These games came out almost 10 years ago, but I spent way too much time playing them both. Final Fantasy 7 defined my senior year in college, and Alpha Centauri was how I spent my year in existential limbo.

Like many things, however, they both served as fuel for my not-too-original science-fictional novel-writing aspirations. The coincidence of the world being named “The Planet” in both games (even though at the end of the FFVII, you discover that “The Planet” is in fact an alternate or far-future Earth) suggested an obvious scenario to me: FFVII takes place on Alpha Centauri A3, which was colonized by humans not once, but twice.

The other thing that I found coincidental was that the forerunner race in FFVII—the Ancients—were also known as Cetrans. This suggests the adjective Centauran or maybe Cetian. Both star systems are known to harbor G-type stars similar to the Sun and would theoretically be candidates for containing earth-like worlds.

So my theory/background plot is that “The Planet” is Alpha Centauri A3 was initially colonized by humanity in the first push for interstellar colonization. These humans became the ones known as Ancients. Humanity managed to push onward, colonizing many other star systems containing earth-like worlds, and a human subgalactic empire ensued for millenia, perhaps. Eventually, different disasters like interstellar warfare, economic catastrophes, and simple failure to thrive (like the lost colony on Roanoke, VA, for example) caused disconnection between the different star systems. In this era of decay, more dominant colonies started on a new wave of (re)colonization, rediscovering old abandoned worlds. So these neo-humans find Alpha Centauri A3, which had been extremely depopulated by strange unknown forces, and they landed their colony ship at the site that became Midgar. (Midgar has always reminded me of a space-station, specifically of Deep Space 9 from Star Trek.)

The reason I was convinced of the colonization idea is that there is such a huge gap in technology between Midgar and the surrounding world, reminiscent of the tech gap between the metropolis and the countryside of developing countries—themselves also former colonies. There is also almost no history tracing back human settlement to more primitive times. There is no history of the agricultural or industrial revolution on the Planet, only evidence of the space revolution and the information revolution. The civilization on the Planet seems to have arisen de novo.

Another incidentally similar phrase in the two games is “the Voice of the Planet.” In Alpha Centauri, this refers to a latent high-intelligent fungal superorganism that humanity makes Contact with. In FFVII, this is a planet-wide spiritual entity akin to the Gaia organism.

(In an unrelated concept, the extraterrestial intelligence known as Jenova has a lot in common with another Squaresoft concept—Lavos from Chrono Trigger. Both are planetary parasites that cruise the cosmos sucking on spiritual energy.)

In any case, that’s as far as I’ve gotten with the idea.