Director, I regret to inform you that no one in that boardroom is going to listen to you.
In this world, there is a company so large, it effectively acts as the government — the president of the company is the president of the world by default. With control over the most important natural resource, hands in everything from energy and power to cutting-edge technology to the entertainment and dry goods sectors, and backed by a formidable military, there’s little anyone can do to stop them. The balance of power and income is heavily skewed towards the executive suite while propaganda and (if necessary) force keep people in line.
Every day life in this world for the average person isn’t great, but there’s the illusion that it could be worse, furthered by this company’s ubiquitous presence and media control. If you live in the slums of the city — literally called “the undercity,” separated into numbered sectors below the middle-class plate-dwellers — your goal is to get topside, to the Levittown-style suburbs of the plate. If you already live topside, your goal is to get into the high-rise glitz and glamour of Sector 0 and the company’s executive floors.
Director of Urban Development and Planning, Reeve Tuesti, has the illusion of power within the company. By contrast, he has significantly more power than your average Midgar citizen and lives a comfortable life. He doesn’t need to worry about where his next meal is coming from or if he’s going to have a place to sleep at night — insert a joke about how he’d probably sleep in his office anyway because he works too hard here — because all of his needs are taken care of by the company.
The price he pays for these things is his conscience. He knows that the company he works for is bad, but for the majority of his scenes in Final Fantasy VII Remake, there’s a distinct impression that he believes things should be done in a certain order, through the proper channels, within the parameters of the system. For as much as he seems to genuinely care about things his executive suite compatriots do not — the well-being of his employees, the efficiency and quality of life within the city itself — he’s hardly a radical. More of us are like Reeve than we would be willing to admit, especially if we do have a semblance of a conscience. Guilt is present but even then, action isn’t guaranteed. The path to one (or a select few) companies running a world into the ground for their own personal gain is more boring in the everyday than fiction depicts it to be and it’s easy to be complicit. Furthermore, if the system is all that he knows and has benefitted from it, it’s easy to understand why he would make the assumption that change could happen by following the rules of that system.
Regardless of who is in charge of the city of Midgar, how much is the daily life of an average citizen in the undercity going to change as the Shinra Company accelerates its control of the city and, by extension, the world? For that matter, how much will Reeve’s life change, or the lives of those who work for him change?
Furthering this line of thought, what choice do most of them have (especially the denizens of the undercity) but to keep working?
The turning point for Reeve isn’t the Sector 7 plate drop itself but the one-two combination of the plate drop (which he actively protests) and the president’s announcement that they’re not going to rebuild the sector at all. They’re not going to touch it. The company is not only going to allow the initial wave of deaths that come from purposefully dropping one section of the city on top of another as acceptable casualties, but additionally is going to let the demolished Sector 7 fester in the aftermath causing a second wave of wholly preventable deaths and spin it as an act of terrorism by another party.
In the original Final Fantasy VII game, Reeve’s inclusion in the much smaller Midgar section of the game is reduced to the single scene where he protests the plate drop (although he appears in the boardroom meeting later as well). The big reveal that he designed the robot Cait Sith, which travels with the party for a large amount of the game, happens at the end of the game. Additionally, Cait Sith is hardly a benevolent force through which Reeve is enacting his vengeance against the Shinra Company. Instead, he’s a spy for said company, but ends up playing both sides once his city is in danger. Remake is setting him up to be a more important character already. This could be positioning him for an earlier defection, or simply filling in some blanks while the game has the time, playing with an informed audience’s knowledge of Cait Sith and who he is.
Regardless, Reeve is a prescient character whose actions reflect an added nuance to the idea of someone who is in a better position than most everyone else in the game — someone who believes in the existing system until it becomes abundantly clear that there is no hand-shaking with a side that wants you dead. Reeve hasn’t reached this latter point yet in Remake, but his increased presence in this first installment could make for one of the more interesting character narratives of the entire game, especially against the backdrop of current global events.
Sidenote: Welcome to the 2020 Twelve Days of Anime project, where I’ll be blogging each day for twelve days (until the Christmas holiday) about bits and pieces of anime that resonated with me personally. Yes we’re including Final Fantasy VII Remake in there, despite it being a video game.