In defense of FF7’s worst character, Cait Sith

Final Fantasy 7 features some of the most beloved characters ever to be featured in a video game. Everyone admires Cloud’s too cool for school attitude. Tifa once brought the proceedings of the Italian senate to a screeching halt. Emo types and guyliner advocates can’t get enough of Vincent Valentine. For decades, there’s been only one confirmed dud in the lineup of playable characters: Cait Sith.

The reasons for his bad reputation in the 1997 original game are manifold. Strike one: he’s the yappy mascot character, armed with an unfunny quip for every occasion. Strike two: his Limit Break special attacks absolutely stink, and can wipe out your entire party if you’re unlucky. Strike three: he’s a Shinra narc. This last quality is the hardest to forgive, yet it’s also the place where Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth makes the greatest strides in making the character not merely tolerable, but a welcome addition to the group.

In the original game and the remakes, Cait Sith is a robot controlled by a high-ranking Shinra executive named Reeve, who’s spying on Cloud and his allies. He betrays your party, but later makes good and joins the squad permanently, sacrificing his replaceable robot body in order to obtain the Black Materia. In the 1997 game, his redemption arc was pretty half-baked. Yes, there are a few Shinra board meetings where Reeve expresses meek resistance toward raising the price of Mako and eliminating Midgar’s entire Sector 7 neighborhood. But he seemed more like a chaos agent looking to liven up his pencil-pushing days than a truly repentant villain.

Also, I only recently discovered that if you have Cait Sith in your party during Aerith’s death scene, he does a weird little tap dance in front of her lifeless body. It always felt vaguely disrespectful to include him on that particular outing, and now I know why. Is this supposed to cheer us up? Read the room, buddy!

Meanwhile, in FF7 Rebirth, Cait Sith is far more endearing, right from his first appearance. For one thing, he immediately admits to being a Shinra employee, rather than concealing it from the group. Rebirth also wisely eliminates the subplot where Cait Sith kidnaps Barret’s daughter Marlene in order to weasel his way back into the party, which is never resolved in a satisfying way.

Instead, in the newer version of the story, he actually seems to think of Cloud and his companions as friends, rather than a means to Shinra’s ends. His lilting Celtic accent goes a long way toward making him more charming, as does his evident (and relatable!) interest in glimpsing a potential smooch between Cloud and Tifa.

Yes, Cait Sith’s new solo dungeon crawl through Shinra Manor — the one with all the clumsy box-tossing puzzles — drags on too long in Rebirth. But the basic premise of alternating between the large and small versions of the character is amusing and memorable. What’s more, it demonstrates that Reeve is willing to use his Shinra connections to benefit the party, rather than the corporate mission. While I wish the experience were tighter, I’m not mad about its inclusion.

Square Enix’s remake project aims to make everything about the original FF7 bigger and better than you remember it. And one of its most surprising feats is to transform Cait Sith from a punk bitch who’s permanently banned from my active party into someone whose presence I actively enjoy. Wizardry!

Does that mean Cait Sith is one of FF7’s best characters now? Oh heavens no! He’s not even in the top five. Or ten. But his new incarnation is pretty far from being the worst. That honor goes to Palmer, the Shinra suit who puts lard in his tea. And Chadley. As the OG Barret or Cid might say, $#*% Chadley.