I just wrote about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and my experiences with the game leading up to a point near the end of Chapter 4 the other day, but I’m back again, earlier than usual, because I played just a little bit more and was absolutely struck by what happened less than an hour of game time after I stopped playing. When I wrote the post linked above, I’d finished my previous gaming time with an enjoyable hour collecting squads of Shinra soldiers for a parade. Having them waiting for me–coming to attention and shouting greetings as I (well, Cloud), their parade captain, exited whatever building I’d been in–was an absolute delight. Since it was already far too late to still be awake and playing video games at that point, I saved my game and shut everything down for the evening. Then, last night, I fired it back up again, worked my way through the parade, the awards ceremony immediately after it, and then the escape from Junon aboard a cruise ship. What struck me most wasn’t the parade (I could barely pay attention to what was happening in the parade since I had to focus on the quick time event) or even the fun tournament of Queen’s Blood (since every major game needs to have a built-in card game, I guess, which I say somewhat resignedly despite actually enjoying this one), but the way Cloud reacted to being a captain in in charge of this group of soldiers.

Initially, Cloud dons this disguise as a means of getting close to Shinra’s president, Rufus Shinra, in order to find out why the group has been moved so far down the priority list for the company’s various purveyors of violence. When he, Aerith, and Tifa get found by an officer and accused of skipping out on parade practice, Cloud tells his two female companions to follow his lead and immediately falls into line. We know, from the hints in the flashback (suddenly far more obvious now that we can see what Cloud looks like in a Shinra getup with his eyes and hair exposed) or from playing the original Final Fantasy 7 game, that Cloud was originally just a flunky in Shinra’s military. He’d never made it into the SOLDIER program and, as a result of being just a mook, knew exactly how to behave in this situation. There’s room to read his knowledge as something he’d have picked up from his early, pre-SOLDIER days (if you’ve missed the foreshadowing and didn’t paly the original game) and neither Aerith nor Tifa comments on it, but he’s a little too good at playing grunt to have only passed through it on his way to greatness.

As the scene progresses and Cloud does well enough to get named Parade Captain, he seems startled and pleased by what is happening, rather than exasperated or annoyed that his plan has been led this far afield. Sure, it will allow him to get access to the President, especially if his group performs well enough to get a commendation, but one would think that a quieter approach would be easier. Still, as he suggests this course of action to Tifa and Aerith, he seems almost excited. As the group grows, as he picks up more and more squads, Cloud seems to get into the role. He talks more in this two-hour period of gameplay than in the rest of the game up to this point. He speaks in full sentences. He addresses people first. He even has emotion and tone in his voice, rather than just the dull, jaded commentary or the wry, sarcastic humor he typically uses to communicate with the people around him. He becomes more fully a person than in any time before this moment. He struggles to give a speech to his collection of soldiers when prompted to, but eventually warms up to it and gets so into it that he has to be dragged away from it by Aerith and Tifa when he gets too into his role as the leader of this group of soldiers.

Then, after the parade, after the events with Rufus Shinra and what might be the biggest deviations (in terms of potential consequences, anyway) from the original game that we’ve seen so far, Cloud has to contend with a squad of soldiers that have grown found of him and refuse to let him wander around the base on his own while a would-be assassin is still roaming the area. Cloud seems frustrated, initially, by this group that refuses to leave him alone, but he warms to them quickly, acceding to their demands that they be allowed to protect him while he tells other squads the lie he made up, that the attacker was seen on the other side of the city. He speaks them often as they move through the base, ostensibly warning other soldiers but actually making their way to the docks where Cloud intends to board a boat to cross the ocean, going from acknowledging their warnings to comforting them as they express doubt about who they can trust. It is a dire moment for these soldiers, but they faithfully follow their captain even as other groups of soldiers move to attack him and, by extension, them.

I found it difficult not to care about these nameless Shinra soldiers, so strong was Cloud’s concern for them. I did my best to keep them alive not just because I cared about these faithful rebels within Shinra, but also because Cloud genuinely cared about them as well. He expressed affection and consideration in a way I’d never seen in this game, or even in Remake, and I couldn’t bear to think of taking that away from him. This little side plot culminated in him saying farewell to these soldiers and all of them promising to see each other again some day in the future, despite the fact that they all seemed to know that something was happening here that they didn’t fully understand. I sincerely hope that they’re all still alive somewhere and that Cloud will get to meet them again. I want Cloud, a boy who dreamed of having people care about him, about being someone people could look up to as their hero, to have this group of soldiers in his life, so that he will have people who still view him as a hero even when all his illusions about himself and his past come crashing down, especially because his allies all know something is wrong with him and they all seem to be watching him like a bomb that might go off at some point. I just want Cloud to be happy because he sure seems like he could use a bit of joy after all that trauma.