Final Fantasy VII/Walkthrough/Finale

So here, our friends reunite. It's time to go finally kicking some goth-bishōnen butt. At the top of the stairway leading to the center of the planet, there's still one more chance to first grab all of the cool trinket the other folks have collected, get your gear in order, and pick your team as you plunge down to...

The stairs
The stairway consists of fights with some really annoying enemies. Basically, if you start mysteriously seeing "Game over" screens, it's more often thanks to these massively annoying guardians. They come in a couple of different varieties: floating eyes (Allemagne), big knights with bigger swords (Iron Man), and skeletal dragons (Dragon Zombie). (In D&D terms: Eyeballs, Level 65 Munchkins and Ancient Dracolichs). Eyes are easy, knights kill you dead, skeletal dragons die when you as much as sneeze at them, but have the nasty habit of killing you dead with Pandora's Box (Be sure you have your Enemy Skill materia equipped if you haven't aquired this Enemy Skill yet!). When fighting Iron Men and Dragon Zombies, it's best to treat each fight with equal seriousness as if it were a boss fight; start the fight with Big Guard and throw some big summons at it. You remembered to bring tons of Ether, right? Just kill the baddies, then afterwards Cure yourself and pump yourself full of Ether.

The hideous thing is coming right at us!
At the bottom of the stairs, you find yourself looking at a gigantic big... mass of... something... Mother Brain? No, something quite more unexplainable than that.

Art thou goth enough?
After the fight, you end up to the actual center of the planet. Well, it is rather hard to say where you are at the moment, but the good thing is, Holy is close by. As is Sephiroth.

For the following fight, you will get to split your party into one, two or three groups, depending on how well you got here.


 * Todo: How is the number of groups determined? I always get two groups!

Fight in the heavens
Bizarro Sephiroth falls down! I know that was a strange fight. What on earth was that thing? But there's no time for extraneous explanations! No time for transitions! Time to tackle something symbolic. And the music is pretty good. "In taberna quando sumus / non curamus quid sit humus / SEPHIROTH!" ... wait, no, it wasn't like that. Some other part of Carmina Burana, anyway.

The end?
After the bad guy has been blown to the ionosphere, it's time to go home. Or not so for Cloud, who weirds up, goes spirit-journeying and ends up fighting...

The end.
Sephiroth is destroyed – in a rather unexplained way. It is quite difficult to tell for sure, though, what really happened at the end. If the end seems weird, just read megabytes of fan analysis and speculation and it all starts to make sense. Kind of.

Holy tries to destroy the Meteor. Lifestream tries to stop all. Everything goes white.

And, after some typographically offensive end credits (boring Arial - is this what they call end credits these days?), Red XIII returns to Midgar after 500 years.