10 Gaming Endings That Get Worse The More You Think About It
3. Humanity Is (Probably) Extinct - Final Fantasy VII
It's fair to say that the storytelling in the Final Fantasy franchise is dense, convoluted, and often highly confusing, enough that when Final Fantasy VII rolled its end credits, many were left totally confused.
The final sequence shows the Lifestream combining with Holy to destroy Sephiroth's Meteor summon, seemingly saving the planet, but we never actually see the entire outcome before we fade to black.
The final epilogue scene that plays after the credits, set 500 years in the future, shows Red XIII and his two cubs staring out over Midgar's ruins, which are now covered in greenery. This suggests that the planet has been healed and effectively reclaimed by nature.
It sounds like a happy enough ending, right? Until you consider those final images in a wider context and do some reading between the lines.
Even accepting the fact that we never learn what happens to Cloud and the other surviving heroes, the planet 500 years on certainly seems bereft of any signs of human life.
The implication seems to be that humanity was wiped out by Holy, which has the power to cleanse the planet of all threats.
Though the faint sound of children giggling and playing can be heard over the final title, this seems to be less a suggestion that humanity has endured than a haunting reminder of what's been lost.
If you're still on the fence, in a 2005 interview game director Yoshinori Kitase literally said "all the human beings are destroyed." It doesn't get much more concrete than that.