final fantasy 7 rebirth dropped last week, and i’ve enjoyed getting reacquainted with all the friends (well, almost all… rip jessie) i made in 2020’s remake. one character i didn’t expect to have even a passing fondness for, however, was sephiroth. the rpg genre’s ur-bad boy serves as the adventure’s main antagonist, but in fleshing out his backstory, rebirth contextualizes his ambitions and makes him far more sympathetic than the confrontation at the end of remake led me to believe.

following their dramatic escape from midgar in the previous game, our heroes — cloud strife, aerith gainsborough, tifa lockhart, barret wallace, and red xiii — hole up in a hotel to listen to cloud explain his history with sephiroth. this plays out as a flashback to his first serious mission as a SOLDIER, a genetically modified military force loyal to shinra electric power company. sometime before the events of final fantasy 7, a strike team comprised of cloud, sephiroth, and two unnamed grunts was deployed to cloud‘s hometown nibelheim to investigate a mako reactor in the area.

it’s here that we get a completely different view of sephiroth. rather than stalking cloud from afar like a hungry predator, the silver-haired hero of the conflict between shinra and the nation of wutai acts as a mentor to our young protagonist. the relationship is very much that of a commanding officer and his subordinate, but there’s a subtle warmth in their interactions that humanizes sephiroth. he even pokes fun at cloud during one battle by flirtatiously referring to his eager charge as a “puppy,” no doubt giving the existing fanfiction community enough material for decades to come.

of course, everyone familiar with the story of final fantasy 7 knows this can’t last. sephiroth discovers his “mother” jenova in the mako reactor, learns of his origins as the result of shinra‘s experiments on the mysterious, non-human lifeform, and absolutely loses his shit. nibelheim burns, its residents so confused by sephiroth‘s actions that many die simply asking their hero why. rebirth then returns us to the present day, where cloud says he doesn’t remember what happened between these events and his arrival in midgar.

as someone with no prior final fantasy 7 experience before the remake series, i felt a profound sadness watching these events play out for the first time. while i don’t yet know if this kind of explosive rage was always bubbling below sephiroth‘s aloof exterior, he was at least generally stable before his encounter with jenova. maybe it was all an act! but through his narration of nibelheim‘s razing — which, i should also say, is looking increasingly unreliable as childhood friend tifa compares it with her own memories of that day — cloud portrays sephiroth as a more complex, arguably tragic figure than the unrelenting evil we’ve seen so far.

i’m very much looking forward to seeing how this relationship plays out as rebirth continues.