In large part because Final Fantasy 7 was not very clear, it’s sometimes questioned just how much control over his own actions Sephiroth (the main villain) had. A product of a what would be called an ethically questionable experiment in bureaucratese and stark raving lunacy by anyone else, they used the genetic makeup of a completely unknown lifeform which apparently was not totally dead despite being eons upon eons old, magically gifted, and nearly-obliterated.
They then, pretty much for kicks, further experimented by injecting various people with super-cells from said creature. This also did not work out well. Apparently, mad scientists will never learn that super-soldier projects are best left to World War 2 and Captain America.
Anyway, Sephiroth was a good leader if a little distant, but (unsurprisingly) grew mentally unstable over time. Eventually, he discovered his origins and found his “mother”. Possibly, the fact that Dear Old Mum was a massively powerful psychic demon was also unhelpful. Sephy tries to kill her (I think?) but is stopped by his friends. Sephy falls into a vat of super-magic juice, which is already known to be quite dangerous and unpredictable juju.
Later on, he apprently went totally nuts and tried to blow up the world. He apprently never says anything. His “Mom” apparently finally went the way of the dodo, but Sephiroth is somehow so powerful that he cannot actually be killed, and can potentially reappear anytime with the proper psychic stimulus and body to possess. He also appears as Cloud’s antogonist in the Kingdom Hearts series, although he is surpringly not particularly violent or murderous, instead waiting for people to challenge him.
So, here’s the million-gil question, who’s really at fault here? Is Sephy just another bland Final Fantasy nihilist with silver hair? (How many of thsoe guys are there, anyway? (Kefka, Kuja…) Is he just the unhappy pawn of more powerful entities? Was he being controlled by Hojo?
Sephiroth is responsible, fully. He’s destroying the world so he can fuse with the Lifestream to become more powerful. I’m not sure where you’re getting the “fall into…juice” part of the story. When he finds Jenova is his mother, he steals her and keeps her hidden away. Later, he’s fused with her entirely, except her head. I’m not sure why you think Hojo has anything to do with his insanity.
His fall may have been shorter due to Hojo’s World’s Worst Parenting (do I even need to spoiler the fact that his experiments on the Evil Alien Cells included his wife and his own unborn child, among other things?), but his transformation to aloof loner to psychopathic mass murder was disturbingly quick. Now, raising Cloud as a point of comparison might not be fair, since Cloud didn’t get fucked over as hard, but he still overcame some pretty serious mental conditioning and chose to do The Right Thing despite all the shitty stuff that happened to him.
Sephiroth may be a tragic villain that makes you wish things could have turned out differently for him, but by the end he was nothing more than a mad dog who needed to be put down.
This was actually why I’ve someetimes suspected that Jenova was the real mastermind. I can’t really see anyone just happening to choose to annihilate all life basically for no reason.
Ah well, I thinkI’ve already given it mroe thought than Squaresoft.