Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase prove a fan’s love for a franchise can stay for more than 20 years. Square Enix finally released Final Fantasy 7 Remake in 2020, fulfilling fan clamor for a remake of the 1997 PlayStation 1 classic. This time, the Final Fantasy game goes to modern consoles with its characters and story intact but with entirely revamped graphics and gameplay.
In Final Fantasy 7 Remake, players find themselves playing as Cloud Strife and his friends from AVALANCHE. Additionally, players finally get to see a revamped version of Midgar, the game’s capital city. However, it seems Midgar has some secrets of its own.
10 Hello, New York!
Players who love Final Fantasy 7 will likely recognize that Midgar looks and “feels” like a living, breathing city. As it turns out, the original development team based Midgar from New York City. Moreover, the dev team meant for the game to take place in The Big Apple.
However, Hironobu Sakaguchi, series creator, opted to create Midgar instead. Regardless, Midgar hits exceptionally close to home as a “real” city. People who love to travel can notice the differences when going to Midgar’s more “developed” areas compared to the slums, something Final Fantasy 7 Remake does a great job of demonstrating.
9 Literally A Slice Of Life
Midgar in Final Fantasy 7 has multiple “Sectors,” all connected to the centralized Sector 0 that holds Shinra HQ. The eight Sectors surround Sector 0 like a “technological pizza,” something intended by design. Moreover, the JRPG’s art director, Yusuke Naora, said he imagined a pizza while designing Midgar for the game.
Interestingly, this “funny” design inspiration turned out transformative for the game. The pizza layout of Midgar divided the citizens. The “privileged” live above ground in these Sectors, while the underprivileged live below the city. This “division” becomes root to a lot of conflict between Shinra and the masses.
8 Do You Want Some Pizza?
Consistent with the pizza theme, Midgar actually features some pizza-related themes in both the dialogue and actual characters. For instance, Barret affirms the pizza connection when he calls the upper plate as a “pizza” in the dialogue. Moreover, the slums below the city have the “Underneath the Rotting Pizza” OST playing during exploration.
Additionally, Midgar is headed by two people named after popular pizza chains. For instance, Mayor Domino is a reference to Domino’s Pizza, a popular pizza chain. Meanwhile, Deputy Mayor Hart’s Japanese name is Hatto which references Pizza Hut, again another popular pizza chain.
7 Size Was A Big Deal
Square Enix seems to have taken the extra mile redesigning Midgar for Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Not only did they outdo themselves in terms of graphics, but they also made sure to try their best “translating” their concept of Midgar into a realistic setting. In an interview, the team explained how they estimated the right size for buildings and structures found in the city - from the houses down to the pillars.
What’s impressive is that Square didn’t even make every part of the city playable. However, they still mapped the regions of Midgar players eventually have to explore and what buildings they should see there.
6 A Paradise For A Dying World
The desolate and dystopian theme of Final Fantasy 7 was not accidental and the idea seeped through Midgar’s design even in early drafts. According to Final Fantasy’s Ultimania Omega compendium, early drafts of the script already cemented Midgar’s role as a “paradise.”
As per the early script, a group of people living underground created Midgar as a means to escape the barren Gaia. Consistent with the final story, first drafts of Gaia showed the planet as a place slowly dying with humanity depleting its Mako reserves.
5 Realism For The Remake
The Final Fantasy 7 Remake team wanted to make a realistic Midgar. However, they didn’t settle with just making a Midgar that fits the size of a realistic city. Rather, they wanted to make Midgar realistic down to the way people live their lives in the capital.
Players see this in the opening sequence. Instead of jumping straight to the bomb mission like in the original entry, the Remake shows a “normal” situation first. Players see people on the playground that divide plate-dwellers and slum dwellers. When the Mako reactor went kaboom in the Remake, players may be able to feel the dread in people’s faces much clearly.
4 A Callback To Previous Entries
The dev team for Final Fantasy 7 Remake wanted to maximize the nostalgia factor of the game to fans of the franchise. They didn’t just tap into the original Final Fantasy 7 game for inspiration, but they explored the entire Final Fantasy 7 Compilation to find the necessary material to make as much of an impact on gamers.
As a result, Midgar in Final Fantasy 7 Remake resembles Midgar as seen in Advent Children as well as other games and media set in the city. This “callback” might reference Square Enix’s desire to make future titles as “action-packed” as Advent Children, something they are close to achieving with recent games.
3 Music Breathes Life To Sectors
Despite Final Fantasy 7’s leap into 3D, it didn’t get to show the full depth of Midgar. Moreover, the Remake also didn’t give players the chance to explore the entirety of the city in an open-world environment. However, the game compensates for this lack of visual impact with its music.
Fans with a penchant for music can recognize a lot of iconic tracks in Midgar from Final Fantasy 7’s original soundtrack. “Under the Rotting Pizza” is the most prominent of these themes, which reflects on how the city looks like a pizza. In upper areas, “Lurking in the Darkness” plays to signal how evil hides in privilege. Meanwhile, “The Oppressed” reflects the people’s plights in the slums, and “Flowers Blooming in the Church” plays in Sector 5’s iconic Church.
2 Beyond Dark
Most newcomers to Final Fantasy 7 might call the entire game “dark,” in both its themes and aesthetic choice. After all, both the original game and the Remake portray the city as a busy cityscape of pipes, neon lights, and Mako degradation. However, Yoshinori Kitase said Midgar’s “dark appearance” reflects their aesthetic choice for the city.
In an interview, Kitase mentioned their choice of coloring and lighting makes the game unique. For instance, the Final Fantasy 7 Remake approached modern Midgar’s aesthetics, not from a photorealistic POV, but rather something still stylized.
1 Constantly In Construction
Given Final Fantasy 7’s original New York connection, it makes sense for Midgar to follow some semblance of real-world years. Shinra started constructing Midgar in 1976 as both an investment and a settlement for its employees. Midgar has been in a constant state of construction throughout the Final Fantasy 7 Compilation series.
This caveat also explains why some parts of the city have a rather “incomplete” aesthetic. Unfortunately, the spell Meteor will be causing catastrophic damage to Midgar. In the event known as Meteorfall, Sephiroth destroys most of Midgar while Aerith’s Holy tries to fend it off.
NEXT: 5 Reasons Final Fantasy 7 Is The Best PS1 Era Game (& 5 Why It’s Final Fantasy 9)
