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The point is not that he killed him but he also  skewered him on a tree to show off, while your party can barely land a hit on him and your chasing in The Man who did that to that.

I like how Midgar Zolom serves multiple functions.

One, it's a natural roadblock. It is extemely dangerous at this point in the game. It has 4000 HP, its physical attacks do over 400 damage, he can eject party members from the battle, and has a powerful fire spell called beta that hits your party for 1200 damage. Most players aren't going to be able to outrun it, nor would they be able to overcome it. Certainly not with brute force.

Though it isn't impossible to get by it. The devs thought of that though so if you get to the Mythril Mine before visiting Kalm, your party will stop in its tracks and say they need to go back.

Two, it's a display of Sephiroth's power. After the Kalm flashback, you get the means to cross the marsh safely and you're greeted with a gruesome sight. The overwhelmingly powerful serpent that you had to evade is seen skewered in brutal fashion. What's lethal to you is effortlessly defeated by Sephiroth. It gave him a terrifying presence.

Three. It's a rewarding challenge for skillful players to defeat. You can mitigate its physical attacks by a great deal. Defending reduces damage by half, so does moving party members to the back row. The sadness status also reduces damage by 30 percent. And all of these stack. Physical attacks that did over 400 damage now does less than 100. It's also vulnerable to the poison status, so an easy way to defeat it is poison it, defend, and heal when necessary. It only ejects players and uses Beta as counter attacks; so playing defensively like this means it'll only be using it's physical attack. Not only can you defeat it, you can even learn Beta for yourself. If you pair elemental and fire materia on your armor,  itll reduce the damage by half. With the damage reduction from sadness you can reduce Beta's damage from 1200 to 400. I choose the character with the most HP to carry those materia as well as enemy skill, and play defensively with them. Ill equip poison on another character and use them to do the damage. With the right timing you can get it to cast beta right before it dies from poison and thus have an incredibly powerful spell for the early game.

So now that i wrote a novel length comment, I should probably begin watching the video. 😂 I'll compare and contrast it with this comment. I imagine its gonna be similar.

my first play through, i totally ignored the chocobo farm and went straight across the marsh, encountering the Zolom, i was (naturally) wiped really quickly.
Id not saved since the midpoint of the cloud flashback in calm, and had some leveling in the grasslands, so i lost a few hours of play. i was incenced!
second time around i saved and stepped into the marsh, he kicked Tifa out of the party, then bit Aeris and cloud to death.
3rd time i was "ready" with my newly acquired cure2 spell. And i was doing well, until Beta. seeing it do 2200 damage to characters that hardly breached 500, i was stunned.

I tried a 4th time, but was Beta'd again.

then i did it the proper way, by going to the chocobo farm and getting the lure.

I never forgot the zolom, i was so angry that late game, i tested every single high level spell, summon and enemy skill on the zolom to exact some small amount of digital revenge.

After the side quest to get the Knights of the round materia, did i plunge headlong into the North crater to give Sephiroth his just deserts?
NO! i boarded the highwind, destined for the swamp, the first ever time id seen KoTR (id heard rumours of its power by this point) it was pummelling the Zolom to death far outside its health pool, I was awed, smug, and satisfied

The scariest thing in the game...until you meet a Tonberry in the final dungeon.

Never thought I'd ever watch a 9 minute video about Midgar Zolom but here we go.

I never really saw it as a plot hole. It’s not like when you defeat the one on the overworld map they stop showing up. There’s clearly an entire species of them out there

I think it's meant to be implied that the swamp is massive and that the likelihood of their being multiple zoloms is to be expected

I think what is most interesting to me is the ways the death of the Midgard Zolom is juxtaposed to the death of president Shinra. Both Shinra and the Zolom represent particular kinds of power or strength, be that political/milterisyic/imperial, like Shinra, or wild/natural, like the Zolom. I see the both deaths as illustrating Sephiroth’s command over power, all kinds of power.

EDIT: Yes, I know it was always Janova. 🙏🏾

I never thought there was only one zolom. Never crossed my mind at all. You can fight it multiple times. There's a killed zolom in the cave afterwards etc. I always thought about the party being surprised by it because of the way it was displayed after being killed, it's a spectacle.

I actually love that they build up Sephiroth the way they do in the OG, and I think it's missing in the remake. Even if most of the story ends up being chasing him around and then getting some team member lore for most locations you go to and then later revisit etc. The structure/flow of the story is so formulaic. Everyone has a sad story, but it's related to the theme of the game. It's just hard to break the illusion after noticing it.

It had such an impact that I would return and cast Knights of the Round on it as REVENGE! for those early post-Midgar struggles to conquer it.

There’s no plot hole at all. Of course there’s more than one Zolom—it’s just an animal species that resides in that swamp. Obviously there would need to be more than one for that species to reproduce.

It kind of reminds me of FF8 where Quistis takes Squall to go defeat a T-Rexaur.

Alleyway Jack, the mystery of a person said to not exist....yet here you are. Thanks for sharing about the snake in a lake.
One of my very first video game memories.

I can not speak for anyone else, but when I first played this game in the late nineties, I never felt any sort of jankiness from the scene where you find Sephiroth had impaled the Midgarzolom and the fact I can still fight it. I had always believed there were more than one of those serpents to begin with. The idea of there being more than one did not take away from how fearsome the serpent was nor how powerful Sephiroth was for having defeated one. If anything tarnished the Midgarzolom's reputation it was how easily it is killed by the player later in the game.

Also, am I just misremembering the original Jurassic Park? I thought there had been two T-Rex in that movie. I do know that the far more scary Velociraptor came as a pair.

I ground my way up and beat the zolom and got kicked back across because my party said we needed to go back. I fought another zolom on the way back across and beat it too. Then later I saw the one on the tree. I assumed that WE could DEFEAT it. But Seph KILLED it. That was at least my 11 year-old logic for it.

I enjoy hearing many different thoughts on odds and ends monsters that people forget about.

I Remember Finally Beating The Midgar Zolom In My First Playthrough.
Not Only Beating It, But Also Obtaining The Enemy Skill Beta As Well.

I enjoyed your analysis.
I recently replayed the original and charged head first to fight him. Two turns later and my party was 1 hit OKed. SquareSoft really created a gem :)

I beat it, and after beating it, I encountered another. I just assumed that meant there was more than one.