Squaresoft went all out in when they decided to grow Final Fantasy VII from a humble multimillion-selling game to a whole series.
To that end, they created the “Final Fantasy VII Compilation,” an ambitious collection of cross-media FFVII titles that would conquer the world. The initiative met a lukewarm response from the public, with the only very well-received title coming out of it being Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, a prequel to FFVII. However, many have forgotten that Compilation tried to set up a character who could replace Sephiroth in future games.
Where is Genesis Rhapsodos, Final Fantasy VII’s new Sephiroth, now?
Crisis Core rocks. It introduces new, more action-inspired mechanics and fleshes out Zack Fair, Cloud’s pal and mentor, in his final days. It also introduces a guy called Genesis Rhapsodos as the main bad guy.
Genesis is a SOLDIER 1st class and a book nut who thinks he’s one of the main characters from his favorite book, LOVELESS. From those two pieces of intel alone, you can gather he’s in the same league as Sephiroth in terms of combat ability and being a quirky evil guy. Much like many other members of the SOLDIER program, he’d been subjected to JENOVA’s cells, which led to him to getting sick and seeking revenge against Shinra.
You can also easily tell that Square really wanted to make Genesis a big thing. He has Dante’s clothes, a cool rapier that glows red, and he’s modeled after and voiced by real-life Japanese rockstar Gackt.
I probably won’t be creating much of a spoiler for people who didn’t play Crisis Core by telling them that he’s absent in the original VII or after that because he bites it in CC — but that’s not really true. While Genesis is defeated at the end of Crisis Core, he shows up very much alive in a pre-MCU style post-credits scene, setting him up as the big bad for whatever’s next.
But he’s been silent for nearly twenty years now. That’s enough time to make Final Fantasy VII Remake five times, so he’s either planning his revenge very carefully, or something must’ve gone very wrong for this man.
Genesis naturally showed up again in the Crisis Core Reunion remake, but that takes place before his last appearance. Even worse, things with that remake got weird because of Genesis. The Crisis Core remake took much longer to come out than many expected it would, which spawned theories claiming that the reason for the wait had something to do with Square Enix having trouble getting Gackt’s image and voice rights. That was not it, as Tetsuya Nomura cleared that the only reason for the delay was the company’s total focus on FFVII Remake.
The obvious reason he doesn’t show up in the original VII is that the developers only came up with the idea for that character after the release of FFVII and then just put him in the prequel as if he’d always been part of the plan. Still, there are more reasons why Genesis has yet to make his return. The first possibility is that even though Crisis Core was a massive success, his last appearance was actually in Dirge of Cerberus, which failed to capture the hearts of fans.
It’s not completely out of the cards to see Genesis making a return in Rebirth, but it’s unlikely that such a thing will happen, considering how the remake trilogy seems hard-focused on working with the elements present in the original game.
You can search for a Genesis cameo on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which is available now for PlayStation 5.
