Early last year I went through the whole Final Fantasy VII subseries again. Which had a myriad of benefits, but most significantly was that I believe journeying through it chronologically (or in as much of a straight line as the overlapping stories will allow) wholly redefined my appreciation of Sephiroth’s character. That is a damn good tragedy right there. As they might say though, if Sephiroth is so good then why isn’t there a Sephiroth 2 huh? Answer me that. Well, you know what, there is, and I assure you I am not paying mind to Kadaj when I say this. You see, a couple games past the Compilation I couldn’t resist the random temptation to replay Xenoblade 2 as well, and since I already had the emulation files prepared from a previous endeavour the next time I regained consciousness I was already about six hours deep. That’s one of my biggest comfort food games, if not the definitive example. Following up FFVII with XC2 proved to be something very beneficial, as that lingering focus on Sephiroth also cast a new lens upon Jin and Malos, whom display a far greater understanding in their critical response to him and are more deserving to be called remnants of the legacy. I will now begin to argue that this is intentional on the part of Xenoblade, because both Final Fantasy VII and Xeno find their roots in a concept originally penned by Tetsuya Takahashi. Mind you that this isn’t even the series’ first time paying such homage, as I would also suggest that designing Shulk as a blonde with a sword slung over his back was almost certainly in direct acknowledgement of Cloud, furthered by both games’ title screens being a lone shot of the iconic sword. Acting God Amalthus also shares his design with the Diamond Weapon.
Ah yes, my favourite giant-katana wielding, latin choir and electric guitar mixing, silver-haired, one-winged angel. Sephiro- A…from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 for the Nintendo Switch. See what I’m getting at? Like yeah, okay, her one-winged thing is a design and concept reference harking back to the Nisan church…but actually those one-winged angels and FFVII’s one-winged angel are linked at the base design level because Xenogears-FFVII history. Everything is analogous and everything is deliberate, any connection you find as you play the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and the Xeno games will have an equivalent logic and justification for why it resembles the other. And so her katana and silver hair are themselves quite telling. But yeah okay so actually that latin theme does technically belong to her evil split half Alpha, and they’re each left with only one wing to signal them as being halved portions of the whole Ontos, who had both. The wings and chanting, specifically, come about because Ontos was looking to emulate Zanza as its image of godhood…but, uh, let’s hop back on into Xenoblade real quick and see that would you look at that Zanza is also Sephiroth. First introduced with long silver hair that can only leave him described as ‘giant naked Sephiroth’, and his backstory as Klaus is a similar tale of a good man corrupted upon mistakenly believing himself ‘chosen’ by the cosmos beyond. Again, do you see what I’m getting at? This discussion does not end at merely we have Sephiroth at home memes, it is a specific overarching focus through which you guide a replay of both full franchises and uncover new things which enhance your understanding of the setting and storytelling in both.
Hm, yes, Jenova and Deus are direct narrative, thematic and visual analogues. Y’know what, because of that I reckon there might be something worth saying about the musical similarities in how J-E-N-O-V-A and Awakening both open up with that set of four rising scales. That sure does seem like a thing that is absolutely intentional on multiple design levels. The connection just goes on and on and on, as Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII were both produced, to some extent, from one idea. You can notice this in a number of references, shared imagery or similarities in the storytelling and how they evolve their setting in a sequel, but nowhere is this more visible than in the main villains. Both are heroes fallen from grace, are manipulators, schemers and deceivers within the storyline, and have long white/silver hair. Sephiroth wants to become God, Krelian wants to go to God’s dimension by traversing the Path of Sephirot. One is possessed by an alien he believes to be his mother, the other is driven by a secret knowledge that the mother of humanity arrived from outer space. Even more directly than Cloud and Fei’s shared multiple personality disorders, Sephiroth and Krelian are two interpretations of the one character concept. If I could select only a single example to illustrate the connection between them, this would be the most important. I know a lot of people feel the wing on Sephiroth is kinda cringe and emblematic of the worse design decisions in the Compilation, but for me I look at it and I see that within that wing is contained a meta-narrative of Sephiroth stylistically acknowledging his relation to Krelian.
With this understanding in place Sephiroth’s one-winged human form introduced via Advent Children is contextualised as a parallel to the golden wings that spread before Krelian departs the mortal plane, making them in fact a really exciting imagery link. This begins to cycle throughout both franchises. Sephiroth and Krelian start a character archetype where it’s impossible, or at least problematic, to discern who the original actually was. There is another tangential discussion to have at some point about a potential transitionary line running from Magus to Sephiroth to Krelian, as an extension of the much more firm link from Lavos to Jenova and Deus, and how core of a predecessor Chrono Trigger is to both these titles at large. Looking to Sephiroth and Krelian as a pair though, the timeline isn’t something you could unravel without actually being one of the creatives involved. But then Advent Children references Krelian by cementing wings as a new staple of Seph’s human silhouette, and the Remake project doubles down on this by reclaiming some of Takahashi’s original mysticism within the setting. Xenoblade continually iterates on Sephiroth – we’re at like version five right now but there will surely be at least one in each new entry for as long as the franchise persists – as well as numerous other character design and location references. Not only is this sephirot archetype seen in both original games, but Jin is a clear fusion of Sephiroth and Krelian where the former aesthetic is dominant, whereas Z is a fusion who aligns more closely with Krelian to signal Xenoblade 3 as the main Xenogears retelling among all the other Xenogears retellings in the franchise. N is part of it to a lesser extent as well.
In addition, Sephiroth was such a smash hit that FF would retread his concept a number of times. Seen in the designs of the ‘silver demon’ marquis Messam Elmdore (whose chibi sprite in the FF Tactics art style therefore also heavily resembles Krelian’s ingame sprite), or…whatever’s going on with that whole Xehanort thing, as well as the meteor-centric storyline and imagery of ‘silver raven’ Nael van Darnus. Lightning is heavily modelled on Cloud, so it’s therefore no surprise that her main enemy Caius turns out to be an overpowered, long-haired, comet-summoning monster of a man, who coincidentally also has a ton in common with Malos despite debuting in 2011 (I’ll surely make a blog post on this for fun later down the line). Furthermore, One-Winged Angel is a cited comparison point for Caius’ Theme, and Fiend is an obvious reference. Most recently for this topic Final Fantasy XVI had a very awesome surprise of bringing everything full circle with Barnabas. At first glance the dark, mysterious, flying swordmaster obsessed with the divine performs similar to Sephiroth in many moments. On even closer inspection though, Barnabas is a bisexual, super-powered paladin covered in jet black armour, who takes up a dark ether blade capable of cleaving the fabric of reality for his crusade to eliminate free will in the name of God – to effectively become their own borrowed version of Malos, literally dubbed by the same guy, as a show of respect since FFXVI is a contender for the closest Square Enix has ever got to their own spiritual remake of Xenogears.
But that, all of that thing that just happened there, that’s a tangent. Which I will not elaborate upon. Because this script, although I haven’t done a great job of introducing it thus far, is about Jin and Malos in the context of this archetype. Please ignore that it is 10 minutes in and I’m only introducing my topic now.
Where do you find the image of Sephiroth in Xenoblade? Essentially, Jin and Malos each comprise half of his character. One is his smothered light and the other a divine hatred. The pair are quite literally the white and black elements of Sephiroth’s colour scheme isolated into two distinct individuals that embody his character contradiction.
For Jin this is immediately obvious. Just look at them next to each other. XC2’s Blade system allowed for a smorgasbord of character designers to hop onto the project, each bringing their own art style with them. Of interest to this discussion is that Tetsuya Nomura was the one handed the enemy group. Although there were jokes about Patroka resembling Tifa, Jin is obviously the most notable. He’s a white-haired man of equivalent build wearing the same type of long coat that Sephiroth does. He’s a bit shorter, but Malos and Sephiroth are the same height so it still works out that if you fused the Xenoblade pair you would effectively create Sephiroth’s character design. When Jin transforms his winged form can be said to resemble Safer Sephiroth as well. Nomura taking this direct inspiration when designing him is not exactly a secret, yet observing both characters with my replays in such proximity heightens its effect. The greatest hero expresses his love to mankind and is betrayed, falling into madness and turning upon a species he now deemed unworthy to possess the world. Sephiroth, a silver-haired SOLDIER wielding a sword named Masamune, was once the hero of the Wutai War. Jin likewise was renowned as the strongest Blade in all of old Torna, also wielding a weapon called Masamune for his part in the Aegis War. Both swords are magical weapons that the user summons out of thin air. Jin’s works this way because he’s a Blade and that’s just their thing, whereas Sephiroth’s has taken all the way until Rebirth for Square Enix to finally provide an insight to where Sephiroth hides his comically long sword when not in combat. We witness him manifest the blade in Advent Children, which I’ve previously always chalked up to the ghostlike nature of his existence in that film, but if you pay close attention you can barely make out the purple energy when Sephiroth summons it to his hand in the opening chapters. Swords with the power to just pop in out of nowhere, a small corroborating detail in the arsenal which aligns further elements of their visual design. And, while I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here, the Blade Weapon of Sephiroth-derivative Logos does eventually manifest as a katana too in the hands of the Sephiroth-derivative Consul N.
Although they’ve already turned villain prior to the game’s start, Sephiroth, Jin and Malos are all first encountered as party members to give this initial recognition of them as powerful, famous warriors. Standoffish but, all things considered, someone you could easily imagine the protagonist would have looked up to; this is the dynamic that the early section of Nibelheim and the Ancient Vessel describe of them. They stay their hand and thus appear to be heroes. Right up until they encounter the conspiracy of their creation and so comprehend the limitations of their existence, that is. Then things turn dark quite fast. Sephiroth accidentally wanders into the truth of the Jenova Project during his inspection of the Nibelheim mako reactor and a lingering feeling of disconnect that he’d been trying to ignore all his life is finally dragged into view. That he isn’t quite human. He’s Shinra’s perfected monster who was born by merging Jenova cells into his genome at the fetal stage. Robbed of his place among humanity, any link to its culture is instantly lost and his initial response is to rampage and seek revenge. Nibelheim is razed in the blink of an eye and he soon turns that wicked gaze upon the world in its entirety.
Jin’s story in Xenoblade 2 covers this section of Sephiroth’s history; Love, loss and the ensuing violence. The flying Indolese Praetorium is based on Solaris, which shares its story origin with Shinra due to FFVII and Xenogears both being adaptations of Takahashi’s draft. His own fall from grace is an equivalent tragedy converted for the setting of Alrest. In the aftermath of the Aegis War, Praetor Amalthus authorises a purge on the Tornan refugees with the goal of eliminating Mythra and silencing any who knew about his human genome experiments. But by this point Addam and the Aegis had long since disappeared, so the Tornans were slaughtered for nothing. Lora is murdered in the assault, and the only thing he can do to preserve her memory is to fuse her cells into his own core as a Flesh Eater abomination. Jin ceases to exist in the way a Blade ordinarily should and so loses his trust in the Driver system. He refuses to be shackled by the Praetorium any longer and unexpectedly betrays his old values by using Malos as a means of becoming external to the current paradigm. From a thematic standpoint Malos, his conceptual other half, is the one who rouses Jin to pick up his sword again and together become an embodiment of Sephiroth’s revenge. The primary difference between the antagonists in these two games is therefore that Jin fails to truly give up on love. Instead of cutting everyone off and racing toward hell all alone, he forms a connection with Malos that then leads him to create another home among a new set of allies. Sephiroth’s obsession with Cloud unhealthily conflates the boundaries of love (since he’s the only living connection Sephiroth has left) and hate (since the only reason Cloud became special is because of that ‘crowning moment’ where he somehow managed to blindside Sephiroth twice at the Nibel Reactor, crossing a barrier that it seemed no other living being would ever be capable of). Cloud is the only person that he holds dear in any capacity, and therefore becomes the most singular target of his violence and torment as a twisted form of preferential treatment. I do personally believe that there is a genuine discussion to be had about the potential for reading into Sephiroth’s abusive affections based on his possessive mannerisms, obviously suggestive dialogue and the homoerotic subtext that’s so self-evidently present in FFVII given how little one has to travel to encounter jokes about Sephiroth chasing his boyfriend all the way to Smash Ultimate and whatnot. Then that trickles down to Xenoblade as the precedent for writing the followup characters Malos and Jin to be more overtly gay, the latter even sharing Cloud’s voice actor. Both his power and his pride don’t manage to measure up to Sephiroth, so Rex’s optimism successfully seep into Jin and in the end he sacrifices himself to protect his memory of the time he lived among humans. This course of events would be unthinkable for Sephiroth, so Jin reveals what it could have been like had he not given up hope, and in doing so they become alternate routes of sorts that synergise and enhance each other’s character depth. This is one of the ways in which Jin qualifies as a remnant of Sephiroth.
Since the human elements of Sephiroth are most strongly conveyed through flashbacks and prequel content, so too does majority of Jin’s homage hinge on the previous era. Everyone is shocked to see his heel-turn specifically because they know what a nice man he was before. Mythra reminisces that there were “none stronger, yet none kinder either and no one who hated to fight more than him”, confused as to how one like that could possibly end up in such a dark place. His role in this topic is dependant on the past. Malos is then the one positioned to be the primary vessel for Sephiroth’s present motivations as a villain and the emotional nuance that comprises his core conflict; After the tragedy has unfolded and now into the personal contradiction as he seeks to define himself once more.
To paint a picture of Sephiroth is not exactly the easiest task, owing in part to the original game’s clunky translation and his sparse appearances within. Aside from the simple matter of vastly differing volumes of text in a 1997 game vs 2010 onward, Sephiroth is just harder to get a feel for than the others in this list. Because he’s bigger and scarier and more full of hate than the comparison points of Jin and Malos, Sephiroth rarely lets you in like those two do. Cloud would never try and talk to him, to unpack, deconstruct or especially not fix him as intimately as Rex does. The player doesn’t get the same direct insights. So you have to actually stop and think why is he rampaging, what are his motivations in this endgame of exceeding humanity and how does this interact with his defining characterisation at Nibelheim? Especially in the plot from before any of the elaborations in the Compilation, it’s admittedly not the easiest endeavour to pull out a definition of the man beyond ‘scary lunatic.’ And because he isn’t as outwardly emotional, a lot of Sephiroth’s effort is channelled into his presentation instead with the booming horror themes inspired by Jaws and countless imagery parallels to The Thing, which are such heavy-hitting setpieces they can further distract one from the more subtle turmoil hidden in his actions, the panic as he’s reaching for mother, reaching for Cloud, reaching for god and none of them actually wanting to take his hand. Nevertheless you can still discern what his emotional conflict is, that he’s trying to elevate himself above humanity because they’ve betrayed his trust. Sephiroth holds some abstract idea for how specifically it is that he wants to supersede man and as such is using the violence to assert himself. Otherwise there’s no good reason why he doesn’t immediately assassinate the Shinra execs, decimate Midgar and throw society into disarray, considering he has the capacity to teleport powerful clones anywhere at will. For his role in the story to make sense Sephiroth’s acts of violence must be something he’s using to send a message. The two key points in his arc are the Nibelheim Incident and declaration of divinity at the Ancient Temple, so for this reason we’re lead to make a connection between them, concluding that because he can’t remain human his pursuit of divinity is something done to supplement his lost identity. However, seeing events unfold in real-time across the Compilation much better highlights the magnitude of his decision to pursue higher existence. The extended content spends more time on his early years – his human years – where we get to see that despite his sharp demeanour he did care deeply about his friends Angeal and Genesis. Losing those emotional pillars when they commit treason is what leaves Sephiroth vulnerable enough to eventually collapse. He’s considerate of Zack’s feelings too, affording lenience here and there to make up for occasionally pushing work onto him. It was once a good man in there, easily misunderstood but caring in his own way. Sephiroth actually smiled quite a lot. When Cloud recounts the Nibelheim incident it’s told from his own negative biases, but Zack was looking at a close colleague in that moment so Crisis Core’s ground-level depiction of the catastrophe focuses more on the trauma that Sephiroth was undergoing throughout. The story illustrates who he was before this and what gravitas it actually carried for his roots to be stripped away. Even when confronted with a conspiracy he intrinsically understood to be true, told by one of the few people he genuinely respected and liked spending time with, Sephiroth still tried to resist Genesis’ provocations. To the point he would tell one of his closest friends to rot. Unfortunately the suggestion still plagues his mind and the week spent immersing himself in reading the entire Nibelheim archive without food or sleep left him delirious enough to internalise the curse, but this is because Sephiroth was desperately trying to find something which would refute the claims made at the reactor. He very much still wanted to be normal, to preserve that connection, but when it can’t proven that he is his mind had to turn to an external factor to stop itself from outright breaking. Mobius Final Fantasy’s crossover events with FFVII are a genuine contender for the worst visuals and voice acting I’ve ever seen in a game, but it nonetheless opens up with a valuable, very rare moment of weakness from the man himself.
“You may turn your back on the past, lock your memories away. Hide reality behind a layer of illusion. Yes, at memory’s end you may plead for it all to go away. But the past is a curse, binding your soul.”
Sephiroth, ‘Mobius Final Fantasy: Fatal Calling’
Although we hear plenty about it in Final Fantasy VII, the greater detail given to his years as a hero is what properly cements Sephiroth’s motivation. Hating man for making him a monster, and so too himself for failing to be human. Thrashing around as he searches for the boundaries of his identity. When Aerith says “everything about you is wrong” and so denounces his quest for evolution, Sephiroth lowers his head as if to acknowledge this as truth, but then continues on in his code regardless as he also understands that his extreme actions have removed any chance of turning back. Hating the world, hating himself, and so trying to use ‘mother’ to turn lies into his long-sought truth that’ll grant him a place to belong: that is his contradiction, his hatred equally individual and indiscriminate, and why he clings so tightly to something as vile as Jenova. Even though it’s a grotesque, mutilated alien, by accepting it as Mother it becomes the only place he can feel familial love, or be assured that he isn’t considered unwelcome purely by being alive. Humans become, in his words, “inferior dullards” and he works to substantiate his new belief that he is not to be considered their lesser.
Malos is faced with this same issue, suffering because his corrupt programming leaves him unable to understand his Father‘s feelings. He’s one of those characters where his apparent simplicity actually stems from how complex his motivations are. If I could paraphrase a quote from the beginning of Advent Children to fit this situation: ‘There was one Blade named Malos who was better than the rest. But when he found out about the terrible experiments that made him, he began to hate Indol. And then, over time, he began to hate everything.’ Another applicable quote is when Aerith mourns that “all these memories and moments, precious and fleeting, they’re like rain rolling off his back. And once they’re gone he won’t cry, or shout, or anything.” In a manner not unlike Sephiroth, a behavioural impasse keeps him away from people by caging him into a set role where he can’t morally accept love without forsaking himself. You watch him take the alternate path of an Aegis. Wielding his power without restraint, yet walking lonesome and enduring his all-consuming rage to the point it even encroaches upon himself. Keeping a tight lip right until the end where Rex finally convinces him to voice his hesitations openly.
His confusion surrounding the Architect and what role he’s meant to play in the world is inherited from his Driver. Their character revelations are intimately linked, so I believe it necessary to digress here and briefly summarise Amalthus.
“O Architect, is this the world you intended?”
Like the majority of Xeno’s main antagonists, Amalthus is someone driven mad by his own misinterpreted version of God’s message. I think it’s important to note that he’s not an outwardly evil character like Zanza, but that his perversions come from a disgust for the human condition. His traumatic past where he caved to revenge when faced with the group that murdered his mother, and of seeing a refugee he personally saved then go on to slaughter another family in search of material wealth, leaves him questioning where God was in all of it. Desperation pushes him so far as to physically climb up and down the gargantuan World Tree in hopes of having his faith renewed by directly meeting with the divine. Perhaps he wanted the Architect to admonish him for the malice which was slowly spreading within, because as it stood Amalthus was starting to lose sight of what value people like these supposedly had. But he finds Elysium dead silent – other than the horrifying war machines – and furthermore one of the Blades summoned from the cores enshrined there proved itself capable of sinking entire continents. Far from being called out, the evil within him seemingly went unpunished by God. Perhaps the newfound arsenal granted to him may even be considered an oracle. And so his eyes fall dark. A character of dense moral contradictions and deliberate obfuscations in the way he carries himself, yet his heart was laid bare by the malevolent nature imbued into his Blade. Malos embodied his resentment in a way he wasn’t prepared to face. The reason why Amalthus fears the Monado’s power in a flashback is because it was such overt, unhidden violence, like his personal doubts suddenly exploding out and scorching the earth, to the extent he considers summoning the other Aegis for a shot at redemption. But Malos puts him off it, knowing that the outcome would remain the same since the problem came from inside. Just before ditching Amalthus he promises to fulfill their shared wish to rob life from the world. Driver and Blade are connected so this is a moment where the unfiltered truth is spoken, tormenting Amalthus with awareness about exactly what kind of a person he is. And in a bid to deny it, Amalthus passes out the other core to Addam. Desiring to halt his worsening opinion of humanity by moving his ‘mistake’ of summoning Malos out of view, and to observe what path the Aegis takes when in the hands of someone else. Amalthus initially had scorned Malos because of his position as a man of faith, and the suggestion that it was his feelings informing the destruction was something he didn’t want to think about. But that faith is slowly twisted into something sickening over his long lifetime, until eventually Rex perceives him as indistinguishable from Malos. Throughout centuries of his reign the Architect’s silence, the declining state of the people and the Aegis’ presence finally affirm his lingering suspicion that the pursuit of death is the true will of God. That, yes, this decay is the world the Architect intended. The reason they’d never been saved was because they were unworthy to bear the flame of life, and Malos, ultimately, was a reflection of his heart and faith after all. Unaware that it was his own nihilism which had poisoned Malos in the first place. Horrible experiences in his early childhood shaped his worldview that people are violent, selfish and unholy, and he has interpreted of God’s inaction that it must be his duty as Praetor to never stop lamenting what kind of beings they are. It’s at this point he begins Blade Eater experimentation to see if humans can be configured into something else and engages in political conspiracy to undermine the other titans, now believing that helping to push Alrest toward its end is how he’ll become the priest who stands closest to God. Ironically enough, in another world he probably would have been Zanza’s most faithful disciple.
That’s the distorted understanding of Father, the self-loathing, the disgust and the personal contradiction through which Malos was given form. He knows himself to be the son of the Architect, but the Trinity Processor’s recollection of Klaus vastly differs from that of Amalthus’, so he’s constantly met with error when trying to identify himself as an individual. At the very least he understands the prestige awarded to him as one of the Trinity Processors, so his personal story is about gathering knowledge and power to reclaim awareness of what he is beyond his summoner.
“If I could climb up to the top, would you be waiting at the top? Will this mean I search no more? Was this what I’ve expected? I don’t even know. Is this the real me I’ve longed for? Wish that was the case. I’m not here at all, I don’t exist here at all. I’ve gotta search for me, wish that I find myself soon.”
Drifting Soul – Xenoblade 2
Drifting Soul is the song associated with any given character learning not to fear themselves, their power and subsequently their place in the world. This is one of the central story themes in Xenoblade 2, which is why its motif resurfaces in the third game to represent Queen Nia when approaching the Cloudkeep or fighting as a party member. You’ve got all this divine angst in circulation with characters wondering why they bear the curse of life, and then Rex – the lad, the everyday working man – is just a normal enough guy to assuage their worries and tell them to take it one day at a time. Drifting Soul plays for Mythra listening in on Vandham’s call to arms and finally deciding to appear after five centuries in slumber, or for Nia taking a leap of faith by exposing herself as a flesh eater. That it also plays for Malos during his final debate with Rex is very telling. Tetsuya Takahashi – original co-creator, executive director, main scenario writer, creative lead and general guy in charge of the team since it began with Xenogears, now CEO of the company that holds Xenoblade, makes an effort to also be the franchise’s main lyricist, so the vocal inserts can and do hold key story insights. Majority are written as the female lead serenading or voicing their vulnerabilities to the protagonist. Small Two of Pieces is Elly promising she loves every fragment of Fei’s personality across all the lifetimes they’ve ever lived, Kokoro is Shion timidly welcoming Kevin’s touch in a time when no one was supporting her, Beyond the Sky has Fiora ask Shulk to take her hand and never let go because life is a gift (considering they’ve both died once before) and the future is bright, A Moment of Eternity sees Lora beg Jin to not let her death ruin him, One Last You is Pyra and Mythra telling Rex that their long lives have been worth it and they no longer want to die, and Where We Belong is Mio’s confidence that the universe literally tearing itself in two will not be enough to stop her from finding Noah again. A Step Away however is approached from the opposite angle to all that, serving as a way to peer into N’s regrets and deep self-loathing over the terrible immortality he forced his wife into. In a similar vein, the more I linger on that scene of Malos and contemplate its implications, the more I begin to feel he may in fact be the primary recipient of Drifting Soul’s lyrics.
In that moment he’s begging Rex to prove humanity’s worth to him so that he can put his hatred to rest. Malos was brought to life as a destructive force, but by the time of the main game he’s already spent centuries roaming Alrest, finding there to be no need for an existence like his anywhere. So then why is he alive? Is he really just his Driver’s shadow? No, surely not. He’s God’s foremost weapon after all, that must justify the genocide. Discovering Aion and christening himself ‘the Endbringer’ is a real epiphany for him because this, although misguided, is the first time Malos has found a purpose that goes beyond what he was left by Amalthus. In casting them down he seeks validation. That although the end result of wiping out Alrest would ultimately be the same it would be enacted through he and Father’s will instead, inspiring new confidence in his beliefs. Giving Klaus and his children the death he thought they craved, because his own understanding of the creator had been overwritten by the negative experiences of Amalthus. However upon reaching the top Malos is unable to eliminate the Architect (whom had little time remaining anyway), and even Jin ends up staying behind to re-evaluate how he feels after witnessing the full extent of Rex and Mythra’s bond. When everyone converges at Aion’s chamber Malos is once more standing alone. But this time instead of it being the natural course of things, he’s had his few positive influences torn away. The title of the final boss theme echoes the state of his heart: What’s left for him after despair and hope both run dry? Nothing. That’s what he believes, anyway. Malos is empty and the wanton destruction didn’t fill the hole in his heart like he thought it would. With all efforts to exceed his Driver exhausted this is now the point in his long life where Malos finally just looks at the blood on his hands, looks at how disgraceful a creature he’s become and turns to the opposite side to say ‘Let’s end this already. If this world has any worth or will, then you tell me because I can’t find it.‘ With his exaggerated mannerisms he successfully deludes majority of the cast into believing that he’s an unfaltering machine acting only in the name of oblivion, resolute in his damnation of the world and its people. But in the late-game focus on his history with Amalthus and Jin, we begin to piece together how Malos has actually spent the entire game at a loss, thrashing around as he searches for identity, and is just as much a victim of the human condition as anyone else. Final Fantasy VII’s Crisis Core has a central story thread about Zack trying to convince people that he and the other mako-enhanced SOLDIER members aren’t monsters. An endeavour which Sephiroth gives up on when he wears the title of “perfect monster” and so begins attacking humans. Much like this, Malos screams “I’m a hideous monster too, far beyond saving”, accidentally revealing that he has tried grasping for personal salvation but knows himself to be unworthy. He understands as well as anyone just how many have suffered from his actions, with an undeniable panic in his voice when he reminds Rex about the severe scale of his crimes. Malos’ Trinity core algorithm is telling him on the deepest level that he was meant to guide the people, but he struggles to look at them through anything other than Amalthus’ darkness and blames it on the folly of both mankind and himself. Their tendency to pollute the pristine and give into desires of greed and violence make them a wretched thing, and he also believes himself so for having such sickeningly self-righteous thoughts on them. Despite trying, he can’t look at them with the love a Trinity Processor is supposed to. The situation of right, wrong and how to change himself or the world is too tangled to navigate and he, ultimately, reluctantly, gives up on trying. Despite recognising that contradiction, Malos can’t change his ways because to do so would be to deny the course his life had taken. His pride, and just the innate ambiguity of emotional/social boundaries between people, keep him locked into a downward spiral. It’s that delicate emotional balance hidden behind his theatrics which make Malos so compelling. As if he so desperately wants to love and be loved by the world, but knows he’s already fallen too far to climb his way back up.
Compare this to Final Fantasy’s official Remnants of Sephiroth. Looking through his section in the On the Way to a Smile anthology, it discusses how at the time Meteor is summoned the Lifestream has already absorbed most memories of Sephiroth’s actual personality, so he uses Cloud’s hatred as the nucleus for his existence. That so long as Cloud is alive, and so long as there is hate, he will eventually and inevitably be able to centre himself. Thus he gives rise to the Remnants who walk the corporeal world in search of Jenova and Cloud, that together they may complete his revival. On the surface the trio therefore do each represent a piece of Sephiroth’s identity. Kadaj is his darkness given form, Loz gains most of the overwhelming physical power and Yazoo resembles him in appearance and personality. However this design ends up being what actually makes them unworthy of their title, as they thus seem to be written from the sentiment that Sephiroth is only a cool emo anime swordsman and nothing else. In the film their despair just comes across as a lost child whining for its mother, rather than the complex emotional balance of Sephiroth as a man who mixes anger, sorrow, hatred for both the world and himself, into one big messy conglomerate as he marches down the wrong path and loathes himself more every step of the way. You could argue that’s deliberate because Case of Lifestream explains how neither they nor Sephiroth truly remember the specifics of who he was; the only reason they even exist is to search out people who do remember in a bid to recreate his ego. But nevertheless the individual performance of the Remnants just comes up so lacking that I don’t want to give them that goodwill. When I went through to review the whole Compilation, I did shockingly come to reconcile Kadaj thanks to his part in The Kids Are Alright’s intense, shapeshifting horror, its recontextualisation of Black Water as a personal character motif which helps validate his aesthetic identity, and a brief affinity from getting to put him and Shelke in the same playable party on Opera Omnia and just thinking that’s kinda neat. But in Advent Children he has all the presence of a slug, while neither Loz nor Yazoo even get that far. As foreign or otherworldly elements deliberately deprived of any individuality, they completely miss the human tragedy that underpins Sephiroth.
Jin I would thus call the body of Sephiroth. As much as I harp on about being the likeness of a filmic horror entity or trend my discussions toward the genuine lunacy which inspires all his evils, the edgy anime swordsman bit is an equally important part of Sephiroth’s legacy to respect. The horror aspect of him is, naturally, a presentational nuance which needs the ebb-and-flow of FFVII’s plot and setting in order to properly arise, so whenever he’s leant out for spinoffs, crossovers and general pop-culture interaction, Sephiroth is characterised first and foremost by his incredible sword skills. Look at my man just slicing Galeem in half and commandeering his own boss minigame for his Smash reveal, or going absolutely bonkers in Kingdom Hearts. Word of god has placed him as the highest power in his setting, to the extent we’ve never seen anyone approach his limits. Genesis & Angeal, Zack, AVALANCHE, they’re all at the level of play for him. Sephiroth is only ever taken down when being surprised by someone he arrogantly deemed too weak to pay any mind, or when having his attention split several ways. Safer Sephiroth is fighting off Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Yuffie, Vincent, Cid, Nanaki and Cait Sith, channelling magic into Meteor to fend off Holy and the Lifestream, and (if we take note from Maiden Who Travels the Planet) potentially also attempting to withstand an assault from Aerith and Zack’s souls, all at the same time. As there is “nothing above Sephiroth”, the heroes only ever overcome him by amassing enough concurrent plotlines to literally crush him under their narrative weight. I don’t think anyone would dispute that Cloud and co are straight up weaker than their villain by a significant degree, so they have to blindside him in some capacity. Sephiroth loses only when the script is written against him. Any other time, man just dominates and makes it look like the easiest thing ever. Sephiroth is left-handed. Cool little detail about him. Yet while Cloud is flash-stepping around to craft mixups and fighting out of his mind at the end of Remake, Sephiroth easily and completely shuts out every strike using his non-dominant right hand. Really going the extra mile to belittle his enemy in any way possible. Look at that smirk on his face as he dodges with only the slightest of movements. He decimates the whole city while toying with Cloud in the film – like genuinely just slices through skyscrapers without so much as a strained breath – and is so smug throughout the whole ordeal that this degree of chaos is basically just Sephiroth showing off. And in Crisis Core he effortlessly holds off some of the strongest SOLDIERs who have ever lived in a 2v1 scenario. I’d love some spinoff to let us see him clash against Deepground because a SOLDIER First Class superhuman barely registers as a threat. The megamix brawler Dissidia NT specifically takes each character from the end of their storyline. The two FF protagonists universally agreed to top the power ranking are Lightning and Noctis. Guess who they pit against Sephiroth. Yeah, both of them. Granted that war is a total charade to lure in Shinryuu and comes from a spinoff, but nevertheless Sephiroth instantly puts them on the defensive through pure sword skill. His swordplay just gets sharper, and his movement imperceptably quicker, to match his enemies as they move up the scale. While Jin’s combat skills don’t really have that same legend behind them, it’s therefore still so important to get these scenes of him doing lightning fast slash barrages or teleporting behind you in dedication to that section of Sephiroth’s identity. The silver-haired SOLDIER, the part of him that is the quintessential moody anime swordsman. His aesthetic design and backstory don’t make any attempts to hide how intensely they pull from Final Fantasy VII.
Malos then would be the mind. He represents Sephiroth after the fall, where he’s in a state of madness and attempting to regain stability by removing any elements that could confuse him. An unused dialogue that was meant to play before clashing with Safer Sephiroth reads “It’s over. Everyone, everything. It’s all over. Now it all begins anew with me!” Such is Sephiroth’s logic. The world denies his existence, so he’s trying to deny everything beyond his own self. A power struggle of self-identification. It’s not only that he’s venting his rage against Shinra, but that because his home within humanity was lost the only path forward is to try and redefine himself as something else entirely. Hence why Malos recreates that signature shot of Sephiroth among the flames of Nibelheim. Also trying to be something more than a mere monster, even if the identity he settles upon ends up being the cause of great calamity.
And just like with Jin, in this section of Xenoblade 2’s critical response the deviation between Sephiroth and Malos once again ends up being that its character does still have love left for the world. Rex in the final confrontation ends his spiel about living to support others by reminding Malos that “even you used to think like that once” – that the fact he offered his hand to Jin was indicative of a deeper regret. Because Malos is a counterpart to Rex as much he is Mythra. The Xenoblade 2 verse in Future Awaits goes “I’ve seen that look before, the stare of your fearful-looking eyes. Will you give up and stay where you belong? Afraid your time…it just might take too long?” The immediate call-back of this line is to where Rex tells Jin “I saw it in your eyes. The look of someone who just wanted to die. It was the way Pyra looked the first time we met.” As well though, that naturally also means that the reason Malos reacted to Jin’s expression is because he sensed the same thing. Rex didn’t know how to help Pyra overcome her pain and decided that if he at least took her to Elysium then maybe something would change within her along the way, that she would stop wanting to die. Malos didn’t quite know how to help Jin either, but likewise felt that if he supported him maybe something would change. Though with his twisted programming his method was more about getting Jin to give himself permission to forget Lora and die.
On the actual Trinity Processor, the housing for each core is inscribed with a verse from the book of Proverbs to indicate its role in the machine’s decision-making process. Ontos is written “blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding” (Proverbs 3:13), Pneuma has “the path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (Proverbs 4:18), Logos is “hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers all wrongs” (Proverbs 10:12). Ontos, as the main decision arbiter, is purely a computer and thus depends upon the understanding reached by the others. The adjacent processors Pneuma and Logos were designed to work in human elements. I interpret Logos’ wording to mean that it was considering those who are outcasts in society and ensuring Ontos doesn’t deem them liabilities in its calculations. If they lash out in hatred, Logos seeks to understand the reason why and offers a comforting shoulder. Fundamentally it was meant to nurture humanity as part of the trinity; that while Pneuma creates a path for the many, Logos will go around and ensure the few aren’t overlooked. That’s it’s original purpose, which is why A and Rex are adamant that Logos would be a comrade if present in Aionios. That is Logos. But Malos unfortunately didn’t work this way. If you compare the object model in Xenoblade 2 to the flashbacks from Future Redeemed it’s visibly apparent how much it had been damaged by resonating with such a twisted Driver. While in the past Logos was a bright purple and textured identically to Ontos and Pneuma, during the events on Alrest the core has lost most of its internal glow and there are specks of discoloured static spread throughout. At the time of summoning, Amalthus’ disgust for the human condition caused Malos to arise as a nihilistic nuke. Zeke reflects upon his encounters with the Praetor and says, “Suppose a guy who hated himself had the power that you do. If someone like that were to meet the Architect, I wouldn’t be surprised if they wished for the whole world to disappear.” The traumatic experiences in his past whisper to Malos that “the truth is, deep down, all humans wish they were dead.” How else could their self-destructive behaviour be rationalised? He had been born from the belief that this was genuinely what people, God and the world itself desired on a hidden level, but were too scared to openly chase themselves. “Humans lit the bonfire”, he only guarded the flame as it burned and speaks as if this was a legitimate display of consideration on his part. When the other processor is awoken he calls to it, expecting it to be a partner in his crusade. But he’s struck down by Mythra in the Aegis War and spends the next few centuries slowly wandering the world while he recovers. By chance he eventually runs into Jin slumped over in an alleyway. Jin. The paragon of old Torna, whose ability to manipulate elementary particles is in itself a light version of phase transition despite not being a Monado. The only Blade in the world with the power to face off against the Aegis and there he was bumming around with no future. The suicide in his eyes triggers a reaction in Malos which reactivates the original directive of the Logos CPU. He wants to help Jin. Unfortunately since Amalthus’ corruptions are still in effect, Malos doesn’t only think “this man still has worth to the world” but rushes to the extremist take that “if the world won’t accommodate this man then it has no worth” and seeks to end everything, believing that is what will make up for the pain he caused Jin. From this point on, although his emotions are hugely distorted, Malos was acting out of a kindness. So many were dying for it, but if he could at least aid Jin then maybe he would be worthy of his identity as Logos of the Trinity Processor.
By the time of the finale he’s started to admit how flawed his logic has become and so pleas “show me why you’re here in this world.” The last battle of Xenoblade 2 is a debate of morality between Malos and Rex. The Logos processor passes out prompts and Rex simply manages to provide the correct answers. At the start it’s established that demanding repentance won’t manage to sway him. Over the course of their back-and-forth, Rex is pushed toward the necessary conclusion – that to pardon Malos of his sins isn’t such a simple thing, but that’s just how the world turns. So long as they’re alive tomorrow will still come, so they have to move forward regardless. He doesn’t ask Malos to repent and can’t promise that forgiveness will eventually follow either. But assures him that at the very least if they both live together in that world, then maybe one day they can reconcile it and put the past behind them. As Rex said with his esteemed Salvager’s Code. He’d give Malos one good punch, and then probably go for drinks in a few years once he’s old enough. This satisfies Logos’ criteria: love covers all wrongs. You can locate further confirmation of this in the soundtrack. The acapella choir tracks Past From Far Distance and Our Hope are musical counterparts, which implicate the Aegis in the finale when viewed as a pair. The former is associated with the pessimistic history of Amalthus. It’s used during the flashback where he finds a refugee he personally rescued and blessed merely hours earlier committing armed robbery with murder, and sets the tone for the way the world was at that point in history. Malos was given form out of his depression, and when she arrived Mythra lacked confidence in declaring that her nature was different. The other track is instead used to indicate Rex’s optimism and perseverance. It plays right before Pneuma martyrs herself to save the world below. During this sequence you can notice that Logos is still showing as active within Aion, and quieting the music clearly reveals it’s his voice asking for her final verdict on what it was like being alive. Once Rex displays his resolve to protect people as they head into the future, he becomes the hope of the Architect and both Aegis. That’s what this soundtrack tells us. Listening to the songs next to each other and thinking about their respective placements in the game can be another way of highlighting that in the end Malos is exposed to Rex’s good nature. Alrest has a lot more kindness in circulation, so Rex and Mythra ultimately soothe him in his dying moments. Whereas Cloud would do no such thing. In the rare few times that Sephiroth reaches out, he’s met with instant rejection. Final Fantasy VII is a story of hate clashing against hate. Even though he’s the last possible connection that Sephiroth has, Cloud scoffs at him whenever he seems to be asked for help. Angeal and Zack are dead, and Genesis is MIA. So the few that could have influenced Sephiroth are gone. Malos though has Jin, Mythra and Rex all wanting to fix him. This is where the distinction is drawn. Both characters are frantically searching for an answer to the question of their existence. Sephiroth at first wishes to take revenge on humanity because he believed they stole the planet from the Ancients, and, by proxy, he who shares her flesh. Hence he says “this planet is my birthright”. Then he immerses himself in the Lifestream and discovers she wasn’t a Cetra after all, so he overrides Jenova’s will and uses it as a tool in his deification. When this again ends up not working out, his revival in Advent Children features yet another ambition of becoming a planetary scourge to replace Jenova in the universe. His attempts at defining himself keep falling short because they’re ultimately predicated on a wilful misinterpretation of the invader as some mother figure or god. Even though it’s blatantly incorrect and his time spent gathering knowledge in the Lifestream means he probably already knows it, Sephiroth has no way of reaching out to others for help in breaking free of his madness. He’s too far gone. Malos’ goals also transition through multiple stages. First to simply erase everything because his Driver taught him that death was at the core of human nature, then specifically honed in as killing the Architect to end the world and free Jin from the pain of living. But at the end he seeks input from Rex on whether it was actually the right thing to do or not, reclaiming his original identity as Logos. Unlike Sephiroth who keeps running into dead ends, the final moments of Xenoblade 2 see Morag preaching that he had indeed found the meaning of his life. But Sephiroth…that man never will. Malos and Jin, unlike their original, learn who they are and what they should have been living for.
Xeno, ultimately, is just an important franchise. The sister project to Final Fantasy VII, which at one point was also intended to be the sequel to Chrono Trigger. What a legendary heritage. It’s a series built around connections intertextual and historic. To understand Krelian you want to understand Sephiroth, and the inverse is also revealed as necessary once the wing is worked into his aesthetic. To best make sense of Malos, Jin or Z you also want to know those original two, and by looking at all as a ‘sephirot collective’ you become able to recognise where they interact and what effect each has on one another. They are all the same core character interpreted in a number of different settings, so reading the nuance of one such as Malos can inadvertently feed back and help to gain a more concrete insight into the enigmatic Sephiroth, for example. Familiarity with Albedo, although not necessary, is another great boon in making sense of Malos’ behaviour. Or that although Z isn’t explored as deeply he could have been, familiarity with Krelian and Wilhelm answers most of the lingering curiosities about his motivations and circumstance. Reading their archetypal origin is how one constructs the most complete image of these mysterious men. In this, the most visible connection is that design link shared between Malos and Jin who were both engineered to cast new clarity upon the two halves of Sephiroth’s history. Final Fantasy VII’s subseries has been my favourite specific media project for a long time and I suppose that deep tie between them is also why I ended up so absorbed in Xenoblade as well. Appearances may differ, but the same heart beats within their chest.
The end. Or at least it should have been, because this next part…is a tangent. And this time I will elaborate. So that was kind of a look at how I recognise the relationship between Sephiroth and Torna dependant on intertextual homage. As a brief accompaniment I think it might be fun to also theorise about the opposite scenario. If one desired to canonically fold Final Fantasy VII into the actual Xeno meta-series through Eternal Recurrence, where would one conversely find the Trinity Processor in it? To no surprise, that would again centre on Sephiroth. I reckon that in this situation not only would Sephiroth have resonated with Logos for the aforementioned reasons, but that he’d probably also be in possession of Pneuma. I’m sure there is an expectation that Pneuma, the female-coded core that’s meant to act as mother, would be bonded to Aerith. But nah I would personally imagine it more likely to align with Sephiroth. His contact with Jenova as mother defines a large part of his aesthetic, in particular also inspiring a change in his language. Prior to this Sephiroth uses the masculine “ore” when referring to himself, but switches to the feminine “watashi” afterward. Jenova (Final Fantasy VII’s alien mother sealed in a tube) is an exploration of the same concept as the Mother of Humanity in Xenogears, so this conceptual link is another reason why I’m sure that Pneuma (Xenoblade’s stand-in for divine mother) would naturally gravitate to Sephiroth. There’s a feminine element written into multiple areas of his character nuance. Realistically, if we return to Kadomony, that’s what the Animus and Anima concept actually refer to anyway. The terms are appropriated from one of Carl Jung’s ideas, but basically what he terms as “anima” is the lesser feminine nature within a man. Therein linking yet another piece of Sephiroth’s puzzle back to Xenogears, as well as, in this scenario, solidifying the reason that Pneuma/Anima would choose to resonate with his will. Coincidentally, the colours check out here as Sephiroth has displayed the ability to channel both green and purple energy through his sword.
I’ll bring the Proverbs back on screen here (when I actually get around to narrating this, that is), but if I were to simplify their alignments by, say, comparing it to another stylistically adjacent franchise such as The Legend of Zelda, the cores can also be identified as Wisdom, Power and Courage. I started writing this right after Future Redeemed and picked away at it all through Tears of the Kingdom. Please understand. Zelda is another I think would be fun to recontextualise as a Xeno cycle through eternal recurrence. Both are about golden wish-granting artifacts governed by a trinity of largely the same function, so do you really think it coincidence that the first Zelda game Monolith helped develop was also the one to solidify the reincarnation of main characters through divine conspiracy and the evolution of its sentient sword, as well as a dark mirror of the sword? That only after they touched it did the Master Sword have this visual of the hilt mechanically unfolding and the blade flickering on between its active and inactive states? There were elements of this already established in Wind Waker, but the visuals become distinctly more Monado-esque after Skyward Sword, so at the very least it’s a solid call to comparison. I see that Zohar mural in the Goddess Sword’s chamber Nintendo, you can’t hide it from me, and this has only compounded with the Zonai eye being evocative of the Xenogears Zohar design + Tears of the Kingdom’s heavy aesthetic focus on symbols.
The Hyrulean trinity are the Golden Goddesses, whose power each constitutes one triangle of the Triforce, bonded with Demise, Hylia and her Knight, who are cursed to ever reincarnate in a cycle of conflict as Ganon, Zelda and Link. These individual triangles would fill the narrative requirement of Kadomony or the Trinity Processor. Nayru the goddess of Wisdom would be Ontos, Din the goddess of Power would be Logos and Farore the goddess of Courage would be Pneuma. When this was first introduced with Link to the Past’s Pendants of Virtue these colours aligned. The Triforce of Power was swapped to red soon after, but I would also point out that even then Alvis has blue ether, Malos has red and Mythra has green, which conforms to the suggested Triforce pieces anyway. Sword Spirits too are similar enough in nature to the Aegis that the concepts can be interchangeable in a theoretical Recurrence. If you poke through the franchise’s arsenal you can locate three Triforce-branded swords used by each of the trinity. Link has the Master Sword which glows white, blue or yellow, Zelda has the Gleaming Rapier that glows pink, and Demise’s sword briefly glows orange it awakens. Fi is the physical manifestation of a divine weapon in a land of sky islands, so Monolith’s time spent working on Skyward Sword was probably the primary influence for the Blades and cloud sea in the first place. Maybe I’ll explore that in more depth at some later point since I do quite like Zelda but haven’t yet managed to really drill its lore into mind.
Anyway the point of bringing that up – other than to flush out these collages which have been hogging my headspace – was to highlight how the roles of the trinity AI can be summarised as embodying wisdom, courage and power. While Sephiroth could easily qualify for all three, in Xenogears and Xenoblade having the three elements of Persona, Animus and Anima unified under one will would mean that person holds complete control over the Zohar’s phase transition engines and, put simply, wins. So I have to split off at least one core to justify a conflict. If it were to be any of them, I’d say it would be Ontos finding its way into the hands of Aerith. She’s the main opposing force to Sephiroth. A true Cetra, rather than a fake one, and wields the white materia to counter the destructive potential of his black materia. She would be the only logical choice for the separated trinity core, and since she embodies wisdom more than she does the other two principles that means the associated core would need to be Ontos. Especially in the Compilation since entries such as Maiden Who Travels the Planet, Case of Lifestream and Advent Children all have her taking up much more of a sage role, quietly aiding the party from her position within the Lifestream and making attempts to hinder Sephiroth whenever he moves to reincarnate. This is where her character definition currently falls. Therefore I think that Aerith would be a definite lock for Ontos. In fact casting an eye over Remake and Future Redeemed we can find two very similar shots of Aerith and A standing before a white void, warning the party that once they walk through it the established future will be thrown into question. The narrative of each naturally leads the two characters to this point, and serves as a solid example for why they would fit together. Sephiroth claims Logos and Pneuma as discussed earlier, and then Cloud would remain a protagonist completely disconnected from the trinity (though I do also think it’d be funny to give him an Aegis so he could have the Buster Monado). Based on my understanding of the Trinity Processor, its alignments and its functions, this is where I believe I see its candidacy fall within the cast of Final Fantasy VII.
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