A Planet Bled Dry

It is the classic era, in an alternate echo of it. For decades the Shinra Electric Power Company has drained the Lifestream — the river of life and death that flows beneath everything — through eight Mako reactors ringing the steel city of Midgar. The Planet is dying, and Shinra calls it progress.

The eco-resistance group AVALANCHE wages its doomed war from the slums. The Cetra are all but extinct. And beneath the plate, beneath the soil, beneath the sea, the Lifestream churns — grieving, and no longer silent.

The Reclaimants Rise

The Planet’s grief found older voices than the Cetra. The Summons — the elemental powers bound into Materia eons ago, Ifrit and Shiva, Ramuh and Titan, Leviathan and Bahamut, Odin and Alexander and more — were the Planet’s first children, worshipped as gods before man, before even the Ancients. For ages they slept inside their orbs of crystallized Lifestream, waiting.

Now they have broken their bindings. They wake furious and certain: the world was theirs before it was ever ours, and they have come to reclaim it. The age of man is over. The Reclaimants have returned.

War With Man

To the Reclaimants, humanity is a parasite, and Shinra the worst of it — burning the Planet’s blood to light its cities. They do not negotiate. Bahamut’s fire falls on the upper plate; Leviathan walks Junon’s harbor under in a single tide; Titan splits the highways. Reactor and slum burn alike, because to a god the difference is too small to see.

Shinra’s armies, the Turks, the rebels of AVALANCHE — people who would sooner kill each other — find their bullets and their bravado barely scratch a being older than the sea. For the first time, the question isn’t who rules the Planet. It’s whether anyone gets to.

War With the Weapons

Humanity is not the only thing the Planet ever made. When the Lifestream itself is threatened, the Weapons wake — colossal living guardians, Emerald and Ruby, Diamond and Sapphire and Ultima, bred for a single purpose: purge any threat to the Planet, without mercy and without mind.

But the Weapons cannot tell saviour from destroyer. They see the Reclaimants as one more infection and humanity as the wound that started it all. So now three powers tear at a dying world: the Summons who would take it back, the Weapons who would scour it clean, and the people caught screaming in between.

The Shadow of Sephiroth

And in the chaos, something colder stirs. Sephiroth — the fallen hero, the would-be god, the man the Calamity made — sees in the Reclaimants’ war the opening he has waited a lifetime for. Why fight for the Planet when you can simply inherit the ashes?

As the Summons and the Weapons rip the world apart, his will spreads through the Lifestream like a cold current beneath warm water, bending the catastrophe toward his own ascension. He is patient. He is unhurried. And in a war this loud, almost no one notices that he is quietly, steadily winning.

Strange Alliances

No one survives this alone — and that is the cruelest part. A Shinra executive and an AVALANCHE bomber sharing the same foxhole. A Turk guarding the very Ancient he was sent to capture. A Wutai thief, a beast of Cosmo Canyon, a chain-smoking pilot, and a man who slept thirty years in a coffin — none of whom would have shared a fire a week ago — bound together because the only alternative is extinction.

Old enemies. Old grudges. Old loves. All of it forced to the same hard choice: hold the line together, or die apart.

Your Story

You are one person caught in the reclamation. Materia doesn’t replay the game’s plot — it builds an original story around your character, your choices, and the bonds you forge in the wreckage. Stand with man, kneel to the Summons, hunt the Weapons, or carve a path no one expected. Broker the impossible alliance, or watch it shatter in your hands.

Every choice is yours. The one rule the engine never breaks is the truth of this world — Mako and Lifestream, Cetra and Calamity, and the long, cold weight of Sephiroth’s name.

The Planet Is Being Reclaimed

The only question left is by whom — and what you’ll do when the gods come home.