Final Fantasy VII Characters

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Professor Hojo

Vital Statistics

Occupation	Scientist
Birthdate	Unknown
Hometown	Unknown

Biography

Professor Hojo is the head of Shinra’s sciences department. At the beginning of the game, he’s very interested in taking Aeris captive, in order to experiment on her. You’ll find out later on that he had an impact on a lot of the game’s characters, and never in a good way...

Additional Information

Being the second most brilliant Shinra scientist (although not from Sephiroth's point of vue), just behind Professor Gast, Hojo was selected to work on the Jenova Project along with said Professor, with the help of a young woman named Lucrecia, and a member of the elite Turks, Vincent. As the experiments didn’t show any progress, Hojo turned towards experimenting on living creatures, eventually deciding to experiment on humans. During that time, a romantic triangle occured between Lucrecia, Hojo and Vincent, but the details of it are still unknown, due to the fact that the flashbacks are textless. From what can be gathered in the flashbacks occuring in Lucrecia's cave, Lucrecia had some romantic feelings towards Vincent, and he did too had some for her. However, at some point, Lucrecia rejected him for Hojo. Although it is unknown if Hojo ever had feelings for her, they did date at some point, until the moment came that Lucrecia was pregnant. That’s when Hojo, having no luck experimenting on adult humans (his subsequent failed attempts with the clones and the monsters in the Nibelheim reactor largely abund in this theory), decided to experiment on his unborn baby. Vincent opposed to this, but was shot down by Hojo, who later experimented on him, giving him the wretched body that he has at the time you meet with him.

The experiment was a success, in the sense that the baby was in perfect health, and was named Sephiroth. However, Lucrecia became very sick during the pregnancy, and was very much altered by the Jenova cells injected in her body. During Sephiroth’s childhood, Hojo didn’t stop working, and eventually found Professor Gast and his wife Ifalna, and their newborn baby Aeris. It is made clear that Hojo had only waited so long for another ancient to be born, in the form of Aeris. In a tragic reunion, Gast is killed, and the two girls are captured (although not for long: see their respective biographies for more informations on that subject).

After the Nibelheim events, five years prior to the beginning of the game, Hojo was left with very little: his son, his most amazing creation as a scientist, was gone and nowhere to be found, and he couldn’t get a hold on the remaining Ancients. Hojo decided to try and recreate Sephiroth by cloning him, using the bodies of the surviving people of Nibelheim. He once again infused humans with Jenova’s cells, under some Mako exposure. The results of this experiment was the black-caped men, that carried tattoos (even though he was part of the experiment, Cloud didn’t receive any tattoo, because he was, under Hojo’s own admission when he meets Cloud at the Northern Pole, “a failure”).

At some point, Hojo also got its hands on a new “specimen”, in the form of Red XIII. It is unclear what he wanted to do with him, however it did implicate at some point meeting Aeris. When this experiment also failed due to AVALANCHE’s intervention, Hojo then turned toward finding the Promised Land, where his superiors were sure to find a great amount of mako energy. Hojo probably went along with it only because he wanted to find Sephiroth, reappeared after five years without being heard of.

When he found out what Sephiroth was up to, he decided to help him one last time. Using the Sister Ray, he tried to give his son more power to achieve his goals. It is at that moment that AVALANCHE finally stopped him, and destroyed a mentally-disturbed Professor Hojo, so far beyond sanity that he had used his own body as a recipient for Jenova’s cells.