The Heroes of Midgar - The 30th Anniversary of Final Fantasy VII

On January 31st, 2027, it will be 30 years (!) since Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VII on the Sony Playstation, and changed RPG's (Role Playing Game) forever. The incredible adventure of Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Aerith, Red XIII, Cait Sith, Cid, Yuffie and Vincent as they battle across Midgar to defeat Sephiroth and repair the planet Gaia's damged and depleted Lifestream, was an enormous hit in Japan, but for the first time a JRPG became a huge international success as well, selling over 9.8 million copies worldwide.

I wasn't an immediate convert as I was rather inexperienced with RPG gaming, and the turn based combat felt very alien to someone raised on arcade games. However, it didn't take long for the visuals, the environments, character design and especially the music, to hook me in and grip me for the hundreds of hours I would eventually devote to this masterpiece. Gamers from Gen X, through to Gen Z will have a tale to tell about their time with this game, and many will shed a tear at key memories that are indelibly etched in to the hearts and minds of those that played. I want to celebrate the game, and the anniversary, and this project is intended to achieve that goal.

I was researching my next Lego IDEAS project for the recent 90s challenges, and although those challenges were explicitly based on Film and TV shows from that era, it got me thinking about how videogaming changed dramatically at that time with the advent of 3D graphics and the arrival of the Sony Playstation. The low-poly style seemed really suited to Lego, with all the new wedges and angled plates that have come into the parts library over the last 10 or 15 years, and many games could be approaching their 30 year (or even 35th) anniversary, so there seemed to be an opportunity to try and celebrate that. Very quickly, I thought of FF VII and its impact on that generation of gamers and the low-poly, chibi-style of the characters in the game. So about 3 weeks ago, I decided to see whether I could build the games' protaganist, Cloud Strife, and capture that distinct style.

At this point I was hooked and felt I had to complete the entire team in the same style! For the next three weeks, I've chipped away, edging ever closer to the Lego IDEAS 5,000 piece limit! I chose to do Tifa Lockhart, Cloud's childhood friend next, followed by her rebel group's leader Barret Wallace.

Next came Red XIII, who was a departure from the build structure underpining the human characters* as Red XIII is a unique species, somewhere between a lion and a wolf. It's a really interesting challenge to balance the limitations of the original Playstation's graphics hardware and the low-poly look of the in-game characters, and give enough detail and potential poseability of the characters.

It was also fun to figure out that the triangular piece used for the nose, required the head to be built upside down!

Next was Aerith (sometimes as Aeris) Gainsborough, the flower seller from the Midgar Slums, who is revealed to have a deep connection to the planet's history. This was an interesting challenge as the character wears a long slim skirt. I ended up adding a axle inside so tha the skirt is in three vertical sections. This should allow for the character to be posed with greater flexibility.

The next character was a real departure from the others, Cait Sith, the robot cat and his Moogle steed. Again, that really useful triangular element (15571 - Slope 45 2 x 1 Triple) proved crucial in capturing the particular colour patterns on Cait Sith's feline face. :)

I probably had to make Cait Sith's head a little bigger than it should be to capture the character's appearance!

The next character, Cid Highwind, is the last character that automatically becomes a part of your group - a pilot, obsessed with flying to the stars, and the owner and captain of the Highwind Airship.

Hidden within the game, are two more characters that you can persuade to join your group. Yuffie Kisaragi, and young female ninja (and thief) from Wutai, and tragic figure, Vincent Valentine, a vampiric ex-member of the Turks who has connections to the mother of the games antagonist, Sephiroth*.

Final Fantasy VII continues to have an enormous international fanbase. The same fanbase were recently thrilled to learn that their long standing dream, that Squaresoft would remake Final Fantasy VII for the new generation of consoles. I believe that means that the audience for these brick-built figures would be huge, made up of fans of both the original and the remake.

I've used some stickers (or printed parts) for the eyes and a few costume details here and there, but for the most part, I've let the bricks do the talking. Talking of bricks, the project uses 4,926 bricks, so there woudl be room for a set of dedicated minifigures as well, which I know FF VII fans would go CRAZY for. Each figure is aound 23 bricks tall, so I think they'd make amazing display pieces. Their articulation, while understandably a little limited, will give the builder some flexibility in how they pose and arrange their heroes!

I hope you all get a kick out of seeing the entire group made out of Lego - they were fun to design, and hopefully, we might be able to help these heroes on their journey to 10K!