It is a massive, rusting pizza in the sky. If you’ve spent any time at all with Final Fantasy 7, Midgar is probably etched into your brain like a vivid fever dream. You can almost smell the ozone and the grease. It’s a city that defines "industrial decay," yet somehow, it’s one of the most iconic locations in the history of digital media. Honestly, it’s weird when you think about it. Most RPGs start you in a quaint village with green grass and a predictable tutorial. Not this one. You start in a cold, metallic labyrinth, blowing stuff up.
The scale is just ridiculous. Midgar is a circular megalopolis held up by a central pillar and several massive "plates." People on top live in the sun. People on the bottom? They live in a permanent twilight, literally beneath the feet of the wealthy. It’s a literalization of class warfare. When Square (now Square Enix) first released the game in 1997, the pre-rendered backgrounds made this world feel impossibly deep. Fast forward to the Remake and Rebirth era, and that scale has exploded.
What's actually interesting is how the city functions as a character itself. It isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a parasite.
The Reality of Shinra and the Mako Problem
The Shinra Electric Power Company isn't just a business; it’s the government, the military, and the local utility provider all rolled into one corporate nightmare. They pump Mako—the literal lifeblood of the planet—out of the ground to power refrigerators and neon lights. Most players realize pretty quickly that Midgar is a ticking time bomb.
You see the toll it takes in the slums of Sectors 5 and 7. There’s no grass. There’s no sky. Just scrap metal and the distant, glowing underside of the plate. It’s gritty. It’s dirty. But there’s a weird sense of community there that the upper plate lacks. Characters like Aerith Gainsborough bring a strange, organic hope to this graveyard of steel. Her house, surrounded by flowers that shouldn't be able to grow in such a polluted environment, acts as a visual thesis for the entire game: life persists even when the world tries to choke it out.
Did you know the original design for Midgar was actually much smaller? Early concepts for Final Fantasy VII had the game taking place in a version of New York City. Eventually, Yoshinori Kitase and the team realized that a completely original, steampunk-inspired dystopia would allow for more creative freedom. They landed on the "pizza" design, and gaming history was changed forever.
Why Sector 7 Matters More Than You Think
Sector 7 is where the heart of the early game resides. It’s home to Seventh Heaven, Tifa Lockhart’s bar. This is the home base for Avalanche. While the remake expands this area significantly—giving you side quests and a much deeper look at the neighbors—the core feeling remains the same. It feels lived-in. You see kids playing in the dirt. You see people trying to fix heaters.
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Then, Shinra drops the plate.
It’s one of the most traumatic moments in 90s gaming. Seeing a massive chunk of a city fall and crush thousands of people just to "prove a point" or "stop a few rebels" shifted the tone of the story from a simple adventure to a high-stakes political drama. It wasn't just pixels. It felt like a loss of safety. Kazushige Nojima, the scenario writer, has often talked about how the destruction of Sector 7 was meant to make the player feel utterly powerless against the corporate machine.
Architecture of a Nightmare: The Design of Final Fantasy 7 Midgar
If you look at the layout of Final Fantasy 7 Midgar, it’s actually a masterpiece of environmental storytelling. The central Shinra Building towers over everything. It’s a phallic monument to ego. From the top floor, President Shinra can look down on everyone.
The sectors are divided by giant walls, making the city feel like a prison.
It’s cramped.
It’s dark.
And yet, it's beautiful in its own way.
The "Cyberpunk" aesthetic wasn't new in 1997, but the way Midgar blended it with "Dieselpunk" and traditional fantasy elements was groundbreaking. You have swords and magic, but you also have motorcycles and hacking. It shouldn't work. But it does. The music helps, too. Nobuo Uematsu’s "Under the Rotten Pizza" is a bass-heavy, funky track that perfectly captures the vibe of the slums—a mix of "we’re struggling" and "we’re still here."
The Remake's Expansion
In the original game, you spend maybe five to six hours in Midgar before leaving for the "World Map." In Final Fantasy VII Remake, you spend forty hours there. Some people complained about the "filler," but for others, it was a dream come true. We finally got to see what a day in the life of a slum dweller looked like. We saw the "Wall Market" in all its neon, chaotic glory.
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Wall Market is a fascinating case study. It’s a lawless zone where the rules of Shinra don't really apply. It’s run by Don Corneo, a grotesque caricature of greed and lust. The neon lights and the bustling crowds make it feel like a localized version of Shinjuku or Akihabara, but stripped of any real civility. It’s the one place in Midgar where people seem to be having "fun," but it’s a desperate, dirty kind of fun.
What People Often Miss About the Lore
A lot of players focus on the environmental message—Mako is bad, saving the planet is good. That’s the surface level. But if you dig into the lore found in Crisis Core or the Ultimania guides, Midgar is also a graveyard of failed experiments.
Underneath the city lies "Deepground," a secret military facility where Shinra conducted horrific genetic tests. This adds a layer of "Lovecraftian" horror to the city. While you’re walking around buying potions, there are monsters being grown in vats beneath your feet. The city is literally rotting from the inside out.
The Jenova project is the epicenter of this rot. When Sephiroth discovers his origins in the Shinra Building (or later in Nibelheim, depending on how you view the timeline's flashbacks), it’s the catalyst for the entire plot. Midgar isn't just a city; it’s a laboratory where humanity tried to play god and failed miserably.
The Science of Mako
Is Mako actually sustainable? Within the logic of the game, absolutely not. It’s a finite resource. Once it’s gone, the planet dies. Bugenhagen, the elder at Cosmo Canyon, explains this through the concept of the Lifestream. When Midgar sucks up Mako, it’s essentially stealing the souls of the unborn and the dead to power a hair dryer.
When you look at Midgar from the outside—as you do in the famous opening and closing shots of the game—you see a blackened circle on an otherwise green planet. It looks like a scab. A wound. It’s a powerful visual metaphor that doesn't need a single line of dialogue to explain.
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Practical Insights for the Modern Player
If you are jumping into Midgar for the first time in 2026, or revisiting it through the Remake series, there are a few things you should keep in mind to get the most out of the experience.
- Look Up: In the Remake, the developers spent an insane amount of time detailing the underside of the plates. You can see the structural supports, the hanging cables, and the flickering lights of the upper world. It really drives home the scale.
- Talk to Everyone: The NPCs in the slums have rotating dialogue. They react to the events of the story. If a reactor just blew up, their dialogue changes to reflect their fear or their support for Avalanche.
- Explore the Verticals: Midgar is built on layers. Don't just follow the quest marker. Some of the best world-building is found in the "dead ends" of the slums or the stairwells of the Shinra building.
- Listen to the Soundscape: Beyond the music, the ambient noise of Midgar—the hum of the reactors, the distant sirens, the chatter of the markets—is what makes it feel like a real place rather than a video game level.
Midgar remains the gold standard for RPG city design because it feels purposeful. Every pipe, every rusted gate, and every flickering neon sign tells a story of a world that is struggling to survive its own progress. It’s a cautionary tale wrapped in a blockbuster adventure.
To truly understand the impact of Midgar, you have to look at how it ends. In the original 1997 ending, we see a shot of Midgar 500 years in the future. It’s covered in greenery. The steel is crumbling, and the reactors are silent. Nature has reclaimed it. It’s a bittersweet image. It suggests that while the city was a marvel of human ingenuity, the planet is better off without it.
That’s the ultimate legacy of Final Fantasy 7 Midgar. It’s a place we love to visit, but it’s a place that shouldn't exist. It represents our highest ambitions and our darkest impulses, all smashed together into a giant, circular plate of steel and sorrow.
For those looking to dive deeper into the technical aspects of the city's creation, researching the "Background Art of FFVII" or looking up the architectural inspirations of the Shinra Building (which takes cues from Art Deco and Brutalism) provides a whole new level of appreciation for what the artists at Square achieved. You might also find it useful to compare the Sector 1 bombing run in the original 1997 version versus the 2020 remake to see how environmental storytelling has evolved over three decades.