions not been made to the script when speaking to for Mitsu around the 15th anniversary of Final Fantasy 7 Tetsuya Nomura who played a prominent role in crafting the game's narrative revealed that within earlier iterations of the game's script Sephiroth was actually positioned as aerith's estranged brother and that's why they have similar hairstyles within the final game as Nomura wanted to convey this familial connection following the introduction of Genova this relationship no longer made sense but the writers still wanted to keep the two characters connected in some way so they made them estranged lovers instead with Sephiroth positioned as Aaron's first love they liked this particular line of thinking but then decided it didn't fit with how they were developing the story elsewhere so ended up creating Zack fair at the last minute using him to fill the role with Aerith and amend that sephiroth's connection with Aerith would end up being wholly different from what they had initially envisioned yet even though other characters had visual changes such as cloud having his hairstyle amended Nomura chose to keep the key visual element that connected Sephiroth and Aerith intact and that's perhaps because of the connection sephiroth's design had to the character that Nomura used as his inspiration as we noted within our Cloud Strife facts video when Nomura was creating cloud and Sephiroth he took a lot of inspiration from the conflict that are transpired between Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro and part of this inspiration from a design perspective must have come from the famous tattoo at Kiko park where Cordero has potted here in the front something which other artists also seemed to have latched onto as it has become a prominent feature in many of his modern adaptations into fiction and that relates rather nicely to our second fact which revolves around how Sephiroth maintains his glorious hair quite often within videogames there is a lot of focus placed on completing the current objective but developers often grant numerous rewards those who want to deviate from the path and explore the world that they've created Final Fantasy 7 was a treasure trove when it came to this kind of content with hidden characters a whole host of minigames and even miserable dialogue sequences some of which related to the origins of Sephiroth if you're able to find luke retzius cave it's something that has always resonated with gamers and so it made sense for this notion to be carried forward into the compilation of Final Fantasy 7 within Crysis Court in particular this saw some rather fun little nuggets of information cropping up all over the place but one of the most interesting sources of this was the in-game email up here you would receive messages about a wide range of topics and they helped to humanize many of the characters including Sephiroth Duty D quirky nature of what was divulged one such email was incredibly revealing in this regard it was sent to Zack after he chooses to join several fan club called the silver elite and the email was entitled the scent of silver winds within it revealed that Sephiroth maintains his glorious silver hair by using high-quality hair products made and supplied by the Shinra company it's noted that he uses one bottle of shampoo and conditioner every single time he washes his hair and they are scented with 13 different types of perfume including rosin vanilla as a side note it's also been theorized that the person who runs the silver elite fan club chairwoman H is actually Professor Hojo given the rather specific nature of the content that's divulged Hojo's obsession with Sephiroth and the cryptic final message it would make sense but perhaps we will never know the truth our third piece of insightful information relates to the final encounter with Sephiroth it has quite a few unique traits after navigating through the northern crater dungeon and defeating Genova synthesis the only encounters that remained in the game were against Sephiroth himself albeit in various forms and they each had unique qualities including the fact that the various forms were fought in separate battles each with their own musical themes the first fight which was against bizarro Sephiroth had a whole host of nuances for one there were numerous mechanics in play that would determine how the fight played out and those related to what happened in the fight against two nova synthesis what the average level of the party was at that point and whether or not you fee and Vinson have been obtained before heading into the fight depending on the answers to these questions you kiddin up fighting against bizarro with one two or three different party setups and each of these scenarios would see bizarro have different amounts of HP associated to each of its body parts the next fight which in literal terms acted as the penultimate battle within the game was against safer Sephiroth I say literal terms because in reality due to the challenge it is considered to be the final boss and because one winged angel is also rather befitting of the occasion like the fight against bizarro it also had variables that could change its HP such as the number of characters who were at level 99 during the fight and whether knights of the round was used in the fight against a nova synthesis and what's also interesting is that within the original Japanese version of Final Fantasy 7 safer Sephiroth had different abilities and its move cycle was modified compared to the international release with safer Sephiroth bested this led to the true final boss battle which was against a meta physical representation of Sephiroth it was accompanied by those chosen by the planet and what's unique about this particular fight is that it's one of only a handful of fights within the main series Final Fantasy franchise that you cannot lose it adheres to the foregone victory trope as no matter what you do cloud will defeat Sephiroth this can be done proactively by using Omni / which is granted to cloud even if it hasn't been learnt yet well by sitting back and countering Sephiroth even if the counter-attack materia is not equipped for our fourth fact we're going to be looking at one of the more unique collaborations that involved Sephiroth now I think we can all appreciate that Square Enix loves a collaboration and in recent years this has become rather extreme as they've been cross promoting products like crazy as shown by the inclusion of reco in Final Fantasy brave X fears and the rather expansive crossovers with Assassin's Creed origins and monster hunter world but this wasn't the first cameo that Square Enix had undertaken with the realm of Monster Hunter as a previous cameo from a few years prior featured the venerable saman Bahamut and his dark friend Diablos The Warrior of Light and Sephiroth the gaming question was Monster Hunter 4 ultimate on the 11th of October 2014 Capcom announced that they would be working with Tetsuya Nomura on a final fantasy themed collaboration they would see two unique sets of armor created called Anat and rage these would be based around Bahamut and Diablos respectively there was a unique palico armor set based on the warrior of light and an associated sword called the sword of parity and then there was the wing of judgment a weapon that was heavily inspired by Sephiroth it's noted on the description that it acts as the embodiment of an almighty deities wing and where the handle stops and the blade begins you can clearly see sephiroth's glorious face jutting out similar to how Genova was fashioned within the nibble hime reactor since we're on the subject of crossovers feels like the perfect time to talk about kingdom hearts as sephiroth's appearance within the first two games clearly left a lasting impression but in the first one there was also something inherently unique when Kingdom Hearts was in its early stages of development Disney were keen for one of their various protagonists to be the lead character in this venture but Tetsuya Nomura refused he believed the game would be much more successful if it featured an original cast of characters instead that's not to say Disney wouldn't have a prominent role to play those assets would just be used to help boost the more original aspects of the game and Final Fantasy was used in much the same way but while Disney properties were used to help give the game a much more distinctive aesthetic Final Fantasy was used to help bolster the game's narrative it was something that Nomura touched upon in the build-up to Kingdom Hearts 3 when he spoke to us gamer he was talking about the significant reduction in Final Fantasy characters as the franchise progressed and said when you look back at the first Kingdom Hearts Sora was still a new character so we kind of had the Final Fantasy characters as supporting characters within the context of the original Kingdom Hearts this support was quite wide reaching and while it did assist with the story development Nomura also had an ulterior motive at that point there had been very few games where Final Fantasy characters had appeared outside of their original setting and Nomura figured that Kingdom Hearts could fill this void so he had numerous characters from the various games that he'd worked on come under one roof together due to his popularity cloud was a Xuan just as he had been within a guys and chocobo racing but within the original Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts there was no place for Sephiroth to appear on the opposite side he was instead added for the international version of Kingdom Hearts as a rather challenging boss encounter content which then arrived later for Japanese audiences in Kingdom Hearts final mix was interesting about Sephiroth within the original Kingdom Hearts though is that he's the embodiment of clouds darkness as opposed to being a direct representation of Sephiroth within Final Fantasy 7 because of this sephiroth's face within Kingdom Hearts was changed to have it resemble clouds and his eyes were also changed from his standard cat-like green to regular blue eyes the thing that's most unique about this appearance though is that within the original Kingdom Hearts Sephiroth held the Masamune in his right hand it meant that Sephiroth was a poster child for left-handers everywhere much late link from The Legend of Zelda except for when he wasn't perhaps this was again a reference to Sephiroth being the embodiment of clouds darkness within the realm of Kingdom Hearts for his second appearance in the franchise he reverted back to being left-handed so who knows all right so our penultimate fact relates to sephiroth's retroactive appearance in a main series game before Final Fantasy 7 as the franchise built out it wasn't too uncommon for characters to appear in small cameos it helped the games to fill more connected acting as a nice surprise for fans of the wider Final Fantasy franchise cloud for example appeared within Final Fantasy Tactics with both their appearing in the War of the Lions and other games such as Final Fantasy 9 have featured many allusions to prior games within the remakes and remasters this has also led to content being retroactive Lee added Gilgamesh for example appeared within Final Fantasy 1 & 2 dawn of souls despite his first chronological appearance being in Final Fantasy 5 it was a superficial addition but a nice ode nonetheless and several appearance within the anthology release of Final Fantasy 5 could easily be described in the same way however unlike some of the other cameos we've seen over the years this one was a bit more subtle as Sephiroth would appear in 2d sprite form on loading screens on random occasions it gave players a taste of what Sephiroth would have looked like had he been around in that particular era of gaming Cloud Strife also appeared in a similar manner but that's where the cameo ended as there was no literal representation of either of them within the actual game and that brings us nicely onto our final fact which relates to sephiroth's appearance within Advent Children and how his hair caused quite a few problems when work started on Advent Children Tetsu Nomura was adamant that Sephiroth had to appear within the feature film despite seemingly being defeated within the confines of Final Fantasy 7 he just knew that his presence would change the entire atmosphere of the film but they had to work out a way to realize that vision once that was established they then had to figure out how to change Sephiroth part of this related to his voice which was provided by a Toshiyuki Morikawa a voice actor who had previously voiced numerous characters including Griffith from zurk when casting had begun Nomura had no idea how he actually wanted suffer off the sound but once they heard Morikawa speak they felt it was the perfect fit and they ended up giving him limited guidance in terms of how he should actually deliver his lines within the final product in line with this the written word was also tweaked to make Sephiroth seem much more seductive they wanted his speech to better reflect his majestic beauty and it saw them increase his vocabulary the idea was to make several statements seem much more profound so as to emphasize his superiority they also wanted to give Sephiroth a slightly different visual aesthetic and they worked hard to make him feel very otherworldly to really push home the fact that he wasn't like other mortals on the planet Takeshi Nazeri who is co-director for the movie noted that despite pushing in this way they were also told to maintain his more alluring qualities at all costs such as his thin lips and attractive nose as you can imagine this also meant that specific focus was placed on his long silver hair and it caused quite a few issues something which mess at suger Yamamoto spoke about within the Final Fantasy 7 reunion files art book he was one of the key animators on the film and said when you have a character with long hair in an intense action sequence you can't just let the computer do all the work we had to animate most of Sepphoris hair manually and the lead animator really had a hard time with that with the fight scene then extended with inadvertent complete this would have become a much more troublesome issue but they rose to the challenge and came up with some seamless animations by the standards of that time another interesting anecdote relates to fatigue throughout the film many of the protagonists show visual signs of fatigue and exertion is sweat and their clothes get worn but that was not the case with several even during the intense fight sequence with cloud at the end of the movie Nomura was adamant as Sephiroth should show no signs of physical exertion he wanted to use this to again emphasize his otherworldly qualities but also his superiority over cloud and with that massive summary of adventure we are at the end of the list so yeah they were seven facts about Sephiroth that he probably didn't know and we threw in a few extra ones for good measure hopefully you guys found them all really interesting if you did then please consider hitting that like button subscribing to the channel if you haven't done so already and hitting that Bell so you get notified immediately when we published new content and if you have the time be sure to let us know in the comments which are the facts you found most interesting alright guys this is Daryl signing out I would like to extend a big thank you to all our patreon and YouTube's membership supporters and of course a big thank you to everyone watching this video I'll see you all again real soon for more Final Fantasy goodness [Music]

Channel: Final Fantasy Union

Views: 651,508

Rating: 4.9037852 out of 5

Keywords: sephiroth, sephiroth final fantasy 7, sephiroth vs cloud, sephiroth kingdom hearts, sephiroth fight, sephiroth kills aerith, sephiroth origins, sephiroth facts, sephiroth final fantasy 7 remake, sephiroth final battle, safer sephiroth, sephiroth advent children, sephiroth crisis core, final fantasy facts, final fantasy 7, final fantasy 7 remake

Id: FQco-FgvaKY

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019