Midgar


Midgar is a fictional city from the Final Fantasy media franchise. It first appears in the 1997 video game Final Fantasy VII, and is depicted as a bustling metropolis built, occupied, and controlled by the megacorporation Shinra Electric Power Company. The city is powered by electricity drawn from reactors which run on, the processed form of spiritual energy extracted by Shinra from the planet on which the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII takes place. Shinra's activities drain the world of its life force, the "Lifestream", threatening the existence of all life as the planet weakens. In spin-offs of the game, the city spanned a town named Edge.
Midgar is a major aspect of the metaseries' industrial or post-industrial science fiction milieu. It is the centerpiece of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, with recurring appearances in related media. Midgar is considered to be one of the most memorable aspects of the original Final Fantasy VII, and it has been well received by critics and the video game community for its cyberpunk aesthetic and dystopian setting. Midgar is featured prominently in discussions about Final Fantasy VII themes of class conflict and environmentalism.

Development

Final Fantasy VII was originally envisioned to be set in an alternate version of New York City before the development team decided on the fictional city of Midgar. Yusuke Naora, the art director for Final Fantasy VII, designed Midgar among many other locations in the game. Contrary to popular belief that Midgar's steampunk aesthetic is influenced by works such as Blade Runner, Naora said that he had the image of a pizza in mind when he originally designed Midgar and its distinctive plate-like structure. Other in-game elements themed after pizza include Midgar's mayor Domino and the musical theme "Underneath the Rotting Pizza", which plays in various Midgar levels. Like other story elements in Final Fantasy VII, Midgar's name is inspired by Norse mythology.
The 2020 video game Final Fantasy VII Remake focuses on the city of Midgar due to it being a highly recognizable symbol of the world of Final Fantasy VII. The city had to be redesigned from scratch for Remake, as the process of converting the original's 2D backgrounds into a 3D space revealed many "structural contradictions". Beginning with Midgar's original design, the development team created architectural documents outlining how its various aspects should work. With the goal of expanding the city in a way that made sense, the team adjusted Midgar's scale to be more realistic by changing the original city's building size and density, and the game's environments were made larger and denser with consideration for their functionality. Midgar's sights and locales in Remake reference different types of world architecture, and these influences are channeled through the use of materials, light, and space. For example, the city's bus signs heavily resemble their real-world counterparts in New York City. Producer Yoshinori Kitase noted that the developmental team wanted to show a different design aesthetic that presents Midgar with strong elements of colour and variety to accentuate the uniqueness of the game world. The team opted not to use a "photo-realistic approach", but instead one more stylized to honor the artistic design of the original game. Environment director Takako Miyake noted that whenever the team extracted Midgar's design elements from the original, they were "focused on combinations that unconditionally inspired excitement, consistency aside". Retrospectively, the team praised Midgar's eclectic aesthetic from the original game, as they felt it was the most captivating aspect of its setting, and they felt that it was important to ensure each area felt distinct to prevent it from becoming monotonous.
The developers of Remake expanded the roles of previously minor characters in an effort to show more of the lives of Midgar's ordinary citizens and give players a better sense of the city's culture. The original game opens with Cloud's first bombing mission with AVALANCHE with the intention of starting the game in the middle of the action. Instead, Remake precedes the mission with mundane scenes of everyday life for Midgar's citizens, as the developers felt that going straight from the bombing mission into the streets was insufficient in conveying the impact of the destruction of Mako reactors on people's lives. The developers also wanted to add nuance to the bombing mission by making players question AVALANCHE's eco-terrorist activities and emphasizing that innocent people suffer regardless of who is responsible.
Director Tetsuya Nomura acknowledged that concerns were raised regarding the scope of Remake but did not feel that expansion of the Midgar section would be problematic. He explained that while it takes about seven hours to go through Midgar in the original game, the gameplay of Remake is enough to cover an entire game, taking into consideration the travel time in traversing a fully three-dimensional map along with expanded story content. The story and scenario writer for Remake, Kazushige Nojima, said that ending the game where the party departs Midgar would also allow for an adequate amount of planned story scenarios to be incorporated throughout its narrative.

Background

Midgar is located on a world referred to as "the Planet" by the characters, and which is retroactively named "Gaia" in some Square Enix promotional material and by Square Enix staff. Midgar is originally formed from the consolidation of several smaller, independent towns in the distant past; each settlement comprised one sector and gradually lost its original name. The city is ruled by the Shinra Electric Power Company and powered by the company's "Mako" reactors. The city has two principal components: an elevated, circular plate, supported by a central pillar and a system of smaller columns, and a network of slums beneath the plate. The upper plate contains office buildings and similar complexes, as well as theatres, bars and various residences. The plate is divided into eight sectors, with each sector punctuated by two walls and a Mako reactor. The city's prosperity is due to the abundance of Mako energy near it, and the reactor complex causes little to no vegetation to grow within or near it. A commuter railway system carries workers to and from the slums, and security measures are implemented throughout the city. A network of maintenance platforms are suspended beneath the plate. Many citizens live in the slums beneath the sections of the plate. Most buildings there are made of collected scrap shaped into dwellings; most lack architectural planning, with the slums as a whole being littered with wreckage.
At some point in its history, Midgar went to war with the neighboring nation of Wutai. Shinra developed a means of mass-producing and weaponizing "materia", small spheres of crystallized Mako energy that grant their user magical abilities, as well as an army of genetically enhanced, elite military units called "SOLDIER". Shinra ultimately won the war and established Midgar as their seat of power and influence in the wider world by the events of Final Fantasy VII. At one point, Shinra had developed a space exploration program, but following the war with Wutai and the discovery of how profitable processing Mako energy was, Shinra prioritized research on Mako and its applications and consolidated their operations around harvesting Mako energy, effectively cancelling the program.

Level content

In Final Fantasy VII and spin-off media, player characters may visit multiple sectors within Midgar. Noteworthy sectors include:
  • The Sector 5 slums, home of Aerith Gainsborough and her adoptive mother, Elmyra Gainsborough. A disused church tended to by Aerith and the area adjacent to Elmyra's house are among the few places with greenery in the city.
  • The Sector 6 slums, a dilapidated passageway between Sectors 5 and 7. Wall Market is its largest and most populated area and serves as a red light district. Noteworthy locations include the Honeybee Inn and Don Corneo's mansion.
  • The Sector 7 slums, where AVALANCHE is headquartered in a bar called "7th Heaven" run by Tifa Lockhart. Inside the Sector 7 slums is the Train Graveyard, a dark and dangerous area of scrapped trains resembling a maze.
  • Sector 0, which contains Shinra's headquarters, a massive building located in the center column of the upper plate which is the tallest structure in Midgar. From their offices, Shinra staff run almost every element of Midgar, from the news media to the reactors that power the metropolis.

    Appearances

Video games

''Final Fantasy VII''

Midgar serves as the setting of the opening section of Final Fantasy VII. The eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE, with assistance from Cloud Strife, engineers successful bombing missions that temporarily put two Mako reactors out of commission. In retaliation, the Turks destroy the pillar holding up the section of the upper plate above Sector 7's slums, causing the plate to collapse and crush the slums below, killing many residents. Shinra executives, hoping that all of AVALANCHE's members would be killed in the incident, blame it on the group to sway public opinion against them.
Following Shinra's capture of Cloud's party during their raid on the company's headquarters, President Shinra reveals his desire to discover the supposed Promised Land, where a "Neo-Midgar" would be built. He claims this land would be so abundant in Mako that it would flow out of the ground without needing Mako reactors to siphon it, which would increase Shinra's profits exponentially.
Some time later, Shinra moves a large Mako-powered cannon from a military installation in Junon to Midgar. It is modified into a superweapon called "the Sister Ray" through its integration with the city's Mako reactor network, with the goal of destroying an energy barrier Sephiroth conjured to protect himself in the Northern Crater after summoning the planet-destroying spell "Meteor". The cannon succeeds, but a simultaneous attack by a rampaging Weapon damages some areas of Midgar and destroys the upper floors of the Shinra headquarters. At the same time, Cloud's party infiltrates the city, defeating several of Shinra's remaining Shinra and disabling the Sister Ray, which is on the verge of destroying the city due to a power overload incited by Professor Hojo, the head of Shinra's Science Department.
The game's ending cutscene reveals that the Meteor nearly destroys Midgar, but it is stopped by the combined effort of a Holy spell summoned by Aerith and the planet's Lifestream. In a post-credits scene set five hundred years later, Midgar is shown to be abandoned and overgrown with greenery.