Phantom Cleansing Mission

The Phantom Cleansing Missions were a series of globally orchestrated strike missions against zones that possessed large quantities of Phantoms such as the Leonid Meteor and the area west of Tucson.

By the time of the events in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within there had been four Phantom Cleansing Missions performed, with the most recent of which was supposedly designed to end the “war” between the Phantoms and Humans; occurring near Tucson in 2043. The missions have proven failures on various levels, with a nation-wide draft in the United States enacted to supplement forces lost during those missions. Physical attacks have proven to possess little effect on the Leonid Meteor and the Phantom population overall, resulting in the creation of the Zeus Cannon as an absolute weapon designed to decimate the meteor site.

Aki Ross, in her pursuit to complete Dr. Sid’s Wave Theory, entered the Tucson Wasteland, site of the fourth Phantom Cleansing Mission, to locate and retrieve the seventh spirit/energy signature.

Trivia

 * Ryan Whittaker’s father was part of the ill fated fourth Phantom Cleansing Mission.
 * The design of the soldier uniforms worn in the fourth Phantom Cleansing Mission were actually based off of the original concepts for the Deep Eyes uniforms.
 * The dead soldier that Aki found in the Tucson Wasteland was one of the inspectors killed by Phantoms in an alternate opening sequence that never made it to film.