A medieval European setting, with soaring castle spires, imposing forests, brave knights, and fair maidens? Your first example probably wouldn’t be a video game from the late 1990s that opens with a group of eco-terrorists planning to bomb an electricity plant. And yet, Final Fantasy 7 has tons of narrative elements plucked directly from fairy tales — and it’s likely part of the reason this story has continued to resonate with players for nearly three decades.
But Square Enix’s beloved adventure goes a step further, giving us an ensemble cast of flawed and fascinating characters who wouldn’t be out of place in a prestige TV drama. The anime-inspired aesthetics might be colorful and cute, but FF7 isn’t a kids story — it’s a fairy tale for adults. Here are seven reasons why.
Whether it’s the Knights of the Round Table or Cinderella, one of the most recognizable tropes of a fairy tale is a castle at the center of it all, which represents strength, wealth, security, and the prevailing social order. FF7 may not have Camelot, but it does have Midgar, the epicenter of the Shinra Corporation’s planet-devouring operation and a gleaming metal monument to its power. Sure, it’s a lot larger than a typical castle, but it’s got soaring towers in the form of Mako reactors and the skyscraper at the center of it all.
It’s even got a pseudo-royal family in the form of President Shinra, his son Rufus, and a gaggle of dipshit henchmen. Cloud and his companions’ adventure begins in Midgar, and though it takes them elsewhere, the super-city exerts a gravitational pull over the fate of the planet and all its inhabitants throughout the story. FF7’s Cloud Strife is kind of an inverted version of King Arthur.
Arthur was a humble countryside squire until he pulled a magic sword out of a rock. Cloud is a weird kid from the sticks who joined Shinra’s armed forces to impress a girl. While Arthur eventually learns he’s secretly the king’s son, Cloud has the opposite experience — he’s not the person he thought he was, or the hero he always wanted to be.
He spends much of his journey figuring out how to live with his flaws, regrets, and shortcomings. All the flashy sword acrobatics and one-liners in the world are never quite enough to totally eradicate Cloud’s impostor syndrome, and that’s why we love him. Many fairy tales presuppose a world in which magic exists, whether it’s Fairy Godmother transforming a pumpkin into a carriage, or The Lady of the Lake cloaking an entire island behind a veil of mist.
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