From the steel sky of Midgar to the frozen wound at the top of the world, the whole Planet is rendered and alive — hundreds of locations, each with its own people, history, and dangers. These are the places that matter most — and every one of them is now a front in a three-way war.
Shinra’s great city: an iron plate raised over the earth on eight Mako reactors, the gleaming upper city of privilege built directly atop the sunless slums it starves. Shinra HQ towers at the center like a spike driven into the Planet. It is the most Mako-greedy place on the world — which makes it the place the Reclaimants hate most, and the first to burn.
Below the city, in the perpetual shade of the plate, the slums sprawl in scrap and neon. Tifa’s bar Seventh Heaven hides AVALANCHE’s cell in Sector 7; Aerith’s ruined church and her impossible flowers grow in Sector 5; Wall Market churns with vice and the Honeybee’s lights. The people here never chose any of the wars above them — and they are the ones who feel each one first.
Past Midgar’s edge the open world begins — the quiet brick town of Kalm, the Chocobo Ranch, and the marshlands where the Midgar Zolom coils in the reeds. The first quiet after the steel, and the first place travelers realize how much larger — and stranger — the Planet has become since the gods woke.
A second city built up the face of a sea cliff, crowned by the colossal Junon Cannon and the airfield, the harbor and the parade grounds below. Shinra’s war machine musters here — and now turns its cannons on Leviathan and the Weapons, on things that cannons were never built to kill.
Dio’s glittering amusement empire floats above the desert prison of Corel — the Battle Square, the Chocobo races, the Speed Square, the Ghost Hotel, all blazing defiance while the world ends below. It is also where a certain fortune-telling toy cat first crosses your path. An island of light, and the secrets it keeps are as bright as its bulbs.
A red-rock haven built into the cliffs, home to Red XIII and the ancient sage Bugenhagen, the Cosmo Candle burning at its heart and the observatory open to the stars. The keepers here understood the Lifestream long before Shinra ever tapped it — which makes Cosmo Canyon the one place that might understand what the Reclaimants truly are, and what they want.
The mountain village where Cloud and Tifa were born, the reactor in the peaks above, and the Shinra Mansion with its spiral of basement laboratories where Vincent still sleeps in a coffin. This is the wound at the root of everything — the night Sephiroth learned what he was — and his shadow falls longer here than anywhere on the Planet.
Yuffie’s mountainous homeland of pagodas and old shrines, a proud warrior culture humbled by Shinra into a tourist trap. Wutai worshipped the Summons as gods long before they woke — and now that the old powers walk the earth, the nation is torn down the middle: take up arms against the Reclaimants, or fall to its knees before them.
Icicle Inn, the killing cold of the Great Glacier, the long climb up Gaea’s Cliff — and beyond them the Northern Crater, the vast scar where the Calamity fell from the sky two thousand years ago. It is the thinnest place between the world and the Lifestream, the deepest reservoir of Mako on the Planet. It is where Sephiroth waits. It is where everything is meant to end.
Not a place you can walk — the truth under every place.
The river of life and death and memory that flows beneath the whole world: the source the Summons rose from, the thing the Weapons were born to guard, and the power Sephiroth means to seize and ride into godhood. Every reactor steals from it, every death returns to it, and in the end every road in this world leads down into it.