welcome!

thanks for checking out my Final Fantasy VII shrine!
this game is so near and dear to my heart, and i hope i'm able to emphasize that through what i put here.

story overview

Final Fantasy VII is a JRPG originally released in 1997 for the PS1. the story, in essence, goes like this: you play as Cloud Strife, a mercenary who previously worked in SOLDIER, the elite paramilitary unit of a megacorporation known as the Shinra Electric Power Company.

Cloud has been hired by Avalanche, an anti-Shinra ecoterrorist group that intends to dismantle the company from the ground up. most of the game takes place in Midgar, Shinra's pizza-shaped urban megalopolis.
the city - along with most other areas in the world - is surrounded by mako reactors, which transform mako energy (hehe) into electricity. mako is a condensed form of the Lifestream - a current flowing through the planet made up of all things, living and dead - and its usage drains the Planet's lifeblood, so the exploitation of mako is the cause of Avalanche's disdain for Shinra, which would do anything to turn a profit...

your party expands as you play, but your original team is Barret - the hotheaded leader of Avalanche with a gun for an arm; Tifa - Cloud's childhood friend, a barkeep, and a skilled martial artist; and Aerith - a flower vendor on the run from Shinra and the last of the Cetra, a dying race of people who can communicate with the Planet.

as you progress through the story, the real enemy becomes clear - Sephiroth. he is also an ex-SOLDIER, but has a much more mysterious reason as to why he went AWOL from the company. he was presumed dead after an incident five years prior to the beginning of the main storyline, but somehow returned to wreak havoc on the planet and everyone living on it. both Avalanche and Shinra want to stop him. he's got an extremely deep connection to the story, which you'll only learn later on.

but how is Sephiroth connected to any of this? how did he manage to return? and does Cloud really know what he claims to about Sephiroth and his own status as a SOLDIER, or is there something missing...? well, you'll have to play to find out.

...or just click the FF7 button so i can explain for you. that works too.

backstory

i first got into the Compilation of FFVII in super-late-2020, when Sephiroth was added into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. (i wanted Waluigi in Smash, so i was a little pissed off, but i digress.)
the trailer looked pretty awesome, and the game was on sale, so i figured, why not try it out? not like i had anything better to do. it was COVID, after all.

long story short, getting into FFVII changed my life. fast forward more than half a decade (0_o) and i'm still here, still loving the game, and never planning to move on, so i hope my obsession trickles down to you in the form of this shrine!!