Is Glenn Lodbrok Alive Or Dead After Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth?

If you’ve played Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, it’s probably because you already played Remake. And if you thoroughly understood the story of both of them, then you’re probably a pretty big fan of the whole Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 as well. Despite all of that, you might still have been asking yourself who the heck Glenn Lodbrok even is.

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To understand Glenn, who is mysteriously very present and important despite never seeming to have appeared, let alone even mentioned prior to his appearance in Rebirth, we have to dive deeper. In typical Final Fantasy 7 fashion, he is not originally from Rebirth, nor has his story even been fully told yet.

Updated February 6th, 2025 by Hilton Webster: aGlenn is a mysterious character in Final Fantasy 7, and it’s likely we won’t get more answers on what he wants until the conclusion of the remake trilogy. For now though, we can look a bit more closely at how exactly he knows Sephiroth, and what that might mean for the future.

Where Does Glenn First Appear?

The Proto SOLDIER

You might remember a certain Final Fantasy 7 game that was released, celebrated its anniversary, and then was unceremoniously shut down. The First Soldier was a mobile-exclusive battle royale with, obviously, plot-relevant information. It was a series of simulations and training grounds for Shinra’s military.

Glenn made his first, albeit very brief, appearance in this game. There’s no story to speak of in The First Soldier, with him instead being introduced purely so that he could be later expanded in Ever Crisis, the other mobile-exclusive Final Fantasy 7 game.

Glenn then appears in The First Soldier chapters of Ever Crisis, his existence now known through The First Soldier game. It’s all a tad confusing for a character that has no lore behind them yet. He appears here alongside fellow prototype SOLDIERS Lucia Lin and Matt Winsord. Glenn, Lucia, and Matt are an inseparable trio, even since Glenn saved Matt, and Lucia saved the duo in-turn. This led to the creation of Team Glenn, with their first mission being a covert op to find the location for a new Mako Reactor on the Rhadore Archipelago.

These friends share another trait, however. They are all P0 SOLDIERS, an early form of the SOLDIER program that were later dubbed the passive-type to differentiate them from the active-type SOLDIERS like Sephiroth. In many ways, Glenn and his friends were dead-weight to Shinra, being a obsolete model. This mission to Rhadore was just using up their time.

Glenn’s Relationship With Sephiroth

A lot goes on here, building a general distrust between Glenn and Shinra. He also became closely associated with a young Sephiroth here. In the years before, he was the famed SOLDIER by the time of the main game. Glenn became privy to the cruelty of Shinra through him, seeing that much of his supposed achievements were propaganda used as a means to drum up the success of the SOLDIER programme.

During the mission in Rhadore, Glenn saw that Sephiroth, the poster boy that Shinra had built as as being proof of the power of the SOLDIER Programme, was just a child, and Rhadore was his first mission too. Sephiroth was misguided, ruthlessly murdering civilians because such thoroughness was strength in his eyes. This shocked Glenn, who mentored Sephiroth during the course of the mission to show compassion to others. There is no one you need to prove your strength to on the battlefield.

For a time, this seemed to have sunk into Sephiroth, and Glenn even rescinded his own remarks on calling Sephiroth a genetically-enhanced cyborg. Of course, such benign cruelty can’t be bred out so quickly, and Sephiroth murdered a Rhadoran child, Rosen, that Glenn had become close with. This was a breaking point, and he did not see Sephiroth for years afterwards.

At a certain point, Glenn had dealt with Shinra and its engineered cruelty for long enough. He defected from Shinra alongside Matt and Lucia and made connections with others who held similar sentiments. Using these people, he overthrew the Wutai government to upset the ceasefire with Shinra, using the military might of Wutai as a foundation for fighting back against Shinra. At this point, the Interim Wutai government was established, and the still mysterious Viceroy Sarruf was elected as the acting head of this new government.

Yet after all of this, Glenn was killed. He was shot in the back by Rufus Shinra, now president of Shinra. This is everything that was revealed about Glenn prior to his role in Rebirth. So if he’s dead, how exactly does he appear in Rebirth?

What Is Glenn’s Role in Rebirth?

When we see Glenn Lodbrok in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, it is never as the party. In fact, Cloud and company never come face-to-face with Glenn even once across the whole length of the game. The only time we see him are in his conversations with Rufus Shinra, the man who supposedly killed him.

Each time we see him, he speaks mysteriously, never quite revealing the reality of how he’s present to Rufus either. He is also, rather notably, wearing the same black robes as all of the others injected with Sephiroth’s genes. This is exactly as blatant as it seems.

Yet despite the oddity of the situation, Rufus works alongside Glenn. It is shown by the end of the game that Rufus and Glenn have orchestrated the breaking of the ceasefire between Wutai and Shinra to make an excuse for a new war, though Rufus’ reason for this is never clarified.

It is at this point Glenn reveals that, indeed, he is another clone of Sephiroth. Or rather, that Sephiroth was the one acting as Glenn throughout all his meetings with Rufus. Sephiroth, now appearing as himself, reveals that he wishes to instigate this war to enact his own plans of controlling the entirety of the Lifestream across all realities. In a rage, Rufus shoots at him, the person before him now appearing as Glenn again, taunting him for killing him a second time.

Rufus is left alone, another pawn in Sephiroth’s grand plan. And Glenn has died yet again.

Is Glenn Alive Or Dead?

Death is a difficult concept in Final Fantasy 7. The body can perish, but in most cases, the soul will return to the Lifestream, memories and personality intact. We see through Aerith that the Cetra can feel this presence, recalling the memories of those who have passed. In that sense, those who die only do so physically, but these memories are also now a part of the Lifestream as a collective whole rather than individuals.

So is Glenn dead? Physically, absolutely. The Glenn we see throughout Rebirth was never the Glenn that was present in The First Soldier and Ever Crisis. The first time Rufus shot him in the back was also the last. The man he meets throughout Rebirth was always just another clone of Sephiroth.

What’s more curious in this regard is the appearance of the Glenn that Rufus sees. Like Jenova herself, Sephiroth can manifest through the Black Robes and appear as whoever he wants. “Those you fear, those you love.” as Sephiroth himself says. When Cloud sees Sephiroth in the Black Robes, it makes sense. He doesn’t know what has happened to Sephiroth, so his appearance is genuinely tangible to him.

But Rufus killed Glenn. We see him shoot him in the back. So why, then, is he so afraid of him? What ambiguity was left at his death for Rufus to so thoroughly be terrified of a dead man that he perfectly remembers killing himself?

Glenn is dead, undeniably. Rufus killed him. Sephiroth is just using another Black Robe to project Glenn’s appearance to Rufus. Yet there must be something unusual occurring with regard to Glenn for Rufus to fear him so much, even in death. With that in mind, it is very likely Glenn’s story is far from over, likely to be explained further either in the next game of the Remake trilogy or in later episodes of Ever Crisis.

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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: Ending Explained

Well, that was a lot to process in a short amount of time.