How I Did It
It doesnt matter if youre trying to find a property value in Midgar or Asgard, there are three crucial pieces of information you need to know:
The propertys size
Its real-world location
The price of similar properties there
Even though Id played through FFVII multiple times over the years, I didnt know the layout of Aeriths home by heart, so I decided to start my quest with a lot of measurements.
Thats Aeriths house above. A pretty humble abode, isnt it? It wasnt until I fired up the game and went back there to walk around inside that I realized how modest it really was.
If you think its tiny on the outside, you should see the inside. In fact, why dont you take a look at it below:
Thats rightits just two floors, and at least from what you can see in the game, is comprised of only:
A living room
A kitchen
Two bedrooms
No visible bathroom
Perhaps the bathroom is around back where you cant see it in the game? Maybe Aerith uses magic instead of toilet paper? I decided it was probably best not to think too long about such things, and got on with the measurements.
Using the size of the bedroom doors for reference (I assumed theyre standard 36-inch interior doors), I measured both floors and the kitchen area to get a total square footage of 1,176. Like I said, a very modest home (more like an apartment at that size, an observation that would help me later).
With the size worked out, I could move on to determining its (and, in the process, Midgars) location in the real world.
Putting Midgar On The Map (And Flipping It)
Id always figured that Midgar was meant to be some sort of futuristic Japanese metropolis, but it turns out I was very wrong in that thinking.
After reading up on my FFVII development history, I learned a pretty surprising fact Id never heard before: when planning the game, producer Hironobu Sakaguachi and director Yoshinori Kitase originally intended it to take place in real-world New York City.
That changed everything for me, and gave me a new path to go down in my search for answers. Actually, I should say it showed me a rabbit hole of research which I promptly fell head-first into.
After looking into a real-world equivalent of Midgar, I discovered a related theory: that the FFVII map is simply a map of Earth turned upside down. This is what it looks like untouched:
I fired up Photoshop and flipped the image 180 degrees to discover
hey, it really does look like that. We have Midgar being in eastern North America, Europes on there, as it what looks like Africa, and definitely Japan. Even the Hawaiian islands.
What really clinched this theory for me was the placement of Wutai, a location that looks like feudal Japan in the game. Lo and behold, its right there on the land mass that looks like Japan.
It was Midgars location, though, along with the already established NYC connection that led me to decide to place it there. I used a fan-created Midgar Mass Transit System (MMTS) station map to further pinpoint Sector 5, the area of Midgar that Aeriths house was in.
I narrowed it down to the southwest portion of Manhattan (Tribeca to be exact). This even fits with Midgars Little Wutai, which could have a real-world equivalent in Manhattans Chinatown.
The Tribeca area also has Church Street running through it, fitting since Aerith spends a lot of time at the church in Sector 5, and St. Pauls is right by the area I decided on.
Confident of my choice of location, I could proceed with my final sub-quest.
Price Per Square(soft) Foot
Now that I had a location (Tribeca), I needed to track down some properties of comparable size in the area to get my price per square foot. This proved reasonable easy, and as I alluded to early they were all apartments. They were all also fittingly expensive given the location.
How expensive? Well, after averaging the size and cost of four roughly 1,000 square foot apartments in Tribeca together, I arrived at an average price per square foot of $1,604.
Thats not too far off from the $1,630 per square foot I got for my Ghostbusters firehouse evaluation, another famous property also located in Tribeca. With that, I had everything I needed to complete my quest.
Limit Breaking It Down
Like tracking HP in a particularly intense boss fight, I needed some math to make sense of what Id found. This meant multiplying the size of Aeriths house (1,176 square feet) by the price per square foot ($1,604) to arrive at a final price of $1,886,304a particularly shocking number after looking at the interior of her home above, wouldnt you agree?
Now, this price doesnt include any possessions or land, and I cant even begin to calculate how much it would cost to purchase meteor strike insurance for the place. I did, however, work out how much it would cost in FFVII currency: 37,726,080 Gil (at a fan-theorized $0.05 per Gil).
Thats enough to buy 125,752 Phoenix Downs in FFVII, an item that youd need to revive people after telling them this price. Or you could get 75,452 tents, which seem like a much more achievable housing goal, at least in the current NYC real estate market.
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