Somewhere, between all the articles I’ve read about Final Fantasy 7 (the original game, Remake, and a few non-spoilery ones about Rebirth), I read a bit of commentary from one of the developers of Remake talking about Cloud’s romance/personal connection scene from Remake. He described Cloud as being five years younger than he appeared, and five years younger than every other protagonist in the game on account of his lost memories, which meant that his interactions with the other adults around him often came off as weirdly stifled or uncertain in a way that mapped better to a 16-year-old teen than a fully grown (if still somewhat young) adult. As I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy VII: Remake, I’ve been thinking about that interview and how it changes the way I read Cloud’s dialogue and body language. At the very base of all this is the image Cloud is trying to project to other people, of being a tough but cool SOLDIER (“ex-SOLDIER”) guy who is untouched by what is going on around him. On top of that, you have this imposed emotional distance that, in the original game at least, was part of maintaining that image of himself. That so far seems to be the case here, though I’ll admit I’m curious to see how that might be changed by the events of Rebirth and whatever the third installment in this series is called. Still, I can’t help but feel that the two Clouds, from the original game and from the Remake/Rebirth/Re-something (my money is on “Renewal,” currently) series, are very different characters.
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I Played Original Final Fantasy 7 So I Can Critically Engage With Remake & Rebirth
Just a quick head’s up: this post contains spoilers for the original Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 7: Remake. Feels a little weird to put a spoiler tag on a game as old as FF7 (it is only six years younger than I am, after all!), but it’s pretty relevant given Remake and, more recently, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
For the fourth time, I started playing Final Fantasy 7. The original, I mean. I’ve only started playing Final Fantasy 7: Remake three times so far. I actually played Remake before I’d played the original. I grew up in a limited console household and none of my friends had a PlayStation around the time that FF7 came out, so I missed my opportunity to enjoy it in my youth. When I had subsequent opportunities, mostly in college and afterwards, I just never felt inclined to spend the time. After all, so much about Sephiroth and the major plot twists of FF7 have seemed into general knowledge of the world. I mean, I knew Sephiroth was a ghost, that Cloud wasn’t really in SOLDIER, and that Aerith dies no matter what you do. Hell, a great example of that is that I’ve never once had to add the word “Sephiroth” to a personal dictionary on any web browser or cell phone I’ve ever owned and that’s not even true for “Aerith” or her incorrectly spelled variant name, “Aeris.” I was under the impression that there wasn’t really much left in the game for me to experience, especially after I watched Final Fantasy 7: Machinabridged and got a lot more of the details. Still, as I picked up my copy of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and realized that my save data for Final Fantasy 7: Remake hadn’t transferred from my PS4 to my PS5, I figured I might as well give the original game another try.
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