In your mind, is FFVII closer to home?

[BG-57]

Well I read that the reason they called it "cloning" in the english version is because there is no equivalent to what they were trying to call it in Japanese.

I'm going to get a little technical here.

Cloning is transplantation of an adult nucleus into a fertilized egg, so that the resulting embryo expresses the genes of the donor nucleus, not the original nucleus. In essence the embryo will be genetically identical to the adult donor, but not at the same age. So far as I know, it is always done between members of the same species.

As for what happens in the game, what they refer to as cloning is a combination of exposing subjects to high does of Mako and injections of cells from Jenova. While it gives the subjects a sort of communal link that Jenova and Sephiroth can exploit, it did not make the subjects genetic duplicates of either Sephiroth or Jenova.

If we view the cells as being suspended in liquid (akin to blood), then transfusion would be a pretty close match. On the other hand, if we view the Jenova cells as essentially alien transplants, then xenografting would also pretty closely describe the process. So there's not a lack of alternatives, although they are generally specialized terms.

Also, I believe Seph was creating an artificial supernova, to demonstrate all the massive knowledge he gained while in the lifestream, represented by the nonsensical mathematical equations on the screen during the sequence. That, and, they just wanted to make an awesome battle animation for the final boss.

Collapsing stars make make for entertaining sci-fi, but it's a lot more difficult then it sounds. What you need to add to a star is a lot of mass. Although it could just be a summon-type magic spell (which is my personal inclination here), the star in that animation cannot be our sun because it's of the wrong order of magnitude to undergo a supernova. However, it could be an alternate-reality version of the sun and solar system, which is what I was suggesting all along.

Also, FFVII isn't the only game in the series to make an allusion to Earth. In Final Fantasy IV the game makes a direct reference to planets in our solar system (Mars and Jupiter I think) to explain the location of the Lunarian planet when it first came into the solar system. The game takes place on "The Blue Planet" and in the ending (at least in the GBA planet) it shows it as the third one from the sun.

Every FF refers to Earth, if only in names and mythological references. The FF worlds are alternate versions of Earth, what might have been.

Kage was 100% right - in the promotional interviews of the creators of Final Fantasy VII, Yoshinori Kitase (the director) said that the entire goal of RPGs is to take something from the real world and use it as a model for the game. When making FFVII they really wanted to harness the technology to accomplish this goal.

The best example is probably Shinra Inc. At the time the game was produced, the mid-late 1990's, the key word in politics was "globalization", the international economy had just then returned to its peak levels of integration from the 1890's. In this field, one line of thinking states that eventually, due to international trading, nations will become obsolete, or at least irrelevant. The game took this and put it in, as for maybe the first time, the evil ones aren't Empires, Kingdoms, or even Nations - they're capitalists in business suits.

Another example of this is the opening mission, Cloud running through a reactor tearing apart armed gunmen with his sword. Alot of people said "yeah, that makes sense" sarcastically, but there is a real life example of when 2 samurai's broke into a British arms-producing plant in the 1600s (i think around then) and the bullets weren't able to penetrate their armor. They blew the place up, too, I think.

Are we even disagreeing here?