Is this game ever political? I see people claiming it is, but from what I played so far...

Is this game ever political? I see people claiming it is, but from what I played so far, I don't really see it besides "evil company sucks life out of planet"

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no

It touches on some political themes if you want to dissect it, but it doesn't push any particular political agenda in a way that insists one way of thinking is correct. The story itself doesn't focus on any of that.

If anything it drops those themes too early because it bit off more than it can chew. But no, FF7 is not political aside from "killing planet bad" which only people who work in the oilfields will disagree with because they are shills.

Of course it is political, you stiff pine-cones. The game rather easily alludes to stereotypical clashes between right and the left-wing, with its themes of environment protection (mako energy extraction vs climate change), social classes, and religion (blind faith in some "promised land" vs Christianity). It's worth noting Shinra and its associates / workers / members are mostly white folks, as opposed to the poor "left-wing" slums, which are more varied in colour and sexual orientation.

>"evil company sucks life out of planet"
>not political

Possessing things that can be related to politics != endorsing a particular political ideology and pushing the audience to believe in it. The latter is the problem. The former exists in all media that depicts people.

I don't think it was trying to critique the use of fossil fuels, but used oil as a base for it. It's a lot more creative, how people return to the planet and become the planet's life source, and Shinra is sucking it out. A modern game would just lazily make it a direct environmentalism analogy.
Mako energy didn't even end up being the main threat to the planet any way. Despite having WEAPONs as a defense, they didn't even come out until Sephiroth was throwing a fucking meteor at the planet. The planet didn't give a shit about Midgar and was probably dying so slow of a death that it just shrugged Make energy off.
At very best if it's getting political, it's a more realistic take on climate change, unlike The Day After Tomorrow where we're going into an ice age within a week.

Extreme environmentalist activism and the negative portrayal of unchecked corporate power are political instances. About everything can be a political or social instance, the difference is whether that's relevant or not. A game where you see girls going outside without supervision of male family and talking to male strangers? That's a social and political instance. A game that portrays the caricature of a real-life politician in a good or bad light? That's a political instance. A game where you're just a roman soldier fighting off barbarians? You're taking a political instance against barbarians tribes neighboring Ancient Rome.

The question you should ask is, is this a RELEVANT, CONTROVERSIAL political message to this present time and place?

it's non-partisan if that's what you mean

It's pretty basic messages about consumerism and environmentalism mixed with Sakaguchi's personal hippie spiritual beliefs.

It's technically political but the themes and messages are so tame and uncontroversial that most people wouldn't be able to distinguish them from simple kindergarten morals like "fighting is bad" and "stealing is bad".

Even those people wouldn't say killing the planet is good. They'd just say what they're doing isn't killing the planet. Or that they're being responsible.

It's actually a good redpill on jews

>"evil company sucks life out of planet"
that's enough to trigger assblasted overemotional kids

The first act of FF7 is deep cyberpunk. So the whole evil megacorporation is less a political statement and more a genre standard.

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It's the usual jap anti-war anti-modernity thing you'll see in Miyazaki's shit.
There's no characters who're supposed to be caricatures of Bush or Clinton some shit.

The only character in the game who calls Shinra evil is Barret and that's only because he thinks they burned down his village.

>the company holistically (as in the sum of all its parts including the employees) is not really all that evil just ignorant of how destructive Mako is and a few executives embody their own perverse character flaws
>Hojo the Fedora tipping Scientist is really the true evil behind Shinra
>terrorist "good guys" kill civilians
>implying conserving the environment is not inherently conservative :^)
no room for nuance in your small brain after filling full of false dialectical bullshit?

>the only

I only need to name one character to prove you wrong.

Tifa.

I don't remember her saying anything of the sort. Everybody just thinks Shinra are a douchbag company that does some shady shit but at one point in the game even Barret admits that without Shinra and Mako the people would be worse off.

Oh shut up.

Bssed.

It does. It's clearly has an environmentalist message.
People will claim this isn't political because they don't wanna feel like hypocrites when they criticize newer games for being political but the game is clearly giving the player a message that huge corporations damaging the environment for profit is not a good thing.
That's still political, specially since the game got released back when these points of view were considered to be hippieshit for treehuggers by the far right.

>I don't think it was trying to critique the use of fossil fuels, but used oil as a base for it. It's a lot more creative, how people return to the planet and become the planet's life source, and Shinra is sucking it out. A modern game would just lazily make it a direct environmentalism analogy.
Bitch, this is as hamfisted as you can get with these subjects without actually making them about this planet. The rest is just mixing it with shintoism.

That is still political.
A story having a political message doesn't mean it's bad, you just don't want to admit that hating games for having political message isn't inherently evil.
The game never shows you how technological advancements that gave nature more than a handful of hits had their benefits and how a lot of people live happy because of this. Everything is portrayed as Shinra=Evil, it's clearly telling you which point of view is evil and which one is right.

The greatest trick by the rich was convincing people that conservation of the environment was a political issue

>"evil company sucks life out of planet"
that's really the only political issue that matters irl, though
everything else is petty squabbling and short-term power grabs

There is a flashback of her stating that she hates Shinra and Soldiers.

It is a political point of view.
Putting resources into protecting the environment comes entangled with political repercussions.
I'm not saying this is bad but saying that it isn't political is stupid specially when you have people(rich people according to you) trying to turn the political side of things against projects that would protect the environment.

Hating something doesn't make it evil. Shinra is not evil, they are just greedy and shady cunts like every other corporation.

Don't forget how they're the only group with the sole exception of Cloud's gang to actually attempt and theorize ways to stop meteor.

>the company holistically (as in the sum of all its parts including the employees) is not really all that evil
>burns down entire towns for no reason
>destroyed sector 7

Dyne, Tifa, Cid, Yuffie(loloptional), to a certain extent cait sith is upset with both avalanche and shinra and there could be more.

Are you arguing that Tifa doesn't think Shinra is evil just because she never explicity says so? Let's be real here.

Also, that gradma thief hates Shinra.

The main theme of FFVII is if we take care of the earth, the earth will take care of us.

But I will say: Gaia seems way worse off without Shinra. Especially after the remake

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Shinra is the government.

It depends on what you define as "political" It has a fairly common for the time "industrialization bad, environment good" message, which some people consider to be too political for them. Though I always wonder if those people just fine everything political at that point.

yes its political, everything is political
even your dick is political

How so? besides sephiroths timejannie propaganda by making them think they're on the wrong path, everything else is going according to plan. The plan being shinra collapses, midgar gets abandoned and people live off the planet again like they should've before, in tune/harmony with magic like the cetra were.

>the game got released back when these points of view were considered to be hippieshit for treehuggers by the far right.
That's not true at all. Fucking Rocko's Modern Life and other children's shows were filled with environmentalist messages at the time. This was when people were really worried about CFCs, aerosol cans, air conditioners, and the hole in the ozone layer. The gulf war was over, Y2K was years off, and the internet was just getting started. People were dying for an issue to get worked up about, and the it was the environment in the mid 90s. Hell, environmentalist JRPGs were so common that it became a cliche at that point.

user, everyone living in new Midgar were all bums in Advent Children. At least, there was a way to work yourself up to cozy middle management and not deal with niggers (minus Barret to that one guy) on the Train home after work. In AC, people in New Midgar live in scrap heaps.

It's not literal environmentalism.
It's an allegory for the damage done to the human spirit by over-industrialization.

And yeah, Sakaguchi's rendition of the Gaia hypothesis with other themes brought out by the characters

That's a gross oversimplification. Conservation in and of itself is not a political issue, but everything surrounding it is. Just for one example, how do we cut down on greenhouse gases? Encouraging public transportation helps, but that requires a pretty severe tax hike or public works project in most places, which turns it into a political issue.