Vincent Valentine

Template:FFVII character Vincent Valentine (ヴィセントヴァレンタイン Vinsento Varentain) is one of two hidden characters in the PlayStation RPG Final Fantasy VII, the other being Yuffie Kisaragi. He has also appeared in the fighting game Ehrgeiz and is the main character in the Final Fantasy VII sequel, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. He also serves as a supporting character in the CGI follow-up to Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, where in which he is voiced by Shougo Suzuki in the Japanese version and Steve Blum in the English version.

To obtain Vincent as a playable character, players must follow a series of clues in the Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim, allowing them to first acquire the combination to a safe located in the mansion. Upon opening the safe, the party must fight a difficult monster called "Lost Number." Once Lost Number is defeated, the player obtains the Odin materia and a basement key. The player can then speak to Vincent in the basement and convince him to join the party. While speaking to Vincent, he tells the party that the real Sephiroth's birth mother is Lucrecia Crescent.

Character design

Vincent appears as a tall, brooding man with long, unkempt black hair wearing a ragged red cloak over black clothes. His left arm below the elbow is covered by a metal gauntlet terminating in formidable claws.¹ His cloak covers the lower half of his face and is held closed by a series of buckles. His eyes are distinctly coloured red. As of Advent Children, his weapon of choice changed to a triple-barrel gun named "Cerberus", reflected in the silver chain that hangs from the hilt of the gun, as it is shaped in the form of the mythological creature of the same name and the fact that the creature Cerberus has three heads as the gun has three barrels.

Template:Spoiler Character Designer Tetsuya Nomura has explained that Vincent Valentine's character shifted from that of Horror researcher, to detective, to chemist, finally arriving at the figure of a former members of the Shin-Ra Company's Turks with a tragic past, only part of which involves being used as a human test subject. It has been further explained that his crimson mantle was added to symbolize the idea of Vincent carrying a heavy weight — related to death — on his shoulders.

Biography

File:Vincent Valentine Turk.jpg

Vincent as a Turk.

Vincent was once a member of the Shin-Ra Company's Turks, a group of highly skilled operatives who specialized in various activies such as espionage, kidnapping, assassinations and serving as bodyguards. When he was assigned to supervise a project spear-headed by his father Grimoire, he fell in love with a scientist named "Lucrecia Crescent," an assistant to his father. However, despite his feelings for her, they parted ways when Grimoire died saving Lucrecia's life. Vincent would later meet her for a second time while assigned to supervise the Jenova Project in Nibelheim, where she was serving as an assistant to Professor Gast. There, Vincent tried expressing his feelings to her, but she rejected him out of guilt over Grimoire's death, ultimately entering a relationship with her associate Hojo instead. Lucrecia became pregnant afterwards, supplying a test subject for the Jenova Project's intentions to investigate the effect of Jenova cells on an unborn child.

Vincent objected to the use of humans—especially Lucrecia and her unborn child, whose parentage he was uncertain of—as live test subjects. Even so, in the interest of science, Lucrecia proceeded with the treatment and suffered various ill effects as a result. Outraged, Vincent confronted Hojo in the Shinra Mansion's underground laboratory and a heated argument ensued. Hojo ended this confrontation by pulling a gun from his lab coat and shooting Vincent down in cold blood. Vincent's body was placed in a large experimental capsule for use in Hojo's experiments based on Lucrecia's research of the Lifestream, originating from the time of her assistance to Grimoire. While Hojo's experimentation resulted in Vincent's anatomy altered to to where he can temporary change his phyiscal form into monsterous enities (Galian Beast, Hellmasker, and Death Gigas), Lucrecia exposed Vincent's body to G Substance, a contaminated form of mako, and he became Chaos, an entity intended to pave the way for Omega WEAPON by killing all living things.

Under the influence of Chaos, Vincent became consumed in feral rage and broke out of his confinement. Lucrecia then used a materia that could control Chaos' power to calm Vincent and place him in a deep slumber. By the time Vincent reawakened on the operating table—with Hojo and Lucrecia nowhere in sight—he responded to his modified body with both anguish and rage. Later, during the time frame of the game, Vincent is discovered by Cloud's party in a locked room in the basement of the mansion. Here, he had been sleeping inside a coffin for some 23 years as a self-inflicted punishment for his inability to prevent the Jenova Project, which Vincent referred to as his "sin". He then joins AVALANCHE in their quest to stop Sephiroth.

File:VinceFFVII.jpg

Vincent in FFVII: Advent Children.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

For the next two years, after the Planet was saved, Vincent traveled the world alone. He rescued Cloud from an ill-fated battle with Kadaj, Loz & Yazoo in the forest outside the Forgotten Capital, and revealed to him that he rescued Tseng and Elena of the Turks after their torture at the hands of Kadaj's gang. He further reveals the nature of Geostigma and Sephiroth's children, a disease from which many suffer, and that he's learned that the Shin-Ra have discovered the remains of Jenova, which Kadaj and his gang are desperately seeking. He later participates in the battle against Bahamut SIN and, upon the airship Shera, reveals the truth about Kadaj and "Sephiroth's children" to the members of AVALANCHE.

Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII

Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII takes place one year after Advent Children. Arriving at Kalm, Vincent becomes a target of the Deep Ground Soldiers, who need Vincent to fullfill their plan. The rest of the original surviving cast of Final Fantasy VII also appear, though their roles range from small supporting appearances (Cloud, Barret, Tifa and Red XIII) to larger roles (Yuffie, Cid and Reeve Tuesti).

The game details Vincent's past and more on his anguish and sorrow. Vincent is able to transform in Dirge of Cerberus, as he did with his limit breaks from the original game, though only the Galian Beast and Chaos forms appear in the game.

Characteristics and abilities

Vincent, while not the most physically powerful character in Final Fantasy VII, is a skilled gunslinger and can cast magic well, making him an ideal distance fighter. His weapons include various firearms, each described in-game as "Long-Range Weapon".

Due to Hojo and Lucrecia's anatomic reconstruction of Vincent, he does not age² and possesses a number of supernatural abilities, including metamorphosis and the ability to fly. In Final Fantasy VII, Vincent transforms into four different creatures as part of his limit breaks: a bipedal version of a Final Fantasy VII Behemoth, the Galian Beast; the Frankenstein's monster-like Death Gigas; Hellmasker, an homage to Jason Voorhees; and the bat-like Chaos. After transforming, Vincent enters a berserk rage and performs extremely powerful attacks. In Advent Children, Vincent also assumes a previously unseen amorphous red form, evocative of his cloak. In Dirge of Cerberus, the Galian Beast was remodled into a more humanoid form, and Chaos was altered to resemble Vincent with demonic features, such as white skin, yellow eyes, spiked hair, monster fangs, and frayed bat-like wings.

Theories

• A once popular fan theory held that Vincent is actually Sephiroth's biological father. However, the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega guide explicitly states that Hojo is the real father.
• Another unsubstantiated theory speculates that Vincent may be a vampire of some kind, though there is nothing but superficial evidence to support this notion. Vincent's mannerisms and appearance are reminiscent of a stereotypical vampire — for instance, he is first found sleeping in a coffin — but he displays no aversion to sunlight nor any other characteristics closely associated with vampires.
• What happened between Vincent's awakening in the laboratory and the beginning of his extended slumber is somewhat ambiguous. In a note written by Hojo — the first clue provided for locating Vincent — he claims to have put Vincent to sleep in the basement himself. However, Vincent's own attitude towards his slumber implies that his slumber was voluntary rather than imposed. One possibility is that after Vincent awakened to find himself alone, he retreated to one of the coffins in the basement, and all Hojo — returning at an unspecificed time — then needed to do was lock the door and hide the key. This explanation would give Vincent time to assemble his trademark attire — which closely resembles that worn by his father — a detail not easily accounted for otherwise.
• Aside from his connections with Lucrecia, Gast, and Hojo in Nibelheim — as illustrated in flashbacks in Final Fantasy VII and Dirge of Cerberus — Vincent will comment upon seeing Yuffie for the first time that her weapon looks familiar to him. This has lead some fans to a belief he may have had connections to Wutai at some point, whether in his official duties as a Turk during the Midgar-Wutai conflicts or, perhaps, as a point of origin. Though, there are theories that Vincent had originated from the small town of Kalm. Evidence from the Final Fantasy 7 game supporting this derives from one of Vincent's weapons found very early in the game, the Peacemaker, up in the attic of one of the houses. The strange part of it being there since Vincent is an optional character in the story and neither of the current characters so far can equip this weapon, leaving it an 'unusable' weapon. Others believed that this would typically have been marked as a hint in the game stating that there might be a 'hidden' character in the game that can use such equipment, (in this case, a gun). But a good few believe that keeping a hidden character's weapon at this particular town which at the most, gives off an unimportant push into the story, is portraying a secret clue that the owner who is capable of equipping this weapon, (Vincent Valentine being the owner), may have had some importance in Kalm and even may have ultimately lived there at some point as a point of origin.

Other appearances

Ehrgeiz

Vincent is a playable character in the PlayStation version of Ehrgeiz yeah true true along with Tifa, Cloud, Sephiroth, Yuffie and Zack, though — like the other DAH DUH Final Fantasy VII characters featured in the game — he has no storyline in the game. His alternate costume is his Turk uniform seen in flashbacks in the original game.

Before Crisis

Vincent has a small role in Before Crisis, appearing briefly in a late episode of the story.

Trivia

• The brooding, lovelorn Vincent is believed by some fans to have been named after Vincent Price and Saint Valentine, the former being a horror film legend while the latter was a crusading martyr who has come to be associated with romance.
• Vincent's love, Lucrecia, is believed by some fans to have been named after the mythical historical figure Lucretia, who was raped by a Roman prince and subsequently committed suicide. Classical legend claims that it was her death which brought about the bloody Roman civil war that transformed Rome from a monarchy into a republic. The Lucrecia in Final Fantasy VII was also exploited to great and tragic effect by the Shin-Ra Corporation; incidentally, the second kanji in "Shin-Ra" is often used to represent Rome in Japanese.
• Due to the fact that Vincent and Yuffie Kisaragi are optional characters, they are not featured in any FMVs, including the ending sequence.
• The phone Vincent carries in Dirge of Cerberus is a reference to a couple of points of comedy relief in Advent Children, in which Cloud tells the phone-less Vincent that he'll give him a call, with Vincent later asking Tifa where he can find a phone shop. In the Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII featurette, he speaks on the phone with Cloud, telling him to pass a message on to Yuffie, as "this is my phone, and she has no right to call it"
• He is a fan favorite, hence the reason, in addition to the fact that he uses a gun as his weapon, he was chosen to be the focus of the Dirge of Cerberus shooter game.
• He was rumored to be in Kingdom Hearts II along with Cloud, Aerith, Yuffie, Cid, Sephiroth, and Tifa, but was ultimately not included. He may be in Kingdom Hearts III however, if Tetsuya Nomura chooses to make it.

Footnotes

¹It has been previously suggested that this is an entirely mechanical prosthetic, but the refined character design used in Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus shows that there is an ordinary, albeit gloved, hand underneath the golden claws, presumably attached to a similarly ordinary arm. It is also interesting to note that brass claws are an ancient Greek chararacteristic typical to monsters (such as gorgons, with brass claws and wings), which would be in line with Vincent's monstrous associations.

²Vincent's age, as provided in official materials, never changes: It remains fixed at 27, which is presumably how old he was when Hojo altered him. In contrast, the other main characters do age, which can be easily confirmed by comparing their ages in the game to those provided for Advent Children, which occurs two years after Final Fantasy VII. Further, Vincent's character designer, Tetsuya Nomura, has stated that Vincent was left immortal due to the experimentation conducted on him.[1]

External links

• Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega Translations FAQ - Translations from the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega