The city is powered by electricity drawn from reactors which run on Mako (魔晄, "magic light"), the processed form of spiritual energy extracted by Shinra from beneath the surface of the planet on which the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII takes place.

Midgar is considered to be one of the most memorable aspects of the original Final Fantasy VII, and has been well received by critics and the video game community for its cyberpunk aesthetic and dystopian setting.

[5] The development team aimed to make Midgar's environments larger and denser while taking into consideration their functionality, as they wanted to expand the city in a way that made sense.

Environment director on Final Fantasy VII Remake Takako Miyake noted that whenever the team extracted Midgar's design elements from the original, they were "focused on combinations that unconditionally inspired excitement, consistency aside".

[5] The developers of Remake wanted to show more of the lives of Midgar's ordinary citizens to give players a better sense of it and its culture, which is why they expanded the roles of previously minor characters.

Remake instead opens with mundane scenes of everyday life for Midgar's citizens, as it developers felt that going straight from the bombing mission into the streets was insufficient to convey the impact the destruction of Mako reactors has on people's lives.

[15][16] Shinra developed a means of mass-producing and weaponizing "materia", small spheres of crystallized Mako energy that grant their user magical abilities, as well as an army of genetically enhanced elite military units called "SOLDIER".

The eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE, with assistance from Cloud Strife, engineered successful bombing missions that temporarily put two Mako reactors out of commission by the events of Final Fantasy VII.

It is modified into a superweapon called "the Sister Ray" through its integration with the city's Mako reactor network, with the goal of destroying an energy barrier Sephiroth conjured to protect himself in the Northern Crater after summoning the planet-destroying spell "Meteor".

The game's ending cutscene reveals that the Meteor nearly destroyed Midgar, but it is stopped by the combined effort of a Holy spell summoned by Aerith and the planet's Lifestream.

[22] The main antagonistic faction of Dirge of Cerberus is Deepground, a SOLDIER sect developed as an experimental military project by President Shinra prior to his death.

[26] Julie Muncy from Wired noted that the city of Midgar, along with characters like Cloud Strife and Sephiroth, have achieved a level of cultural impact far beyond the games they originate from and "exist with power outside of their context".

[27] Stephen K. Hirst from Ars Technica suggested that a major theme of Final Fantasy VII, which involves an armed struggle between members of the working class and a "hyper-capitalist machine hellbent on extracting every ounce of value from the planet" to benefit Midgar's elite, resonated with a generation of players and inspired some to become environmentalist advocates and activists.

[34] Harry Mackin from Paste Magazine said the opening act of Final Fantasy VII in Midgar is the game's mostly fondly remembered aspect, and that the city recalls the cyberpunk themes of Akira and Blade Runner.

[35] Konstantinos Dimopoulos from WireFrame concurred, noting that Midgar is a "place that managed to define, encapsulate, and summarise a whole setting – a pithy urban symbol of FFVII's world".

[36] Jason Faulkner from GameRevolution opined that Midgar is an exemplary JRPG setting which "stands as one of the best examples of world-building in the genre", and the "crowning achievement" of the entire Final Fantasy series.

[37] Tom Senior from PC Gamer perceived Midgar's "contradictory identity" to be fascinating in its level of detail, "a breathtaking vision of industrial living gone wrong".

[38] Joe Juba of Game Informer lauded the handling of the city in Remake, specifically the expanded detail of its "political conspiracies, everyday desperation, and quiet hope".