With the new imagery inserted into Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I personally see the Gi Tribe having a symbolic exchange with a particular group and their storyline from Xenogears, and these parallels can be used to A) solidify some evolutionary oversight from Jenova, and B) explain something which I noticed the Gi using in my first Rebirth playthrough and have been trying to mentally situate ever since – Animus.
Animus
If Jenova had created, or even just influenced the evolution of the Gi Tribe then there would actually be a really awesome Xenogears reference in it, which is something that I have personal biases in favour of. First point of context is to introduce that FFVII and Xenogears are two sides of one coin. The story goes that after Chrono Trigger, Square had opened up for staff to submit their suggestions for the upcoming seventh Final Fantasy. Tetsuya Takahashi and his wife Soraya Saga sent in their idea, which kind of continued the themes of ancient DNA aliens from Chrono Trigger. If you know anything about his work, you know that this type of iteration and homage becomes Takahashi’s calling card. Their pitch got approved and was put in use for a period of FFVII’s development, before the people in charge decided that it wasn’t actually appropriate for the Final Fantasy series due to its tone, content and length. Xenogears, infamously, is really quite long and heavy on the reading, especially for a PS1 RPG. This story concept was next temporarily in use for Chrono 2, then swapped again to finally become Xenogears. However, it was still used for a period of all their developments. Chrono Trigger, FFVII, Xenogears and Chrono Cross all therefore have a lot of connective tissue in their character archetypes, plot developments, themes and imagery.
Lavos, Jenova and Deus all crash to the planet from space, leaving a large impact crater behind. The creatures then hide themselves away to begin harvesting the genetic information of the people on the planet over thousands, if not millions of years.
All three share the key imagery of the woman in a tank, and evolve through similarly-shaped forms. Namely a round one, a tree-like form and a humanoid. Among numerous other parallels.
At every turn you can see connection in FFVII and Xenogears. Their main protagonist and main antagonists essentially both have the same arc told in minorly different ways due to a shift in setting and style, or there are direct references like a catatonic Cloud mumbling lyrics from Small Two of Pieces and a poster of Tifa hanging somewhere in Solaris. But like it runs deep throughout every part of both games. Any comparison you make between them carries a certain level of authority because they are genuinely two outcomes of one idea.
Where this becomes relevant to the theory of Jenova possibly producing the Gi Tribe is that in Xenogears the Mother of Humanity creates the twelve original human men out of the Kadomony supercomputer’s biological circuitry named Animus. There are twelve male Animus who seek to locate their accompanying female Anima, whereupon they could recombine with the supercomputer and enable the interplanetary bioweapon Deus to be resurrected. The Gi likewise seem to be an all-male tribe of warriors, and the Gi Spectres use a move called Animus where they empower themselves further with their red miasma (they didn’t have this attack in the original FFVII). The red miasma which their Enemy Intel specifically highlights. You want to know something that’s just kinda neat? One way of reading Xenoblade Chronicles is that supercomputer core Pneuma processes green and gold Anima ether, while supercomputer core Logos processes purple and red Animus ether. Logos is eventually summoned in the form of Malos, who is himself Sephiroth-derivative. Hmm.
In fact there is Trinity Processor-esque imagery found in Cosmo Canyon that I wanted to joke about at some point. A similar motif appears on the ground of the Gears & Gambits subspace, and there are distinct green, red and violet Lifestreams floating in the underground river outside the Village of the Gi.
The Xenoblade things are just observations, but the Xenogears Animus parallels carry genuine implication due to the shared history it has with the FFVII property. You can use Xenogears to piece together equivalent setting details of FFVII, and vice-versa.
I believe that you can draw some rather strong parallels between Cain (leader of the Animus), and Gi Nattak. They’re primitive or tribal leaders from a time of antiquity, whose people are associated with the term “Animus”. Both wear distinctive skull masks.
Cain is connected closely with the Mother of Humanity and Deus, whereas I’m here trying to determine if Gi Nattak is connected to revenant mother Jenova. Cain proclaims “we are the people expelled from paradise and forced to live on the cruel surface of the earth”, Gi Nattak laments that the death of his home planet has left the souls of his people stranded upon an unwelcoming world, considering their immortal toil “a penance imposed by the planet for the sin of our existence”. You can definitely see the Animus in what he’s saying.
Cain’s storyline centres around the Mother of Humanity and Deus. Jenova, meanwhile, is FFVII’s analogue to both of those beings. It’s of particular note that the Jenova Doll and Deus both share that blank, mask-like face. Rebirth even removed the lines from the Jenova Doll’s face so that it now better matches to Deus. There’s a key shot of the Mother within Kadomony’s tube compartment that resembles Jenova in the Mt Nibel tank. Deus, to whom the Mother is linked, and whom shares its grey face with the Jenova Doll, is also found in a blue tank at some stage. Krelian, who is Sephiroth’s counterpart character, learns of the Mother’s existence and the fact that she has extraterrestrial origins. This inspires him to exceed his human limitations by traversing the Path of Sephirot through to God’s dimension. Sephiroth meanwhile believes that the extraterrestrial Jenova is his mother. This eventually inspires his decision to replace his lost human identity by becoming God instead, and Rebirth even gives him access to a world-tree space we could reasonably dub the Path of Sephirot.
So the decision to give the Gi access to Animus is a rather deep-seated reference to Xenogears, and could be used to implicate them as Jenova’s children. Or if not her progeny, at least that the planet Gi may have held a preexisting worship of her. Again, I don’t think she engineered their entire race per se, but she absolutely spread her mutagen to them before arriving on Gaia.
The two entities have further similarities across multiple transformations and even their boss music. J-E-N-O-V-A and Awakening both begin with the same rolling scales, and both honestly sound pretty inspired by Lavos Core.
Not only does FFVII Rebirth now have these Animus men, but in addition it’s actually also made Jenova seem more like an artificial bioweapon than ever, with the laser blasts that Lifeclinger shoots from her wings. Those look less like magic beams and more like spaceship lasers. At this stage I am genuinely pretty serious in treating Jenova as a fragment of Lavos until explicitly proven otherwise, but in this way you could perhaps also legitimately implicate her as a Deus-type bioweapon too. The Animus of Xenogears want to recombine with their Anima to resurrect Deus. Sephiroth in FFVII Rebirth wants to use the Black Materia created through Animus to ultimately make whole his fragmented mother. The parallels are there.
If we say that Jenova bears some genetic responsibility for the development of the Gi, just look at what we can do with it. It agrees with Xenogears on every level of the Animus and mother imagery overlap. FFVII Remake has really upped its Xenogears DNA in lots of areas – kabbalistic divinity and phenomenon phase shift all throughout – so I am going to assert that the Gi Tribe are one of them. By wielding the element of Animus, by resembling the skull mask of Cain, by lamenting the day in which they were expelled from paradise, I will claim that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth has deliberately made the Gi Tribe a story element analogous to Xenogears in order to hint toward their own origins, and peek into the larger interplanetary history of Jenova.
Not that it necessarily matters at this stage of separation, but I will also point out that Yunalesca’s Jenova-like tentacles are also the spitting image of Cain’s skull mask, with the golden colour and glowing eyes set inside dark holes.
Anima
There is a single species of enemy throughout FFVII Rebirth which we can find empowering itself with Anima actually, and it’s just the right one needed to where we can extrapolate those claims out further: The Joker fiend in Gus’ Beast Battleground, described as a cursed jester who feeds on souls.
- Joker (Enemy Intel): “Gus’s cursed ace-in-the-hole: an evil jester that has bathed itself in the blood of its enemies. It feeds on the souls of its opponents while drawing cards that foretell the future.”
Joker repels you with “Anima Howl” when pressured, and at low health it buffs itself with the attack “Anima Unleashed”. Both the Animus and Anima attacks are new for FFVII Rebirth, neither the Gi Spector nor Joker had these moves in the original game. So these aren’t leftover relics, but new additions asking to be read into.
I’ve honed into Animus as being Planet Gi’s Lifestream energy, so what is the Anima referred to here? As expected, it appears to be the name of the Gaian spirit energy which Joker extracts through its Soul Sucker attack. Neither Gi Nattak nor Aerith’s Soul Drain pull out this green energy, but those might functionally be different since they’re absorbing MP instead of legitimate soul energy. When the fiend becomes pressured it then uses the souls it had stolen in order to envelop itself in a green miasma, similar to the Gi’s red Animus miasma
Interestingly, Joker takes this Anima spirit energy and imbues it into its various cards. We could potentially connect this to the way that the Shadowblood Queen’s Animus spirit energy was embedded into her Queen’s Blood card.
With that said, while the Gi have displayed the power of Animus with legitimate, multitude reasons to symbolically link it back to Xenogears and thus use it as implication of the tribe’s potential connection with Jenova, the Anima miasma glimpsed within FFVII Rebirth is a bit less supported due to not functioning in the same way. Just to reiterate, Animus and Anima are the gendered biological circuits of the Kadomony quantum computer which it employs as part of its deliberative process when responding to queries and requests. Animus is the destructive, male-coded logic route, Anima is a protective, female-coded logic route. With that gendered criteria in mind, I’m not sure the “Anima” representative makes sense. The Gi Tribe seem to all be men, but Joker does not present female. I considered if Joker may be a heavily clothed Gi woman, but this isn’t the case. We can spot ashen skin visible on its hands and chin, instead of blue, and it has sharp fingernails. None of those traits match the Gi. The 1997 Joker design did have a tusked mask akin to Jenova and the Gi, but they’ve retooled that for Rebirth.
The more problematic element though, at least as far as a 1:1 parallel is concerned, is that in Xenogears, Animus and Anima are both components of the Deus System. The Deus equivalent in FFVII is Jenova. If we go all-in on the parallels, this would mean that Gaia needs to have some origin in Jenova’s genetic material as well, which it doesn’t. The Cetra muse that Jenova may have been the one that motivated the humans to wipe them out, but that’s not enough to tie all life on the planet back to Jenova, especially not when she only made contact 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, I do like this reading where Animus is Gi Lifestream and Anima is Gaian Lifestream. Hiding this terminology within FFVII Remake’s setting like this is just one way of galvanizing a link between Jenova and the Gi Tribe, since it helps to confirm that their red spirit energy is a distinctly different substance to Gaia’s Lifestream.
I did go through and double-check what colour of spirit orbs Joker fades away into when defeated, just to check whether it’s green, red, purple or whatever, which was not easy since the only encounter with the multiple Jokers needed in order to view one dissipating is the non-repeatable Ultimate Party Animal quest, meaning I had to do a lot of sidequesting to get back there from Chapter Select. Joker fades away into white orbs. I’m sure that I noticed a small few other enemies with no colour to their Lifestream throughout my Rebirth playthroughs, but the only ones I’ve managed to conclusively turn up while working on this blog post are the Gi Tribe’s ceremonial Two Face mask, Hojo’s R&D creation the Adjudicator, and the Panthera Protector. I did check other things which I thought might fall in this group such as the Stone Golem or Ironclad, but they had the standard green. Even Tonberries have souls apparently, and the Black Robes die green with just a hint of purple. My sample size admittedly is lacking since it’s hard to try and locate every enemy to double-check them, but I would therefore think that the blank colouration indicates either a homunculus or soulless lifeform. That seems like a relatively safe reading to me. Things which have form and have life, but no genuine soul of their own.
In any case, just thought this was neat and exciting to see Final Fantasy VII reclaim its lost Animus and Anima terminology.
skapbadoa 
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