One of the things that always sticks in my mind about a lot of video games is the often huge difference between the abilities of a character when they’re in a cutscene and when they’re under player control. Compounding this problem is that there’s also sometimes a huge difference in a character’s abilities from one cutscene to another. Take Final Fantasy 7: Remake as an example: Cloud makes some truly impressive leaps, runs up falling debris, easily carries people while moving quickly or jumping, and then, in other cutscenes, he can’t make the small jump from one side of a channel to another (which was maybe ten feet–fifteen, tops). Hell, the dude can’t even pull himself up by his arms half the time while, the other half, he can easily support his own weight, Tifa’s weight, and Barrett’s weight without straining. Then, throw him under player control and suddenly the dude has to move slowly and carefully lest he fall into the “abyss” which is less deep than some jumps I’ve seen him make. Yes, I know the interplay between these moments is to create drama or make Cloud seem particularly heroic or cool or to maintain reasonable pathing in a video game with a lot of environmental detail that was clearly not supposed to be interacted with. But what if it wasn’t? What if there was some indiscernible but otherwise still present and consistent logic beneath it all that governed whether or not Cloud was capable of incredible physical feats from one moment to the next? There isn’t any that I know of, but sometimes I like to approach games that pull these kinds of shenanigans in a completely serious manner, as if every instance of this makes sense, to see if I can find some wild (or mild) explanation that fits what I’ve seen.

Since all of the moments in this game where Cloud should be able to perform some supernatural feat of physical action but cannot are moments where something dramatic is happening, we could infer that this is a world in which the laws of physics change depending on whether it would or wouldn’t be dramatic for someone to struggle. Sure, Cloud is a Super Soldier, juiced to the gills with Mako energy that lets him do cool green sword slash energy attacks on top of using a ridiculously large blade with the ease that a normal person wields a cool stick they’re pretending is a sword, not to mentioning his incredible combat abilities and general feats of physical prowess, but even he struggles with simple tasks like not running across a collapsing walkway or clearing a ten-foot vertical to get into a shielded information kiosk. This universe would have to include a similar rule to enforce complicated pathing puzzles, since people appear to ignore their ability to leap incredible distances into the air with enough force to kick massive enemies aside and instead find the right order of objects to climb on and monkey-bar across to get from where they are to where they’re going. This mercurial world of drama-based physics probably makes the most sense based on what we see in the game, given how different people react to falling, how only some people (super soldiers and super buff ladies so far) can perform these incredibly physical feats, and how no one seems to notice the inconsistency in their abilities.

At the other end of the spectrum (aka, the much more “logical “scientific” end), it is entirely possible that the humans in this world react differently to adrenaline than we do. Maybe, rather than merely pushing us to act and overriding other responses to stimuli, the people in the world of Final Fantasy 7: Remake also gain additional strength as a multiplicative or exponential factor based on their normal strength. Which is why these super soldiers, super tough martials arts ladies, and corporate operatives can all do such incredible feats when the pressure is on. They don’t have a “fight or flight” response, they have a “fight or go Super Saiyan so you can do some sick flips or save your friend at a dramatic moment.” The brief but intense surge of power being adrenaline-based would probably make the most sense, scientifically, since one of these powerful feats of strength or athleticism is never a person’s opening move or instant reaction. They can only pull them off when they’ve had a moment to prepare or are able to have a second, slower reaction to a sudden disaster. Which is why, when Cloud decides to run after some people standing on a crumbling bridge, he almost falls approximately eight feet into some likely stinky water. His adrenaline spike didn’t help him at all since he was already falling when it happened. He didn’t have a large enough chunk of collapsing bridge to jump off as he fell like he did when he jumped away from a falling bridge in the first chapter of the game.

Another possibility is that they are using once-per-day abilities. Each person gets to do one sick stunt every day in this game and, unfortunately, almost all of them spend their stunts on walking away from falls that should have killed or incapacitated them. Or maybe they’re only capable of incredible vertical jumps, so any jump that requires lateral movement without allowing for much vertical movement means that they can’t use their springy legs to launch themselves unbelievable distances. Or, maybe everyone has some kind of jump magic they can use and just don’t think it’s worth the MP most of the time. So many possibilities. I mean, hell, video game pathing can easily be explained away as the characters in the game being more focused on the task at hand than your average completionist player, not wanting to run fifty miles down a tunnel just to see if there’s a treasure chest at the end of it. There’s so many easy ways to explain away all the seemingly arbitrary aspects of a video game if you’re willing to just buy in, accept them as truly happening rather than being mechanical supports of the narrative playing out in the gain, and seek an in-world explanation. All I know for certain is that it’s fun stepping into the game’s world and taking everything that happens at face value. You can wind up with some interesting worldbuilding ideas that way, if you consider what has to be true in order for everything to make sense.