A Crystalline Connection Between Final Fantasy VII and Street Fighter III
One of my favorite features of this site is the wanted list, where I post video game mysteries and sometimes people respond with answers. One of the most recent additions comes from Bluesky user Brienne, who was also responsible for the post about a certain Final Fantasy IV character’s name sounding a lot like the Japanese rendering of the word vulva. And I actually think this one checks out!
After that post went live, she reached out again asking about an apparent connection between Final Fantasy VII and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. Both have scenes where male characters — and notably emo ones at that — visit not especially alive-seeming women who are encased in ice-like crystals floating in subterranean lakes. That’s a rather specific scenario, I have to admit, and considering when these games came out around the same time — the former on January 31, 1997, and the latter on May 12, 1999 — it didn’t seem unreasonable that they’d both be referencing the same pop culture antecedent. I just had no idea what it was.
In Final Fantasy VII, our emo boy is the vampiresque Vincent, whose lost love Lucrecia is imprisoned in a glowing blue crystal, seemingly in some kind of state of suspended animation.
Lucretia’s cave as it appeared in the original Final Fantasy VII, via.
And the slightly flashier version from Dirge of Cerberus, via.
In Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, the mopey boy in question is Remy, who only shows up in this one game and then has never resurfaced in any Street Fighter since. He’s a lanky, teal-haired Frenchman whose moveset recalls Guile and Charlie, though with no storyline reason for that similarity. He’s participating in this particular martial arts tournament out of some desire to avenge his dead sister, whom he encased in ice somewhere underwater in the Bay of Biscay. No, I don’t know why, but you see him visiting her in this ending.
Notably, the way he’s drawn embracing his dead sister’s crystal “coffin” suggests romantic love more than the kind of love you’d expect to see between siblings, and that’s perhaps a result of that existing as well in the thing that’s likely being referenced.
It’s Saint Seiya — specifically the backstory offered for the character Cygnus Hyoga. And as a guy who loves Saint Seiya, I’m embarrassed I didn’t realize this connection myself, but it took a comment on the wanted list post to bring it to my attention. I haven’t read the manga, but I have watched the Saint Seiya anime, and in the third episode — “Cygnus! Warrior of the Ice Fields” (キグナス! 氷原の戦士), originally airing October 25, 1986 — you see Hyoga visiting his mother’s underwater grave. Hyoga, it should be said, is more hung up on interpersonal attachment than are the other main characters in this series. When Hyoga was a child, his Russian mother died in a shipwreck in frigid waters off the coast of Siberia. The desire swim down to the ocean floor to go see his mother’s preserved, frozen body is actually what inspired him to train to become a superhero in the first place, and that’s enough to account for what I’ve described in both games.
Here, watch the relevant clip. But keep in mind how Hyoga’s obsession with his dead mother reads as a little unseemly. Part of that results from the fact that they don’t read on screen as parent and child, because she has stopped aging but Hyoga is now an adult. It’s also more than that, however.
Is it just your standard oedipal vibe? Maybe. But whatever it is, I’d argue that it bleeds into the video games being discussed. Final Fantasy VII and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike both show a moody protagonist visiting a female loved one who is essentially dead, but in both cases the scene in question is complicated by family dynamics. In the case of Vincent, Lucrecia actually was the assistant to his late father. The fact that she initially withholds this information from Vincent speaks to the fact that there’s something improper about her having a romance with her former mentor’s son, though that’s far from the only awkward familial relationship with which Lucrecia is associated. For Remy, his ending sequence is drawn in a way that invites an interpretation of something illicit.
I’m not sure if that was intentional, but if the inspiration truly was Saint Seiya, then I’d say there’s something similar there as well. In fact, a later episode concerns Hyoga needing to sever his relationship with dead mother in order to realize greater power. In short, his weird relationship with his dead ice mommy is holding him back and needs to be abandoned. I just think it’s interesting that this weird familial baggage traveled along with ice crystal imagery.
Mystery solved?