There's a section in this game I've never forgotten ever since I first played it. Cloud discusses what turns out to be a false memory of his hometown getting destroyed to the rest of the party. As he's explaining the memory, the player runs around the town as cloud doing whatever they want, and the stuff they do becomes integrated into Cloud's narration. In a sense, Final Fantasy VII preempts something like The Stanley Parable, and becomes this weird little dual-layered dynamic narrative for about an hour.

In a particularly inspired bit of writing, you can have Cloud go into Tifa's room during this sequence and rummage around her stuff, at which point she asks you, 'wait, did you seriously do all that?' You can either answer yes, at which point Cloud reveals himself to be a huge weirdo, or you can say 'no,' and the rest of the cast assumes you're joking around. But either way, this is a genuinely fascinating moment, where Final Fantasy VII actualizes the idea that conjuring memory is an active process, one which is inevitably dominated by subjective analysis and selective recall.

The multiple layers of the metanarrative operation become even more interesting when you remember this is a false memory for Cloud, that the arbitrary decisions you're making as a player as to what's 'true' or not are just as arbitrarily arranged in Cloud's head within the narrative. By trying to explain the truth as he understands it through the subjective re-telling of what Cloud considers to be an objective memory, he is, in actuality, revealing who he really is, which is a narrative construct, a stoic affectation stolen whole cloth from another person's personality.

The idea that completes Cloud's character arc, and the philosophical outlook which separates him from Sepiroth, is that Cloud can nevertheless build something from nothing - or, better put, already has built something from nothing. Because of the value he places in his relationships and experiences, Cloud manages to self-actualize in spite of his stolen life's history, which Sepiroth was unable to do.

Like Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII ultimately culminates in a battle between hope for the future and nihilism for the present. Because it's also a deeply pro-environmentalist game with concerns that go beyond the psychology of its main characters, this conflict also manifests on a much broader scale. The enervating forces of industrial capitalist accumulation, which vampirically drain the Earth of its energy, represent a societal nihilism, where even the threat of the end of all life on Earth is insufficient to stop the process of wealth extraction from continuing.