How Big is Midgar?

[The Twilight Mexican]

164 feet is such a short distance as to hardly be worth the effort to build the thing. That's forty-four feet shorter than the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and only about the height of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.

It's clearly a much greater distance in scenes like when Cloud falls from the no. 5 mako reactor or when looking at the height of the pillar that holds up Sector 7. It's got to be a good 75-80 meters.

 

[ForceStealer]

Yeah, and 245-260 feet in all directions would still feel pretty oppressive. A 24-story building is a tall building, but it's no skyscraper, and it's the absolute most you could fit under a plate of that height.

 

[Strangelove]

maybe people in ffvii's world are just really really short so they don't need tall buildings

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

As usual, the explanation is simple.

 

[matsukix]

So, I think I may have a reasonable estimate of Midgar being roughly 2 miles in diameter. I simply took the length of time for the motorcycle escape sequence which is 2:40 from the moment the Hardy Daytona's busts out of shinra HQ to the outter edge of the city. Regardless of the speed of the cycle, the truck sets the pace, so I estimated it at 25-30 mph (since trucks of that size irl tend to have very low max speeds and you can see by the passing scenery it's only moderately fast).

This ended up being way more simple than I expected, but heres my calculation anyways:
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calc...=minute&given_data_last=dt_va_ds&action=solve

 

[Makoeyes987]

In the original game, Midgar was stated to be 50 meters above ground level.

However, that's no longer the case with the Remake.

Spoiler: In case anyone finds this to be a big spoiler for whatever reason, the FFVII Remake height of Midgar is...

According to the Remake, Midgar sits 300 meters from the ground surface.

That height is the equivalent of the Eiffel Tower of Paris. 100 meters short of the Empire State Building.

So that's a much more fitting and expected height for Midgar. Although to be honest, I sorta thought it'd be even higher

 

[Tetsujin]

50m in the original never made any sense, this seems more accurate for sure.

 

[Odysseus]

It'd probably be better if they just never specified and left it up to the imagination, but I know us needs love our statistics. That new value is definitely more what I thought it should be though.