The Rise Of Final Fantasy 7’s Corporate Villain Would Be A Perfect Game For Our Late Capitalism Moment
Maybe the most impactful thing about returning to the world of Final Fantasy VII for me has been how much its ideas resonate in 2024–many of them even more than they did in 1997. The environmental themes and plotline of FF7 might be exceedingly blunt, but they’re also continually relevant as we live through yet another “hottest year of your life so far.” And after finishing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I keep thinking about something else that feels a little too real: the Shinra Electric Power Company.
Shinra is the corporation of cackling villains at the heart of FF7. Much of the story is about how resource extraction for the sake of human progress (with “human progress” often being interchangeable with “greed”) is literally killing the planet, how Shinra are the folks responsible, and how they do not care. More than that, though, is the fact that Shinra is a corporation whose power has grown so immense that it dominates most of the world. It makes and enforces laws, it owns and polices cities, it manufactures weapons and trains soldiers, and it wages wars.
The Shinra of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth isn’t exactly one-to-one with the corporations of our late-stage capitalist real world (although it is pretty similar to the oil companies that knew about the effects of climate change as far back as the 1970s). But while the concept of an all-powerful corporation felt a bit more out-there in 1997, it’s a lot easier to believe today, when one capricious billionaire owns major global communications networks and wields absolute control over them, another is running for a second stab at the United States presidency while fighting off lawsuits and criminal trials, and many more spend untold millions to elect politicians who will pass policies to reshape the US to their vision.