Further Reading

Scene from AC depicting Meteor's descent toward Gaia

The moon over Ajit.

The thick red vertical lines demonstrate where the timezones would be divided, one hour being lost per timezone as one travels east Timezones on Earth fall every at approximately every fifteen degrees longitude, so we applied the same concept for Gaia, making each time zone about 269 km wide. Ergo, the circumference of the planet is 6,456 km--that means the entire planet is not that much bigger than the United States, to give you a sense of orientation. Since the map of landmasses only spans approximately 981 km, most of Gaia is water. The size being as it is, Gaia must be a moon, since no planet can be that size and still be a planet. There are two scenes in Advent Children that indicate Gaia itself has a moon in its sky, however this can easily support the idea that Gaia is one of multiple moons to a larger planet--Spira, for example--and has little bearing on whether or not Gaia itself can be classified as a moon.

The full scale of Gaia's area vs. the known landmasses from the game.

All of Gaia's landmasses would fit in Texas O_o.

As further demonstration of the diminutive stature of Gaia, here is a full-area map of the world (it's mostly ocean, we assume), and an overlay that shows how big all of the known landmasses in Gaia are in comparison to the size of the United States. Please bear in mind that the second map is only for size-comparative purposes and does not show the proper latitude of Gaia's landmasses.

Since the landmasses of Gaia cover such a small percentage of the planet itself, there are only three timezones represented on land. Since Midgar seemed to be the largest and most populated, industrial city in the game, it served to reason that it was thus the most important. To prevent temporal issues that would have arisen from the fact that traveling east causes one to lose daylight, we chose to unite all three timezones under one blanket timezone: Midgar Standard Time--similar to how on Earth we use Greenwich Standard Time to synch up official timepieces. While each timezone does run on its own hourly marker, we chose to show the events of Advent Children as having a timestamp from a consistent source, giving us Midgar Standard Time.

Gravity and Physics of the Native Gaians

Moving right along, a significant amount of complaints seem to arise as to the physics--or lack thereof--depicted in Advent Children. I find it a bit unusual that the relatively comparable lack of physics in the original game itself is apparently perfectly excusable, but a lack of physics in a movie is complete and utter blasphemy. *eyebrow* Whatever. Either way, most of the issues with the physical sciences can be easily rectified with a simple explanation--and no, it's not 'magic'. It is, in fact, significantly more concrete than that. It's gravity. Gaia is an exceedingly small body, ergo the gravity thereupon would be significantly less than that of, say, Earth. This means that objects fall slower, things are lighter, and motion has potential to be much faster.

The point is, the residents of present-day Gaia descended from those Ancients who arrived on the planet some two millennia ago. And if those Ancients were originally from Spira, then much of the argument for lack of physics dies right there. Supposing Spira is a full-fledged planet (as opposed to a moon or a dwarf-planet), the gravity on it would be significantly higher than that of Gaia. Therefore, the indigenous creatures of Spira would have evolved to be able to withstand and function in an environment with that higher amount of gravity--their bone structure would be sturdier than that of a creature that evolved in lowered gravity, and the musculature of the Spirans would be exponentially stronger than someone from a lowered-gravity environment. When the Spirans arrived on Gaia, they probably had a hard time adjusting right away--think moon-bouncing. But as time passed, they would adapt...like ya do...to be able to walk on Gaia as any native creature would. However, there isn't enough time in two millennia for evolution to take any drastic steps to adjust the skeletal and muscular makeups of these people; meaning that, while they appear to move in normal Earth-style gravity, their bodies are used to a level of gravity that is much greater. So much like martial artists can manipulate their bodies in ways that your average Joe cannot, highly skilled people on Gaia like Cloud and Tifa and Vincent and the Turks all appear to be able to utterly defy physics, because their trained bodies simply allow them to use their muscles and inert bodily strength to overcome an amount of gravity significantly smaller than that which they were designed for. So while they walk as if gravity holds them down like anyone else, the evolutionary process that molded their race to function in high-gravity gives them almost superhuman strength in a low-gravity environment.

Think like how Goku from DBZ trained in space at 100x the gravity of Earth, and then when he got to Earth, he was the friggin' strongest dude EVER. Now take that amazing strength, and make it built-in. In order to pull the feats Cloud and the others do, their bodies obviously had to be trained for it. However the strength and sturdiness comes standard in Gaians--their origins demand it.

It is that alien origin of all Gaians that would allow for Cloud to carry and swing his enormous sword, for the Remnants to make their bikes literally jump off the surface of the planet (which, for the record, you can actually do on Earth with the right shocks on your bike...), for Reno to climb buildings and do handsprings in midair, and since objects are inherently lighter and fall more slowly in lowered gravity, this even permits Rude to get cracked on the head by a metal billboard and get up dusting off his sleeves. Especially if the sign was made of, say, aluminum. On a sidenote, Nanaki/Red XIII is somewhat exempt from these particular stipulations; his species is native to Gaia. However, he is a feline of sorts, and felines have a tendency to defy several levels of physics in the first place.

Inter-Planetary Medicine, and the Remarkable Powers of the Lifestream

So...continuing our thoughts on the defiance of physics, let's take a look at the lack of science that pretty much makes a video game a video game--restorative magic, items, and abilities. Sure, it's completely acceptable to bring your dead party back to life, but Rude can't get cracked on the head with a sign and live to tell about it? O_o Buh? It is this dichotomy of acceptance that makes me question the sanity of the fandom in the first place sometimes, but even so, we have a card to play in this situation as well. While harnessing the power of the Lifestream is one thing that has no immediate parallel in reality, a lot of restorative items can be easily explained with simple medicinal Earth-logic.

Potions, Ethers, and other Items

Since the Final Fantasy worlds revolve around magic and the use thereof, coming up with a feasible method of explaining materia and Potions and the like to the satisfaction of our scientific OCD was trying. But we finally came up with something that satisfied canon and our anal-retentiveness. Since Potions and Hi-Potions restore a specific amount of HP (100 and 500 respectively), the amount of healing a Potion can do is exact and does not vary based on who is using it. The same goes for Ethers--each Ether restores 100 MP, no variation. This was easy to explain; dosages. [w] amount of [x] substance will heal [y] amount of [z] damage. However, an X-Potion restores a character's full health. Ergo, an X-Potion is not a specific strength or percentage; it's going to be different for every character. This took a little pondering, and we finally decided that since X-Potions cannot be bought in shops and are difficult to come by anyway, we'd take a little artistic liberty and say that an X-Potion is not a specific type of potion that magically restores you to full-health--rather it's...sort of like a prescription. You have it calibrated to your specific stats. Each X-Potion is made exactly to the specifications of who it is being made for, which would logically be the only way anyone who uses one could be restored to full-health without severely overdosing a low-level character, or falling short for a high-level character. Now, this also presents the issue of potential overdose if you're not that hurt. Well duh, an X-Potion is a pretty coveted item; you only use it when you're about to KO anyway. ^_^

This rule also applies to other such items, including Turbo Ethers, which restore all of one's MP, and Elixirs, which fully restore both HP and MP. Granted, having a magical item calibrated to your specific stats is probably difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, thus explaining why these items are harder to come by and not available for purchase in shops.

Most other items remain unchanged; they need no particular explanation... Just as a Potion is basically a portable one-use Cure spell, Dream Powders, Ice Crystals, Ink, Echo Screens, and other such items are in the same vein; they are simply a means to an end that negates the need for materia or the MP to use it.

Zombies?

We also ran into a bit of a quandary on the subject of Phoenix Downs or Life spells that will revive a KO'd character in-game. Now...biology and physics would argue that it is pretty much physically impossible to bring someone back to life once they are "dead", so we took a bit of artistic (scientific?) liberty with the definition of these sorts of items/magic, and added the stipulation that they do not re-animate someone who is dead...but rather revive someone who is unconscious so that they may heal themselves and continue battle. After all, save for the Full Life spell, both revival magic and the Phoenix Down only return a small percentage of the character's total HP...so it served more to reason (and science) that reversing death would be...unreasonable. Ergo, these sorts of items/materia can only revive someone who is unconscious and restore the amount of health and magic applicable. If you die, you're screwed. Sorry.

...Otherwise, we come back to the age-old argument, "Well, why didn't they just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith?"

Just as with the Phoenix Down item, Restore materia can only revive someone who is unconscious--it cannot bring you back from the dead. This is a scientific impossibility on just about every level of every reality feasible. Certainly there are feats stranger than fiction that have happened in real life, but there is no medicine in a bottle that will bring your mortally wounded girlfriend back from the dead after she's been skewered by a nine-foot sword. On a similar tangent, there are undead monsters that are actually cured by attacks and killed by Phoenix Down and Life spells. If you destroy something that is reanimated dead by the spell that would bring someone back from the dead... My head spins from all this circular logic. No matter how you look at it, magic or not, it makes no sense.

Part of the reason being able to bring people back from the dead is such a ridiculous prospect in the first place is that it erases fear of death. Perhaps even more important than the literal circle of life being interrupted by this false immortality is that the entire psyche of society would unravel. If dying is of no consequence, then no one would be afraid to try ridiculous death-defying stunts. No one would listen to rules held up by deadly force, because teh very word 'deadly' would mean nothing. Without fear of death, it wouldn't matter if people did foolhardy reckless things, because they would know that anybody could just bring them back to life. Certainly in an actual video-game setting, being able to revive your fallen party is going to be a necessary stretch of reality in order to defeat your final boss. In a game, if you only had one chance, nobody would get very far. But in 'real life'--in writing a story where the characters are three-dimensional and living out an actual life instead of simply acting as a two-dimensional pixellated avatar for the person holding the controller--fear of death is a necessary evil. Without it, there would be no villains (why bother killing anyone if they could all be brought back? What an exercise in futility!) and there would be no heroes (kill the villain, and his sidekick just brings him back? What a useless, vicious cyle!). In order to maintain that every mortal would have some awareness of his own mortality, that mortality needs to exist, and if the Lifestream itself negated that mortality, it would be killing itself slowly, if its power truly lay in the energy of dead souls.

Dead is dead. If death were truly reversible, Aerith would have been brought back. President Shinra would have been brought back. The Turks wouldn't have been commanded to kill Veld in Before Crisis, because it would have made no difference--they could have just as easily had someone bring him back to life.

Materia/MP

All right. Here's the big one. Here's the deal, kids. You really can't science magic. That's the nature of the beast--it's like oil and water. You can put them in the same jar, and they'll still separate into two levels of stuff that will never mix and get along peacefully no matter how many times you shake it up. However, we can make things a little more consistent by placing some limitations and stipulations on what materia can do, and how it can be used.

We all know that different materia do different things. As in any battle in-game, lower-level materia will cast a weaker spell. Elemental materia was probably the easiest to define in an out-of-game context--Fire materia, for example, will burn an opponent briefly with a Fire spell, moderately with a Fira spell, and significantly with a Firaga spell. We could even take Fire, Ice, and Lightning materia in particular to the next level of specificity and venture than a level one spell would give a first-degree burn/frostbite, a level two spell a second-degree, and a level three spell a third. Earth materia was a little harder to pinpoint, but in the end it seemed logical that since materia is made of Lifestream itself, an Earth materia could command the earth beneath the feet of an enemy to quake at a certain intensity. Status-effect materia was also relatively simple to pull out of a game context--things like confusion, petrification, and berserk-status can be easily inflicted with a chemical substance. Even Mini and Toad can be achieved with hallucinogenic means.

We hit something of a roadblock with Time materia. Despite the fact that it's magic to begin with, the ability to weild power over time itself is not only dangerous, but somewhat non sequitur in what is otherwise endeavoring to maintain some grip on reality. Messing with time only ends in tears--Doc Brown and Marty McFly can attest to this. So we again turn to the Lifestream for some assistance here, and assume that as Earth materia can control the earth beneath someone's feet, Time materia can control the very internal so-called biological clock within every human being. If the Lifestream is made up of soul energy, then it's certainly acceptable to assume someone with hold on the Lifestream would have hold on your soul and the internal mechanisms that make everyone click. Time materia doesn't give the holder power over time...it gives the holder power over the energy and mobility of the person they are casting the spell on.

As mentioned previously, spells at different levels obviously cause different amounts of damage. Mastered materia might even have the capability to kill someone with a single spell (in a different means than a Death spell, which has a limited success-rate)...however this, too, would have some restrictions. MP, not to put too fine a point on it. Obviously, stronger spells require more MP to use. But how were we to translate MP into something that could be grasped out of a game context? Simple--mental stamina. The best mages are strong, disciplined individuals with a good hold on self-control and a steady hand on their own abilities. In any RPG-style game, if you intend for your character to be a mage, you train/equip/level them to have a higher MP bar than, say, your tank. This would apply the same way to an out-of-game setting; people who use materia learn to temper their minds to be able to properly weild materia well. Using a powerful spell can leave a weak mage drained and vulnerable. Using multiple powerful spells can leave even a seasoned mage stumbling. An amateur who tries his hand at a level-three spell from a mastered materia will likely find himself either unable to do anything, (not enough MP to cast the spell), or knocked flat-unconscious from the sheer mental drain of overexerting oneself magically. It takes a lot of work to master a materia...so in removing this world from a console and putting its people in a real-world setting, we maintained that difficulty by making a mastered spell cost a significant amount of energy.

For example, Cloud's MP maxes out at L99 at 905. The most draining spell one can cast is Shield, at 180. This means Cloud can cast this spell AT MOST five times before he is mentally exhausted and will likely pass out. He can only summon Knights of the Round three times before he would need to rest or consume ether. However, Cloud is also a warrior who has trained to be able to use materia properly. Cloud's beginning stats are at L6, and at that point, his MP is a measly 54. Aeris, who is a mage by default, starts the game at L1 with 23 MP. The point here is that while come Advent Children, we can assume that all recurring adult characters as well as new villains such as the Remnants can be considered at the equivalent of L99 stats. However most of the people in Edge are not warriors, are not mages, and are likely not at a high level. Your average person on the street is not a black belt, and cannot bench-press their weight. Ergo, most people probably not only don't know the proper method for using materia, but are liable to wear themselves out even trying.

Cure and Regen

Now we come to the subject of Cure. Why does this get its own bullet point, you ask? Restorative magic in general is something of a sticky subject to make feasible in a three-dimensional setting. If Cure were simply a miraculous fix-all, it would present a similar issue that lack of fear of death does. But if we restrict it too fiercely, it no longer lies within the parameters the original game setting gave us. So after some deliberation and several passes through some medical informational sources, we decided that, while Cure is a powerful and extremely useful spell, even it has some limitations.

Cure can fix most injuries. It can mend broken bones, close lacerations, and even heal gunshot wounds. Cure and Potions can, in a nutshell, heal any wound so long as the body is still alive. Regen works the same way--it simply heals you in increments instead of all at once. However, what these spells cannot do is heal bruising or swelling. The reason for this is simply that these are instances where the body has to actually physically reabsorb the fluids causing the problem, and forcing this could cause more harm than good to the person involved. Cure cannot heal a concussion, for example, because forcing the swelling around the brain to go down instantaneously could severely damage the brain itself. A concussion is caused by the impact of your brain against the inside of your skull, resulting in bleeding and possible damage of nerve fibers. These are not things that should be rushed when healing--this is your brain we're talking about, folks. We postulate that perhaps part of what a Phoenix Down or Life spell does is assist in the speedy reduction of this swelling, resulting in your party awakening from an unconscious state...but it does not fix the problem, and in an out of game context, using something of this nature is likely not recommended if the unconscious person is out due to acute severe head trauma.

Immunity and Tolerance?

One could assume that, as the Lifestream is made up of soul energy, an immunity or tolerance to such a thing would be unlikely. However at the same time, if the body is constantly healed by an artificial means, regardless of the source, the body would stop relying on its own restorative or regenerative powers when injured. In order to maintain this principle, we implemented the idea that natural maladies would be handled differently than unnatural ones.

Poison materia, for example, casts a Bio effect, basically making the affected person ill and lose small amounts of HP at intermittent intervals. This is different from someone actually getting sick. Gaians are, for all intensive purposes, akin to humans, meaning their bodies have a similar immune system to our own. Anyone who's ever had a cold can attest to the fact that there is no ten-second cure-all for such things. However, an inflicted status effect such as Bio can be reversed with an Antidote, Remedy, or Heal materia, since it was an artificially instigated ailment and will not rectify itself without the use of external remedial assistance. These items would not, however, affect someone who had been stricken with, say, bronchitis. In the same way Life spells would have the capability to negate fear of death if they could actualy reverse it, if all illnesses, no matter how bad, could be cured with an item that could be bought for about forty bucks in a store or a materia that can be purchased, medicinal establishments would go out of business, and further advancement of nonmagical capabilities would come to a screeching halt.

Similarly, in the case of small injuries that would easily heal on their own, Cure should not be used unnecessarily. Too much of a good thing can be bad, of course, and restorative magic and items should be no exception to this. The more pain relievers one consumes, the more the body requires to achieve the same effect over time. And while a Potion will heal the same amount of damage each time, regardless of a tolerance, if one's body comes to rely to heavily on external means to repair itself, its ability to heal without assistance may become severely stunted, leaving that person at a significant disadvantage should they run out of Potions...

Nobody's Business but the Turks

So now that we've gotten physics out of the way...let's talk about the Turks. That's right...ShinRa's Department of Administrative Research, the crème de la crème elite task force that not only holds Top Secret security clearance to all of the information ShinRa knows and kicks ass to preserve it...but looks damn snappy doing it in their three-piece suits and ties. While the exact history of the Turks and their origins with the ShinRa Company remain unknown, a close analysis of the compilations of FFVII give us enough of a foundation to be able to glean a feasible back story for this R&D-turned-assassin faction of the corporation. So let's work our way backwards, from the events of Advent Children back to Before Crisis, to try and understand just how deep the roots of the Turks as a department go.

The information below, as with all of the not-specifically-canon information stated in this wiki, is not supported or condoned by the creators of FFVII, and are merely the speculations of the authors. This is our take on the Turks, and how they came to be not only the most powerful defensive force of the strongest bureacratical presence on Gaia...but also its greatest liability... [dundunDUNNNNN!!!]

Advent Children

In Advent Children, ShinRa itself is mostly in pieces. After Rufus's being stricken with geostigma, what remained of the company after the horrific events of FFVII had no leadership with which to rebuild. As a whole, ShinRa as a global presence was done for; the president was dying, the planet was dying...there was simply no room and no motivation for ShinRa to rebuild...that is until Rufus came upon the idea that Kadaj and his brothers were after Jenova and there was suddenly an opportunity for ShinRa to 'redeem' itself in the eyes of the planet. It appeared that post-FFVII, the Turks (all of them--we discover in the final episode of Before Crisis that all of those Playable Turks who were believed dead after the battle with Zirconiade had actually been in hiding with Veld) were basically reassigned to simple bodyguards for the ailing president. Aerith was dead--the projects to attempt to recreate the Ancients died with her. Hojo was dead--the Jenova project died with him. Heidegger and Scarlet were dead--Weapons Development and the SOLDIER Project no longer had management. We are actually not given much indication what became of Palmer, but the Space Program was mostly shut down after the failed rocket launch... Reeve survived, but had gone off in the direction of the WRO in something of an effort to try and repair some of the damage ShinRa did.

In short, ShinRa Electric Power Company had basically been reduced to the dead corporation of a dying president whose worldly dreams had been destroyed with the tower in old Midgar.

That didn't mean that the loyalty of the Turks had been shaken, however. Despite the crumbling foundations of their corporation, the Turks stood by Rufus and were prepared to defend him to the death from the Remnants and their plan to resurrect Sephiroth. Mostly all this tells us definitively is that the steadfastness of the Turks is unwavering and endless, despite the impermanence of their company. Even without ShinRa's logo to stand proud before, the Turks would never back down from their duties. Even decades after the creation of the department, despite scandal, conspiracy, betrayal and tragedy, the constancy of the Turks remains unbroken.

FFVII

The role of the Turks in FFVII-proper was decidedly that of anti-heroes of choice. While the Turks certainly weren't the good guys, they were far from villains. Over the course of multiple altercations with these blue-suited opponents, even Cloud seems to come to the conclusion that the Turks might not be entirely bad. They even temporarily team up in an effort to rescue their respectively kindapped teammates.

For that matter, as a general rule, the Turks don't really seem to want<i> to engage Cloud and his group. There are a couple of occassions in which Reno actively <i>refuses to act offensively against them, claiming he and the other Turks are 'off-duty'. In fact, the final battle with them is completely optional (providing you didn't act like a jerkface in Turtle Paradise)--they'll let you go if you opt not to fight them, even though they're supposed to be keeping you away. This rather proves that while their orders are important to them, even the Turks will bend the rules when they know it's the right thing to do. Despite being given direct orders to find and eliminate Cloud and his group, Reno, acting as leader in the absence of Tseng, in the end allows the heroes to pass. Despite the chagrin it undoubtedly caused him to allow Cloud to go ahead, Reno knew that unless Sephiroth was stopped, there was no hope for anyone.

What all of this indicates is that, while the Turks' loyalty to ShinRa is obviously fierce and runs deep, even the most faithful Turk isn't blind to reason. Adding this layer of depth to the Turks as a whole helps humanize them significantly--no one can really relate to or like or significantly respect a bunch of corporate dogs who will follow an order to certain death. But take that loyalty and add reason and the ability to think for themselves, and we get a smart team of upright and ultimately likable anti-heroes who know when to follow an order to the end...and when that order will lead to their end.

Before Crisis

Before Crisis's story begins shortly after the ending of the war between the ShinRa Electric Power Company and the Wutai tribe, a conflict mentioned in passing during Final Fantasy VII. With Wutai defeated and the people of the world now dependent on their mako energy and materia, ShinRa finds itself the dominant economic, military and political power in the world. But there are those who remain dedicated to the destruction of ShinRa, chief among them being the newly emerged insurgent movement known as "AVALANCHE". Before Crisis focuses on this conflict between ShinRa and the original AVALANCHE group, which began six years before the events portrayed in Final Fantasy VII, and lasted up to the time immediately preceding the events that took place in that game.

The first few mission files of Before Crisis deals with AVALANCHE's first hostile assault on ShinRa and its global power. AVALANCHE confronts the Turks in Sector Eight at all hours of the morning, and then make an assassination attempt on President Shinra himself in Junon. However, at this time, the Turks are already a highly trained and deadly force.

More things