I guess the story is probably the most fascinating aspect in Final Fantasy VII. The hero in our story is the young Cloud Strife. In the very beginning of the game he joins a small group of rebels, the AVALANCHE, who fight the almighty Shinra, Inc.. This company extracts Mako-energy from the planet with reactors. This energy is the base for life on the planet and for the planet itself, nothing would exist without Mako-energy and its lifestream. During the game several different characters join the party, you'll e nd up with 7, 8 or 9 characters. Another person fights the Shinra, a former member of a group of strong fighters working for the Shinra, Sephiroth. He found out about his past with the Shinra, their experiments and their bad intentions and now wants his revenge. When he worked for Shinra several years ago he was Clouds teacher and idol and becomes the true enemy of our friends: even if he helps destroying the Shinra, he also wants to hurt the planet with a meteor to find the lifestream in the planets core. Our heroes of course try to stop him in a final showdown. During the game each character developes a story of its own, filled with love, pain and revelations of the past, so the game really never gets boring . And until the very end many things are hard to predict, like in FFVI, and that's what i missed in VIII and IX.