Final Fantasy 7: Kabbalah and The Official Soundtrack
- Ezra Sandzer-Bell
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
If you grew up with Final Fantasy VII, you already know that this game hides things in plain sight. Secret characters tucked into random forests. A snowboarding mini-game buried inside a tragedy about environmental collapse. An entire optional subplot about breeding chocobos that leads to a secret island with the most powerful summon in the game.
FF7 has always rewarded the people who look a little deeper. With Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3 now confirmed to be in a playable state and a full reveal expected later this year, a new generation of players is about to experience this story for the first time, and millions of us are about to return to it.
This felt like the right moment to reveal the most profound "easter egg" in the game, buried deep within the original FF7 OST. This was a complex technical challenge that required an exhaustive analysis of Final Fantasy's music, names and terms, and a general understanding of kabbalah as a method of acquiring deep insight into sacred texts.
As I'll explain in the remainder of this essay, they key that unlocked this mystery was buried in the original OST's source MIDI files. I cross-referenced the tempo of each track (BPM markers extracted from the PS1 MIDI files) against the deciphered alphanumeric values of the game’s core vocabulary. What emerged was a web of correspondences that reveals entirely new, fascinating layers of the story.
Table of contents
Final Fantasy VII Kabbalah: A big musical easter egg
I am not the first person to point out the connection between Final Fantasy 7 and Kabbalah. It's an overt feature of the game; the arch villain Sephiroth is named after the Kabbalistic Sephirot, or spheres on their mystical diagram called the Tree of Life. Fans have also pointed out that main characters Tifa and Aerith seem to allude to the sixth sephirot at the center of the treet, Tifareth.
But until now, every analysis of FF7 and Kabbalah was based on a surface level reading of the character names, visual similarities like the materia system, and broader parallels between final fantasy and Gnosticism. Nobody has thoroughly documented the process of applying the kabbalistic method to the game itself.
This article focuses on a practical Kabbalistic technique called gematria, whereby words are converted into numbers. I'll explain what I mean.
Early Hebrew (and Greek) cultures both used their alphabets for counting, because Arabic numerals (0-9) had not been invented yet. Every letter in Hebrew had a numeric value, and so every word had a value equal to the sum of its letters. English gematria also exists and is based on the same principle, where A=1, B=2, and so forth until you reach Z=26.
When multiple words or phrases had the same numeric value, the tradition of Kabbalah claimed that those ideas were intrinsically connected. Scholars would think about their relationship to one another, arriving at new insights not overtly stated in the bible. Western ceremonial magicians later used the same technique, pairing everyday objects with divine names to create a kind of "web of correspondence" that amplifies the intent of their ritual.
To apply the kabbalistic technique of gematria to Final Fantasy 7, we have to use the basic English alphanumeric cipher, because the game is built up English letters, not Hebrew. We've also got to compile a comprehensive musical dataset that includes the track names, tempo, and alphanumerical values.
This is the conversion chart we'll use through the remainder of this article. I've discovered what appears to be an advanced musical cryptogram technique and perhaps the most sophisticated musical easter egg ever created in modern media.
GOLD SAUCER = 105 = Gold Saucer (105 BPM)
Gold Saucer: G+O+L+D+S+A+U+C+E+R = 7+15+12+4+19+1+21+3+5+18 = 105.
The track "Gold Saucer" plays at 105 BPM.
This is the only track in the entire 85-track OST where the title's alphanumeric value equals its own BPM. Out of 85 opportunities for this kind of self-reference, it occurs exactly once, at the game's carnival of fortune and spectacle.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The full web of correspondence goes deep.
Part II: FF7 Tracks where BPM matches the gematria
The strongest category of evidence consists of cases where a term's alphanumeric value matches the BPM of the specific track that plays during that term's appearance in the game.
AVALANCHE and JENOVA = 67 = The Oppressed (67 BPM)
A+V+A+L+A+N+C+H+E = 1+22+1+12+1+14+3+8+5 = 67.
The Oppressed (67 BPM) plays in the Sector Seven slums. You've joined the group AVALANCHE in their effort to gain secrets about shinra and take down the second tower.
This was the first alphanumeric easter egg that I personally discovered, and was the catalyst for investigating all of this. It got my attention because the name AVALANCHE is rendered in capital letters. Why did they choose to do that?
When I checked the MIDI file for "The Oppressed" and saw it was 67 BPM, my hair stood up on end. What a strange coincidence.
It also occurred The title of the original MIDI file for PS1 shows JENOVA split separate, capital letters (J-E-N-O-V-A). This distinction doesn't carry over into the later track listing on Spotify, but it still shows up across fan videos and in AI summaries about the MIDI track.
So then I tried this operation again with JENOVA and sure enough...
J+E+N+O+V+A = 10+5+14+15+22+1 = 67
That's what set off this entire musical Easter egg hunt for me.
There's a higher-than-average occurrence of words from Final Fantasy VII that have a numeric value of 67. Here are the most important ones:
MATERIA (the substance everyone fights over)
JESSIE (an AVALANCHE founding member)
SERAPH (the angelic root of Sephiroth's name)
SILENCE (the status effect and spell)
MOOGLE
CACTUAR
BRONCO (the Tiny Bronco vehicle)
FLAYER (Cid's weapon)
ESTER (the Gold Saucer chocobo jockey).
And lest you think that I overlooked it, we may as well acknowledge the "six seven" trend, which thankfully is fading now. We'll file that one away as a coincidence...
AERITH and CHURCH = 61 = Who...Are You? (61 BPM)
A+E+R+I+T+H = 1+5+18+9+20+8 = 61. The track "Who...Are You?" plays at 61 BPM.
These are the words that Cloud ask during his first encounter with Aerith in the Sector 5 Church, the moment the game's central relationship begins. The word CHURCH also sums to 61. Two terms, one value, one scene: the woman and the place where you meet her, both encoded at the tempo of their introduction.
But in a strange twist, the actual theme music for "Who... are you?" first appears while cloud is having one of his dissociative episodes in the Honey Bee Inn. He's pretending to be someone he's not (a male escort in a gay brothel). That's why we hear a theme hinting at his false identity, pushing through to the surface of his consciousness.
We hear "Who... are you?" again later in the game when he encounters JENOVA. Sephiroth asks Cloud this question to taunt him, because he knows who Cloud actually is, and that he's adopted Zach's identity to cope with the trauma of Hojo's mako experiments.
REACTOR = 80 = Mako Reactor (80 BPM)
R+E+A+C+T+O+R = 18+5+1+3+20+15+18 = 80. The track "Mako Reactor" plays at 80 BPM, along with countless other tracks from the game. It's one of the most common tempos that I found as I combed manually through all of the MIDI files.
This is the simplest case: the thing and its music share a value. The word SECTOR also equals 80, and the Mako Reactor track plays inside the sectors of Midgar.
There are five other MIDI tracks in the OST that clock in at 80 BPM. Those include the game's opening music (The Prelude), Tifa's Theme, Under the Rotting Pizza, Desert Wasteland, and Lifestream.
You don't have to engage in Kabbalah to think about these recurring tempos and how they create a "composite meaning" or meta-narrative about the game, tied together by the music.
The "Final Fantasy 7 Kabbalah" treatment of 80BPM goes something like this:
The Lifestream is the Planet's living energy.
The Mako Reactor extracts it, draining the Planet.
Under the Rotting Pizza is the soundtrack to a metal plate decaying over the slums. The infrastructure rotting because the life force beneath it is being siphoned.
Tifa's Theme is the home built in those slums, Seventh Heaven, the bar sitting directly on top of AVALANCHE's hideout, the domestic life that exists in the shadow of the reactor.
Desert Wasteland is the endpoint of the extraction: Corel, an entire region turned to desert after Shinra's reactor destroyed the town.
The Prelude is the eternal arpeggio, the cycle of life that persists across every Final Fantasy, the thing that existed before and after the mako reactors.
WALLACE = 57 = Mark of a Traitor (57 BPM)
W+A+L+L+A+C+E = 23+1+12+12+1+3+5 = 57.
The FF7 track "Mark of a Traitor" plays at 57 BPM during the Corel Prison sequence, where Barret's past as a supposed traitor to his hometown is revealed.
Barrett's surname is Wallace, and as we learn about this part of his history, the music pulses at the same tempo of his name's alphanumeric value.
57 BPM is a very strange tempo, and yet there's a second song from the soundtrack with this same mark; Mako Cannon: The Destruction of Shinra plays when the Sister Ray fires. It's an act of institutional violence that mirrors the destruction of Corel. The cannon motif also mirrors Barret's arm cannon.
Shinra = 69 = Aerith's Theme & Five Others (69 BPM)
S+H+I+N+R+A = 19+8+9+14+18+1 = 69.
The evil corporation extracting mako energy from the earth has the same numeric value as the most recurring BPM in the entire soundtrack.
Six standalone tracks run at 69 BPM: Anxiety, Dear to the Heart, the Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII, On Our Way, On That Day, and Aerith's Theme (that plays when Sephiroth kills her). The Ending Credits and Planet's Crisis also contain 69 in their tempo maps.
The emotional range of these six tracks spans the full register of the game's experience: dread (Anxiety), love (Dear to the Heart), adventure (Main Theme), hope (On Our Way), memory (On That Day), and death (Aerith's Theme).
Shinra's alphanumeric signature is not confined to a single mood or scene. It saturates the emotional infrastructure of the entire game.
I was surprised to discover that two of the track titles from the Final Fantasy 7 OST also summed to the alphanumeric value of 69 (don't confuse this with track BPM).
THE CHASE: T+H+E+C+H+A+S+E = 20+8+5+3+8+1+19+5 = 69
This is the motorcycle escape sequence where Cloud is fleeing Shinra. The music about escaping the corporation encodes the corporation's value in its name.
WHO AM I: W+H+O+A+M+I = 23+8+15+1+13+9 = 69
The soundtrack of Cloud's identity crisis, Shinra experimented on him and are the source of the trauma that triggered his memory loss and amnesia.
Paramusical connections to other artists and films
There are many more secrets to unpack here relating to the harmonic and melodic content of the music itself. So far the only thing I've been focusing on tempo markers exclusively. But the same methods of correspondence found in Kabbalah can be applied to other layers of the game, including melody, harmony and even subtleties like MIDI velocity levels.
FF7 Prelude and Twin Peaks: Musical topology and hypnosis
Yoshinori Kitase, the director of Final Fantasy VII, was interviewed by Vice magazine in 2020 explaining the influence of David Lynch's show Twin Peaks on his work.
This may explain why the final fantasy prelude closely resembles the Twin Peaks theme and why FF7 has a character named Palmer. The Twin Peaks MIDI score for the main female character, Laura Palmer, is literally shaped like two mountains.
Fans have compared the final fantasy prelude's melodic contour to the Twin Peaks melody, as shown in the image below. A completely novel insight occurred to me during my analysis of the FF7 MIDI, however.
The hypnotic percussion sound that we hear during the game's opening track resembles a "bird's eye view" of the prelude. It's the same shape, viewed from above. Instead of pitches that rise and fall, it's the MIDI velocity level! Even the MIDI's color coding resembles the topological maps of mountain altitude.
If this interpretation is correct, it gives new meaning to the name AVALANCHE.
This leads me to my next point. The first four tracks of the FF7 OST form a graduated brainwave entrainment sequence. You can clearly hear and sense the hypnotic quality of these fast pulses in the game. I recognized this even as a young person but never knew quite how it worked.
To solve for this, I started by identifying the tempo of each track's hypnotic click, whose velocity fades in and out as shown in the diagram above. I divided those pulses per minute by 60 to get pulses to derive the clicks per second and converted that to hertz (the measurement of sound waves in cycles per second).
Sure enough, I found that the game walks the player's nervous system up through increasingly active brainwave frequency bands. Watch the full sequence here:
The Prelude (80 BPM) has 16th note arpeggios running at 320 PPM, which equals 5.33 Hz, deep theta. This is the brainwave state associated with dreaming, deep meditation, and hypnagogic imagery. You're watching the title screen, not yet in the game. You're being brought into a state of deep relaxation. Peaks and valleys.
Opening (100 BPM) shifts the 16th note pulse to 400 PPM, or 6.67 Hz, upper theta. The game has started, you're on the train, the cinematic is pulling you in. You're being brought up slightly toward the surface.
Bombing Mission (the second half of Opening, after a metric modulation to 135 BPM) converts the 16th note pulse into triplet 8th notes at 405 PPM, or 6.75 Hz. The pulse rate barely moves (only 5 PPM faster), but everything about the music transforms: the tempo jumps, the melodic contour shatters from smooth curves into jagged, aggressive shapes. The music makes you feel like you've woken up into combat mode, but the underlying entrainment frequency holds almost steady. The surface texture changes while the trance stays locked.
Mako Reactor (80 BPM) introduces triplet 16th notes swelling in and out at 480 PPM, which equals 8 Hz. This is the alpha-theta crossover point, the hypnagogic threshold of maximum suggestibility. It is also the Schumann resonance, the electromagnetic heartbeat of the Earth, commonly cited at 7.83 Hz and rounded to 8. A non-tonal pulse at this rate bypasses the analytical cortex and goes straight to the brainstem.
After bombing the Mako Reactor, while on the train, the same 480 pulse per minute of the Mako Reactor track persists, but it becomes the foley of the train tracks in the background. This is where the Anxiety track comes in and the hypnotic entrainment ends, and all that's left is the slow, oppressive 69 bpm track.
Anxiety (69 BPM) & Kraftwerk Spacelab
Final Fantasy 7's theme for Anxiety directly references Kraftwerk's song Spacelab at the 1 minute mark. Kraftwerk means power plant in German. The band had an album called Trans Europe Express about a train, and Final Fantasy's Anxiety theme plays while you're on the train.
Nobuo Uematsu used precisely the same chords, top melody, key signature and even a similar sound patch. In this way, he's making a paramusical homage on multiple levels, to both power plant (Shinra) and trains. I've time stamped it here:
You can compare that to the Final Fantasy track here:
Mako Reactor (80 BPM) + "There's a World" (80 BPM)
There are other paramusical quotes throughout the game, not based on alphanumeric codes and tempos, but on harmonic and melodic content instead.
The most profound example of this I've found in the Final Fantasy VII OST comes from comparing the Mako Reactor theme (80 BPM) to Neil Young's song "There's a World" off of the Album Harvest, also 80 BPM. Uematsu has said many times in interviews that his first major influence was Elton John's 1972 album, and I'd like to take note here that Harvest was also released in 1972.
There's a World is the most hated track on the album. People have called it the most skippable song on an otherwise classic album. Even Jack Nitzsche, the man who created the orchestral arrangement, told Neil Young it was too "over the top".
Uematsu references the track in spite of all that, or maybe for precisely that reason. He quotes the same four-note motif using the same tubular bells, and even precisely same melodic pitches during one section. Uematsu's chord arrangement is different, alternating between a two-chord pumping rhythm to mimic the sound of the reactor.
I've copied the precise timestamp here so you can hear them back to back:
Neil Young's song There's A World is about a hidden, beautiful world beyond human perception. So the first and simplest layer of interpretation is simple; Shinra is harvesting Mako Energy from the Lifestream.
The four-note motif from Mako Reactor can be heard in the Anxiety track, interrupting the gentle moment after the Kraftwerk Spacelab chords, which closely resemble Flowers Blooming in a Church, where Cloud first meets Aerith.
With Aerith in mind, the next details is dark and comes with a trigger warning:
Neil Young wrote Harvest for and about Carrie Snodgress, an Oscar-nominated actress who became his romantic partner.
When Young and Snodgress split up, Nitzsche (the guy who arranged There's A World) entered a relationship with Snodgress.
in 1980, Nitzsche violently assaulted Snodgress with a gun and almost killed her. He pleaded guilty to threatening her and received probation.
Here we have a structural triangle: Neil Young, the tender and sensitive musician, loved Snodgress. He partners with Jack Nitzsche, who creates the overwraught arrangement for this song, and Jack brutally attacks the woman it was about.
Now compare this to the core premise of Final Fantasy 7: Cloud loves Aerith. He works with Sephiroth briefly and both were exposed to mako experiments. Later on, Sephiroth brutally attacks and kills Aeriith.
It's a well documented story that Uematsu, as a fan of classic rock, would have likely encountered somewhere between the event in 1980 and the game's development in the mid 1990's. Maybe this inspired his decision to use the motif.
Carrie Snodgress died on April 1, 2004, the same year that Advent Children (featuring Aerith's post-death presence via the Lifestream) went into production.
Several other triangles like this exist in Final Fantasy 7's soundtrack and narrative. I would encourage you to look into the harmonic similarity between Aerith and Tifa's themes, as they relate to John William's Princess Leia theme (Star Wars) and Marion's theme (Indiana Jones). You can trace William's motifs back to Max Steiner's 1942 film score theme for Now Voyager, as explained in this short video.
Back to earth: Structural Implications of this analysis
The findings documented here occupy an uncomfortable epistemic space.
On one hand, when mapping approximately 1,000 terms onto 43 possible BPM values, some percentage of narratively suggestive correspondences will emerge by chance. A 31.7% hit rate across the full dataset, while notable, does not by itself prove intentional encoding.
On the other hand, the specificity of the top-tier matches is difficult to dismiss as noise. Gold Saucer = 105, the same BPM as the theme song for that location.
What remains open is the mechanism. Did Uematsu or the development team consciously encode alphanumeric values into the score's tempos? Did the naming team consult the music? Or do these correspondences emerge from a deeper structural logic inherent in the game's design, a logic that operates below the threshold of conscious intent but above the baseline of random chance?
This analysis does not answer that question. It documents the evidence and leaves the interpretation to the reader. What is certain is that the Final Fantasy VII OST, when examined through this lens, reveals a web of numerical correspondences that mirrors the game's narrative web with uncanny precision.
Whether that web was woven deliberately or emerged organically, it is there, and it rewards close reading. I've deliberately omitted a number of other fascinating insights, so that you can continue exploring this topic for yourself.
Want to start writing your own music using techniques like this? Check out our text-to-midi encryption software, AUDIOCIPHER, to start creating and managing your own repository of musical codes. You can also read our article on how to write leitmotifs for video games and movie scores.
