Plot Hole? How was Sephiroth's sword used to kill President Shinra?

[hartellage]

How was Sephiroth's sword used to kill President Shinra?

I have always been bothered by this after realizing that Cloud and crew were following Jenova around and not Sephiroth. If Jenova was taking
Sephiroth's form (and therefore Jenova that killed president Shinra), why would the real Sephiroth's sword be sticking out of President Shinra's back?

This may be a question without an actual answer, but would love any ideas from the greatest minds of FF7 lore.  ;D

 

[obesebear]

Well, it could be possible that shinra recovered his sword after he died in the reactor.  Then during the shinra prison escape jenova used it to kill the president.  It's not impossible

 

[LordUrQuan]

Or... they originally had it so it was literally Sephiroth and later amended the story - but left that part in.

Based on other things I've seen over the years, pretty sure this is what happened.

 

[Kefka]

It might also be possible that the sword is just an illusion created by Jenova (she's VERY good at illusion/halluzination stuff, as we know) to entice the party - especially Cloud - into following her. If I recall that scene correctly, no one ever touched that sword, so it's possible that there really is no sword there after all.

Anyway I still agree that it's rather poor writing regardless.

By the way, I've got a much bigger (or more obvious) plothole and didn't feel like opening a new thread just for that, so here goes:

At the end of Reactor No. 5, why does Tifa ask if Airbuster is a soldier? She met Zack and Sephiroth before, and at this point in the game everyone still believes Cloud to be a soldier too, so she knows that soldiers are human beings. That question makes zero sense. What were they thinking when they made this up?

 

[hartellage]

So thrilled to see all the responses already!

I also had the assumption that the writing process had left this little error sitting in the President's back, but I have to also accept that I don't know every last detail of this game so I had hopes that maybe there was something I missed, hehehe.

The coming Remake has me extra curious how they will address this or if it will be addressed at all. I don't want to just disregard it as "an illusion" simply because you don't see this type of illusion anywhere else in the game. I actually like the idea of Shinra having retrieved the sword as this would make the most sense. Hojo would undoubtedly be eager to reclaim it if he were at all aware of its location.

As for Tifa talking about Air Buster, I never saw this as a problem. President Shinra refers to Airbuster as a "Techno-Soldier", and while I am not sure how the translation works with "SOLDIER" and "Soldier" I still find it plausible for her to be confused.

Tifa says "This is from SOLDIER?" and Cloud responds that it is just a machine. I could easily see this as Tifa simply being confused about what all comes out of the Shinra project/division referred to as "SOLDIER". Similar to someone seeing a drone and saying "This is from the Army?"

 

[Kefka]

Ah, ok, then it makes some sense. Never played the retranslation, so I couldn't know. Or maybe they just didn't fix this in the later german translations?

 

[shikun]

I think Tifas ”is this from Soldier” is just a bit of worldbuilding, aka clarifying that Soldier only consists of human soldiers.

they definitely should have gone back to the sword scene after solidifying that Jenova was impersonating Sephiroth and just have had Tifa remark on sword wounds or similar. Jenova clearly can conjure clothes and weapons, since it does kill Aerith with such a sword, but having the weapon continue to exist outside of its body is too farfetched and indeed bad writing.

 

[Izban]

As for sephys sword.... They probably had spares, and one of the reunion did the murdering by taking it from sephys locker, personally I think Cloud did it it would explain why his door was open, and having been shinra he would have had knowledge about shinra tower and the soldier floor which sephy would of kept spare gear.

But yeah most likely the story changed between midgars development and the rest of the story