[Following The Man In The Black Cape]

Ok, so I'm setting up this thread to study Sephiroth's behavior through the whole compilation both for quick reference and to make a lil more sense of what's truly going on with him in R. (And to maybe get more sad.)
Please watch this zone.

Also I'm probably getting to it when I'm dealing with insomnia because it helps me sleep to be really productive in a way or another, so please expect this to come during super unexpected times lol

Before Crisis is a funny 2004 game.
It's iconic in which its existence's now something like a cryptid due to the platform it was released on and due to the fact it was NEVER rereleased officially in any other way, shape or form other than Japanese phones. (This gives me pain.)

It's also special due to the fact that it's (most likely, please fact check me on this if I'm wrong) the entry in the compilation with the longest timeline ever.
Seriously, this baby starts even before Crisis Core (Get it? *Before Crisis* :P) and ends at freaking Meteorfall!!!

We'd get to see fun stuff like recently joined Cloud Strife ruining a whole mission, Rude trying to date and Hojo putting materias on people just for the fun of it. What a great lil game. Please experience the fanmade PC port of it if you can. I love it.

But we're not here to talk about why I love BC so much. We're here to look at Sephiroth. (Or at least I am, on my lonesome, in this early Wednesday morning. Sometimes this is how your fellow Arkee has her fun.)
So, you'd think that, with BC covering so much of the timeline,

that we're gonna to see Sephiroth a lot, right? Well... no. This isn't a game about him, after all. This is a Turks game.
That we get to see him here is a little privilege he gets for being so important to FF7 as a whole. (Which I'm very glad for! I love him!)

But then, how often do we see Sephiroth in BC?
The answer is a number I like to associate with him a lot: 3.
Yes, only 3 times!!
But we can learn many things about Sephiroth's behavior and routine (?) from looking at it and speculating a little.

Those 3 times being:

1. During a mission the player Turk is in; two steps ahead to interrupt Avalanche's mission and have this brief confrontation with their leader, Elfé
2. When Fuhito abducts Hojo to try to win him over to their side; Sephiroth comes in to deal with a dragon—

—and stop a helicopter
3. The Nibelheim Incident. If you're in this thread, I'm assuming you know what that means and what goes down there. If you don't, well. This whole thread is a spoiler fest anyway.
But this event's one of the most known things about Sephiroth.

Notably, for the first two times, the order to deploy Sephiroth at once comes from the president himself. Which left on me the permanent impression when I recall BC that, if the president needed a bottle of pickles open at 3am, he'd probably call Sephiroth.

Hopefully writing this thread will be the end of that little misconception.
Now, for the 3rd time... It's not made clear who exactly gives the order to send Sephiroth, Zack & 3 troopers to Nibelheim. The reason for them being sent gets confusing between compilation games, though.

BC states that they're there to serve as backup for the Turks, since there are too many powerful dragons in the area, so it's difficult to investigate the disappearance of the folks who were manning the Nibel reactor. (And yes, these exist! It's not just abandoned up there!)

CC completely ditches the "Turks were there already" scenario and goes for a more OG-like approach. Which... ok, the Turks have a secret agent vibe to them and whatever, so I guess you wouldn't see them. But for a game who gave Shuriken a new name? Rude. She should've been there.

And this is something I'm only realizing now while writing this. Cissnei should've been in the town and Tifa should've had her cat. I hope future Remake installments address this somehow?

Anyway, as BC starts before CC (yeah, I know, I laugh every time) that means the war against Wutai is still happening and that at some point during that, Genesis and Angeal abandon Shinra.
BC has a special episode just to mention Genesis copies, which was added to the game—

—sometime in 2007, when that game got ported over to other 2 Japanese phone models (and after its English release of 2006 was absolutely cancelled because apparently the concept was too intense for non-JP phones?)
But anyway, with Cloud having joined AFTER Angeal and Genesis—

—leave, with his episode being 5 and Sephiroth's first appearance being on episode 3, we can speculate that maybe Genesis and Angeal were still on Shinra's side at BC's early game.

With that and the fact the war lasted 10 years (and that Sephiroth seems to have been first deployed as a pre-teen by timeline calculations!) we can just wildly guess that Sephiroth lives on a constant of being sent to Wutai, recalled, sent elsewhere on emergency orders,—

—sent back to Wutai for whatever important battle requires him, recalled again and sent off to deal with whatever else the company needs him to do. Maybe he *does* open that pickle jar at 3am.
I don't envy him one bit.
He doesn't seem to get holidays.

We have no evidence as to where he goes when he needs to sleep or eat a meal. Nibelheim incident later on tells us he can apparently ignore the need for that for a full week, at a cost. And he's very, very scary when it comes to that.
So scary that my insomnia ran off elsewhere.

So, to sleep with me. Will be back with more saucy facts, speculations and screenshots later. (Well, not so saucy. BC!Sephiroth on his own is a simple dude to understand.)
See ya then.

Y'know, one of my favorite things when reading stuff with Sephiroth in it is when people describe Sephiroth as a neat fighter who always does it with 'grace' and 'clean cuts'

cw: blood
.
.
.
//

Like, yeah, he can do that if he wants to and I love when he does it, but the very first time we meet him in the timeline of FF7, he does this to a bunch of Avalanche members

Considering the time of this game's release, I'm inclined to believe this is just a cool throwback to the first time OG really brings Sephiroth into the story. But the implications here are interesting if you consider that this Sephiroth's still sane, while OG's is just—

—a Jenova vessel shaped after him, at this point in time.
It tells us that Sephiroth's used to/trained for absolute massacre and that he apparently won't hesitate in doing it. It also tells us that even in the messy mental state he's in when merged with Jenova—

—he retains that aspect of him.
So, mindless massacre it is, then. He probably mentally divorces himself from it and treats it as just part of the job, so much that it comes automatically whenever it comes, I want to think.
Anyway, it's funny that Tseng at this point is just like

"Ah, so they probably sent him? (Sephiroth)" when the player Turk tells him about the massacre they found and that they didn't deactivate the cannon themselves.

He's unfazed by it. The game's telling us that mindless massacre is a normal we should expect from Sephiroth, in the way we expect guns to shoot and swords to cut. It also tells us it's normal for Sephiroth to be sent out like this, even if there were already folks on—

—the field taking care of the operation. It's almost as if Sephiroth here is some sort of fast forward button/resource.

I'm back to this with a small correction? Tseng does show feelings about the matter of Sephiroth doing the massacre of AVALANCHE members. But it's just to wonder if it really is Sephiroth who did it, since the work was done far too fast.
He wondered about his speed of all things.

Anyway, Elfé comes and thinks the Turk did the massacre. I have no idea how she linked those deep cuts in the walls and floor to a gun bearing Turk, but ok, alrighty. She's too strong for the Turk to handle and chases the poor thing to a dead end. But just then, Sephiroth comes.

And he seems surprised that someone aside from his unmentioned friends can block his attack. Which, I should note, for matters of future proofing, was Sephiroth willingly moving forward to hit this enemy, with no hesitation whatsoever.

Should I note that their clashing wrecked the previously unharmed ground? Because heck, it sure did.
Makes me wonder what would have happened if Elfé wasn't the powerhouse she seems to be, but stronger than the Turk still, and if the hit had landed on her...

Anyway, remember how Sephiroth's massacre feels like a mindless obeying of orders?
Well, Elfé confronts him on his reason to fight. It goes like this:

And then she retreats because she's too important to this story to become a Masamune kebab. Fair enough and honestly? Same.
But while she goes onwards to her tragic plot, let's look at Sephiroth's non answer to that question and think a little.

The sprites do very little to convey emotion in this game and his reaction is just the classic 3 dots.
To me, it gives the impression that he just never thought about that matter. He was raised to follow orders. He was raised for mindless massacre.

Aside from a little rebelling here and there that CC and the OG delve a little into... Sephiroth's nothing but a guard hound at this point. He follows orders as a job he was raised into and doesn't do it for any particular personal reason like saving the Planet—

—or eating a bucket of ice cream at half past 8 in the morning (dude, I wish I had ice cream) or for becoming stronger and getting to fight many people out of enjoyment like Azul does later on. He just does it. And he probably knows nothing else to do in life but this, sadly.

He was never a civilian, after all. He was just told he was a "special existence" as a kid and trained to go to a war caused by greed. He seems to have spent a great chunk of his life in this war, too! (Probably his whole teen years, since he's about 20 when CC begins.) Yikes!

And so, after his run in with Elfé, he warns the Turk of her strength (showing a little care/kindness for this weapon-named coworker) and leaves... like this, the 3 dots following this bit of dialogue:

It's as if he's still wondering what that really means.
It also ties in nicely as a parallel to a late point in the OG, where Cloud invites his comrades to get off the airship they're on to go look for their actual reasons to fight, since all this time they've been focused on—

—defeating Shinra/Sephiroth, but seem to be doing it for others (the Planet, the people living in it) rather than for their own reasons primarily.
Which proposes the interesting question of "Can Sephiroth find his reason to fight, too?" that I shall revisit at some point later on

I mentioned earlier that Sephiroth's called to deal with Fuhito & Hojo who are fleeing by helicopter.
But did you know! That Sephiroth slashes that helicopter IN THE FREAKING AIR?! I love him. So! Let's look at that because I can't seem to sleep.

Since that encounter with Elfé, putting on the table that Sephiroth's pretty much a guard hound, the plot moves on without Sephiroth rather intensely. The Turks go fetch some "SOLDIER" candidates, (and we learn, due to Azul being there, that those are Deepground recruits)

we're introduced to Cloud, who manages to ruin almost the entire mission by puffing out his baby chest and being all "uwu this is my job! Let me do it", ending with important SOLDIER data getting stolen. AVALANCHE starts making some supersoldiers of their own, we poke into—

—Rude's love life, we go to the Icicle area to get super sad with Zack losing his friends Essai and Sebastian to the supersoldier thing AVALANCHE's doing and we even go to Junon, where Heidegger's keen on not running the Turks properly because "uwu my general army is superior"

Right.
So we don't see Sephiroth for like, 6 chapters. Yeah. It's chapter 10 now. We miss you, Sephiroth.
After a funny truck nod to the Crazy Motorcycle Chase and some road shenanigans, a dragon gets unleashed on the poor Turk, and it's about to defeat her
But wait! Is that...?

Yes it is! Sephiroth's here to rescue the Turk once more.
He just slashed through an enhanced dragon, finishing it in one hit, while the Turk could just scratch the thing.
He also did a clean job at it? Sometimes he's gotta be like that.

And then, Sephiroth does the only hilarious thing he does in this game (everything else is just... sad, as you can see): he slashes a helicopter out of the sky from a freaking distance. Woah.
I dunno how exactly he does it, but he does move his sword during this event.

He says nothing but "..." when dealing with this combined dragon + helicopter mess.
And when he's done, his words are short, directed solely to the Turks. He's entrusting the aftermath of the mission to them and uses this kind of tone:

While in the last time we saw him, he takes a moment to reflect on the words Elfé said, here he seems eager to just leave ASAP. That's almost Seph's way of saying "there are bees here, let's leave immediately". Just replace the bees with Hojo. He wants to avoid Hojo.

He just slashed the helicopter Hojo was in, causing it to pop in small explosions and fall. Hojo's old. Hojo's not enhanced. He could very well have perished due to what Sephiroth just did. (Again without hesitation.) It's funny to me that he wants to avoid Hojo so much—

—that he's uncaring of what happens to Hojo in the end. His mission was to stop the helicopter. He did it. Who cares about Hojo? He doesn't.

But it's also terrifying to think about what Hojo did to cause that kind of behavior on Sephiroth. That... maybe not exactly fear, but a clearly desperate desire to be as far away as possible from Hojo.

So, yeah, that's the earliest point in the timeline that it gets established that Sephiroth despises Hojo. And I love the way it gets told subtly, by actions rather than words... Even if it's on a game that craves more words to demonstrate things, because the visuals are... small

Anyway, Hojo calls him out as he leaves to tell Sephiroth he's getting stronger. Sephiroth says "..." to this and leaves very quickly after two seconds. Did he freeze in disbelief at the praise? Or is it something else? It's unclear.

But after he leaves and the Turks are to take Hojo back to his sciencey place, Hojo stops to laugh and muse on it. He says he doesn't intend to leave Shinra (so he was just having a cool ride on a helicopter and gathering info from Fuhito for his own sake) because—

—Sephiroth's there.
And he closes this chapter with this chilling remark on Sephiroth:

Yeah! I don't blame Sephiroth for hating him! That's... holy shit.
The mindset that's presented suggests that Sephiroth has no freedom to become anything else he might want to become if he changes his mind about being a SOLDIER one day. Do they even consider him a person when—

—it comes to the higher ups meetings? Or is he merely an asset and nothing else to them?
Well, whatever the answer to that is, it doesn't matter. He'll burn a fucking town.
Chapter 12 will hit and that's the final point in BC we see Sephiroth.

That also crosses with how Last Order presents the event, because they're both from the Turk's POV.
But I'll not touch the Nibelheim incident now.
I think it would be better to go through CC and the bits of OG regarding Kalm before touching it, so it can be done all at once.

Reasons being that 1. it's such an important, life changing event (get it? because he dies ;3) in Sephiroth's life and 2. the amount of POVs for this event basically begs one to go through all versions at once, to construct a Mega POV™ that might explain things better.

So I think I'll make a quick summary of Seph in BC to throw after this thread point before moving to CC, which is tied with R for my favorite game in the compilation.
But that's a thing for future me. I'll try to take a nap.