Yes indeed. To retain the Final Fantasy lietmotif, it’s the formidable foil brandished by the seventh instalment’s angsty antagonist. He of the pensioner’s greying hair in the rather flamboyant -dare we allege?- effeminate style.

Sephiroth is inseperable from his favored blade, the Masamune. There are documented occasions of him composing odes of eternal love to the sword, reciting them in raconteur-esque fashion on the Masamune’s doorstep at dawn. (“Get lost!”, reprimands the sword through its open window, “I don’t like you that way. You’re a little too attached to your mother for my taste; and there’s also your penchant for skewering twenty-foot-long snakes on sharpened tree trunks. That’s pretty uncool, right there. Most pertinently, though, your hair is utterly crap.”)

Whereupon, a crestfallen Sephiroth sulked in his bedroom for three months, emerging only to stab innocuous by-standers right in their innocent groins to cheer himself up. The cad.

Most befuddling about this weapon is the notion that, as our hero Cloud Strife alleges, nobody but the ‘Roth can wield it. Nuts to brandishing it, they can’t even lift the thing. As such, we must inquire: Is this due solely to its great mass? Is the Masamune constructed from Adamantium, and therefore weighs seven tonnes or so? As anybody that’s beheld Cloud’s own Buster Sword can attest, that can’t be the issue. He appears to have about as much upper-body strength as an anorexic stick insect, so such logical concerns are seemingly moot.

Perhaps some arcane sorcerer has imbued the Masamune with a malevolent curse? Something to the effect of: nobody else can use the sword, because they would indubitably drop it on their foot is they attempted such. This is the very deterrent that a mean, mean dude of Sephiroth’s calibre would enjoy putting upon their belongings. That’s so him.

In the midst of all this facetiousness, it’s incumbent upon me to remind us that this sword has attained a notoriety rivaling that of its enigmatic master. It’s a gaming icon in its own right; who doesn’t recall the disconcerting image of it protruding from the president’s anus (or, indeed, back) in the Shinra building?