A Dark Hero. (Part I)

Final Fantasy VII is the game that revolutionized Role-Playing Games. Not because of its deep gameplay mechanisms, but because of its storytelling. It departed from the common story of RPGs, usually set in a medieval land with magic, orcs, and lots of magical swords. Final Fantasy VII was set in a dystopian land, where an evil corporation controlled most of the Planet, and literally sucks out its life force to generate electricity. This is where our spiky-haired hero comes into play. Cloud Strife, a mercenary, is hired by a terrorist group to blow up a reactor designed to absorb the Planet's lifestream and convert it into the useful movement of electrons. The situation quickly grows out of proportion, and Cloud discovers that the Shin-Ra Company is more than an electrical monopoly, and that the Planet's survival has been jeopardized by the Company's experiments on life's very support structure.

His antithesis comes in the form of Sephiroth, a fallen hero who went evil and insane. Sephiroth is nothing but an experiment conducted by the Shin-Ra Company in an attempt to make a perfect soldier. This revelation made him start to hate everything, and to destroy it all, he embarks on his own quest to become a god.

Cloud is the very image of the dark hero, as his past is unknown even to himself, and his life is nothing more than an illusion. Cloud is described as a puppet by his arch-nemesis, Sephiroth, as every event in the game was planned by none other than him. Cloud distances himself from his travel companions at the beggining of his tale, but quickly learns that they should depend on each other if they are going to save the world. His quest is mostly for redemption, as the life he lived was actually based on his dead friend's memory. By the end of the first third of the story, Cloud is comfortable with the idea of saving the world, but then tragedy strikes, and he is left as a sad little lump of human. He then goes through a journey into his innermost memories, rediscovering who he is, and why he should fight to stop the Planet's impending doom.

Cloud's heroic quest mixes many aspects of several types of heroic journeys. He embarks on a quest for identity, vengeance, and knowledge. All of this mixed into a tragic journey where his sweetheart gets killed.