Review of “Final Fantasy VII: On the Way to a Smile” by Kazushige Nojima
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In Braille here: https://ko-fi.com/braille
Episode: Denzel
When I first watched Advent Children, I was confused who Denzel was supposed to be or where he came from other than that he was another random kid that Cloud and Tifa picked up. Episode Denzel explains where he came from in detail, as well as gives us more tidbits about Reeve and his life, so it’s nice to have that.
Denzel relates his story of going from a normal kid in a normal home, with a parent who worked for Shinra, to losing both parents when his mother wasn’t willing to leave Sector Seven without trying to warn other people, and his father goes after her. He ends up with an subordinate of his father’s, who makes sure he gets to what was supposed to be their new home.
But after that he ends up completely alone when going from house to house searching for anyone else and ends up running into Ruvie, and older woman who takes him in. They stay together until Meteor comes, at which times the Lifestream overwhelms the house they’re in. Ruvie does everything she can to keep it from getting to Denzel but it’s really only a matter of luck because its force is so great.
When Denzel wakes up, Ruvie is barely able to respond to him before dying of Geostigma – something that no one knows anything about at that time.
People start going down the train tracks to take refuge, and more and more people die of Geostigma. He ends up making a living with a group of other orphans by collecting scraps that people need to rebuild for a while. But, as the new city emerges, the orphans slowly make their way out of the rubble and move to the new city, until Denzel is alone again.
He wanders around until he happens upon Aerith’s church, where he stumbles on Cloud’s cell phone with his bike. He tries to call his home or anywhere else he can think of with no luck, before finally calling a number that’s already in the phone and getting Tifa.
All of this is told by Denzel to Reeve while he tries to apply to become a member of the WRO (not explained in the book, but the “World Regenesis Organization”, created by Reeve to work on restoring the world.
It is nice to have Denzel’s origin, as well as a description of everything that happens after the Lifestream and Meteor. We get a fair amount of information about what it was like from Ground 0, and also how many people died, as person after person that Denzel comes into contact with either disappears or dies shortly after from Geostigma, whether they be adults or small children. It really shows how merciless it is. Denzel himself finally ends up sick with Geostigma, thus leading into Advent Children.
If you watched Advent Children and you were wondering “Who the heck is this kid?”, this episode explains everything about him.
Episode: Tifa
Episode: Tifa revolves around how quickly the group dissolved after the fighting was over, and how Cloud, Barret and Tifa moved on to try and find someplace where they could live a ‘normal’ life. After everything they’ve been through, trying to go back to being normal is pretty much impossible.
Almost everything gets decided for Tifa and she finds herself being frustrated. Barret suggests they make a new bar, and Tifa is basically volunteered to run it because of her experience. Marlene suggests it be called Seventh Heaven, even though Tifa wanted to avoid getting stuck in the past. They get the place built and running and then Barret moves on, leaving just Cloud and Tifa there.
Soon she’s set up in a bar and Barret and Cloud are off doing other things. She’s raising Marlene and running things, stuck in one place. She can’t just run off and do whatever she wants.
It’s a bit of a struggle between her and Cloud as they both have their problems and Cloud distances himself. They find Denzel, and for a while things seem to come together like a little family, until Cloud starts doing his delivery service full time and is almost never home to spend time with them. They continue to try and force things, especially in front of Marlene, but eventually Cloud has taken off and Tifa is left with Marlene and Denzel.
There is no maliciousness involved, but it’s easy to see how Tifa can be irritated that everything is placed on her even though she doesn’t necessarily have another idea in mind. Barret has gone off to deal with things. Cloud eventually disappears on her, and she can’t go anywhere because two kids are depending on her. She has to be the one who keeps it together to raise the kids. She doesn’t get to run away anywhere. It’s not hard to see how that could be a frustrating and overwhelming situation when she’s been through just as much as Barret and Cloud have.
It ends with her trying to call Cloud and him not answering. So she’s isolated and alone in the bar with Marlene and Denzel, and she’s struggled to get close to Denzel because he’s only interested in Cloud. She doesn’t really have anyone to turn to besides Marlene, and Marlene is just a kid.
This chapter shows how, without a common goal they’re all working toward, everyone heads off on their own quickly with just a promise that they can get in contact with each other. And then there’s a lot of floundering, with people unsure what to do, with a lot of trauma they have to resolve, guilt they have to deal with, and no clear direction. Everyone gets preoccupied with their own trauma, and Tifa doesn’t speak up because she doesn’t want to put anything on anyone else, but she ends up not being able to talk about her own problems.
Episode: Barret
Barret is wandering the world almost without purpose. He only knows how to fight, and there’s nothing to fight left. So, he goes about searching for something he can do in the world.
Eventually he ends up where Cid is. Realizing they’re going to need some source of energy to help people recover, they come up with oil, but they’re limited on anything they can do. Barret decides that he’s going to find oil no matter where in the world it is.
I think this chapter meandered a bit, like they were a bit lost what to do with Barret just like Barret was lost on what to do with himself. It does eventually arrive at a goal for him, but it kind of felt like a hodgepodge of things until finally it got there. It’s not a very long chapter, though, so it doesn’t hurt to get an idea of what Barret is up to. But it didn’t leave a big impression on me.
Episode: Nanaki
Nanaki leaves his village to go experience the world. First he goes where Yuffie is, to find that she’s dragging along a man who has geostigma. Yuffie is trying to find a materia that can cure it, and asks Nanaki to go look for information in Midgar.
He keeps experiencing a sensation that he names ‘Gilligan’, a terrible dread that overcomes him, that he isn’t certain what it is.
On the way to Midgar, Nanaki ends up in a forest instead. He saves a boy who is about to be killed by a Nibi bear and he protects the boy. While protecting the boy, the father comes and shoots and kills the bear. Then he considers shooting Nanaki.
The boy wants to keep Nanaki like a pet. The father recognizes Nanaki as the creature Shinra put a bounty on before. Nanaki decides to leave them both without speaking to them, not impressed by either.
When he returns to what is left of the bear’s carcass, two baby bears come to find their mother dead. Nanaki ends up raising these bears, naming them Baz and Lin. Knowing that more human hunters will be coming, he ends up raising them for two years and trying to teach them to survive.
Baz and the boy stumble on each other again. When Baz and Lin are about to team up on the boy and kill him, Nanaki steps in and stops them. They feel bad for accidentally hitting Nanaki instead and go back into the forest.
Nanaki discovers that Elena is in the forest and that the Turks seem to still be operating, and it seems they’re looking to get an ingredient from Nibi bears. He goes back to where Baz and Lin are and goes to sleep there. When he wakes up, they’re both gone, and he finds that while he was sleeping they went to the hunters’ encampment, and he finds their corpses have been hung up with their tails cut off.
Even though it is the law of nature that when you fight one loses, he becomes enraged and goes to attack the hunters. Vincent ends up being there and stops him, shooting him and getting him out of there.
He tells his story to Vincent when he wakes up, and how he isn’t sure where he went wrong. Vincent tells him he’s going to think about it for the rest of his life and always be changing his answer, and that when he’s sure he’s come onto an answer is when he’ll be the most wrong. Then Vincent leaves.
Nanaki goes to visit Cid, then, who gives him some welcome relief. He ends up riding on their airship with him, when they spot Yuffie on the ground, though Nanaki is a little concerned that he promised he would help Yuffie find out information and didn’t do that at all in the last two years.
Yuffie thinks she’s onto something, because she believes geostigma most affects people who wallow in despair, and they do better when they’re engaged in activities that prevent them from wallowing. And Nanaki promises to help her keep searching for materia to cure it even though he doesn’t believe it exists.
In the end he has another conversation with Vincent, and they agree to meet in Midgar once a year so that Vincent can listen to his stories and look uninterested. As it turns out, Gilligan is his eventual fear of being alone. He will outlive pretty much everyone he knows and eventually return to these places with only unfamiliar faces.
Vincent himself is immortal, so he, too, will lose everyone. Although Vincent makes fun of him for naming his fear ‘Gilligan’ and they end laughing in the Forgotten City, it is too a slightly bitter ending, knowing that both will lose everyone in the end, though Nanaki will at least have Vincent.
First, I’ll say that I wish he had named it something other than Gilligan. I could only think of Gilligan’s Island, and so the name has a goofy vibe to it.
I think this one is the hardest to read. Not because it’s bad, but for me it is always difficult to read about harm coming to animals. It fits with the theme of Nanaki’s story. Animals have short life spans as it is, and naturally Nanaki lost the two bear cubs he raised long before he himself would die. In this case they died due to hunters, and he has to imagine the pain they felt in their last moments, but even had they lived they wouldn’t live long compared to him. He has to deal with the pain of that loss because there’s nothing he can do about it.
Even though children are dying through the book, in this one Nanaki spends much longer with the cubs, and it’s easy to feel his loss, especially when he sees their bodies strung up ad their tails cut off. For people sensitive to something happening to animals, this chapter might be a difficult one to get through. It definitely hit the hardest for me.
Episode: Yuffie
The group splits up and Yuffie goes home from her adventure, only to see that Wutai has suffered a lot of damage. Then she’s blamed for bringing disease from Midgar and locked inside of a building.
After a while, Yuri rescues her from the building, not believing that she’s the reason people are getting sick. They go to look for materia that might cure the Midgar pox.
They end up in a random cave and explore it until black water chases them and ends up catching Yuri, and he gets ill. Yuffie is trying to carry him back home, but that’s when Nanaki stumbles across them, as we already saw in his story. He carries Yuri.
They’ve built a place to quarantine the sick people outside of their village. Yuffie starts switching between caring for the sick and exploring the world hunting for materia. After a while, Yuri informs her that he believes everyone who got sick thought they were going to die. They come up with two rules to warn people to stay away from suspicious water and to not think about death.
While she’s out one time she happens upon Cid’s airship flying around, and she continues to hunt for a materia that will cure the disease even though it’s unlikely to exist because it’s giving the people hope.
This episode seems a bit like several pieces mashed together to explain other parts previously mentioned. In Nanaki’s episode, it seemed like Yuri would be someone Yuffie was close to, but here we discover they don’t know each other that well and were only together hunting a couple of days before he fell ill. They did know each other as children, but Yuffie didn’t even remember him, and they weren’t particularly close.
It also shows that doing things like getting people to laugh helps them to feel better. Overall it seemed like an episode that filled in a few details but went very quickly from event to event without embellishing on them a lot.
Episode Shinra
This is the longest one and also the episode that is most like a short book in itself, and the most action-packed. It could also be called “Rufus has a really, really bad time”.
We see that Rufus escapes the blast from the Weapon by going into an escape chute that his father built. It was only there because his five-year-old self had asked how his father would be able to escape his office in case of an attack. His father scoffed at the idea of running, but said he would put it in in case Rufus wanted to run when he was an adult, and he labeled it “L”, for “Loser”.
The end of the fall from the top floor leaves Rufus seriously injured in a tiny locked room with a password lock. Eventually, he finds the password was his birthday, which was apparently a password his father often used. All the while he’s nearly in hysterics going from one near-death experience to the next.
Rude and Reno get him, and the Turks take him to Kalm. But he ends up getting kidnapped from there by an angry mob while the Turks are out. He’s knocked out and taken and locked up in the basement of Mütten Kylegate, a former lieutenant, where he continuously prods Rufus for his rebuilding plans and Rufus explains them piece by piece to buy himself time to live.
The Turks, meanwhile, are trying to figure out what happened to him but people aren’t willing to talk to them. Eventually they discover people taking stuff from there storehouses, using the emergency code Rufus gave them. They change the codes.
Verdot shows up to give them a clue that Kylegate probably has Rufus and they run off to save him.
Meanwhile, Rufus is getting beat up because they changed the codes and he doesn’t know the new ones. While he’s getting beaten, a revolt happens, and eventually he ends up kidnapped again – this time by a doctor named Kilmister. Kilmister previously worked with Hojo and claims he’s trying to find a cure for a new disease. He transports Rufus forcibly, along with several willing patients, to a cave. There is a steep drop into the cave he puts them into so that they can’t climb out, and Rufus is stuck there for some time with the other patients because Kilmister claims he will need him to find out about Jenova.
The Turks have absolutely no leads to find where Kilmister is now, so they’ve secured the storehouses and such in the meantime.
After some time in captivity, and several of the patients having already died, Rufus realizes that Kilmister has become addicted to the drug he uses to treat their symptoms. He uses that and tells Kilmister that the Turks will know where to get more.
For many days the doctor does not return, and while they’re waiting the cave gets flooded. Rufus gets pieces of wood off the beds they have and uses them to help the weak patients stay afloat on the water. The water never goes high enough for them to actually escape so they’re trapped inside of the flooded cave. Then, Rufus gets attacked by black water.
Finally, Kilmister comes back. He shoots one of the patient’s to another’s great dismay. Shortly after, the Turks show up and stop Kilmister from being able to shoot anymore, and they rescue Rufus.
While Rufus was trapped, Kilmister had forced the Turks to get stimulant as well as set up a place for patients in an old abandoned R and R facility in the mountains. He finally agreed to show them where the president was when that was done, and they went and got Rufus.
They stay at Healen Lodge for years, with Kilmister promising he’s working on a cure. But when he’s high and lets it slip to Rufus that he’s considering doing other things if he gets a piece of Jenova, the dismayed patient ends up shooting him the next day at the behest of a ‘friend’.
It ends with Rufus believing that it’s his job to cure the world.
I think this episode and Episode Nanaki are the strongest ones in the book, and probably both because they somewhat have their own plots going on. Nanaki has his own personal journey raising Nibi bears, in which much of the episode he doesn’t even worry too much about the human world.
In this episode, some of the others are brought up – for instance, why Elena went to kill the Nibi bears – but it’s overall focused on Rufus and the Turks and what they’re doing, and they have a lot more specific action going on than some of the other episodes. Where in “Episode: Barret” we might get a brief mention about his hometown and then he leaves, in “Episode: Shinra” we get a whole backstory of why he had an escape hatch to go down and an interaction he had with his father.
We also see Rufus and the Turks switching they’re roles. They’re used to being bad guys, but now they have to shift to trying to help people. This does carry on into “The Kids Are Alright,” where some Turks adjust better than others.
Rufus also has a better tendency to make decisions and take action, whereas in some other stories the characters sort of meandered around. It’s easy to see why most seem to consider this the strongest story, and I would agree with that opinion, though I thought Nanaki’s story was fairly strong as well.
There are also sections after each episode delving into what’s happening in the Lifestream with Aerith and Sephiroth. These can mostly be summed up as, “Sephiroth is fucking things up” and “Aerith is trying to stop him”. Most of these are about half a page long – very short.
Overall, this book gives a fair amount of information to fill in the gaps between the game and Advent Children, and lots of little tidbits that fans would enjoy. Not all the stories are that strong, but they aren’t very long, either. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to know more detail about what happened after their near-apocalyptic event.
Next time will be “My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Volume 1”.
Buy it here: Amazon
Other reviews:
"The Second Jungle Book" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/the-second-jungle-book-by-rudyard-kipling-1390007675730792452
"We" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/we-by-evgenii-zamiatin-1390784329147224071
"Anthem" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-anthem-by-ayn-rand-1395054370269171723
"Spice & Wolf Vol.2" https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-spice-wolf-volume-2-by-isuna-hasekura-1397584117876396040
"Spice & Wolf Vol.3" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-spice-wolf-volume-3-by-isuna-hasekura-1400209025269764103
"The Elements of Style" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-the-elements-of-style-by-william-strunk-jr-1400925092455649291
"The Great Gatsby" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-the-great-gatsby-by-f-scott-fitzgerald-1402686087800819722
"Heidi" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-heidi-by-johanna-spyri-1405629505891995656
"Glow Worm" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/review-of-glow-worm-by-harlan-ellison-1406700959396007949
"A Modest Proposal" and "The Lady, or the Tiger" - https://www.minds.com/eisah/blog/a-modest-proposal-and-the-lady-or-the-tiger-1409272420245704713