Well, Aeris is dead.

I realise I should probably be more emotional about this, but I think the fact that I knew it was coming dampened the impact a little.  I can imagine that for Jim, playing this game when it first came out at the ripe old age of 8 (what kind of sick mind does that to an eight-year-old?  Hell, what kind of sick mind does that to my eight-year-old best friend?), it was probably a pretty nasty shock.

What happens, in short, is that Cloud and the others arrive at the City of the Ancients (which seems to have a very pronounced marine theme for some reason; I didn’t think the Cetra were an aquatic race…) and find Aeris praying alone in an underwater sanctuary.  Apparently under Sephiroth’s influence, Cloud draws his sword and, slowly but surely, struggling every step of the way, raises it over his head, ready to slice Aeris in two.  This, I think, is about as close as I got to the shock someone playing this game sans spoilers would have experienced because, although I’ve known from the start that Aeris’ life had a use-by date, I didn’t think the game would be cruel enough to make the player push the button.  That was… well, honestly a little sickening.  I briefly contemplated just turning the game off.  In the end, though, Cloud snaps out of it, and instead Sephiroth drops out of nowhere and skewers her.  As I said, probably quite a nasty shock for someone who doesn’t know it’s coming, especially after Cloud has just come to his senses and you think it’s safe.

After Aeris’ death, Cloud vows revenge, and the party continues following Sephiroth north, past another town (where we learn some interesting things about Aeris’ mother, Ifalna) and eventually to a crater in the middle of an ancient glacier where Sephiroth’s black-robed mind-slaves are gathering for the ’re-union.’  Cloud fights Sephiroth again and takes back the Black Materia, gives it to Barrett for safe keeping, and heads further in to settle things once and for all.  Meanwhile, Rufus Shinra arrives at the head of the Turkish air force, believing that the materia-rich crater is the ‘Promised Land’ he has been searching for this whole time.  This… is where things start to get a little bit screwy.

Backing up a bit.  Ifalna left a few video recordings behind – interviews between her and a scientist studying the history of the Cetra.  This man is Professor Gast, the former Turkish head of science, and apparently Aeris’ father (!!), who sacrificed himself to help Ifalna escape the Turkish police with their daughter.  The substance of what she says is as follows: two thousand years ago, the planet was struck by an object falling from the sky (the last time Meteor was cast…?) – the impact crater is where we are now.  The local Cetra clan attempted to help the planet heal itself, but they were deceived by the thing that fell from the sky: Jenova, who approached them in the guise of a Cetra and infected them with some kind of plague that drove them mad.  Jenova destroyed all the Cetra clans in the same way, though a few survivors eventually defeated her.  The planet itself had also been concocting some way of fighting back – a huge, powerful monster called simply ‘Weapon’ – but by the time it was grown, Jenova had already been subdued, so Weapon now sleeps in the impact crater along with Jenova’s remains… and Sephiroth.

Yeah, Sephiroth’s been here the whole time.  In fact, as far as I can make out, he’s been here ever since he was supposedly killed five years ago.  The Sephiroth we’ve been seeing, and chasing, and fighting, who killed Aeris, is… I guess a figment of Cloud’s overly active imagination?  The real one is sealed in some kind of crystal at the centre of the crater.  However, after he ‘died,’ Hojo tried to clone him, with mixed results – hence all the black-robed men with numbers tattooed on their faces… and hence Cloud.  Yeah, Cloud is actually a clone of Sephiroth… somehow.  Apparently the boy Tifa grew up with, who came back home five years ago and fought Sephiroth then, is a completely different person.  Cloud, being a clone of Sephiroth, who is a clone of Jenova, was able to insert himself into her memories, without even realising it himself (kind of like how Jenova was able to appear to the ancient Cetra as members of their families).  He, and all of the other clones, are drawn to “reunion” at the crater – they all contain cells from Jenova, who wants to reassemble herself.  How exactly this fits into Sephiroth’s whole “nuke the planet so I can take control of the lifestream” plan, I have no idea.  In fact, in the midst of all these revelations, I still don’t think we know what Jenova actually wants, or even whether ‘want’ is an applicable verb here, for that matter.  Is it just in her nature to destroy things?

Anyway, while Cloud and Tifa are learning all these things, an image of Tifa, another of Sephiroth’s illusions, appears to Barrett outside, telling him Cloud is in trouble and he needs to come and help right away.  Once Barrett arrives, Cloud asks him for the Black Materia, which he obligingly hands over, and Cloud promptly gives it to the real Sephiroth, suspended in his stasis crystal thingy.  All hell breaks loose.  Sephiroth brings down the whole structure of the crater, forcing everyone except Cloud to evacuate on Rufus’ airship, creates a magical barrier around his sanctum, and begins casting Meteor.  The monster Weapon wakes up (Ifalna only mentioned one of these things, but I think I counted at least four leaving the crater – only one seems to be relevant right now, though) and, apparently heedless of its function to destroy Jenova, starts destroying everything but Jenova.  This is where we stand now: Rufus Shinra, the evil power company, and the Turkish air force are trying to save the world from Weapon; Barrett and Tifa are prisoners on his airship, and are about to be executed as scapegoats for the whole ‘end of the world’ thing… oh, yeah, and Sephiroth is bringing an enormous flaming hunk of rock down upon the planet.

In short: it’s time to put on your war face, b!tches.

To be totally honest, the whole Cloud/Sephiroth thing is still making my head spin a little, but I think it may have some very worrying implications.  If Sephiroth’s been up north in the Jenova crater the whole time, it seems like the Sephiroth we’ve been seeing is basically in Cloud’s head – only everyone else can see him too.  Of course… as a descendent of Jenova, Cloud can alter people’s perceptions, without even necessarily realising that he’s doing it.  He caused Tifa to recognise him as her childhood friend (who looked completely different, by the way), and inserted himself into all her memories.  So maybe everything ‘Sephiroth’ has been doing this whole time is the work of the shuffling, mumbling clones… along with Cloud himself.  What I’m getting at here is that it’s possible Cloud never actually gave the Black Materia to Sephiroth at the Temple of the Ancients at all, but was just subconsciously creating a narrative that would justify his drive to travel north so he could bring the Black Materia to the real Sephiroth at the crater.  And, even worse… I think it’s possible Cloud actually did kill Aeris.

Where I left off, the party had just remembered that they were supposed to be looking for Sephiroth, who is supposedly heading for a place called the Temple of the Ancients.  Questioning random members of the citizenry reveals that this temple is ‘way down south’ and cannot be entered without a special keystone – and, as luck would have it, we also happen to bump into the random weaponsmith who just sold this thing to, of all people, the owner of the exorbitantly pricey Golden Saucer amusement park, who even agrees to loan it to Cloud in exchange for a brief stint in his arena.  Everything’s going according to plan!  Now all we have to do is keep Sephiroth from getting his grubby mitts on this thing- and I guess maybe check out the temple too, just to be safe.  The party chills for a while at the Golden Saucer’s haunted house, which doubles as a hotel, and Tifa drags Cloud out on a date, although I don’t think he ever quite realises that it is a date.  He’s just… not a subtle person (as his taste in mêlée weaponry makes abundantly clear).

At this point, Cait Sith steals the keystone, hands it over to the Turkish police, and reveals that he’s been working for the evil power company all along, and GOD DAMN IT I knew it was a bad idea to trust a fortune-telling robot cat with a pet marshmallow demon but I just had to let myself be won over by his… his… I don’t know, I guess his blatant disregard for reality?  And after pulling that $#!t, he then has the gall to ask that Cloud let him stick around like nothing had ever happened!  Unfortunately, he has apparently taken Barrett’s daughter prisoner somehow (damnit, you had ONE JOB, Elmyria!), and his body is only a remote-controlled toy anyway (he’s really a power company employee, plugged into some sort of remote interface at their headquarters), so Cloud and Tifa reluctantly agree to let him stay rather than just filleting him on the spot as any reasonable person would.

Okay.  New plan.  We’re going to the Temple of the Ancients to fight the Turkish police.  Cait Sith, for his part, is totally okay with this and even gives us the co-ordinates to the temple.  Once we get there, it turns out that the Turkish police not only stole the keystone, they also failed to keep Sephiroth out of the temple after opening the damn thing.  Nice going, boys.  Good job.  It’s not even like he’s that tough; one good stab and he just turns into a twenty-foot-tall alien angel monster, and we all know how to deal with those, right?  Anyway.  The moment Aeris gets near the temple, she starts hearing the voices of a group of Cetra who refused to rejoin the lifestream when they died, who give her pointers on getting through the temple, and also show us a vision of Sephiroth in a room with a striking mural of a large group of people watching a meteor fall from the sky.  When we find the room, Sephiroth isn’t there, but it doesn’t take him long to put in an appearance and, like all good supervillains should, explain his diabolical plan: acquire the ultimate destruction spell, Meteor (a ‘calamity from the skies’… hmm…), from the Black Materia inside the temple, then use Meteor to cause such massive, horrific trauma to the planet that it will divert a significant portion of the lifestream to the epicentre of the blast in order to heal itself.  Sephiroth will then use the knowledge he has already gained from the temple to absorb all that power and become, for all intents and purposes, a god.  Honestly this sounds like a terrible plan and, if not for the part about “massive, horrific trauma to the planet,” I’d buy a truckload of popcorn, tell him to follow his dreams, and settle in to watch the show, ’cause I figure there’s better than even odds the lifestream will either take control of him somehow or just blow him up.  It’s almost a shame we can’t afford to let him try.  Oh well.

Anyway, Sephiroth messes with Cloud’s brain briefly and then vanishes.  Aeris learns from the Cetra spirits that, actually, the Black Materia Sephiroth is looking for is the temple itself, which can be magically shrunk down to a nice convenient size by solving a puzzle model – but this can only be done from the inside, crushing whoever gets stuck with that job.  Luckily, Cait Sith has a suggestion – he’ll do it!  His body’s only a toy anyway.  Before the others leave, he says farewell to the party by offering to read someone’s fortune, and Aeris asks him to check her romantic compatibility with Cloud (apparently, they’re astonishingly perfect for each other) – while Tifa is standing right there.  Dick move, Aeris.  Seriously, dick move.  Cait Sith gets a nice scene in the temple core where he talks about how he’s happy that he gets to be a hero, and how there are lots of toys like him, but there’s only one of him, and anyway even if he’s going to die it was worth it to make Aeris smile, and y’know what?  This would be really touching if not for the fact that the bastard comes straight back in an identical new body about five minutes later.

So we get the Black Materia… and Sephiroth shows up again, mind-rapes Cloud into handing it over, and leaves.

…y’know, I’m starting to think everyone in this party is going to betray everyone else at least once by the end of the game.

Cloud has a total breakdown and goes to sleep for about a week, waking up with a profound sense of total worthlessness, and contemplating abandoning the whole fight, since he clearly can’t let his teammates rely on him against Sephiroth.  Tifa and Barrett convince him that it’s no biggie; they can always smack him upside the head and sort him out later if he flips again.  There are bigger problems, though.  While Cloud is sleeping, he sees Aeris in a dream, explaining to him something she has evidently told the party as well: Sephiroth is going to a place on the northern continent called the City of the Ancients to cast Meteor, and Aeris wants Cloud to just sit back, take some Cloud-time, and let her handle Sephiroth.  Alone.

Wait, what?  No.  Aeris, no; that is a terrible idea.  Do you remember what happened the last time you left the party without taking any materia, Miss Quarterstaff-and-a-pink-dress?  I can understand wanting to leave Cloud behind; he’s just not in a good place at the moment, even if he is the best fighter in the group.  You don’t need to leave everyone else behind to guard him,though!  Even if you don’t want anyone else to get hurt, what did we just learn about Cait Sith?  It’s okay if he dies.  He doesn’t mind.  By the way, as long as we’re on this train of thought, it’s also okay if Yuffie dies.  She f#$%ing deserves it.  I’m pretty sure with Cloud out of commission you’re pretty much the de facto protagonist anyway; no-one’s going to question you if you just want to lead the whole party in there.  There’s no reason this has to be a…

…suicide mission.

…c^@p I just figured out how Aeris dies LET’S HAUL ASS, PEOPLE!