Final Fantasy 7: Let’s Take the Stairs!
There are house-monsters that will attack Cloud and Aerith as they progress through the slums of Midgaur. There’s giant, kaiju monsters released by the planet to wipe humanity from the face of the earth. There’s a man with a literal machine-gun for an arm. There’s a corporation using the DNA of aliens to develop experimental super-soldiers, one of whom is a near-god-level-powerful being who’s driven mad by the reality of his birth. There’s a tiny sentient cat wearing a crown who uses a fluffy, white fantasy creature called a moogle to fight. These are all elements of the original Final Fantasy 7 videogame released for Playstation in January of 1997.
So, naturally, I wanna write about the sequence when you run up a flight of stairs.
Final Fantasy 7 is probably one of the most well known, and well beloved fantasy, science fiction/cyberpunk videogames in the history of the medium. I’ll be honest though I never played the original game until about last year (last year being 2022 when I wrote that sentence). The main reason was because I never owned a Playstation. I was typically one or two consoles behind, so while my friends were playing Twisted Metal, Castlevania, and Metal Gear Solid I was still working through Donkey Kong Country on my parents SNES. Needless to say I missed out on a MOMENT in gaming history. With literally millions of fans across the globe who celebrate it in cosplay, fanart, spicy fanart, fanfiction, spicy fanfiction, YouTube videos, or even just playing the original game, the Final Fantasy franchise remains a staple of the videogame market and Final Fantasy 7 is one of the main reasons.
The other reason is Chocobos.
Chocobos are rad my dudes.
The shortest explanation of the plot of Final Fantasy 7 is that an ex-soldier named Cloud Strife joins a group of eco-terrorists named Avalanche to help them blow up a chemical reactor in the fictional city of Midgaur. One of the members is Tifa Lockhart, a woman Cloud knows from his childhood, and another is Barret Wallace, a well-built black man who has a machine gun on his left arm. Cloud goes on a few missions with them, and it's during one of these missions that Cloud gets separated from the group and meets a young woman named Aerith Gainsborough. Aerith helps Cloud get back to his friends, however she is captured by corporate operatives working for Shinra, the massive energy company who is also effectively the government of the city of Midgaur. Cloud, Barret, and Tifa decide to rescue Aerith and storm the headquarters of Shinra.
There’s much, much more to the story, and I’ve probably done a disservice with this paltry summation, but it’s enough for what this essay is concerned with.
When Cloud, Barret, and Tifa arrive they do some investigating and discover that Aerith is on the 65th floor of the Shinra complex. It’s here that the player is given a decision: I can take the elevator and possibly stumble across Shinra staff, or, I can take the stairs.
Again, Aerith is on the 65th floor.
When I played Final Fantasy 7 Remake (before the original(I know that makes me worse than Satan(even worse it makes me a Final Fantasy poser))) I took the elevator because I couldn’t find the stairs. And also because I was not aware that the stairs option was an iconic moment, not just for the videogame itself, but also for the millions of fans who had been worshiping this game since 1997 and filling subreddit after subreddit with memes.
When I downloaded the original Final Fantasy 7 to my Playstation 5 and started playing it, I decided to take the stairs.
Final Fantasy 7 was released on the first Playstation, so unlike Remake, the player is not going to ascend the entire run of stairs in one go. Instead I will guide Cloud’s sprite up at least three flights of stairs before arriving at the next “entrance” and the game will effectively load the next three flights after a quick fade-to-black. Because this is also a Playstation 1 game, the scene is employing pre-rendered backgrounds and I suspect (and completely understand) that as I’m cutting from stairwell to stairwell the game is simply recycling the same background.
Cloud is typically the sprite I control throughout most of the non-combat portions of Final Fantasy 7, and the game shows Barrets and Tifa “walking into” Cloud indicating that, should he encounter soldiers, monsters, robots, etc they will suddenly be at his side supporting him. This technique was frequently used in what are now “retro” games because programmers only had so much space on memory chips and then later graphics cards in order to show figures on screen. Because this is not a combat sequence however Barrett and Tifa are shown running up the stairs along with Cloud, sometimes passing right by him.
This will change the higher up I go.
After a few flights interrupted here and there by Barrett complaining about height, and in one unfortunate instance of Tifa calling Barrett a word that begging with “r,” the sprites will begin to stop. If my reader has never played Final Fantasy 7 then they may not realize that outside of combat the characters are represented by an almost chibi-style 3D sprite making the characters look more like dolls at times than human beings. Opinions differ on this representation, but personally I’ve always found them cute and charming, especially on the stairs because they begin to stop, hold their knees, and pant desperate for breath.
Climbing the stairs is exactly that, it’s climbing one flight after another until the characters reach the top. And where at first the high energy and conviction to rescue Aerith pushed them forward, in no time these characters are worn out from the sheer exhaustion.
I tried to find an article or essay about this moment in the original game, but when Google provided me with 16,700,000 search results most of them were about Remake. There may have been more past the second or third page but as much as I love this game at some point reality sets in and I have to ask how much energy I have to dig through that many websites just to find a quote.
On a side note, there’s a beautiful coincidence of me refusing to scale 16 million search results while writing about scaling 60 flights of stairs.
I did find an article on kotaku.com published 24 April 2020 by Ian Walker titled, “Final Fantasy VII Remake Made Me Climb 59 Flights Of Stairs And I Loved it.” Though brief, Walker’s article observes this moment in the newer game, while observing how his perception of characters changed, and how this iconic scene was remade. He writes:
The scene plays out much the same way in Remake as it does in the original, but with a few key changes that act as a wink and a nod to old-school players. About halfway up, you lose your ability to run, forcing Cloud to switch from a brisk jaunt to a trudging shuffle. The energetic theme that reflects the urgency of the rescue mission eventually distorts as Cloud gets more and more worn out. By the end, all three characters need to take a lengthy breather before moving on.
I won’t lie, at some point I found myself wondering how much longer this scene was going to last. Moving my joystick in the same configuration over and over again to move Cloud up the stairs while Barrett begged us to go back and even the athlete Tifa began questioning her resolve, I started to feel a pinch of boredom that festered into frustration.
At some point a thought entered my mind.
This wasn’t fair.
This thought led to a question.
Why should I have to do this?
While I was researching for this essay, and finding little if anything about this stair sequence, I stumbled across an blogpost about the original Final Fantasy 7 game, specifically about the moment when Cloud has to find a battery to make a propeller move so that he, Barrett, and Tifa can make their way to the upper levels of the city of Midgaur. Published on September 9, 2012 by Cameron Kunzleman, the article “In Praise of the Worst Design Moment in Final Fantasy 7” offers a truly insightful observation about the themes of poverty that run throughout the videogame, and how the design of certain moments only further develop this theme.
It also offers a wonderful answer to my question concerning the stairs.
Kunzleman writes:
One of the ways that poverty is entrenched structurally is through information control. There are forms to be filled out. There are tax documents to wade through. There are services that are never communicated to the people who need them because realistically servicing an entire population is prohibitively expensive. Poverty exists in loops–you never see a way out because you’re too busy making ends meet, or no one shows you, or no one tells you that you need to apply for scholarships by a deadline. To not be homeless, you need a job; to get a job, you need a permanent address. Infinite loop.
This passage hit me in the gut pretty hard after I read. Mostly because it was painfully familiar.
Working in a public library I encounter people literally everyday who are coming in to fax or print off paperwork to government and/or legal offices. Most of the time these documents are related to employment, social security, food stamps, and a multitudinous host of other reasons folk in their positions need them to just exist. It gets dispiriting after a while seeing how much runaround folks will have, and by the time I’ve helped a woman in her eighties make a copy of her driver license that expired three years ago and is held together with tape I can’t help but wonder why she’s being put in this situation in the first place.
But it’s not even just paperwork because as Kunzleman notes later in his essay:
Finally, and I think this might be the most important, this section of the game makes sure that the frustration comes only from the architectural difficulties. The battle system, which would generally interrupt the player every thirty steps or so, is suspended. That means that the game, in totality, becomes less challenging here. It is beautiful design; you aren’t stressed out or distracted by the battle system, or by ephemeral enemies. Instead, you are locked in a meditation between the self and the system; the act of navigation becomes all consuming. The movement from abject poverty, where the living being is literally reduced to that-which-can-be-killed, to the middle class is the all-consuming goal of the player.
Physical barriers in videogames have always been tools for designers who either want to test the player's knowledge of mechanics, and/or opportunities for narrative flavor. Whether it’s the blue maze in Pacman, the narrow chasms of Metroid Prime, Snorlax in just about every Pokemon game, or even the endless locked doors in Silent Hill these barriers are designed to test a player’s ability to navigate the world until they find a solution, and also to further entrench the player in the world. Having to walk up 59 flights of stairs is a challenge to the players’ resolve, but it’s also a brilliant way to remind the player that Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett are living in a system that is unfair to them simply because they are not wealthy. Final Fantasy 7 is a videogame that successfully explores the realities of how poverty creates unnecessary barriers for people to simply move freely through the world.
From the beginning to the end of the stairs the player is given nothing else but the option to walk up them. There is no fight sequence, there are no cut scenes, there’s one item on the way up(a single elixir which the original guidebook for the game calls “your only prize for taking the long way”), and there is no moment of final victory. For a good five minutes or more the player is effectively in a walking simulator in a videogame where you can literally cast lightning, fire, and ice to fight sentient motorcycle monsters.
So why is this sequence so damn memorable?
Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett are panting and holding their knees by the time they arrive at the top of the final stairwell, and throughout the last few minutes they’ve been talking to each other, encouraging each other. I get to see these three characters interacting as I ascend the stairs with them, often laughing at poor Barrett who just wants to stop and go back down (not that I can blame the guy much).The stairs are probably one of the best moments in the game where everything in the world is stripped away and I’m left alone with three people who are just, for lack of a better word, “being.” Sometimes the fantastical and cyberpunk elements of Final Fantasy 7 keep me from remembering that the videogame is a story about human beings fighting for their very survival in a world that seems to be continually challenging their resolve to even keep going.
And man, if that ain’t life.
Everyday is an opportunity to give up, to stop trying, and to allow the near endless obstacles of existence the chance to win out. I could have decided not to try today. I could have decided not to write this essay. I could have not gone out to buy groceries. I could have not brushed my teeth. I could have let one of the endless numbers of cars in the parking-lot collide with me and end my existence. I could have just stayed in bed, waiting for life to take me. But I didn’t, because I chose to keep going.
Fans of Final Fantasy 7 love the stairs sequence in no small part because it’s a funny, human moment.
Here’s mine.
At the library where I work there’s six flights of stairs. I go up and down these stairs, sometimes multiple times a day. It’s a joke I sometimes make, though at times there’s a cold prophetic ring to it, that these stairs are one day going to be the death of me. Six flights of stairs does not sound like much, until the sheer verticality of the steps is considered. These are not slow inclines but rather a 90 degree ascent up to the third floor where I typically work in the Local History office. And it’s always the case that someone needs me on the first floor as soon as I reach the top while I gasp for breath, desperate for another cup of coffee.
There’s 59 flights of stairs to ascend in Final Fantasy 7.
I know that comparatively it’s not that much.
But I’ve had to go up and down the ones at work multiple times a day, everyday, for the last seven years I’ve worked at that library, so I feel comfortable saying I’ve got Cloud, Barret, and Tifa beat by this point.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
2.5.2024
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***UPDATE***
I’ve uploaded a video on YouTube of myself reading this essay. You can listen to me read it by following the link below: