There are many horrors scattered around final fantasy 7, to the point that not all of the scariest moments involve an actual vampire that you can recruit. Sephiroth is responsible for most of them, and if you ask one of the producers of the classic JRPG, a certain scene involving Jenova would be at the top of the list.
On X/Twitter, some Japanese developers have shared some of the weirdest experiences they've encountered while making games. Among the stories told is a small jump scare Takashi Tokita, a Square Enix producer, suffered from while working on Final Fantasy 7 for the original PlayStation.
“As I was working on my computer during development of FF7, suddenly a Jenova video started playing on the PS dev kit monitor and I felt like I was about to have a heart attack,” he states. translated from Automaton. He subsequently confirmed that this is the scene in Nibelheim, a flashback where Sephiroth meets his mother in the Nibel reactor.
While I was working on my computer during the development of FF7, Jenova's movie suddenly started playing on the monitor of the real PS machine and I thought my heart was going to stop. https://t.co/Hr1DgKWbByDecember 6, 2025
It's a chilling tale, the nexus of a villain's descent into rage and madness. I get goosebumps just thinking about it, especially the first time I received a surprise myself. I can only imagine how shocked Tokita was.
The technology context helps define the situation here. This was an early version of 3D, when the then-SquareSoft team was working on revolutionary technology. No one has ever seen videos like this on a home console before, and now suddenly the dev kit is crashing?
I would have thought the whole place was haunted. Tokita may have done it too, but he decided to continue anyway. I'm glad he did it. At the very least, it was proof that Sephiroth would make a great villain, as he terrified his creators in the real world as well.
