just what the fuck religion is Aerith's church anyway?? it's the only church in the whole freaking world and absolutely no one ever talks about worshiping anyone. what gives?
Posted May 5, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC
Non-committal answer: The Japanese are often more spiritual than religious. It’s not so much about worshiping deities, but rather about connection with your ancestors and great people of the past
hence, Aerith and the Cetra :o
https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Church
Apparently: churches were a common element of the series early years that faded away, but, this doesn't help much since every entry in the series is pretty much an isolated story; but...
I have kind of a crazy theory that at least some of the single digit entries are chronologically connected, but, they are separated by periods of thousands of years; it would be long enough that forces like tectonic activity and erosion would change the land masses of the planets some.; enough time that a separate world society rises, falls, and, is completely forgotten in the interim in between the games.
A few small things give hints of this. In bone village, there is what looks to be the remains of an oddly normal looking jet aircraft. Is this an artifact from the interim era that existed between 6 and 7?
This leads to a non-canon extrapolation of why there is a church. Midgar is probably the oldest city in that world aside from Forgotten City (of the ancients) and, lets think of how long it would have to have been there.
The people would have to initially build the "old city" of the lower level sectors. The sector slums was once a thriving normal city in its own right.
They wouldn't immediately start building the above plate city as soon as mako energy was discovered; there would be a period of time when the ground level city was being retrofitted to run on smaller scale mako reactors.
Midgar would be the first, and for a time; the only city to have this form of reliable electrical power. Due to issues with the distance that the energy can be reliably carried (they didn't invent substations) they couldn't horizontally sprawl the popular growing city any further, so, they started going up. At first: they put some commercial and management structures atop the central spire, and then, they gradually started building scaffolds connecting the spire to the tops of the eight centralized mako reactors, and, over time and over the course of some remodels, they get to the city layout as we see it at the game start.
After all that: enough time passes that the long term use of mako energy creates a large patch of dead land surrounding the city.
We are talking about several generations to complete this process, and, whatever religion that church was to represent could have been lost to the ages early on in this.
Midgar might have started as a very minor village; three houses, an item shop, and, that church, and, the religion becomes abandoned for some reason at that stage in the city development. They could have kept the church as a central meeting place and town hall devoid of believe in the religion it once stood for. Either that or it was a historical site, as it was the last church in the world.
"i know we all stopped believing in god simultaneously, but.... some of us still want pancake breakfast fundraisers and Friday night bingo, so, we are keeping the building intact. "
By the time any serious talk on demolishing the church to build a new structure would occur, the ground level property was rendered virtually worthless by the shadow of the above plates and the death of the soil.
The church of flowers.
It's a temple of yevon
To be fair, it's a church design by Earth standards. In that world, it could've just been a building for "town meetings" at some point, later abandoned. Since there is nothing that actually points to religion, or even implied, it could be anything.
I would have to thoroughly research to be certain, but, i do believe the characters refer to it as "a church" or "the church"
I guess it could be the only surviving remnant of a lost religion, but then, it would be odd that no one ever makes note of that. No one seems to find any novelty in the building aside from it being one of the few midgar places that can still support vegetation.
I think you're right that it is referred to as a church but the english translation is full of errors. If you really wanted to research that I'd check with Kotaku's Let's Mosey series which is all about the differences in the Eng/Jap translations. I'd do it but I honestly don't care enough.
The purpose is so people can make elaborate april fools jokes
By the way, isn't it also the first church in the entire series? Nintendo was pretty strict about religion appearing in the games.
If you count Chrono Trigger, there's a church important to the plot.
FF2 has churches to revive your fallen party members, but that didn’t make it stateside.
Final Fantasy Tactics is filled with churches and religion.
Yeah, absolutely! But it came after FF7.
Long lost religion worshipped by Ancients?
Plot twist: they worship Jenova.