#frankly i think tifa can do better

[darrengrave]

I'd probably appreciate a romantic take on cloud and tifa more if everyone I've ever encountered that's super into that ship wasn't absolutely insufferable. Queer platonic best friends it is then.

[blackhakumen]

Mini Fanfic #791: Wrath of the Certified Moms (Super Smash Bros Ultimate)

4:23 p.m. at Smash Mansion's Dining Hall......

It was quiet and Intense afternoon at the Mansion of Smash as everyone hides away and watch an unfazed Kazuya have himself a conversation with the Certified Moms Squads, who are not very happy with him at the point.

Peach: Mr. Kazuya. (Crosses Her Arms in a Not Pleased Yet Professional Like Manner) I take it that you are wondering why we wanted to talk to you at this very moment, yes?

Kazuya: No. I don't actually. But since we're here.....(Slams Two of his Feet On the Table One By One) Let's talk.

Samus: What the hell are you doing?

Kazuya: (Raised an Eyebrow at the Bounty Hunter Glaring at Him) Pardon?

Daisy: (Glares at Kazuya as Well) You heard the lady, buster. Why the hell do you have your crumby feet on the table!?

Kazuya: What? Am I not supposed to do that here or something?

Rosalina: (Simply Nodded) That is right. It's very rude and thoughtless.

Isabella: Not to mention unsanitary.

Tifa: This might be our first time meeting one another.....(Glares at Kazuya Harsh) But I know for a fact that you weren't raised on a damn farm.

Samus: Exactly. So if you know what's good for you going forward....(Starts Gritting her Teeth) We suggest you take your feet off the fucking table. Right now.

Kazuya: (Starts at the Glaring for a Brief Second Before Scoffing a Bit in Defeat as He Reluctantly Did What He Was Told) There. Happy?

Samus: (Glare Pierce Harder at the Man) Very.

Peach: ('Sigh') Now with that out of the way, Mr. Kazuya, after you fought Ganondorf and threw him off a cliff, is it true that you tried to do the same to Pit and Kirby afterwards?

Kazuya: What? You mean the Angel Boy and Pink Puffball? ('Heh') Yeah. I did. What of it?

Palutena: (Immediately Gets Up and Angrily Slams her Hands on the Table) ('SLAM') WHAT OF IT!? YOU ALMOST KILLED MY BABY, YOU MURDEROUS PIECE OF-

Bayonetta: (Immediately Got Up and Place Her Hands on Palutena's Shoulders to Calm her Down) Paulie dear, please. Calm yourself.

Tifa: (Gently Place her Hand on Top of Palutena's) Bayo's right. Don't let him get to you like this.

Palutena: How can you all expect me to be calm in a time like that!? (Tears Starts Falling Down on her Face) Have you forgotten what that bastard done to Pit!?

Peach: (Turns Around to Palutena with a Worried yet Understanding Frown on her Face) We understand how you feel completely, dear. Which is all the more reasons why you should let me do all the talking. You do trust us, right?

Palutena: Of course I do. ('Sniff') You girls are my family...('Sniff') I just....I just can't help not being upset, you know?

Bayonetta: (Gently Pulls Palutena into a Loving Hug) I know, my sweet, beautiful goddess. I know. But we all need to pull ourselves together and get Peach handle this. For our babies sake.

Palutena begins to looks up and see Pit, Kirby, and the Phantom Thieves hiding behind the living room's wall, witnessing everything going down in the dining hall.

Palutena: (Sighs While Finally Calming Herself Down) Right. I do need to pull myself together. (Turns to Pit While Quietly Saying 'I Love You' to Him With a Sad Smile Before Sitting Back Down)

Pit: (Smiles Softly) I love you too, mom

Kazuya: (Suddenly Starts to Chuckle Evilly For Almost Everyone in the Mansion to Hear)

Peach: (Raised an Eye Brow at Kazuya in a Very Unamused Manner) Something's funny to you, Kazuya?

Kazuya: Yes, actually. Here I thought participating in this kind of tournament would be somewhat interesting. I'd never imagined how pathetically soft amd weak minded all of you really are. But I suppose be too shouldn't be surprised by the outcome, since you have an embarrassment of a tyrant king and an annoying puffball as one of your competitors.

Ganondorf: (Growling Angry at Kazuya from the Distance With the Other League of Villains Members)

Kazuya: And worthless angel boy of yours was easily the weakest of them all that it's laughable at best.

Pit starts to frown sadly by Kazuya's words until Ren place a hand onto his shoulder while giving him a reassuring look that feels him to not to believe a single word he says. This, in it if itself, actually helps calm the angel down immensely.

Kazuya: Hell, he's better off being dead if any-

'CRASH'

Without a second thought, Peach angrily punched down the table I front of her, the ladies, and Kazuya so hard that it crumbles to the ground, easily breaking it into small, tiny pieces, much everyone's surprise and shock.

Bowser: Holy........

Samus: ........Shit........

Ryuji: (From the Living Room) EXCLAMATION MARK!!!!

Kazuya: (Starts Smirking at the Angered Princess While Being Unfazed by the Sudden Event) What's this now? Did I do finally struck a nerve, your highness?

Peach: (Immediately Grabs Kazuya By the Collar While Giving the Most Darkest, Piercing Glare Imaginable, Even For Her) Listen here, you insufferable, arrogant creep! I don't what made you the way you are right now, and frankly, I don't give a single damn about it at this point! All you need to know that if you're planning on continuing to set foot in this mansion, you don't EVER insult my babies and harm my family ever again! YOU HEAR ME!?

Daisy: (Immediately Got Up to Calm Peach Down) Woah there, cuz. Take it easy for us, okay?

Samus: (Got Up and Calm Peach Down as Well) Daisy's right, Peach. He's not worth the trouble at this point......

Peach looks back and forth the girls and Kazuya for a few seconds before finally calming herself down.

Peach: ('Sighs in Defeat') Okay......(Finally Let's Go of Kazuya) I suppose I should apologize for what happened just now. It wasn't lady like of me.

Daisy: (Chuckles Lightly) Are you kidding me? That was most badass thing I've ever seen yet! (Happily Hugs Peach) And it was all caused by my favorite cuz~

Peach: (Giggles Softly) I'm your only cousin, Daisy.

Samus: Yeah I'm gonna have to agree with Daisy this on. (Smirks a bit Playfully at Peach) I did not expect you to be this hardcore. I'm proud. Though, I think we might need to replace that table in a little bit.

Peach: (Giggles Softly Some More) I know. Thanks, you guys.

Kazuya: (Watches the Trio While Fixing his Collar and Shirt) ('Tch') Knew I should've ignored them if I had the chance.......

Peach: Kazuya Mishima!

Kazuya: (Turns Back to Peach) Yeah? What?

Peach: (Crosses her Arms While Glaring Darkly at Kazuya Again) Remember this well: If I EVER hear you pulled this stunt again, I will NOT hesitate to kick you out of this mansion and ban you from ever taking part of this tournament! Do you understand me!?

Kazuya was able to say something to the princess until his eyes suddenly begins to widened, as he comes to the realization that Peach's glare is starting to remind him of a woman from past. Who happens to be his deceased mother, Kazumi Mishima. It wasn't too long until he suddenly begins to get down on his knees and bow himself down to the princess in a traditional like manner, much everyone complete surprise.

Kazuya: I apologise for my foolish actions. It will never happen again.....

Peach: (Couldn't Believe What She's Seeing in Front of Her) Oh my.......I-I Mean! (Starts Clearing Her Throat Before Turning Away From the Fallen Man) As long as you got message, we'll hold you to it. Let's go, ladies. (Begins to Walks Away with Other Ladies Following Her)

Palutena gives one last harsh glare at Kazuya before walking away with the others. Leaving him to his lonesome self altogether. (While Still Being in a Bowing like Position).

Meanwhile.....

Bowser: (Eyes Widened After Witnessing Everything That Went Down Just Now) Well.........That happened?

Hades: (Starts Snicking) I know, right? Who would've thought the Devil Boy got whipped so easily?

Sephiroth: (Carrying Pichu in his Arms) I'm more surprise on how strong the princess has gotten. Mario's a lucky man.

Bowser: ('Tch') (Crosses his Arms While Looking Away) Yeah. Lucky jackass, bastard.....

Ganondorf: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ridley: (Turns to Ganondorf) What gotten you in a good mood?

Ganondorf: Seeing this warm grovelling on the floor! (Crosses his Arms While Smirking Evilly and Triumphantly) Knew he wasn't shit from the beginning.

Ridley: But didn't he still beat you and threw you off a cliff?

Ganondorf: (Slowly Turns to Ridley with a Deadpinned Glare) Do you want me throw you off a cliff instead, Ridley?

Ridley: ('Sigh') No.......

Bowser: (Looking at Kazuya Shaking Slightly in the Ground From a Distance) Uhh....Guys? I think the new guy's crying over here. Saying about missing his mom or whatever.....

Hades: Ah yeah. Forgot to mention this sooner, but his mom died when he was little. Just found that one out when I was reading his inner thoughts earlier. So.....oops.

Sephiroth: The loss of a loving mother is never an easy feeling. He has my pity.

Pichu: (Nodded in Agreement) Pika. Pi.

Ganondorf: ('Scoffs') He can cry about her all he wants. (Starts Walking Away) He'll no sympathy from me.

Elsewhere in the Fitness Gym.......

Ike: (Paused his Training Session For a Moment) Hm?......... (Shrugs Before Resuming his Workout)

@keyenuta

@princekirijo

@caleb13frede

@cyber-wildcat

@26shann

@ma-lemons

@albion-93

[melinabeana]

hi! i saw you arguing about how zerith and cloti shippers often demean the women in the pairings by saying they 'belong' to the men (and i agree). i know you're a clerith shipper, but i was wondering if you could help me pinpoint why people saying aerith is cloud's 'default' interest makes me feel the same? like she's somehow lesser or inferior. it feels like an insult to her, instead of somehow making her or the ship seem better or more supported. the argument is...uncomfortable

Hi! If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that people will say Aerith is Cloud’s ‘default’ love interest in the game as a form of evidence in support of Clerith. 

If that’s the case, that is an incredibly weak and lazy piece of evidence. I think just the existence of Cloud and Aerith is enough evidence, but let me explain why I have always supported Clerith. Cloud and Aerith are so similar and yet so different. They both grew up in less than ideal situations. They both grew up alone and lonely, during a time when creating relationships and having friends is so important as a child. Cloud develops a superiority and hero complex, enter Tifa, who enables the behavior. We know Cloud is not the typical hero, and quite frankly, he is in no position to play hero. He’s not always very good at it, so when he fails, it becomes even more detrimental to his self-esteem. 

Aerith refuses to play the damsel, insisting she’s not a princess who needs to be coddled and saved, even when she could definitely use the help. But, Cloud and Aerith save each other, and Aerith is more than capable of keeping up with Cloud. We see this in battle and throughout their time in the Colosseum. Also, Cloud doesn’t have this silly ‘promise’ to always save her lingering in the back of his mind at all times. Aerith does not rely on Cloud. She has her own dreams and aspirations apart from Cloud. She can save herself and she can save Cloud and she’s happy to do both. 

Cloud doesn’t respect Aerith when they first meet. Cloud doesn’t really respect anyone when we first meet him. It’s all about the paycheck for him. But, we very quickly see, during their time on the rooftops together that Cloud grows to respect Aerith, arguably more than any other character in the game. She laughs off his backhanded comments and it becomes a game between the two. It becomes their way of communicating and their way of joking with one another. This is healthy behavior, as long as it’s not one-sided.

They poke fun at one another, because they know it won’t hurt the other’s feelings. This brings a sense of comfort to Cloud. He can relax and be himself around Aerith. He doesn’t have to worry about opening his mouth at the wrong time or saying the wrong thing. He doesn’t have to worry about being scolded for not being nice enough. We have to remember that the developers told us that Cloud still has the mentality of a sixteen year old boy. Sixteen year old boys are not ‘nice.’ They can be sarcastic bullies who often pick on those they have crushes on the most. 

Aerith doesn’t let him get away with his sarcasm and bullying. She laughs it off or gives it right back to him. He starts to see Aerith as an equal. Aerith has to learn patience with Cloud. She’s impulsive and typically says whatever’s on her mind. Cloud is incredibly socially awkward, to a point where he doesn’t even know how or care to high-five anyone. Cloud grows with Aerith. Once they’re in Wall Market, I think she forgets herself a little, and starts pushing Cloud hard. But ultimately, he agrees because he knows Aerith won’t judge him and he has her support. Before Wall Market, Aerith doesn’t push Cloud.

There are two very important character defining moments for Cloud during his time with Aerith. The flowers and the high-five - neither of which Aerith tells him to do. She doesn't tell him to scold the flowers for her. She doesn’t even think he’ll believe her. Knowing Cloud, he probably doesn’t believe her. But, he can see she’s upset and he can see how important this is to her, so he listens while she talks and he scolds them for upsetting her. This is so important in a relationship. You don’t have to share everything in common, but you should respect your partner’s interests, even if they don’t interest you. 

Aerith doesn’t ever say a word to Cloud about him not high-fiving her, but she also doesn’t hide her emotions very well either, which is good for Cloud. As someone who is clearly socially inept in some regard, Cloud needs someone who will tell him or show him how they actually feel. He can’t necessarily read between the lines. She frowns and sighs when he doesn’t reciprocate and he looks at his hand and clearly shows signs of confusion. Part of me thinks Cloud is wondering if something so simple, that he could do, could actually make her happy and it does. 

Again, Cloud is stuck with this hero complex. He believes he has to save the girl to win her affection. I think Aerith confuses him. Is he actually gaining her affection by just listening to her and spending time with her and high-fiving her? Of course he is! 

One of the most frustrating pieces of ‘evidence’ I see supporting Cloud and Tifa is that they need each other. This is so unhealthy. You should never need a single person. They should be a form of support, but they should not be your only support. What happens when that relationship ends? You’ve lost your only support and you’ll crumble. Tifa is essentially a representation of all of Cloud’s past failures. Aerith and Cloud need to move on from their pasts and that doesn’t make them cowards and that’s not unhealthy. They both had terrible pasts and sometimes in order to move on, you have to keep looking forward, not back, as Aerith described it. 

Long story short, Cloud is the quiet, stoic, thoughtful type and Aerith is the vocal, eccentric, opinionated type. They completely balance each other out. Cloud pulls Aerith back, when she needs to be pulled back, and Aerith pushes Cloud forward out of his comfort zone, when he needs to be pushed forward. They don’t need each other, but they want each other. Cloud and Aerith’s relationship is the textbook definition of perfect, whether it’s romantic or not, it would be successful.

I could go on and on and on, but I won’t. I hope this helps answer your question! If not, let me know! I’m always happy to chat! Be well! :) 

[silver-wield]

FF7R: The price of strength

Siddown. Let’s talk about this because frankly I’m worried about yall’s education.

The wording of this part of the story summary is as particular as the one using “they lose Jessie right before their eyes” later during the pillar chapter to indicate that Jessie actually died, whereas “a seriously injured Biggs” didn’t.

Because word choice matters.

The title first: since I totally forgot to mention it originally and had to edit this. 

The price of strength has parallels to the price of freedom, which on the surface is a Zack reference. I can already hear the romantically motivated screaming this is proof. However, the price of strength relates to Cloud and his knowledge that he’ll degrade because that’s what president Shinra said would happen at the end of chapter 7. That’s what the title’s referring to. The price of strength is Cloud’s degradation, while also being another Zack hint at the price he paid for his and Cloud’s strength.

Back to the rest of it.

So, Aerith “ambushes” Cloud. Do...yall know what ambush means?

Okay? We good? An ambush isn’t cute. Now, put it in context of Cloud, who literally swung his sword at Biggs because he thought it was an enemy lying in wait to ambush him. It’s not a positive way to describe what Aerith did.

Cloud’s on edge when Aerith appears because he’s too used to having to fight anything that approaches him in a stealthy manner. The blocking is an OG reference to the forest dream, but the story elements are different this time. Cloud spent the day with Aerith being bossed about. He stayed because she wouldn’t tell him how to get home and as much as he hated that she was right, he would’ve gotten lost.

He hasn’t just come from the temple of the Ancients where he hurt her, gave Sephiroth the black materia or went through any of the previous location events to build up a rapport between them. He has literally just met her that day. He’s known her for around 12 hours. They’re not even friends at this point.

Aerith appears because she wants to spend more time together. It doesn’t say anything about Cloud wanting to spend more time with her. Cloud wants to go home. People keep on about it like he doesn’t wanna leave. He does. Cloud wants to go home.

So, Aerith’s sudden appearance has put him on edge. Let’s take a look at that, since we know for a fact Cloud is suffering from anxiety—or did yall miss the actual meaning of Hollow, too? 

Sounds like Cloud. He’s constantly prepping for hidden danger. He’s always five seconds away from reaching for that sword hilt. He’s always checking the area for danger. He’s also extremely irritable a lot of the time. He was way more snarky and sarcastic to Aerith than he was to Barret during chapter one and he couldn’t stand Barret in chapter one. In OG his catchphrase was “Not interested” but in Remake, he’s heard saying “Seriously?” way more often, which he says because he’s annoyed about something. Yeah, it’s cultural slang for the times because we all say it, but in Cloud’s case he says it because he’s irritated/annoyed (and it’s adorable and I love that he says it and yall better thank Wedge for that because he taught it to Cloud)

Onto more medical stuff.

Cloud has less physical symptoms of anxiety, though many of them only happen during his PTSD attacks. He’s seen sweating, trembling, looking pale, breathing hard, clutching his head and we know for a fact he has trouble sleeping.

Now we’ve got that cleared up, let’s head back to the rest of the story summary. 

As Aerith walks on ahead, it triggers the Jenova vision, and Cloud’s heart skips a beat because of the vision. We don't get to see the contents of the vision, though, so can't say for certainty what it is.

One other common symptom of anxiety is an abnormally increased heart rate, also known as heart palpitations. Heart palpitations can feel like your heart is racing, pounding, or fluttering. You may also feel as though your heart is skipping a beat.

So Cloud, in the middle of a PTSD/Jenova attack, gets a heart palpitation, which is a typical symptom of anxiety, which he suffers from. It’s not related to any romantic feelings because Cloud doesn’t have romantic feelings for Aerith here and since he’s not meta and doesn’t get echoes of OG to feel anything that OG Cloud might have felt, this is just him reacting to anxiety triggering vision of a presumed death. It’s a build up, a step along a series of events that leads to Cloud’s mental breakdown. It’s yet another moment where Sephiroth—through Jenova—is trying to goad a reaction from Cloud, but again, he’s mistimed things (like in chapter 2 when he put his hand on Aerith’s shoulder to freak Cloud out) because Cloud at this point doesn’t have feelings for Aerith. 

For anyone who isn’t clear on this, Jenova can prompt future visions. Lucretia got visions too while she was pregnant with Sephiroth. She saw meteor fall nearly 30 years before any of this.

So, why does he cry? Oh, I dunno, maybe it’s got something to do with a senseless death? Zack’s? Y’kno, his best friend? Cloud’s been conscious for five days by this point and everything in his recent past is about loss. It's possible the flash was Aerith's death, but we see all of those, so why hide this one? The last major death that affected him was Zack’s, and this moment could be where Cloud partly softens his attitude towards her on the trip through the collapsed freeway. But, that doesn’t mean he wants to hang, which is why he says no when she says to take a break. But then, she talks about her boyfriend, who she obviously still misses and is in love with and this makes Cloud feel sorry for her. He relaxes his guard. Thinks that maybe he’s been too harsh to her. He’s not gonna see her again anyway, and then the moment—literally the moment—he sees Tifa in that chocobo carriage, Aerith’s an afterthought. 

And then later on, just in case anyone thought that story summary line held any kind of meaning, we see Chocobo Sam using it, which totally undermines any kind of importance it might have held. If Chocobo Sam’s heart can skip a beat, then it’s not a big deal, even if some people held those words in a romantic context. And the fact you only get this dialogue from Sam by doing his sidequests, getting Cloud’s canon outfit—which matches Tifa’s—and actually bother going to find him to chat, shows the devs were already expecting people to latch onto this phrase as something special and hid it for everyone who actually bothers to play the game properly so they could find it and enjoy the shade. Not to mention Jessie says it, too, and Jules, so it really doesn't have much impact when everyone says it.

Annnd finally, even if people do still wanna insist, those words are literally part of the same sentence that mentions Sector 7, so even if you wanted to put romantic coding on it, Cloud’s heart is more likely to have skipped a beat anticipating getting back home to where Tifa’s waiting for him.

Basically, no matter which way you slice it, that summary isn’t about love in connection to Aerith. Hell, it’s not about love at all, but more of Cloud’s anxiety and y’kno, plot stuff. 

Not to mention Aerith is literally trying not to cry, which if I remember rightly, isn’t romantically motivated context wise. 

[eldritchwriter]

Defeating Sunrise by @eldritchwriter | Fandom: Final Fantasy VII | Rating: Explicit | Relationships: Sephiroth/Cloud Strife, Zack Fair/Aerith Gainsborough

Additional Tags: Time Travel Fix-It, Found Family, Slow Burn, Pining, Hero Worship, Cloud Strife Needs a Hug, Sephiroth is Oblivious, Denzel is So Done With Them Both, Grown-Up Cloud

Summary: Cloud isn't good at this whole 'parenting' gig, and even when he tries, it doesn't seem to be doing him any good. He's ready to give up, when he is inexplicably pulled into the past with his young protege in tow. The last thing Cloud expects is to be dropped straight into the Wutai War and in front of a Sephiroth who is younger and still in charge of his own mind.

As Cloud spirals headlong into his trauma-filled past, trying to make sense of his memories and discern truth from his own fictions, long-buried feelings for Sephiroth begin to emerge. With Denzel's help, he can surely change the future, but the biggest question of all is what that future should look like at all. Read here on AO3 or read more below:

Chapter One

“It’s not so easy. We’re all traumatised by what we went through. Cloud most of all.”

Cloud rested his head back against the door to the rebuilt Seventh Heaven and let out a soft sigh. He hadn’t meant to intrude on the conversation between Tifa and Barret, but now it was inevitable. He guessed he was lucky that he hadn’t just walked in and that his enhanced hearing had picked up the urgent tone of Barret’s voice before he’d opened the door.

At least this way he could steel himself for whatever Barret was going to ask him to do.

“Well, we all got heaps of trauma. Enough to keep the shrinks goin’ for decades. But Cloud’s tough. He’ll do it, no problem.”

Do what? Cloud wondered. What more could you possibly have to ask of me?

“When he says no, I don’t want you to push it,” Tifa’s reply was exasperated sounding, and Cloud detected the sound of a bar towel hitting the floor. “I mean it, Barret, I know that Cloud needs… reminding sometimes that people need him to do things, but I don’t want you pestering him. This isn’t something he’s duty-bound to do.”

“I wasn’ planning on it,” Barret said, a creak of a bar stool. “It’s just the easiest way, is all.”

“Well, have a Plan B ready.” The sound of glasses being thrown into a dishwasher, one of the newest additions to Seventh Heaven, now that there was running water into the place.

Cloud had plumbed it in himself, after several assurances from Reeve that the water was definitely clean and not contaminated. Cloud had made him drink it straight from the tap when it was plugged in just to prove the point.

“Roger that. Say, how’s Denzel been doin’ in school? Marlene’s been tellin’ me all kinds of stories- “The conversation turned to the children and Cloud stopped listening. Whispered conversations about him rather than with him were the norm, and he’d long grown used to people acting in his best interest without consulting him. Sometimes he was glad that Tifa acted as a buffer between him and the ridiculous requests of his onetime comrades, other times it frustrated him.

Today, he was just tired.

He pushed away from the wall, steeling himself to head inside, to listen to whatever Barret’s request was and to grit his teeth and give his answer whatever way it went, but then…

Why?

Why indeed. Why did he have to? He had his own plans for the rest of the week. Nothing urgent, certainly, but he had a few delivery jobs, a run out to the Chocobo Farm… Hell, it was Parent-Teacher Meetings this week and he’d promised Denzel that he’d make it to this one despite not feeling remotely like an appropriate paternal figure.

If he stayed away, eventually Barret would leave. Tifa had made it clear she would not bring up whatever this was. He didn’t have to deal with it now unless he wanted to, and quite frankly, he didn’t want to.

He stepped off the porch and walked towards Fenrir, kicking his leg over it. It showed how lost Tifa and Barret had been in their conversation that they hadn’t heard the thing roaring up next to the bar in the first place.

No, he wasn’t going to deal with this now. He’d pick it up later, much later.

He disabled the kickstand and revved the engine.

Cloud was not in the mood to deal with this today.

*

It somewhat surprised Denzel to see Cloud outside his school. Some older boys had gathered around Cloud’s bike, trying to strike up a conversation with him. Cloud remained detached though, his arms folded on his chest and his eyes showing that he was completely lost in thought.

Not so unusual, and it probably made him look cool to the kids who had flocked around him, but Denzel knew better. He knew that, no matter how cool Cloud looked with the all-black motorcycle and the enormous sword strapped to his back, that his unwilling mentor was just a shy space cadet.

“Er, hi?” Denzel leaned around the front of the bike to put his face in front of Cloud’s and snap him from his reverie.

Cloud blinked slowly, then the corners of his mouth tilted up a bit. “Hey. Thought I’d give you a ride back from school today.”

Denzel wondered what had spurred that decision, but he knew he wouldn’t get an actual response from Cloud about it. Cloud and Tifa had been involved in his life for years now. He was in his teens, but they had nowhere near what could be called a father-son relationship. Cloud was too distant, his reasoning for his actions too coloured by his own past, to be much use to Denzel in learning to navigate the world.

But still it was useful, especially when wanting to seem cool in front of some upperclassman.

“Sure. Can I shove my backpack in the storage?” Denzel asked, like it was an everyday occurrence for Cloud to let him ride on the back of Fenrir.

Cloud got off the bike, showing an impressive show of strength by just casually holding it upright with a one-handed loose grip while the other opened the under-seat storage to let Denzel dump his bag in. The other kids were goggle-eyed at Cloud, and that made Denzel smile a bit.

Cloud shoved a helmet and goggles into his hands, causing Denzel to pout. It was less cool to wear this thing. Cloud pulled on his own goggles though, without a dorky helmet though. Denzel knew that Cloud probably couldn’t be killed by coming off the bike at speed like he could though, and if it meant that Cloud might rev the engine harder it was worth looking stupid for.

Helmet in place, Denzel clambered onto the back of the bike. Cloud leaned forward, then looked over his shoulder, waiting for Denzel to adjust himself.

“Hang on,” was all Cloud said, before the engine roared and Cloud was already kicking the bike into a higher gear.

Denzel scrambled to wrap his arms tightly around Cloud’s waist before he fell off the back and found out precisely how effective his helmet would be. Cloud weaved the bike through traffic and crowds and back allies that definitely shouldn’t have been driven down.

In anyone else’s hands, this would have been suicide, but though it was exhilarating, Denzel felt safe. For all Cloud’s faults and sometimes dumb decisions, he never purposefully put anyone in danger. The incredible strength to manoeuvre the bike through tight gaps, and the lightning-fast reflexes he had meant that it was rather more like riding on a rollercoaster. The safe journey to their destination was all but pre-determined, so Denzel could just enjoy the ride there.

Pulling up outside Seventh Heaven wasn’t exactly welcome, but his arms were sore from holding on. Cloud kicked down the stand and waited for Denzel to dismount before making sure that he had his bag and that the helmet and goggles were stored appropriately.

Cloud reached out, self-consciously ruffling Denzel’s hair in a way that was a shadow of paternal instinct that just made both of them feel awkward.

“Go say hi to Tifa,” Cloud said, grabbing a box from inside the storage attached to the bike.

“You mean, go check the coast is clear, don’t you?” Denzel asked, putting his hands in his pockets. “Not that I’m not grateful for the ride, but you only come pick me up when you want a buffer between you and whoever’s in there.”

Cloud’s shoulders hunched. “That’s not- “

“It’s fine,” Denzel said, shrugging. “But at least be honest about it, at least to yourself if not to me.”

He didn’t wait for Cloud to turn round, instead announcing his entry to the bar and greeting Tifa brightly. No one else was here, so maybe Cloud was just trying to avoid being alone with Tifa. It wouldn’t be the first time for that either.

When Cloud entered, he didn’t meet Denzel’s eyes, but there didn’t seem to be a tension between him and Tifa, so Denzel let it go. Whatever this was about, he’d find out in the end anyway, when the row inevitably started and Cloud roared off on his motorcycle at 3am to Ancient’s knew where.

“Denzel!” Denzel turned to see Marlene running from behind the bar, pink bow bouncing in her hair. “Papa says I can stay for dinner tonight! Let’s do our homework together?”

Cloud groaned. “Is Barret still-“

“’Sup. We need to talk.”

*

Returning to Nibelheim, to this Nibelheim, left Cloud with an itching soul. The people here, the few that had returned, were not originally from the town. They didn’t know the legends of the local mountains, or the best way to trap Nibel Wolves, or which paths to avoid so they didn’t run into dragons.

Most of them didn’t even know that Nibelheim had once burnt to the ground. All they knew was that there was a town here, rebuilt and mostly empty, and that the WRO was interested in generating hydropower from the waterfalls in the mountains. That was enough for them.

As usual, it was capitalism that was the driving force of Nibelheim’s destiny, and a new flow of money brought a new flow of residents and washed away the blood and soot and smoke. Even the acrid tinge of mako in the air had long since dissipated except in Cloud’s mind.

“I didn’ think you’d come, bein’ honest,” Barret said, rubbing the back of his neck.

Cloud had fully intended not to, but there were some things that he still felt he couldn’t say no to. This was one of them. Nibelheim was a wound on his soul that wouldn’t heal and that he couldn’t stop picking at.

“Right, not feelin’ talkative, got it,” Barret scratched the back of his neck with the barrel of his gun-arm, looking sheepish. “I’ll be headin’ out into the mountains a bit, gotta check up on the generator to report back, y’know? But you’ll be alright here, right?”

“I’ll be fine,” Cloud waved him off. “But you can’t take longer than a few hours. I have to get back.”

“Yeah. School shit. I remember. I won’t make you late to play daddy, promise.”

Cloud didn’t want to question Barret’s parenting skills, but he thought out of all his former-comrades, the one was most likely to put work above ‘school shit’ was probably Barret. For all his bluster and dedication to Marlene, he had a somewhat lax attitude towards the formal things that it seemed children needed. Like routine. Or regular schooling. Or a parent figure who didn’t disappear on them at the drop of a hat.

Well, Cloud couldn’t really judge any of that. He hadn’t exactly been a model guardian either.

He didn’t bother to answer, instead turning towards the hotel and hoping that there’d be somewhere for him to sit and wait. He had no desire to explore the town the way he had done coming back here five years ago, where he had frantically run from house to house trying to work out why it was different, his own fear and horror reflected at him from Tifa’s eyes.

The hotelkeeper was new, a man with a Rocket Town accent and clothes that were just a little too thin for the mountain temperatures. He greeted Cloud warmly, offered him a room for the night – which Cloud politely declined – and then offered him a warm meal instead.

And so, Cloud spent the afternoon eating Nibel Stew that someone who had never tasted the original had clearly prepared, and waiting for Barret to return. He kept his eyes firmly on the woods outside the window, trying not to give in to the ghosts in his vision of the old townspeople, of the flames, of the shuddering clones.

He didn’t think much of it when it started to rain.

*

Cloud didn’t expect Denzel to actually throw something at him in frustration. It was only a towel from the bar, soaked in beer, but it still hit him in the face with a soft whump all the same. Cloud let it slide to the floor, just as he’d let it hit him. He deserved this.

“I waited for you for hours!” Denzel yelled.

Tifa reached out hesitantly for Denzel’s shoulder but he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and jerked away from her.

“Denzel, I’m sorry. The dam that Barret was working next to burst and-“

“I don’t care! You should never have gone! You could have gone next week! Or he could have found someone else to go with him!” Denzel shouted, his fists balled by his sides. “No one would have died if you’d waited!”

Well, that was debatable, as it wasn’t like Cloud or Barret’s presence had set of the chain of events that caused the dam failure. In fact, their being there had saved many lives. But none of that was going to make an angry thirteen year old like him any more, Cloud was sure of it. Long gone were the days where Denzel was impressed by heroic tales from far-off places. No, now he wanted something more concrete from Cloud, stability and dependency, both things that Cloud had never been in the best situation to provide.

“You’re right, I’m sorry,” Cloud offered, putting up his hands in a placating gesture. “I should have said no. I shouldn’t have let you down.”

It seemed like the wind went out of Denzel’s sails at that but instead of doing what he usually did and apologising too, it seemed that Denzel truly had settled into his teenage years because he stormed out of the front door of Seventh Heaven instead, letting it bang behind him.

“It’s late, you should go after him,” Tifa said after a few moments silence.

Cloud shook his head. “Better if it’s you. He doesn’t like me much right now.”

“Which is why, it’s got to be you.” Tifa began to push at Cloud’s shoulder, forcing him towards the door. “You might not be forgiven, Cloud, but you have to sort this one out yourself. Family don’t go to bed on fights.”

“We have plenty of times,” he pointed out. “You’re always yelling at me late at night after the patrons have gone.”

“Yes, well, I’m not thirteen years old and I didn’t just wait for you for hours,” Tifa countered, pushing Cloud towards the door again. “Just sort things out, Cloud. And next time… just don’t be late.”

Cloud reluctantly stepped out of the door and onto the porch. Denzel hadn’t gone far. He had a rock in his hand and was standing next to the Fenrir, but Cloud couldn’t see any scratches on it. Clearly Denzel had entertained the thought of scratching it, but thought better of it.

Good, because Cloud would have hated to add that to the fight as well.

“We’re going for a ride again,” Cloud said, walking past Denzel and getting on the bike without looking at him. “Hop on.”

“No,” Denzeil said stubbornly.

Cloud waited as seconds rolled by to become a minute.

He felt hands on his shoulders as Denzel climbed on and waited until the boy was settled before he took off.

He hadn’t really known where he was going until he ended up on the cliff edge. He’d brought Denzel here once before, to show him the place where a hero had died. It seemed fitting that they were here now, in the place where the hero that Cloud had tried to emulate before all else was memorialised, to have this conversation with a child who emulated him.

Cloud got off the bike and went to sit on the edge of the cliff, looking over at the lights of Edge and the ruins of Midgar. There was still so much rebuilding to do.

“I’m only human,” Cloud said finally, mostly to the night, but knowing that Denzel was still awkwardly perched on the bike and no doubt watching him. “If there’s one thing I learned, through all of it, it’s that I’m only a human with faults and flaws.”

“Yeah, well, one of them is being really shitty about remembering to show up for things.”

Cloud couldn’t deny that. “Memory is not my strongpoint, agreed.”

“You’re just never around, even when you promise you’re going to be.”

Again, not something Cloud could deny. How many birthdays and holidays had he missed? Sometimes on purpose, sometimes because he simply forgot about them? His thoughts were always scrambled, stuck in a past he fuzzily remembered and one that he had constructed for himself from pure trauma.

None of those were things that a teenager would understand though, even one like Denzel. Cloud had no intention of burdening him with the knowledge of it either.

“I won’t promise you I’ll always be around,” Cloud conceded, and he heard Denzel getting off the bike. “But you know, there are some things that you get to do that others don’t. You’ve never seen me let Marlene anywhere near the bike.”

“Only because Barret would riddle you with bullets.”

It seemed Denzel wasn’t going to join him, so Cloud stood up, giving up on the male bonding moment over the edge of the cliff with a sight.

“I know it doesn’t mean much, but I am doing my best. This… this whole series of events is just…” Cloud struggled to find the words. “Every event in my life has taken the worst possible turn. Even when I try, I still mess up. It seems inevitable at this point, and though I’m going to try my best, I know that I’ll still disappoint you.”

Stood before Zack's grave, with Denzel's quiet censure worrying between his shoulder blades, Cloud couldn't remember a time when he'd last felt good about himself. He hadn't asked for this hero-worship, or to be the guardian of a teenager who was turning out to be just as taciturn and unruly as Cloud had been at that age. He hadn't asked for any of this, and duty could only take him so far down a path before he had to put some effort in.

"If you truly think this is the worst timeline, the worst it might get, then do you really think it's okay to throw in the towel?" Denzel asked, eyes hot and accusing. "Is it really okay to just give up and not even try for a better one?"

"A better timeline?" Cloud rubbed his temples. "Sure. We'll just magic one into existence for everyone, shall we?"

“Now who’s acting like a kid?” Denzel challenged him.

Cloud turned now, ready to just apologise again, but what he saw chilled his blood. A shrouded figure with long, reaching fingers.

“Denzel! Come here!”

But it was too late, the creature had snatched Denzel, dragging him into a dark portal.

Cloud’s heart felt like it was going to beat out of his chest. He lunged after the creature, into the dark and cold unknown. It lasted only a fraction of a second where he felt like he was floating in the Lifestream once more, before his boots hit ground at a different level than he’d been expecting and he tripped.

He landed on something soft, and was relieved to take in a surprised expression under a mess of red-hair.

“Where’s the monster?” Cloud asked, looking around them.

Their environment was completely different. From the vegetation, Cloud guessed they were somewhere near Wutai, which was not only impossible, but was also deeply worrying. How had they got so far from home?

“Cloud! Behind you!”

Cloud didn't think, he reacted, immediately bringing First Tsurugi up to parry the blow he vaguely caught from the corner of his eye that would rend him and Denzel in two. He didn't expect for the katana to spiral through the air, landing six feet away, embedded in the dirt with the moonlight reflecting off its blade.

Masamune.

No.

Sephiroth was frozen, hand empty. Green eyes, glowing and surprised, fixed on Cloud and for the first time Cloud recognised that this Sephiroth was not the same Sephiroth he had fought last. He was younger, his features still a little softened by adolescence. The Sephiroth that Cloud had seen in the papers fifteen years ago. The Sephiroth that he had idolised, left home for, joined Shinra for.

"You have got to be fu-" He remembered Denzel was still behind him. "'Effin' kidding me."

[avaantares]

FFVII:REMAKE - A Review

So I beat the game two weeks ago and started writing down my thoughts while they were fresh in my mind, but I didn’t post anything then because my one IRL friend who is also playing it hadn’t finished it yet and I didn’t want to risk posting anything spoiler-y. But the extra time has allowed me to play through the game again on Hard difficulty, which has allowed me to reconsider and elaborate on some of my thoughts. And frankly at this point I just need to dump my Very Big Opinions somewhere, so... here ya go.

I discuss visuals, gameplay, character and story below. I’ve tried to keep spoilers minimal up front, though obviously if you want to go into the game totally cold, don’t read this. All major spoilers are clearly tagged. All of it is below a cut to spare your dash.

Also, there are pretty pictures, because why not?

First, my background with this franchise: I played through the original FFVII multiple times; I’ve watched and rewatched Advent Children and Last Order, played Crisis Core, gave up on Dirge of Cerberus despite my deep love for Vincent Valentine (sorry, VV, but your game was just a mess), and lamented that Before Crisis wasn’t available in my country. I even played (and own!) Ehrgeiz, the obscure fighting game that featured the main cast. (Still bitter that they didn’t keep Miki Shinichirou as the voice of Sephiroth. He’s one of my faves.)

^ Ehrgeiz, a mediocre fighting game that forever endeared itself to me by including Turks!Vincent Valentine as a playable character. 💖

In short, I’ve been waiting for this game for DECADES.

So. Here we go. My thoughts on Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE.

The good:

The character models are very pretty. With individual pores, threads and scuffs visible, they’re so detailed that it’s almost impossible to reconcile them with the mouthless sprites from the original game – even more so than Advent Children (and dear goodness, that was over a decade ago now, wasn’t it?). Still, they’ve kept the costume details and absurd proportions largely intact (Barret’s fists are literally larger than Tifa’s entire head, yet somehow it works visually), so it’s not too much of a departure from the familiar.

They’ve kept the aesthetic. I was afraid the game would try to update the iconic world of Midgar, but by and large, it’s full of visually-arresting designs that preserve the gritty-industrial look and feel of the original.

Japanese version is included. BLESS YOU, Square Enix, for including the Japanese voices and character animations. Not only is it impossible for me to hear Cloud in anything other than Sakurai Takahiro’s voice, but the Japanese script is a bit nicer to the characters. I’m not really keen on the English dub… but more on that below.

They fixed the spelling of Aerith’s name. This may seem like a minor point, but considering it’s been 20 years and I’m still bitter that Devil May Cry still hasn’t corrected “Nelo Angelo,” it’s a small victory.

Improved combat. Admittedly, I wasn’t sold on the new combat system at first, but after playing through the game twice, I’ve come to really like it. It has a few rough edges and can get chaotic in some battles, but it does a decent job of blending the feel of an action game with turn-based strategy. The fact that you can switch to a more traditional turn-based system if you prefer is also nice. (I haven’t tried Classic mode yet, though.)

Weapon customization. The Skill Points system allows you to upgrade your loadout instead of acquiring new gear. The tutorial was somewhat lacking (I didn’t quite figure out the multiple-core-unlock thing right away), but I appreciated the ability to add materia slots or stat buffs rather than just cycling through a dozen swords that Cloud apparently keeps in his back pocket.

Background dialogue management. On the whole, the conversations as you run through town enhance the story without slogging down the gameplay; you don’t have to stop and talk to every single resident, because snatches of their conversation reach you (and your on-screen chatlog) as you pass. You can stop and listen for more detail if you want, or you can just keep moving. The extra worldbuilding is really nice.

The music. The orchestrated versions of the original themes are excellent (and some of those music cues gave me goosebumps… Did I spend way too many hours immersed in the original game? Probably). I can take or leave some of the collectible jukebox tunes, but the background music in general is good. (But did I earn that Disc Jockey trophy? Yes, yes I did.)

Supporting character development. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge actually have characters! And personalities! Clichéd ones, admittedly, but it’s an improvement over the original game killing them all off within the first few minutes. The game also does justice to the Turks, and actually surprised me with how much depth of character it gave Reno and Rude in particular (perhaps setting them up for a mini redemption arc so players forgive them for dropping a plate on tens of thousands of slum residents?). Their moments of concern for each other and (brief) crises of conscience made them more than the stock villains they were in the original game, more in line with their temporarily good-aligned characters in Advent Children. Tseng, likewise, was on point. However, I do have to qualify all this with one irate question: Where the heck is Elena?! Seems like the female characters are always getting left out… /sigh/

Improved plot devices. REMAKE cleans up some of the more questionable and outdated content from the original. As you likely already know from the demo, the new game somewhat exonerates the protagonists by having Shinra blow up their own mako reactor to turn public opinion against AVALANCHE (possibly because someone finally realized that it’s hard to sympathize with characters who are willing to melt down an entire reactor and kill a bunch of innocent civilians). AVALANCHE are still eco-terrorists, but they’re… terrorists with a conscience? I dunno, at least they feel bad when people die now… Likewise, the weird and uncomfortable Honey Bee Inn segment of the original game has been reborn as an amazing dance extravaganza. Less voyeurism/prostitution, more Vegas floor show (complete with minigame choreography) and makeover. The whole Don Corneo scenario is still hella creepy, but frankly, there’s nothing that can fix that.

Series references. Fans of the original will appreciate all the inside jokes and direct references to the original game and other franchise entries: One-off comments about Chocobo racing; a broken console in Wall Market that shoots at you; a framed picture of the original 32-bit Seventh Heaven; ads for Banora apple juice; side mentions of characters and plot devices from spinoff games; PHS communication… The game definitely pays tribute to its history. They even recreate the original loading screen and several of Cloud’s iconic poses/animations throughout the game:

The neutral:

Recycled gags. Look, I know Advent Children was the ultimate evolution of FFVII for a while, and admittedly, it did some things very well. The running gag with Rude’s sunglasses and the victory fanfare being used as a ringtone are some of the best moments in the film, in part because they were so unexpected. But as much as I enjoyed the repeated nods to AC in this game, they felt a little desperate, like there were no new jokes to insert so they had to double down on the ones they’d used the last time this franchise had a renaissance. (See Rude’s broken sunglasses, below.) And fitting into the series as a whole, it feels a little weird. Why is Rude’s ringtone the same as the clones’ from Advent Children? Does Barret really need to sing the victory fanfare over and over when he defeats an enemy? Is there supposed to be some history behind that song that was left out of the worldbuilding? It just feels too meta.

Arbitrary localization of names. I don’t really grasp why it was necessary to rename so many items and characters for the English market. Some changes make sense for localization (e.g. Whack-a-Box certainly works better for an American audience than Crash Box), but others seem arbitrary, like changing Aniyan Kunyan to Andrea Rhodea or Mugi to Oates (a play on the meaning of his name in Japanese, but... does it matter?). And then… well, I don’t want to spoil A Major Plot Element, but there’s another thing that changes names from one English word (in the Japanese track) to a different English word. Why? No idea. It doesn’t affect gameplay, and it’s not really a problem, but listening to the Japanese track, I found it jarring to have the subtitles contradict what I was hearing.

Underutilized characters. While the whole gamut of original FFVII characters make appearances, several of them aren’t used to full effect, or aren’t used at all to advance the story. Rufus Shinra’s bossfight is a decent challenge, but while his character was vital to both the original FFVII and Advent Children, his presence in this game is little more than a cameo. His fight could be cut or swapped out with any other boss, and it would have zero effect on the plot. Similarly, while Hojo is a key player in the full story (which this game doesn’t cover, since it’s only a fraction of the original timeline), he’s largely wasted here, except as a means of extending play time by making you wander through corridors and fight a bunch of monsters for “research.” (I have no idea what his motivation is; you’d think he’d be more interested in recapturing Aerith or Cloud, but instead he just... opens an elevator and lets them leave? after they beat up some midbosses.) Reeve Tuesti actually has a solid presence in this game, but since he’s ONLY ever active as himself, there’s no explanation for the random Cait Sith cameo in one scene (players new to the franchise probably have no idea why a random cartoon cat showed up for a few seconds and was never mentioned again). Obviously the plot arcs have to change when the game is covering only a few days’ time in a much longer story, and the major players need to be introduced at some point if they’re going to feature in later games in the series, but from a narrative standpoint, there are an awful lot of superfluous characters doing things for no reason in this installment.

The bad:

THE PADDING. Dear goodness, there is so much padding to make this a standalone game instead of just the first chapter of a longer adventure. I got really, really sick of running literally from one end of the map to the other on side quests – and that’s me, an avowed trophy hunter who spends hours scouring dark corners for collectible items in other games, saying that. So much of this game felt like time fill that didn’t really advance the story. It’s also full of unnecessary new characters with improbable Squeenix hair, like Roche the super-annoying motorcycle SOLDIER (below), or Leslie, Don Corneo’s doorman who somehow merits his own backstory and side quest. (Though in fairness, every FFVII sequel has added superfluous characters, with Crisis Core possibly being the worst offender.) But it just felt really drawn-out and bloated for a game of this generation. If this game had been as compact and tightly-written as the other games I typically play, it probably only would have taken me 15 hours to beat instead of 50. (I don’t actually know how many hours I spent on it the first time through, as I didn’t check the play clock before restarting on Hard difficulty. I do know it took me over 110 hours total to complete the game on both modes, though much of the second run was spent dying repeatedly on a handful of nasty fights. Hard mode removes items and MP replenishment, and if you run out of MP at any point during a chapter, you’re going to die. A lot.)

The pacing. Related to the above... the Midgar portion of the original game was just the setup for a larger story. It wasn’t meant to have its own complete dramatic arc so much as to introduce you to the world and the major players. Consequently, there are some really odd beats in this story, as well as a total lack of urgency in your mission. There are no natural places to slot in the side quests and minigames, so they’re shoehorned awkwardly between plot sequences. “Quick, our friend is in mortal peril and needs our help!” "Okay, cool, we’ll go rescue her after we spend ten hours running around town doing random errands for townspeople and playing games with the local kids.” Uh... what?

The graphics just aren’t as good as they should be. While the character models are gorgeous, there are a lot of low-res background textures and weird polygons that don’t quite match up with other components. Most egregious are the Shinra logos, which frequently get close-ups as part of the fixed camera work and, frankly, look like lossy JPEGs. (See image below, screencapped from a PS4 Pro. Those jagged edges on the logo are present throughout the entire game.) There are weird clipping errors and artifacted images and reflective surfaces that don’t reflect, making the game look more like something from the PS3 era than a 4K late-gen PS4 game. (And it’s not that we don’t have the technology: Uncharted 4 was released back in 2016, and the rendering of its vast world was twice as pretty. Devil May Cry 5, released in early 2019, has far more realistic textures and object interaction. Granted, those are different types of games with fewer NPCs to render, but I feel like there’s no excuse for a game this big to look this mediocre.)

The HUD could be better. The lower-corners concept is okay, though it took me a while to train my eyes to travel between both sides of the screen and track the fight action. But for a long time, I didn’t even notice the commands in the upper left corner of the screen, and after playing through the game twice I still have no idea what they say because I couldn’t focus on the tiny text long enough to read them while trying not to die in combat. (I just looked it up; apparently they’re combat control shortcuts? Huh, that would have been useful to know.) It wasn’t until my second time through that I realized there even WERE separate controls on screen during the motorcycle minigames; I had resorted to panicked button mashing to figure it out the first time through because there was no tutorial (you’re just dropped into the action) and, having ignored the small text for the previous hundred combats, I had no reason to look for on-screen instructions there. Not that it would have helped, since on many backgrounds the text in the upper left is really difficult to read (see below). It’s worth noting that I have better than 20/20 vision and played this game on a large TV screen and still had trouble reading some things; on a smaller TV, or for someone with less acute vision (like my sister, who is blind in one eye), I think even the basic menu controls would be difficult to see. While you can resize the font for subtitles, my cursory glance through the menu did not uncover an option to increase the size of the HUD. 

Inter-fight menu mechanics. Specifically, the inability to save (or save loadout settings) between fights in a multi-part sequence. There are several back-to-back fights in which it is necessary to switch characters or change gear between bosses. The game treats them as one continuous fight, though it does allows you to access the equipment menu by holding square during key cutscenes. Which is good, if you only have one of a particular materia or accessory that you need to switch between characters, and in most cases when you die the game lets you restart just before your current fight instead of restarting the whole sequence -- also good, since some multi-stage bosses can easily take 20-30 minutes to beat, and if several of those are strung together in sequence, you’re in for a long play session to get past them. But since it’s treated as one fight, you can’t save between bosses (more than once, I had to leave my PS4 running in Rest Mode overnight and just hoped we didn’t have a power glitch), and if you happen to get killed and need to restart the fight, your loadouts reset. Which means if you’re, say, fighting the end boss on Hard difficulty and get killed in the first two minutes -- which happened to me a lot -- by the time you restart the fight, sit through the unskippable cutscene, access the menu and rearrange all the materia and accessories you need, you’re spending five or six minutes gearing up for two minutes of play, and then doing that over and over again every time you die. It gets really old.

The English dub script. *deep breath* Okay, look, I know I can be a bit elitist about translations, but I really do not like the English adaptation of this game. It makes Cloud come across as less socially-awkward and far more of a deliberate jerk, Aerith is mouthy and even swears (which is not accurate to her original character), and it downplays some of the symbolism that’s more obvious in the Japanese script. One quick example: When Aerith gives Cloud a flower, she says (in Japanese), “In the language of flowers, this means ‘reunion.’” It’s subbed/dubbed in English, “Lovers used to give these when they were reunited.” That’s a subtle difference, but since the concept of “reunion” is a freakin’ huge part of the FFVII plot, and since Sephiroth was on screen literally seconds before that line is delivered, my brain automatically went, “OMG REUNION!!!” while I’m guessing people listening in English only picked up on the romantic subtext. It’s a pretty minor thing, and of course translation is always a complex balancing act between literal meaning and local market understanding, but the English version just seemed to me to have a different vibe overall. (Unfortunately, the English subtitles are the same as the dub, so unless you can understand the Japanese audio you’re kind of stuck with that dialogue.)

-

-

[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT]

-

- …And my #1 complaint about Final Fantasy VII: REMAKE is…

…it’s not actually a remake.

Sure, the game starts out the same way and covers a lot of the same events, but fundamentally, it’s a sequel, not a retelling. It’s evident from Cloud’s future-oriented visions throughout the game that something else is going on, and the ending MAKES NO SENSE if you don’t already know the story. Heck, even the rest of the game doesn’t really make sense if you don’t know the story -- Sephiroth’s presence is never explained; Zack isn’t even introduced, just shows up randomly at the end; Cloud’s flashbacks of Tifa and her dead father in Nibelheim are left as a complete mystery (and since she evidently remembers the burning of her town, judging by her dialogue outside Aerith’s house, why doesn’t she even react when Sephiroth shows up?).

The core elements of the plot – the Feelers (Whispers) preserving a specific fate; the three entities from the future (whose weapon types just happen to correspond to certain named characters) defending their timeline; the return of post-Advent Children Sephiroth (the only time we’ve seen him in human form with one black wing), who has inhabited the Lifestream since his death and promised that he would never truly disappear, who in the end appeals to Cloud directly for an alliance rather than attempting to control him, because he knows now that Cloud is strong enough to defy the Reunion instinct; the change in the outcome of story events in which Biggs (and, unconfirmed as to which timeline he’s actually in, but quite possibly Zack) now survives his intended death -- all point toward Sephiroth trying to manipulate destiny into an alternate outcome in which he is victorious, and using this naive version of Cloud to facilitate it. That means this game is taking place in an alternate or splinter universe, created at some point after the events of the original Final Fantasy VII, and possibly even after the events of Advent Children.

All of that is fine from an overall continuing-story perspective – it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, like the fact that Aerith might survive now that Cloud has seen prescient flashes of her death (among other events), and there are opportunities for more story twists and changes from what players might expect. But touting this as a remake of the original game has the potential to confuse players who are new to the franchise. FFVII was groundbreaking back in 1997, and it defined JRPGs for an entire generation of Western gamers. But that was more than two decades ago, and a lot of current gamers weren’t even born then, so while they’ve probably heard of the classic game, they aren’t necessarily steeped in its lore. FFVII:R relies heavily on prior knowledge of the series to carry its twist ending, so it largely fails as a standalone game.

Also, speaking as a longtime fan of the franchise… I honestly found the ending rather lackluster. It was a twist, of sorts, but not the sort of shocking, mind-bending revelation that made the first game so iconic. Granted, it’s hard to follow an act like revealing that your protagonist’s entire identity is a lie, not to mention killing off one of your main characters a third of the way into the story! But when the surprise ending is just, Surprise! We’re going to change things up a bit this time around so you aren’t entirely sure what’s coming! Also, here’s a gratuitous Sephiroth fight because everyone expects that, even though it doesn’t serve the main story at all nor resolve any conflicts previously established within this game! it smacks of Different for the sake of Being Different, not for the sake of a really amazing storyline they’re hiding up their sleeve. It’s a bit of a let-down, and I find that I... just... don’t really care that much. Which, for someone who’s been a fan of the series for nearly a quarter of a century, means there’s a Big Freaking Problem somewhere. If you’re not keeping the attention of your die-hard fans, how do you hope to build a fanbase of players new to the franchise?

Given the pacing and story issues inherent in this game, I’m not convinced that the following game(s) in the franchise are going to be structured any better. Considering the amount of pure side-quest padding they did in Midgar, I have no idea how they’ll maintain that same tone on something the scale of the World Map portion of the original game, unless they just completely eliminate things like Fort Condor and the submarine and the spaceship side quests. I have a feeling the Gold Saucer is going to be reduced to a Jessie flashback, a Chocobo race (probably to win a key item), and a battle arena run like the coliseum in Wall Market in this game. If they include all the story elements and side characters from the original, this series is going to be a dozen games long.

Still, on the whole this game was enjoyable, and I’m glad I played it. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but they haven’t completely killed off my interest, so I’ll probably continue with the series whenever the next game comes out. Though I’m not really sure if the higher-priced edition I pre-ordered was worth the extra money, so I may wait and see how the next game is shaping up before deciding which version to get...

But if they don’t give me a really pretty (playable) Vincent Valentine in the next installment, I may riot. I do have priorities.

[monkey-network]

to Defend Desti’s Death

I’m not particularly one to make major response posts like these, but I feel these thoughts I’ve had have simmered for quite a while now and I just wanted to get this off my chest. To some that may know, I’m a fan of the Anime Arc cuz honestly, it was fun and hype to sit through. On the look back, it still is, even with the noticeable drawbacks. But I won’t deny that the moment we fans know is divisive is one for a reason. For some, it was bad and other say it was good but frankly I haven’t seen many properly explain why. Which is where I want to come in momentarily, give my two cents on why Desti’s passing worked on an objective level.

Initially, and I hate doing this, but I gotta respond to the most notable saying of why it doesn’t work. So link here for the argument: https://todpolle.tumblr.com/post/185301760988/meme-gene-scene-how-to-kill-a-life. And I only wish to say, no hard feelings @todpolle. I’ll get to the main argument in a moment but I wanted to discuss the setup point where it revolves around the deaths of Avocato from Final Space and Gamma from Sonic Adventure. 

Now truly, I remember these passing moments fondly but I feel that comparing them to Desti’s death is noticeably unfair if we wanna talk contextually. Like if we’re taking both series to its full context, Final Space has the disadvantage where it resurrected Avocato while SMG4 kept Desti dead; the resurrection not only undercutting the weight of the initial departure but having not as much weight as before. Much as I like Avocato, having a “No One’s Ever Really Gone” approach to Final Space kinda devalued the idea that death is permanent for Gary and his friend, if only for a moment. If Desti’s resurrected later on, I’ll eat that crow, but that is doubtful. Though, if we take season 2 out the equation, it’s fair to say both deaths have their considered impacts with who it affects especially. 

I’ll express that a little later, but I want to move over to Gamma’s death where, and I hate to say this, it’s an unfair comparison all around cuz Gamma’s story doesn’t have the same set pieces as Desti’s because contextually his death was understandably sacrificial, he willingly self-destruct after knowing his true identity. Heck, you can’t even stack Gamma’s with Avocato’s because his heroic death meant something far different than the other two. Nah, I say the death reminiscent to Desti’s the most is with Aeris’ of Final Fantasy VII. But, I think it’s fair to first point out what this counter purposefully omitted: Desti’s character.

Now it would stand to believe the most we see of Desti aside the anime arc is “If Mario was in Splatoon 2”. But to say that is all to her character is being ignorant towards her character because the anime arc furthers expressed who Desti was as a character. She was prideful, no-nonsense, loves being a step of Meggy even when it means playing unfair. She was basically Meggy put to a logical extreme. In “Splatoon 2″, “Meggy’s Bootcamp”, and “Mario Showdown”, we see that seed of how much Meggy means to her as a rival and how focused she can be when it came to their rivalry, considering her the biggest threat in the Splatfest games. These traits are expanded in “The Splatfest Incident” where she is willing to her pride aside for a moment to help the gang find Meggy when she goes missing. The search for Meggy doesn’t throw away her hot-headedness and pride however, as we see in “The Inkling Disappearances” and “Mario and the Experiment” that she is more than willing to throw down regardless of what stands in her way, even to where she’s making her and Meggy’s escape into a challenge. 

More importantly, we get to see a soft side of her where she isn’t fully aloof and tries to be there for her team, or those she come to find as close as she gets. You get to see her bond with someone she wants to fight free and true to form. I say the writers did their job in giving us reason to stand with Desti, make us like her beyond being the Negachin. She’s much the better half to Meggy, the Zero of Megaman X, the being our main inkling girl strives to be in the right way. Now, I wanna talk about Aeris.

Aeris was a very cool character in my eye when playing FFVII. She’s not Tifa but she still had a badass charm to her, especially in the part where she and Cloud go a rescue/date to infiltrate a brothel that held Tifa hostage by helping Cloud disguise as a woman. It slows the game down in a good way, giving us some time to know Aeris. Like Cloud, you get to feel just as attached to her, in both the story and gameplay where she is a boss when it comes to magic. She shows herself as the one that helps Cloud shed his initial machismo and is a very considerate friend while they’re on the journey to escape Midgar. She certainly has more of a character than what most of the images on Google would make you believe. I’d say like with Aeris, the anime arc subtly make you invested in Desti. And like Desti, it happens...

Now I can say, yeah, this shouldn’t make sense. But really, as much sense as I wanted to wrap my brain around why this shouldn’t have happen, this emotionally got me every time. I say what makes this work, what makes Desti’s death worked, comparative to the previous mentioned, is how it worked it’s way both before and after the moment. For Aeris, you can feel the weight of her loss in our main characters in the story and in the gameplay where with her gone, it’s pretty hard to fill the void of what she excelled at. Put that with what we got to see of her which makes the loss all the more shocking. Which makes Cloud avenging her with his final conquering over Sephiroth all the more cathartic. Now I’m not saying Desti’s death had as much intentional thematic development as Aeris’s, but when you take into account how it is structurally, especially the aftermath, the oomph of it all feels just as real, feels respectfully impactful for what it did.

But before I get to my main point, I wanted to address another point against this case where “SMG4 was supposed to just be a comedy like Spongebob and such, this totally goes against that tonally.” Which, I don’t know what else to say beyond “Did we watch the same show?” I can understand not liking the 2nd half of the anime arc writing wise, but it’s not like the arc turned everything into a whole different show all together. We weren’t getting some Heavy Rain type melodrama shit, the tone of the 2nd half was clear, the objectives were there. It wasn’t that heavy-handed, it wasn’t that serious, they didn’t sacrifice the comedy all together for some oscar-bait Gotham brooding bullshit. A dumbass Monkey like myself could understand the direction the bros were going with that arc, regardless of whether I liked it or not. It is pretty myopic to think a series like this can’t and shouldn’t be anything else beyond a skinner box type comedy, because god forbid experimenting with the stories in lieu committing to a considerable routine most of your career to keep a certain mindset happy and buttfucking numb. *sigh* I apologize. To carry on...

I’ve talked about this before, so if you want here’s a link about the funeral scene of the arc’s final episode (quick read), but I wanna say that with Desti’s passing, they treat it with respect. They have their couple of jokes, but they don’t treat it like a joke; Desti's death would’ve been a lot more insulting to me if they didn’t take it as seriously. It showed that yeah, that shit hurt, it was not expected, and we’re with the gang as we see Meggy and them send her off, guns out. We’re with the characters where all that happens and it felt... organic. Like I said before, Desti was “someone who appeared to be distant and feisty but still had a heart. Someone who was among people that [grew to] care about her, in life and death.” Whether we consider it was for shock or not, she made her impact, it hit hard in the end, and they made the moment matter in the respective time.

And like Final Space, this affected the likes of Meggy the most, a character that had the most connection to Desti than the others, all while the others respect her grieving and trauma that came with it. Moments like “Something’s Up With Meggy” and “Mario Does the Chores” show that that stuck with her for real, and they don’t treat like some sick running gag. SMG4 mentions it not long afterward but respectably knew not to dwell on it for the rest of the year until “The Grand Festival” where it comes back as a soft, yet optimistic reminder.

Now I won’t say you can’t have your issue with the arc, I have my issues with it. But to say Desti’s death was crap was to objectively ignore the effort they put into making it a solid plot point, a solid heel turn for both Desti and Meggy. To ignore that they gave us a good character to basically just feel mad that they pulled the rug from under you. And I would’ve been mad too if killing her off was done poorly, but it wasn’t. The bros didn’t make a whole masterpiece, but they did what they set out to do and I say they pulled it off well for what it was. For who Desti was.

[transgamerthoughts]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Thoughts and Ramblings

Surprised to dust this off but I want to collect my thoughts quickly now that credits are rolling on Remake:

In general, I enjoyed it quite a lot. As one of many players with a unique relationship to the original (I first “played” it watching a childhood friend over the course of several sleepovers before playing on my own and occasionally returning to it) I was skeptical. I’ve express some of that skepticism at Kotaku , a website I write at. Remakes and remasters sometimes fall short or deviate in strange ways. Remake forges its own path and I’m grateful for it.

SPOILERS AHEAD KIDDOS

So! Here’s some scattered thoughts. Maybe they end up on Kotaku, maybe not. And while I’m loathe to immediately rush to create content on a Sunday night, this game has my mind spinning. Here we go.

The characterizations in this game are very strong, perhaps stronger than the original’s Midgar section. Some of that is owed to a very bad localization in ‘97 (you can get insight into that from my former colleague Tim Rogers’ series here) but Remake takes a lot of effort to allow the cast to breathe. That can come from the ways in which Cloud alters his way of taking with Tifa, and it can come in the moment where Barrett is more explicitly an ideologue. It’s quite good even if the script has a flaw that we’ll talk about in a second. 

That flaw is, frankly, that if you’ve not played the original then Remake is going to end up impenetrable in the final hours. This is particularly true once characters like Zack are brought into the fold and the visuals begin to mirror the original. (See: the hard cuts before Sephiroth and Clouds final duel mirroring the Omnislash moment from ‘97.) I don’t think that diminishes the character work here but I think that the more interesting meta-narrative stuff *so* damn crucial to this game that I can’t imagine what a newcomer will think. 

Connected to this, I’ve seen folks disappointed that this is not a perfect remake but in this instance, I think that sentiment is misplaced. Valid, but shortsighted? You can’t make Final Fantasy VII today. Not in the way it existed in ‘97. Which isn’t to say the visuals or script but the context cannot be reproduced. New hardware, FMVs taking a forefront, an advertising campaign that positioned the game in competition with movies, and a cultural splash that the series hasn’t ever quite replicated. Because the weight of expectation hovers over Remake—folks have been obsessed with a new version since the PS3 tech demo stirred imagination at E3 2020—the game *needs* to be about that. To be a game about this moment, the moment gamers have waited decades for, Remake needs to be about itself in a very explicit way.

I can’t not see the Whispers and Arbiters of Fate as anything other than stand-ins for gamers, fans, and the culture as a whole. That’s an obvious reading but an undeniable one. The core question of Remake doesn’t really have much to do with the fictional stakes. It’s this: who owns Final Fantasy VII, and who owns the Remake? Is it the story tellers or the players? I have a cheat answer: it belongs to the characters. In unbinding themselves from player expectation, they claim ownership over the narrative now. 

Aeris just flat out knows she’s in a sequel/alt-timeline thing. Her final line is about missing the surety of something as presumably ever present at the metal sky of Midgar’s plates. 

I like the combat here more than FFXV, which isn’t saying a lot but worth saying. There’s more participation from the player. That’s it. I don’t think *more* active choice inherently makes a combat system better but it is the key reason this works better than XV.

Character swapping breaks things somewhat since enemy aggro is (save for using the provoke materia) focused on the player. Wish the combat design took this into consideration a bit more. It’s the one glaring flaw in the system.

Tifa is the most fun to play as in this game. It’s not even a contest. Starshower is overpowered as hell and Chi Trap rules. Love using her to increase the potency of the stagger meter when the time comes.

Fights do get occasionally Too Busy. Airbuster is a big culprit here. Too many phases for what was essentially a jobber of a boss in the original game.

Train Graveyard section is an atrocious pace killer as well. Again: “too many notes.”

I never found the Nail Bat and that was a bit of a bummer.

I tweeted out a quote from Barrett this weekend and it made the rounds. In general, for this game, Barrett works best in this revolutionary mode even if certain scenes (Shinra middle manager for instance) deploy visual language that’s dated. Of any character, he has the highest highs and lowest lows. Not surprising.

re: that tweet some folks kinda lost their shit about it(?) but I think the quote still holds. Remake does a good job of showing *individuals* within Shinra but Barrett does rightly note they are complicit to an extent in Shinra’s crimes. You can disagree with what Barrett does about it but that’s 100% true. Sorry, not sorry. (The discourse today was just a hassle frankly. Multiple things can be true at once, but I don’t think Twitter is a place where that’s ever acknowledged.) Whatever eventual regrets he might feel about methodology in ‘97′s script, he’s not wrong on this individual point. I’m interested to see where he goes as a character when it comes to all this.

Kinda related to the above, Remake arguably does a better job than ‘97 showing the alternative to Shinra. It’s the communal nature of the individual sectors. It’s the Neighborhood Watch and local leaders in Sector 7, the trio in Wall Market. Remake rejects Shinra’s autocracy and favors the various slums communes. This is made ever more clear by how little of Reeve we see in this script. Who are the leaders shaping life into a passable experience in Midgar? It’s not the Urban Planning guy with the cat robot. 

Also: hey, is that Cait Sith in the plate drop cutscene? Yep! Hope you played the original or there’s just this sad cat that shows up for 4 four seconds.

Is he a Chad? Well, he’s Chad-ley...

Not sure what to think of the Wutai stuff being more explicit but it feels right for 2020 for a variety of reasons. I’ve never been too interested in FF7′s realpolitik tho. It’s not really much of an expansion so much as a background element but one that’s deployed a bit lazily. 

Roche owns in a way I was not expecting. He’s a balls to the wall anime motherfucker and I kinda love him? I’m really, really surprised that (as far as I could tell) he didn’t even come back for the final bike sequence tho.

I don’t really have the energy to litigate or talk about Wall Market much. I think it’s better than the original but pandering in the sense that it’s a very safe and commodified version of queerness. I appreciate that Nomura and folks looked at the original and were like “well, we can’t do *that*” but it doesn’t quite land for me.

That said: “yes, I know, nailed it,” is a fantastic line with a fantastic read from Cloud’s English VA.

Hell House announcers rule. Hell House fight? Kinda terrible actually.

Nice shout out to Kunsel in Shinra Tower. Crisis Core is a messy game but I like Tabata’s work a lot. Even the messy stuff, which is most of it. That game’s story is bonkers but I like Zack and I actually like the idea of the Digital Mind Wave as a mechanic. If nothing else, Squeenix lost a pretty exciting designer when he left.

Less nice? This game’s tendency to pad out dungeons. The whole approach to the Sector 5 reactor comes to mind. Train fight then tunnels then sun lamps then reactor. It’s a lot. Also: all of the extra Hojo stuff. I know we’re padding out like 5 hours but some of the sections could have been abbreviated. Probably would have made the game better.

Even less nice? Zack’s English voice actor. Maybe the only voice actor I didn’t like. Really miss Rick Gomez on this one. 

 Conversely, Red XIII? They nailed it. 11/10. Nanaki, I love you so much.

 Counterstance is an amazing move and I can’t want to carry that over into Hard Mode. 

The Jenova fight fuckin’ ripped. I was a bit huffy when I learned through leaks that there was a Jenova fight (since the first fight in the original is on the boat to Costa Del Sol) but this was a great set piece. One of the moments where everything worked.

Also good: Rufus fight. Bad: losing Rufus’ speech to the party.

Not a ton more thoughts right now? Sephiroth fight was good although for all his presence in the story I think we suffer without the full Nibelheim flashback to round things out. In all really liked it. Want to play again pretty much immediately. Will write something more cogent for the site I guess? Got a few ideas. But yeah! entered as skeptic and left mostly a believer on this one. 

[eageinz-movedback]

one step closer [part.1]

Settings / Timeline: Original Game, hidden scenes around Scene 86: Aerith Forest and Scene 87: Cloud Self. A Headcanon. Summary: Returning to Gongaga Village after the Temple of Ancient incident, what actually made Aerith finally decide to face Sephiroth alone? What gave her strength and courage?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                               "Beautiful ... Your eyes."                           "Take a closer look. Like the color of the sky, isn't it? "                                      "If that was the sky, then it’s not scary at all."                                        (Crisis Core Chapter 5: First Date)

It was still early in the morning when Aerith had left the inn and walked for a breath of fresh air typical of the countryside in Gongaga. The air is so natural, really different from the slum that he lives everyday in sector five Midgar. The smell like this can only be felt in front of the expanse of flowers in the church that is miraculously not contaminated with pollution outside.

"It feels like returning at home ..." [1]

A voice like a whisper was heard when a memory piece in her head jumped out as she reached the ruins of the Shin-Ra reactor in the village. Exploded reactor. The explosion certainly traumatized the residents, just as she witnessed the Midgar sector seven reactor accidentally blown up by Shin-Ra. But on the positive side, the absence of the reactor is like refining the previously polluted air.

Aerith looked briefly at the wreckage, where Scarlet found useless material where Cloud actually found a useful material called Titan.

Cloud and materia.

Her memory also drifted to events a few days earlier when the party arrived at the Temple of Ancient, where she felt so close to the voices of her ancestors. Finding the injured Tseng, they entered the temple to find Black Materia before Sephiroth’s arrival. Aerith then watched Sephiroth controlling Cloud like a puppet, making him surrender the cursed materia to their enemy. She even got hit by Cloud until Tifa came to help her. Mumbling, Cloud then collapsed.

Aerith felt her body aching due to being hit. But she felt the pain was nothing compared to Cloud who had been unconscious since that day. Feeling better, she left the room and headed to Cloud's room to see his condition. She did it many times that she just wanted to be by his side. But every time she opened his room door, she always saw Tifa never leave the bedside. There was a jealousy in her heart. Indeed, she considered it as a rival of love despite being bestfriend. But on the other hand, Aerith realized there was a room between the two that she could not enter. That in this case, she was defeated. She felt she could not understand Cloud as well as Tifa who had known him since childhood. And in her heart, there was a little yearning for someone she once touched and hugged when that person was helpless and shown weakness. Someone who had been with her for a long time. That at that time, she also did not move from his side until the person was strong again. Yes, Aerith wanted someone who can occupy the position of a soulmate which is empty like how she currently saw Tifa having that person to provide care and affection.

That was the reason that made Aerith left the inn to arrange her sore heart. She could not watch Cloud and Tifa for too long. And it felt like it was a coincidence that she and the others returned to this village to get rest for their wounded self and for Cloud until he regained consciousness. What a miraculous coincidence as if she had indeed been led to this, as her feet were once again stepped in the same direction she was familiar before.

A middle-aged woman was sweeping her yard when Aerith passed by. Frankly, the woman greeted him. "You're the girl from last time, aren't you? Why are you alone?"

Aerith removed the awkward impression when she first visited the Fair family residence. "Our friend is sick, we’re resting at the village inn until he recovers," she answered.

"Sorry to hear that, is he that blond SOLDIER?"

Aerith nodded slowly. "Yes."

"I hope he's all right. Being a SOLDIER must be prepared for all tough battles, " continued Mrs. Fair.

"We hope too," Aerith made a small smile.

"It's been a long time since there were other travelers here beside your group, were you willing to stop by?"

Aerith hurriedly waved her hand, not wanting to be held in that place for longer. "Eh, I'm not ..."

But Mrs. Fair nimbly invited Aerith into the house and called her husband that they had a guest. She then spoke again to Aerith. "About a year ago, there was a girl who had been here too. Her hair is short wavy and orange. She wears a suit like a man." [2]

"Turks," Aerith said, recognizing the characteristics of the clothing.

"Ah yes, she is from Shin-Ra. She looked for our son, asking if he had come back here soon. Because it seemed like she worried, I even had time to see if she was our son's lover as stated in his letter. From her critical expression, we knew that he must be in trouble. Well, he indeed never gave us news. But if Shin-Ra gets to find one of his SOLDIER like that, we finally think up in seriousness. Is it possible that our son really missing?"

A year ago? Aerith felt completely ignorant of this story. She let Mrs. Fair continue to tell her.

"Talking about the Turks girl made me remember something in sudden. Rejecting, she said that our son's girlfriend was the girl tending flowers in the slum. A girl like that is what makes our son love her like crazy. In her hair tied a pink ribbon he gave."

Wha----? Aerith was surprised. Turks were always watching her, there was no way they could not know the relationship between the Cetra and one of his SOLDIERs. But.....

"Girl," called Mrs. Fair, "we know. You're Zack's girlfriend, aren't you?"

Aerith did not answer, it was still the same as when she first met the Fair couple at their residence. "I..."

"I'm fine though I never hear of him," that’s what she told Cloud here before. Liar! Then for whom did she write the eighty-nine letters?

"But I feel bad for his parents." So why didn't he tell them? Like when she told her adoptive mother about the spirit of her husband wanting to meet her? That as a Cetra, she could sense if the person she holds dear returned to the planet?

That is, this time Aerith did not run out of the house. Since dating Cloud at the Gold Saucer, she has decided to stop the denial, seeing Cloud not as a shadow of the man she misses anymore, that she can fall in love once again, and starting to accept the fact that three months ago, Zack had...

Zack had been gone...

And suddenly, Aerith could no longer hide how her tears dropped. The tears of pain she even hid from her stepmother. The tears of sadness that she did not want to show in front of her comrades, forcing them to believe that she was a strong-willed girl who always remains cheerful. When did she really mourn him? When did she truly let him go? This forget-me-not choker?

.....never.

She just wanted to believe that he was alive somewhere, happy with someone else.

“I’m sorry... I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you yet.” Aerith tried to speak but her voice was buried in her cries. "Zack.... Zack... he has....”

Without words to explain it all, Mrs. Fair embraced her, making the Cetra girl's cries even more. The woman fully understood that her son would never return. Mr. Fair came in as he figured the situation, he also patted Aerith’s shoulder. She couldn’t leave, her holds to his mom was even tighter... not that she could quit to cry. 

This moment, just at this moment, let the time stopped for her. Let her be a weak girl. Let the parents soothe her. Let the world cry with her again.

And let she wash away the grief.

                                                                -----tbc-----

Crisis Core Footnote: [1] Zack's answer when Aerith asked, "What do you think of sector five?" This dialog is in Aerith DMW Scene. [2] Referred to Cissnei, she told Zack that his mom thought she was his girlfriend.

[scripting-life]

FFVII: returning to my first love

 *peeks out of the corner of my lurking spot*

Hello? Anybody out there? It’s only been, oh you know, four-ish years since the last time I’ve posted anything here. I apologize in advance for anybody who’s still following me from my Castle days. If you couldn’t tell from my extended absence, I’ve mostly moved on. Castle and Beckett were fantastic characters that let me to play with some deep-dive analyses, and Castle will always hold a special place in my heart as my comfort show and my first real and extended experience with online fandom. I’ll always be grateful to the community I’ve had the joy of interacting with (or, the community with which I’ve had the joy of interacting, as Castle would correct me my dangling preposition).

I honestly didn’t think I would ever have reason to come back to Tumblr after Castle ended. But the FF7 Remake has returned me to my very first love--when I was young and innocent and before I knew anything about OTPs or ship wars. I’ve been back lurking for several months now and seeing all the fanart/fanfics and fun theories and analyses has reignited my enthusiasm for the FF7 franchise. It’s also fun coming back to this franchise with a more mature understanding of the themes/concepts that completely flew over my head as a young preteen.

(This ended up being super long, so the rest is below the cut to spare everyone the pain of scrolling. Apparently, my rambling tendencies have not changed at all. lol.)

When FF7R was officially announced (five freaking years ago!), I was filled with apprehension. FF7 was my first taste of a “grown-up” game. I was 11 and played my brother’s copy of the OG on PC in 1-2 hours spurts on the weekends when I visited his apartment. It took me months, if not years, to finish the game (I ended up stealing his copy to play on our computer at home...lol), and I was so blown away by it. I remember the exact moment I finished it and how I was literally shaking as I watched the ending FMV.

Later, when I found out my brother had a copy of FF8 (my poor brother was so accommodating to his annoying little sister...haha), I was so excited to play, in large part because I thought it would continue the story of FF7. Young, naive me didn’t understand the numbering conventions of Final Fantasy titles. I was madly theorizing and breaking my brain trying to find connections between the two games’ plots and had literally played through more than half the game before I finally realized the storyline of FF8 had absolutely nothing to do with FF7. I was sorely disappointed, and I think that has somewhat tainted my appreciation of future titles. Not to say I haven’t enjoyed the subsequent FF titles, but I think a little part of me is always comparing them to that first experience of wonder and awe that I had with FF7.

I discovered fanfiction in my teens and starting writing FF7/Cloti fics in college. Aside from interacting with a few fic writers at the time, I was not involved in any online communities, so I kept myself pretty free of any ship war drama and the like. When I did research for my fics, I’d sometimes see shipping sites and theories where I didn’t always understand the logic of how certain conclusions were reached, but frankly, I didn’t much care and didn’t realize that Clerith vs. Cloti was such a touchy subject. I was peripherally aware that some sort great LTD war was waging, of course, but it didn’t really touch me. I stayed in my Cloti shipping/fic-writing lane and was probably a lot happier for it. And, to be honest, based on FFN’s listings for FF7, I felt like I always saw a bunch of Sephiroth/Cloud fics and thought that was just as popular as the more conventional ships.

Graduating college and entering “real life” pretty much ended my FF7 fanfic-writing journey. In the intervening years between college and the release of FF7R, I haven’t gone back to the OG too much. I’ve played almost all the Final Fantasy games since then, and I always enjoy getting my FF7 crew fix when I play the non-canon mobile games or the Kingdom Hearts franchise. But FF7 was a happy part of my teenage years, and I was content to think on it with sweet nostalgia.

Remakes, in recent experience (*cough cough* Disney, why?), have been hit or miss, with a lot of misses. It’s hard to strike a good balance between catering to nostalgia and delivering a fresh product, never mind the change in social mores through the decades. I was so afraid FF7R would screw up my memories, especially since I wasn’t the biggest fan of Advent Children. The graphics were great and the action scenes were fun, but the story felt like a let-down. Cloud, in particular, felt so different (and yes, moody) from where we left him after the OG. I understand now that a lot of his character motivation was better explained in the On The Way to a Smile novels, but back then, I just felt like AC came out of nowhere. 

Btw, because I see this question a lot on other blogs when I’m lurking, I’ve ALWAYS thought that it was very clear in AC--even without reading anything else--that the reason for Cloud’s depression was due to guilt and not because he was pining for Aerith. The only reason I didn’t like his characterization in AC was because it felt like it came out of nowhere since AC is set 2 years after OG and by the end of the OG, he seemed to be in a pretty decent place mentally and emotionally. That being said, I can absolutely understand why some traumas resurface years after the originating incident and how times of peace might actually be worse because he is no longer solely focused on saving the world, but I was just surprised and a little bummed that this was the direction the devs chose to take AC at the time. Now that I’m older, I do better appreciate the complexities of Cloud’s mental state and the fact that they depicted a hero with lingering mental health issues is actually pretty awesome. I’m drawn to characters that have flaws--sometimes serious ones--but try their best anyway. Hence, why why Tifa Lockhart and Kate Beckett are some of my all-time favorites.

Anyhow, that didn’t stop me from pre-ordering FF7R, of course. I avoided reading any reviews as I didn’t want my first impressions to be swayed, and boy, was I happy that I went in mostly blind. That sense of awe really almost felt like playing the OG for the first time again, but somehow more. The combat system is incredibly fun and the world-building is nothing short of incredible. The variety and abundance of NPCs gives the game so much flavor and the locations have been rendered so well. As I’m going through areas like the Sector 7 train station and Wall Market and Aerith’s house, I can almost superimpose the layout from the OG in my head, but now it’s in 3D and so rich and full. It’s obvious that a lot of attention was paid to details, and I love all the head-nods and homages to the OG.

And oh, the characters!

This is the Cloud I’ve been wanting to see in glorious HD and the Cloud I remember from the original game: all awkward, dorky trying to be cool, socially inept, mentally unstable, abrasive-at-times, reluctant to act depending on who’s asking, wannabe hard-ass who’s actually a big softie inside Cloud. I remember reading an article a few years back about how the devs basically redid Cloud for the Remake because they wanted him to go back to his dorky roots--which ends up making him closest to his personality in the OG than his appearances in other franchises--and I was SOOOO incredibly happy to hear that. I was so sick of the way Cloud was constantly depicted as this cool, broody McBrood in his cameos when he was a pretty big dork in the OG. (Anybody remember him doing squats in the Highwind when Tifa says it’ll be lonely with just the two of them and Cloud responds that he’ll make enough noise to make up for it? Like I said: cute, but a dork.)

I WAS surprised by how comfortable and sweet and touchy (so very very touchy) the devs made him with Tifa from the beginning. That initial scene of Cloud being such a smooth operator giving Tifa the flower had my jaw-dropping and every single flirty interaction after that (and there are many) had my Cloti heart overflowing in shock and bliss. Throughout most of my years as a Cloti shipper, even though I believed Cloti was supported by canon and pretty clearly together, I was also under the impression--mistakenly or not--that Cloti was the minority ship. So for Square Enix to make it so blatantly obvious that Cloud is really into Tifa at such an early stage has been an unexpected gift.

Also, they’re just really hot together. (Clotiscrew tunnel--be still my heart!)

As for Tifa...oh, what wonderful character development we’ve already gotten for Tifa. Tifa has always been one of my all-time favorite characters ever since reading her character blurb in the OG game manual. Initially, as a child, it was because I saw so much of myself in her. She was outwardly bright and optimistic, but tended to hide all of her stronger feelings inside. She fought with her fists, and for someone who was a tomboy growing up who liked playing contact sports with the boys, I connected with her in a way that I had never been able to connect with other female protagonists who were primarily back-row specialists. (I also aspired to grow to her listed height of 5′4″, which alas, did not happen...lol).

I love how the Remake delves into more of Tifa’s moral conflict between the destruction that she causes as part of Avalanche and needing to do something to stop Shinra, and yes, even seeking revenge. They touched on this in the OG lightly, but the Remake really hammers it home. She’s perhaps the most conflicted character in terms of motivation in Part 1. That scene with the Shinra manager on the train is actually one of my favorite scenes of her because it highlights that tension. The elevator scene, if you opted for it instead of the stairs (or if you did one, saved, and reloaded to do the other one, like me), is also underrated in terms of how much it reveals about Tifa’s inner struggle.

On this point, I also appreciate that the Remake has the characters reflecting on the damage they’ve both indirectly and directly inflicted--the Avalanche team all do this to a certain degree. In particular, Jessie’s constant inability to figure out what she’d done wrong with the bomb to cause such a massive explosion and her remaining feelings of guilt during her death scene (”they were my victims” ouch!) were heart-breaking.

Aerith’s depiction was another pleasant surprise. I’ll be honest; I didn’t much like her in the OG. She was too pushy and willfully oblivious to the point of being mean at times. In the Remake, much of her sometimes too in-your-face playfulness was kept--perhaps still a little too much--but I appreciate the nuance that they gave her. The train graveyard scene tells the player that she didn’t have friends growing up, and I think that partially contributes to her lack of social tact at times. The other factor that gives her personality more nuance is the hint of special knowledge that affects how she interacts with the rest of the group. It gives her additional hidden motivation and adds to her mystery for new players while simultaneously pulling at the heartstrings for old players who get the impression that Aerith is somehow aware--to a certain, unknown extent--of her own fate. 

I also appreciate that Aerith is more grounded as a real person than as some sort of revered being. I do blame AC for some of that. When you have the power to cure a fatal disease from the afterlife and send the dead back to life, it gets into some godlike territory. Maybe it’s a fair depiction of her powers as a Cetra, but I just get the feeling that Aerith herself wouldn’t really appreciate being made into this goddess-like figure. Remember that her character blurb in the original game manual implied that she was more interested in earthly things (i.e. the love triangle) than in exploring her own powers. I personally think that Aerith used the “love triangle” in the OG as a form of escapism from the weight of her burdens rather than genuine interest, and I just think she’d want to be thought of as a person rather than as a god. One of my favorite scenes for Aerith is when she and Cloud are traversing the rooftops and she slips on the ladder, letting out a simple, “Shit.” It humanizes her in a way that combats some of the ways she’s sort of been deified in the last 23 years. Also, Aerith wielding a folding chair like it’s WWE never fails to make me laugh. Overall, she just comes off as a more reasonably flawed and--as a result, to me--a more likeable character in the Remake, and I do very much like her now.

Barret is pretty much the exact larger than life character I imagined in my head, only somehow even better, and I really love how expressive and emotional his eyes and facial expressions are. His scenes with Marlene are truly the cutest thing ever. Red XIII is a big, furry ball of sass, and I need so much more of him in the coming parts (Cosmo Canyon still wrecks me to this day). The interactions between the Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie are incredible, and they really feel like people who’ve been friends and basically each other’s family for years. The Turks and Rufus are pretty much as cool as I imagined them in the OG.

There’s still so much more I haven’t even started touching on about the Remake, and I think that’s why I’m finally posting this now. I just can’t contain my love for this game any more, and I really really need a place to express myself. I don’t know if anybody is still reading, but I appreciate having the opportunity to finally gush about this game and franchise that I’ve loved so much for pretty much two-thirds of my life.

[acepanromcloudstrife]

I'm thinking that Cloud, however much he denies it, has a fear of Hojo.

[he absolutely, 100% does. and since @pickpocketarc has already confessed to being this anon, all of y’all can blame her for what your about to read. It’s about Hojo, so general creepiness and vague but bad medical stuff abound, so if that bothers anyone, i’d suggest they stay away.]

He was 14 years old the first time he met Professor Hojo, completely accidentally, in the research laboratory's medical wing.  He was in the Shinra building to apply for SOLDIER, and part of the process involved a physical exam.  It made sense--the military would want all their potential new recruits to attain a certain standard of health and well-being, especially so with the elite SOLDIER program.

But no one had informed him that he would be there for hours on end, or that there would be quite so many exams.  He was poked and prodded in nearly every area of his body, had blood drawn twice, had been hooked up to wires that monitored his heart, and had filled out so many questionnaires, he'd literally lost count of them all.

Right at the end, as he was nearing the end of his final set of papers to sign, the door to the exam room he was in opened.  A middle aged man with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail entered the room, too busy looking at the file in his hand to notice that the room wasn't unoccupied.

"Beckett, call back that last candidate--Wilson, I think it was?  There are some sight abnormalities on his blood panel that could exclude him, but--"

"Excuse me, Professor," interrupted Beckett, "I'm with someone right now.  You'll have to ask Martin."

The older man looked up from his papers and noticed Cloud for the first time.  He studied him for a long minute.  Cloud felt scrutinized in a way that hours and hours of testing couldn't even begin to compare to.

"You're joking, surely," was all the man said.

"No," Beckett confirmed.  "I'm not joking, sir."

The Professor (who looked vaguely familiar to Cloud, but where could he have known him from?) scoffed and picked up the packet of papers that had taken all afternoon to compile.  He flipped through them quickly.  "Family history?"

"Relatively good, sir.  Grandfather died young of heart failure."

"And his heart?"

"Chest x-ray and EKG were clean.  Still waiting on lab results."

"Mako-erythrocyte reactivity?"

"Fingerstick test seemed okay, but like I said, the labs are still running, sir."

The man let out a short, disgruntled sigh and rolled his eyes.  "Send the file to Heidegger.  Public Security at best."

He turned on his heel and left the room.  It wasn't until Beckett shook his head and muttered, "Fucking Hojo," that Cloud put two and two together.

***

He was 16 the next time he met Hojo, broken and bleeding and barely alive.  He'd been nervous and excited in turn for this mission.  Nervous, because he was going home to Nibelheim, but excited because he was going to be working with Zack.  And Sephiroth.  He'd finally gotten the chance to prove himself to his idol, and--

And it had all gone to shit in the absolute worst way.

He was drifting in and out of consciousness.  He remembered being lifted onto a stretcher and escorted out of the reactor, and then the next thing he knew, he was face down on a cold, metal table, being held down by far too many sets of hands, and there was a sharp, stabbing pain deep in his pelvis.  He tried to scream, but the sound refused to leave his throat.

"Anaesthesia and paralytic's wearing off," someone said.

"Vecuronium," replied a disinterested, somewhat familiar voice.  "If he keeps moving, the samples will be contaminated."

A moment later, Cloud felt his muscles relax and, to his horror, stop responding altogether.  He couldn't move at all, no matter how hard he tried, but he still felt everything that was being done to him.  He couldn't speak or scream or even whimper.  All he could do was cry.

"Subject is still exhibiting reactions to pain stimuli," another voice said.  "Blood pressure is skyrocketing.  Heart rate--"

"We're almost done."

"But sir--"

"We can't give him anything else for this procedure.  He's scheduled for anaesthesia and narcotics when he returns to the submersion tank."

And that was, apparently, the final word on the subject.  He couldn't say how long he laid there.  It seemed to go on forever, the pain making every passing second excruciatingly long.

When the procedure was over, they took him back to his tank, and he was suspended once again in mako, still conscious, still in pain, still unable to move.

***

The final time he ever saw Hojo, he was 21 years old, full of rage and ready to kill.  Three of them stood against him, Cloud and Vincent and Tifa, and as the vengeful old man's body once again melted and reassembled thanks to the Jenova cells he'd spliced into himself, Cloud thought about how this form finally matched what a monstrous individual he'd been all along.

When they eventually wore him down, Cloud pinned him to the ground with his sword and yelled at Vincent to take his shot.  He aimed his weapon with the speed and precision one expected of a Turk and pulled the trigger twice in succession.  Two bullets landed home in what was left of Hojo's chest, directly to his partially exposed heart as it pounded wildly.  Whether it was from the exertion of battle or if he was simply frightened at the prospect of his imminent death, Cloud didn't know.  

And frankly, he didn't fucking care either.  Hojo was a madman and a menace, an ugly, egomaniacal bastard, and the world was immediately a better place now that he was no longer a part of it.

The three of them stood there for a few minutes, just watching the corpse, ready to jump back into the thick of it if needed.  It didn't move, but with Jenova cells, there was always a lingering uncertainty.  

Finally, Tifa broke the silence.  "I think...he's really dead."

Cloud felt himself relax slightly.  He noticed Tifa cradling her left arm gingerly against her chest and dug a potion of his pockets for her.  He figured Vincent needed a moment by himself anyhow.

As they readied themselves to move on, however, Cloud felt an overwhelming desire to have the last word, as it were.  He walked over to the mass of disjointed and disfigured flesh that had formerly been Hojo, but he couldn't decide what he wanted his last words to this despicable man to be.

In the end, unable to think of anything more articulate to say, he just spat on the man's corpse and growled a spiteful, "Fuck you."

***

He was 24 years old the final time Hojo directly interfered in his life, and even though Vincent had been the heavy-lifter this time, Cloud and the rest of AVALANCHE had done everything in their power to help him.  When it was over, Vincent told them everything, the whole sordid tale, start to finish.

No one had known what to say.  There really wasn't anything that seemed right.  The room was quiet and awkward for several minutes as they all digested the story of how Hojo had copied his consciousness into a computer system, cheating death for 3 years until DeepGround was ready to put their plans into action, how he took over the body of Weiss in order to try and bring destruction to the Planet once again.

The solution to their silence, someone decided, was alcohol.  They all drank more than was good for them that night, happy to be alive at the end of so much violence and anxiety.  He stumbled upstairs into his bed, and for the first time in over a year, he had a nightmare about Hojo. He was 16 again, floating in a mako tube, paralyzed, unable to scream, and in so much pain his body felt like it was on fire.  He was alone this time, the tank besides his empty and broken.  Zack had escaped and left him there alone to be the sole target of Hojo's sick, twisted science.

He must have been talking in his sleep, because when Tifa shook him awake, she asked him if he was okay.  He felt wetness on his cheeks almost immediately, but the first sob didn't escape him until Tifa had already wrapped her arms around him.  She was warm and soft and comforting, radiating a calming energy he'd come to associate with home and with safety.  Her fingers combed through his hair gently as she cooed soothing nonsense into his ear.  He was relatively calm within a few minutes.  

"Better?" she asked.

"Yeah," was all he managed.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay."  She kissed his temple and gave him a squeeze.  She didn't need to say anything else.  He knew that she was there for him, and if he wanted to tell her what his nightmare was about, she would listen.

After a moment, he said only, "Hojo."

Tifa kissed him again and hummed against his skin.  "I'm sorry."

He eventually fell asleep again like that, curled against Tifa, tucked securely into her arms, his undisturbed tears dry on his cheeks.  The next morning, he would have one hell of a hangover, and it was just as well that he had another excuse to stay in bed for the rest of the day and feel bad.  

For now, though, he could only pray that Hojo didn't enter his dreams again.  Cloud didn't need reminding twice in one night that, no matter how long the man himself might be dead and gone, Hojo would never, ever leave him be.  He had scars from his time with Hojo that would never heal.  He'd always be right there under Cloud's skin, taunting him, tainting him, slowly but surely.  

Fucking bastard.

[melinabeana]

She has finally found her place in the world and thus her courage. She wants a family, partly to replace the one she lost. One of my favourite scenes in AC is when she says to Cloud that she wants to be a family with him, Marlene and Denzel, but she's not willing to wait for Cloud forever. She loves him but she now not only has the kids to think of, but enough respect for herself to say and do this. As she says "Which is it? A memory or us?" I love it. There are my reasons for loving Tifa!

I appreciate you sharing all of that! I will admit I liked her interactions more in remake than OG. What I find most interesting is I actually really enjoy her when she’s interacting with anyone but Cloud. I don’t think they have a very good connection and I love how you said she’s holding onto Cloud because he’s all she has to tie to her past. I still don’t think that’s healthy and it honestly just adds another point for me as to why i don’t even think Cloud and Tifa make very good friends, let alone actually being romantically involved.

She seems much more open with Barret and Aerith and she seems to be much more introverted and shy with Cloud, which often comes off as rude, to me, when she’s scolding him to be nice. I remember seeing her and Aerith on screen together and actually saying, “aw!” Like when they talk about their shopping date and Tifa says, “We found you,” in the train graveyard. Or when she’s joking around with Barret about him asking her to dance. These are cute moments for Tifa, for sure. I still don’t like her on her own though. But i like her interactions with the other characters and I can only hope it keeps getting better with part 2.

Thanks again for sharing! I really am keeping an open mind with Tifa, at least I’m trying to! But I’m just not sure that I agree with so many others who say she’s the best character in the FF series or she’s “queen.” Maybe I need to stop reaching and trying to find out why people think that, and just try to appreciate her interacting with other characters? In all honesty, I hope she moves on from Cloud. I think maybe that’s why I’m so hard on her too. Like understand your worth, and if he’s not showing interest, don’t push him. Everyone in Midgar is in love with you. Don’t hang onto the past in Cloud, when quite frankly, you deserve so much more. Thanks again! As always, be well! ❤️

[leathenorthernlight]

Cloud Strife and I

I was going to start this series with Tifa because she is my love and my light, lol. Yeah, she is my favorite, but since we are talking about characters, I think it’s better to start off with the main one. So today I will talk about my experience with Cloud Strife.

My feelings for Cloud are… conflicting, a real strife as his last name well indicates. They’re a roller coaster with ups and downs. It’s kinda ironic actually.

I didn’t like him in the OG, honestly. I found him to be rather… impersonal? At least that was my personal feeling, and his famous catchphrase “Not interested” never helped me to make me a better idea of him. As far as I was concerned, he was supposed to be cool and cocky, but at the same time distant and harsh with others.

At the end of the day, I think the OG never gave me a concrete picture of him, and that had to do a lot with the optional dialogue and how players answered them. Sometimes he was decent and sometimes he was a total jerk, so it gave me the impression that his personality was all over the place.

Of course, objectively speaking, this is a great achievement since it is an important theme in FF7, specially for Cloud. It’s literally his arc, his story as a character. I mean, he doesn’t have idea who he really is for the most part of the game, so how are we going to know any better?

When the scene in the Lifestream came around and the real Cloud appears for the first time, I was not impressed. I got it and I understood it, but I couldn’t really see it. I had implanted so deep into my memory the idea of a Cloud with a scattered personality, that his return to his real self didn’t do much to me. The fact that real Cloud didn’t have as much screen time as his fake persona didn’t help. I would have loved to see him for a longer time and not only at the end.

The next Cloud’s version I knew was Crisis Core version.

And oh the irony: I loved him so so much. He was adorable, and a dork, and weird and so socially awkward that it was charming. He is so precious there. It was then when I understood that this Cloud was the real one, this was the Cloud that I should’ve had remembered at the end of OG. This is Cloud. It was then when I also understood that he wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Of course, I never believed he was a bad character. On the contrary, Cloud is one of the most complex MC I’ve seen. I love the way he became a casual hero. He didn’t want to be one, but because of the circumstances and life experiences, he became one. He didn’t asked for any of the tragedies he went through, and even so, he went forward and triumphed. That’s pretty amazing. Cloud is pretty complete.

It doesn’t mean he is my favorite, but CC helped me to see him on a new light and to grow fond of him. I also got a better understanding of his overall arc and the game’s lore.

But then I watched another version of him: Advent Children and ah… he fell from my grace again.

Now, I always try to be objective and empathize, so after I analyzed the movie together with some fragments of the novels, I got the whole picture and understood why he acted the way he did. His depression was understandable. His self esteem issues that led him think he didn’t deserve happiness; his huge guilty over the deaths of two important people to him, his feeling of inadequacy for not being able to help Denzel, to finally get Geostigma, condemning him to die, which would force him to let his family behind.

Yeah, of course he had reasons to get depressed and see everything through tunnel vision. Actually, I’m surprised that he still had enough strength to walk or fight with monsters. However… I was so frustrated with him in AC, ugh. I honestly couldn’t handle him.

I’ll be fair though. At that time I was going through a complicated and very emotionally-charged situation at home and I didn’t need more depression in my life, frankly. Maybe that’s why I crashed so much with Cloud, because meditating about everything that was going on, I found that I would have acted just like him or worse, something that it wasn’t easy to recognize, that ended up souring me more and made me disliking him more. I know, I’m petty, but those were my feelings.

After I finished the movie, I knew Cloud got better and now would be happy at last, but I had a similar experience with the one I had with the OG. Having little screen time with the determined and uplifting Cloud didn’t help me to erase his earlier depressed mood, so it was easy for me to remember him for his somber attitude.

It had to pass years after for me to have a new perspective on him thanks to the Remake. And I’m not gonna lie, I’m liking Cloud Remake quite a bit.

He’s made me laugh so much because I can clearly see how hard he tries to be the cool and tough guy he believes he is, but sometimes things just don’t work for him. He has had at least one moment like this with every character, when he thinks he is saying something great and the others’ reaction tells you that this guy is so lost and hopeless. It hilarious, tbh.

Maybe I shouldn’t find it so amusing. After all, the poor guy got a severe case of PTSD, he hallucinates, got amnesia, his mind is a mixture of memories and stories. It’s not something to be laughing at… but I can’t help it. Remake Cloud is so different from everything I thought he was, and that’s awesome.

Well, that’s pretty much my experience with our protagonist. In reality, Cloud is the character that has made me feel so many and different emotions throughout FF7 and I’m grateful for that. When a character does that you know it’s well done. Now, I’m really excited to know what else will he make me feel on the next parts.

[bladeofthecetra]

Why do you like Jessie? All she does is hang on you, flaunt it, then when you show interest run away and hide, she's a total bitch!

@chasiingrain @evcryopeneye

He sighed, shaking his head, if this was almost any other subject he wouldn’t say anything, but unlike the ones saying he wasn’t worthy of them, such as with Tifa and Aerith, which he actually agreed with, this was an attack on someone that he cherished, considered special, and quite frankly, whom he was a fan of as a person, an actress, and so much more.

“First things first, if you ever call someone that I treasure a bitch again I won’t hesitate to melt your face, slide your legs and arms off, and then cauterize them so you don’t bleed out followed by castrating you........as for the rest, the reason why I like her is because she is a treasure. She is pure, earnest, hardworking and very kind and caring. Everything she does weighs on her, far more then it should, and that is very rare, more then rare it’s special, she won’t do something that will just hurt other’s because it makes it easier, instead she’ll dwell on it for hours, days, even weeks, trying to find a way to save as many as she can and if any single person dies she will blame herself, and use that as a means to become better in the future. 

“She is someone so pure, and so wonderful, that she draws you in. Her little flamboyant personae is just to make things easier on other’s, but the real her isn’t some easygoing, loose woman that truly wants to sleep around, it’s one of the most amazing people I have ever seen in my life, and I would die for her. So before you dare insult her, think about whom you are insulting, because you’re insulting someone that is trying to save all of your lives, your families lives, and everyones souls.

“We celebrate heroes like her, we do not insult them.”

[razieltwelve]

Briefing (Final Rose AU Snippet)

Note: This is set in the Tifa/Lightning/Fang/Summer AU.

X     X     X

“You know why you are here, right?”

Averia nodded at her mother. “It’s about Elsa, isn’t it?”

“Under normal circumstances, a princess would not be attending Beacon Senior Academy. If she wanted training, she would be receiving it personally from elite tutors while still residing in her home kingdom. Elsa, however, was adamant on receiving a proper education as a huntress, with all that implied.”

“Understood.” Despite being a single word, Averia’s approval was obvious. Elsa did not simply want to be coddled. She wanted to become a proper huntress, and that was worthy of praise in Averia’s eyes. Indeed, she expected nothing less from her friend. 

“Of course, she would never have been allowed to attend Beacon Senior Academy in the first place if we had not been willing to make certain… concessions.” Lightning sighed. “Given the prestige her attendance brings, to say nothing of the funding and naval assistance her kingdom has agreed to offer, we agreed to certain requests they made.”

“I assume that is at least partly why she is on my team.”

“Correct,” Lightning said. “We would most likely have placed her on your team regardless due to the personality and power fit, but her parents wanted a guarantee as well as assurance that you would personally see to her safety if necessary.”

“I see.”

“You and Elsa have continued to correspond since we last visited Arendelle. You are, quite possibly, her best friend. There is no one here at this academy that she would trust more than you. You will also be her team leader. I think it’s safe to say that if you give her an order, even one related to her personal safety as a princess, she will obey.”

“And having someone with Saviour in close proximity to their daughter would soothe her parents’ worries, correct?” Averia asked.

Lightning nodded. “Like it or not, our family is the most prominent family of huntresses in the world, and the Semblance we share is one of the most powerful in history, some would say the most powerful. Appearances and power matter. You are widely considered to be my ‘heir’ whatever that might mean, and your power is without question.” Lightning’s lips curved up into a small, proud smile. “I would bet on you to beat any student at Beacon Senior Academy even though you’re only just about to start your first year here. You have access to the second level of Saviour, and the third will not be far. If something wants to hurt Elsa, it will have to get through you, and there are very, very, very few things that can manage that, to say nothing of the support Elsa herself could provide in battle.”

“I would take care of her regardless of what her parents asked,” Averia pointed out. “She is my friend and my teammate. I refuse to let any of them come to unnecessary harm.” It went unspoken of course that trying to prevent them from ever getting injured would only hamper their growth, but Averia would not hesitate to step in if she thought they had bitten off more than they could chew.

“There was some concern they might ask your sister to help with this…”

“Ruby is fifteen,” Averia said bluntly. “I have every confidence in her abilities, but she’ll have enough on her plate leading her own team for the first time.” Like many of the advanced students at the Junior Academy, Averia had already led makeshift teams on missions. Ruby did not have the benefit of so much experience. Averia would not allow her younger sister to be overburdened due to the political machinations of others. “It wouldn’t be fair to ask her to do this. She also doesn’t know Elsa as well as I do.”

“Indeed.” Lightning nodded. “Those were my exact thoughts. Your sister is talented, but she is still very young. I would like to hold her back until she’s seventeen, but…”

“Your analysis concluded it was better to let her proceed.”

“Yes.” Lightning nodded. “It did. As for Anna, Elsa’s younger sister, she would also like to attend Beacon Senior Academy…”

“Diana, right?”

“Yes. She fits Diana’s team well, they get along, and Diana has more than enough power to ensure her safety. Anything that can get through Diana would have no trouble getting through any other team we put her on.”

“Politics is aggravating,” Averia remarked.

“Yes, it is, but it is part of the world we live in.”

“I assume Ruby will be getting Weiss Schnee then.”

Lightning nodded. “Correct. The Schnees are an extremely powerful and influential family, and Weiss has incredible potential. They all but demanded we put her on your team, but Ozpin put his foot down. He didn’t want to have two VIPs on the same team. When they found out, the Schnee pushed to have her on Ruby’s team. Refusing would have been seen as an incredible insult given our family’s prominence and Ruby’s status as a prodigy.”

“Then give her Yang as well,” Averia replied. “Weiss appears to be an ideal support type with some room to grow into a highly capable of melee type and a devastating ranged attacker. What they need is some who can draw enemy attention and keep it. Yang would be ideal, and she and Ruby already like and trust each other.” It went unspoken that Yang was one of the people that met Averia’s exacting standards when it came to her younger siblings. Yang could be trusted to protect Ruby if necessary and support her position as team leader. She would also tease Ruby mercilessly, but Ruby would survive. Probably.

“I’ve already put her on Ruby’s team,” Lightning said. “For those exact reasons.”

“Dare I ask who the fourth member will be?”

“Blake Belladonna.”

“Of Menagerie?” Averia raised one eyebrow. “Isn’t she a princess?”

“Technically, no. Her parents rule Menagerie, but they haven’t styled themselves as royalty. However, Blake is very, very good. After the… downfall of the White Fang, her parents took steps to develop their own, highly skilled armed forces whose loyalty and honour they could trust. Blake has been training with them for years. She is already at an advanced level in terms of her combat abilities, even for Beacon Senior Academy.”

Averia almost rolled her eyes at the mention of the ‘downfall’ of the White Fang. They’d had the audacity to bomb one of her Tifa Mom’s establishments went it was undergoing construction back when Averia had been only a few years old. Her parents had responded by attacking the White Fang directly. The campaign had been short, bloody, and decisive. Dropping Ragnarok through the roof of the White Fang’s last stronghold had brought an end to the White Fang and prompted Menagerie to develop its own, professional armed forces instead of relying on zealots and extremists.

“What do the simulations say?”

“Your Aunt Vanille and Diana have run the numbers. Blake is the best fit out of the remaining students. It was either going to be her or Jahne.”

“Give me Jahne,” Averia said. “Ruby’s too nice to deal with her all the time.”

Lightning laughed. “That’s probably true, and Elsa could use some practice dealing with someone like Jahne. At least she isn’t quite as bad as Jihl.”

Averia’s sighed. “Yes, there is that.” In all honesty, she liked Jahne, but then again, she also found all of Diana’s plotting and scheming adorable. There was probably something wrong with her, now that she thought about it. “Is there anything else I should know about?”

“Keep an eye on Team JNPR.”

“Oh?”

“It’s one of Ozpin’s projects,” Lightning said. “The leader, Jaune, is an interesting case.”

“And by interesting?”

“Frankly, he shouldn’t be here if we look solely at his grades and transcripts, most of which are fraudulent. However, Ozpin has pinpointed him as a person of great potential, and Yeul has peered into the future. She concurs it would be advantageous to allow him to remain. However, he may need assistance from time to time.”

Averia nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“He has Pyrrha Nikos on his team, so he should survive without too much difficulty simply due to her prowess. She is not someone who would allow her teammates to come to harm. However, he will need help when it comes to leadership, strategy, and tactics. If he approaches you, at least hear him out.”

“Then I hope he is a hard worker,” Averia replied. “Because if I’m going to help him, I won’t do it in half measures.”

“I would expect nothing less.” Lightning glanced back at her notes. “One last thing…”

“Oh?”

“Try to keep your schedule flexible. Atlas has some… work they need done, and either you or I will likely be the ones to do it. Given my current schedule…”

“Of course,” Averia nodded. “Will I be working with one of their specialists then?”

“Your point of contact will likely be Winter Schnee.” Lightning smiled faintly. “Don’t worry. She’s one of James’s finest which means she may be a stickler for protocol, but she is also going to be highly competent.”

“I see.” Averia nodded again. “Then I suppose I should get going. Aunt Vanille and Diana are running another ‘killer robot apocalypse’ simulation, and they want me to examine the safety protocols they have to identify points of inefficiency.”

“You know, they could simply stop building killer robots if they want to avoid accidentally causing a killer robot apocalypse.”

“They could,” Averia replied. “But we both know they won’t.”

X     X     X

Author’s Notes

Behold the intrigue that goes on behind the scenes! As members of a super prominent family, Averia and Ruby are in high demand as team leaders. Of course, things can get complicated. Luckily, Lightning is up to the task of juggling everything, and there’s no one she trusts more out of her children than Averia to handle this side of things. After all, they’re both killer robots.

You can find me on fanfiction.net, AO3, and Amazon.

[raptortext]

@knightadora asked: 45. To Keep a Cover (couple not established) kiss :: Zack/Tifa - FFVII

(ao3 link)

2,159 words, fake married, Zack needs a hobby

Tifa is tired of pretending to be Zack’s wife. When she signed up to be his guide and host in her hometown she didn’t realize she was going to be part of some undercover assignment. It’s been a few months now and she’s not even allowed to know what progress has been made on Zack’s case. She doesn’t like being left in the dark, especially not like this. At least Zack feels equally restless despite being the special agent in charge.

Out of boredom Zack learned how to bake bread. Tifa never thought she would get tired of bread. Out of the many things Zack has introduced to her it’s the most unexpected. Sure, he taught her knife throwing and that spontaneous sets of squats really do relieve stress, but the bread thing really got her. She’s sure Zack’s also tired of bread but he’s the one constantly baking it.

“Is there anything else you could learn to make?” Tifa offers, genuinely trying to be helpful. Bread is taking a toll on both of them. “There’s ice-cream, nut butters...pies even sound nice.”

Zack knocks on his newest sourdough with only a portion of the zeal he did when he first started doing this. “I guess I could start pickling stuff,” he says absently, seemingly unaware that Tifa suggested nothing like that.

Tifa sighs. “You could do that. It’s not bread.”

The sourdough passes Zack’s inspection and he sets it aside. “You got that right.”

Zack’s phone—the specific one for communication about the assignment—starts ringing. He answers it, listens for the code word, and sighs when he ends the call. “Back door,” he says to Tifa. Tifa at this point knows that this means Tseng is here; it used to be Rude but he stopped coming by for some reason.

Tifa beats Zack to the back door and unlatches it. Sure enough, Tseng is waiting on the back porch looking like a secret agent. In the past Tifa’s asked about the uptight attire and Tseng’s somewhat embarrassed answer was that he looked more like a secret agent in civilian clothes. At least the suit made people giggle instead of whisper amongst themselves.

Tseng nods to Tifa. “Good morning.”

Tifa shuts the door behind him. It’s mid-afternoon. “Good morning,” she replies. She follows him to the kitchen and doesn’t miss the brief glimpse of confusion flash on Tseng’s face when he’s faced with Zack’s multiple bread loaves.

Zack leans back against the counter, hands tucked in his hoodie. “Hey, man. What’s going on?”

Tseng seems fixated on the bread. “Have you considered filing to sell from a home kitchen? We can bring a crew in to make sure it’s up to code.”

“I’ve thought about it but all I make is bread. Well I just thought about pickling stuff and—”

“So what’s new, Tseng?” Tifa interrupts before Zack can go on a tangent about all his ideas for entrepreneurship. “You don’t stop by that often.”

Tseng clears his throat. “Our intelligence—” Zack scoffs and Tifa elbows him. “—has discovered that you two are raising suspicions.”

Zack gapes. “What? How?”

“Are we doing something wrong?” Tifa asks. She feels more calm than she thought she would. Maybe it’s the very vague implication that this situation could end if the cover falls through. It’s a selfish thought but it’s always present in her mind.

“To put it frankly: you two aren’t affectionate enough. Your neighbors are gossiping,” Tseng continues. “A rumor has started that you two aren’t married or aren’t in love. It will only lead to people trying to pry into your relationship which could be detrimental to the assignment.”

Zack and Tifa glance at each other. They’ve mingled enough with the neighbors to guess who it was and have lived with each other long enough to exchange nonverbal communication. “So we just need to be a little more touchy-feely around certain people, yeah?” Zack guesses with a hint of annoyance that Tseng picks up as being personal.

“I suggest you two start learning to kiss each other convincingly,” Tseng says outright. He ignores the gawking he receives. “Being “touchy-feely” isn’t as convincing, especially for your particular neighbors. You obviously don’t need to get more physical than that.”

Tifa breathes a sigh of relief. “That’s good.”

“You might have to start talking as if you are, however. We’ll inform you if that becomes necessary.”

Zack groans and slumps against the counter. “Dude, can’t these people mind their own business?”

Tseng is ever stony-faced. “No. They can’t.”

“Couldn’t you have, I dunno, done all your creepy surveillance before putting us on Gossip Lane?”

“...I’ll admit we may have made a mistake.”

Tifa sighs. “So we’ll just...kiss a little in front of people.”

Tseng shakes his head. “You two will need to make it convincing. It has to seem completely real. If you show any awkwardness or uncertainty it may tip them off that—”

Zack interrupts, deadpan: “That someone among them is telling us what they’re saying behind our backs? And suddenly changing our behavior unconvincingly will make it look like we’re covering something up?”

“Exactly.”

Tifa and Zack look at each other and frown a little deeper. They’re both the kind of people who prefer for things like that to happen organically; honesty is important to both of them and it gets in the way of acting their parts. Tseng senses the discomfort and has absolutely nothing to soothe their concerns with.

He looks at Zack’s bread corner. “I’ll be on my way. May I take a loaf off your hands?”

Zack holds out his hand. “I gotta pay for my new hobby. You can take two.”

Tseng, still expressing confusion yet going along with it, complies. He hands Zack three bills of the highest currency and takes three loaves in a reusable shopping bag from Tifa’s horde.

Tifa escorts Tseng out the back door and returns to the kitchen, walking in on Zack holding each bill to the light. “Do you really think he would give you fake money?” she inquires.

“Can never be too careful with that bunch,” Zack mutters. “Tseng’s pretty generous at least. I like that guy.” He pockets the cash and crosses his arms. Tifa’s lived with him long enough to recognize that he’s uncomfortable. She puts her hands flat on her hips instead of her fists. Zack’s lived with her long enough to recognize that she’s uncomfortable.

“So...” Tifa starts, “We really have to do this, huh?” Zack nods. “When do you want to...um...start?”

Zack looks at her. “Have you kissed anyone before?”

Tifa’s silence is her answer. Zack whistles and Tifa looks away. “I just...never got around to it with this boy from my hometown, okay?”

“Nah, it’s okay. It’s not scary,” Zack says. He straightens up and gestures for her to get closer. “I don’t mind teaching you.” He grins and Tifa simultaneously feels comforted and annoyed.

She heaves a sigh and goes to him. Her heart is beating faster as her anxiety rises. She’s never been intimate in any sense with someone else and suddenly she has to get a crash course in kissing. It’s not her favorite thing in the world.

Zack is taller than her and she’s close enough that she’s extra aware of it. She gasps when Zack puts his hands on her hips.

“Is that okay?” he asks. He waits for Tifa to nod and he tugs her closer, only tugging after every full set of steps Tifa takes towards him. When she’s able to put her hands on his chest, he lets go of her hips. “How about this?”

Tifa swallows. “Um...”

Zack smiles and Tifa feels like she’s seeing a softer side of all his flirtatious, excitable sunshine. “We can take it slow, this can be it for today.”

She looks down at her hands on Zack’s chest. Of course she wants to take it slow, but what if it’s too slow? The sooner they can fix this gossip problem the better, right? Tseng was more pushy and urgent about this than Zack is, at least.

Tifa turns her gaze back up to Zack. “No, it’s okay. What next?”

“Can I hold you?” Zack asks. Tifa nods, hesitant at first, then more confident. Zack puts his hands on her waist this time; they’re so big and warm and holding her so securely.

She could...get used to this.

Tifa looks at her hands. “Should I do something, too?”

“Hm...you could put your arms around my neck, or something like that,” Zack replies. Tifa goes for holding onto Zack’s shoulders. “And now we kiss.”

Tifa takes a deep breath. She closes her eyes. “Okay...okay, I’m ready.”

She feels Zack’s breath and her heart races. He’s so close, closer than anyone has ever been to her. He’s going to kiss her. He’s really going to kiss her. She knows she doesn’t have to worry about being good or bad at it right now—she doesn’t even know what makes a kiss good or bad—but it’s something she’s entirely unfamiliar with and that’s enough to worry her. She stays firm, though; she’s not one to back down from anything.

Zack kisses her and it’s...nice. Lips feel weird but at least his feel nice. He’s gentle but firm, he’s holding her just enough to not constrict her, and he...he smells nice, too. She never noticed. But she could blame that on smelling flour on him so often.

The kiss ends and her eyes flutter open. She stares up at Zack who seems about the same amount of pleasantly shocked as she feels. Zack smiles a little at her.

“Hey, you’re still holding on,” he notices. “Want another one?”

Tifa can tell he’s joking now, that he’s brushing this off by being his playful self. Honestly it’s a relief to see him act this way after a few weeks of him baking endless loaves with increasing depression. She smiles.

“Actually...yeah. That wasn’t so bad.”

Zack blushes a little. “Oh—really?”

“I don’t want to force you if you don’t want to!” Tifa rushes to clarify. She feels her face getting warm. “I’m just saying it wasn’t so bad.”

“We can do a little more practice, I didn’t mind that either.”

Zack kisses her again. It’s the same as the first but this time Zack tilts his head when he parts from her and goes back in. Tifa keeps herself still, she feels stiff. Zack can tell and he whispers on her lips, “You can relax. I’ve got you.”

Tifa relaxes for a moment but when Zack kisses her again it’s a little more intense and her guard is down; she felt protected by herself before but now she feels too open. She pushes on his shoulders and Zack immediately pulls away and lets go of her waist. Tifa backs up and fidgets her hands.

“I’m done for today,” she proclaims. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready again.”

Zack puts his hands back in his hoodie pocket. Tifa’s sticky lip gloss is still on his lips; he doesn’t mind it. He smiles and nods. “Yeah, sure thing! You know where to find me.” He makes Tifa chuckle.

“We’re doing this so we can get away from each other, remember?” she says lightly. Zack shrugs.

“I dunno, I think you’ll be the first person I ask to buy some bread and pickles from me,” he teases. Tifa smiles.

“Okay. I’ll wait for you,” she promises. “I need to get some laundry done.”

She leaves and when she turns the corner into the laundry room she puts her back to the wall and covers her mouth. She can still feel Zack’s mouth on hers, his hands on her waist and his shoulders under her hands. It’s all in her head though, right? These things don’t actually linger. It was her first time, that must be it. She just needs to keep her cool and not let her guard down too much.

She looks up at the laundry machines and discovers that she does not, in fact, have any laundry to do.

In the kitchen Zack scratches his head and figures he should clean up all the dirty dishes and baking supplies; he already cleaned the counter where he kneads the dough so that’s one task down. He takes a deep breath. Tifa’s trust, even if brief, made him feel blessed or...something. He knew before that she was pretty, sure, but the way she looked up at him after they kissed gave him butterflies. He grabs a paper towel, wets it, and starts to dab at the gloss she passed on to him. It wasn’t his favorite feeling in the world but the lingering evidence of her was exciting.

He gets back to cleaning the dishes. He needs to research pickling. He wonders what kind of pickles Tifa would like the most.