- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
No? Anyone can get that item and still get 100% completion it just takes a while to get to the second opportunity to pick it up
Why are you spoiling Omi?
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh hey so speaking of breaking the action economy it turns out multiple Counter Attack materia get you multiple Counter Attacks even on the same character.
EDIT:
This caused problems for me in the Corel train sequence as the final enemy there has a steal and I had enough Counter Attack materia stacked on Barret that he killed the damn robot before I had a chance to fish for it.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was doing some math and it is theoretically possible to kill your characters in the materia equip screen. You can have up to 16 materia slots, and high-end materia often has a 5% HP penalty, and some -- like Contain, Full Cure, and Phoenix, to name some Omicron has found so far -- have 10%s.
12 x -5% (-60%) + 4 x -10% (-40%) = -100%.
Could it be done using materia Omi has right now...
Neo Bahamut, Phoenix, Full Cure, Contain, and Ultima are -10% each, so that's -50%.
Alexander, Kujata, Bahamut, Leviathan, and Odin are -5% each, that's another -25%.
Destruct, Time, Comet, Barrier, and Revive are also -5% each, for another -25%.
So yes. Yes it can.
There's even a spare slot -- that's just 15 used.
Update to the above:
The game does idiot-proof this: A character's maximum HP can't be reduced below 10 by materia slotting.
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kairuf
(Verified Kaiger) (Not the Siberian)
- Location
- The land of Potatoes
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
I think that might not be the item they're referring to, then? Or at least, not what I thought it was. I forget the name, never went for it myself, but IIRC there's only one chance to get it, in the final dungeon, and the entire playthrough up to that point basically has to be deliberately structured to get it. For effectively just bragging rights, because it's not even that great mechanically and has no lore value. Which, okay, yeah, from what I've heard, it's impressive people have managed to get it (and I do not know how someone discovered it in the first place), but I think Omicron going for it in his playthrough for the thread would probably result in a significantly less fun experience for everyone involved.1986ctcel said:
(Whereas it sounds like the item you're talking about might actually come up as more than something to not do, so while I'm curious what that item is it might be better answered in the spoiler thread, if you've not posted about it there already.)
The latter explanation is almost certainly the correct one, but, by chance, does it heal for more? Linking HP-Absorb transforming Cure into HP transfer would be neat.
Final Fantasy VII, Part 29: The Lifestream
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Welcome back to Final Fantasy VII, the game where I'm a fucking genius.
Last time, an earthquake destroyed Mideel and Cloud and Tifa fell into the Lifestream.
Which seems bad. Of the things you do not want to fall into, the giant torrent of raw energy that breaks your soul is one of the main ones. Unless you're Sephiroth, then it makes you into a psychic Force Ghost with godlike power I guess.
They both sink, drifting into the green flow. But, if the Lifestream is the souls of the departed, if it's a flow of knowledge, then it follows logically that for two persons to be immersed in it could create the environment for a kind of direct spiritual communication unlike anything that could be experienced outside of it… And indeed, that's exactly what happens.
There's a long shot of Tifa turning on herself, unconscious, in the darkness (which, considering the environment she's physically in is anything but dark, is probably taking place inside her mind), until finally she wakes up.
At first, she asks where Cloud is, and then seems to respond to a voice telling her things by saying "You're wrong" and "It wasn't me" and "I'd never do anything like that"; she's being accused, but of what and by whom, that's not clear. It seems like the game is supposed to be playing a weird medley of sounds like a tuning radio and a barking dog that grows increasingly louder, but in my version the game is completely silent during that scene.
Eventually, the assaults of whatever voices she's hearing proves too much for Tifa, and she starts running away while covering her head and calling for help, eventually falling to her knees and screaming… And as she does, the darkness clears up, and she finds herself in a very strange place.
OH YEAH BABY, IT'S TIME FOR A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE MIND
I dig that there are just… Planets drifting inside Cloud's mindscape/the Lifestream. What are they even representative of? Possibly they are "other minds" within the Lifestream, possibly they're a metaphor for his efforts to try and save the Planet.
Tifa turns her head up, looking at the larger of the phantom Clouds who is looming over the whole scene.
Tifa: "Cloud!? What is it, Cloud? What is this? Is this the inside of your dreams? Or is it… your… subconscious?"
Tifa: "You're searching, aren't you Cloud? Searching… for yourself… I can help, too. We'll work together to try and get the real you back!"
Tifa: "But… where do we start?"
This is where we take back control of Tifa. We are on a central platform, and there are three spokes radiating out of it, each one with the path forward blocked by a Cloud, each one standing in front of a fragment of Nibelheim; one mutters about the promise under the starry night, another about 'a sealed up secret wish, tender feelings that no one can ever know,' and the last one is standing in front of the gates of Nibelheim, and interacting with him moves us to the next scene.
Tifa: "Let's go have a look, Cloud. I know it's not easy… I'll be here for you…"
[The camera moves and the scene shifts to Nibelheim.]
Tifa: "Cloud… look."
Tifa: "Here's the well…"
Tifa: "And that's Gramps' inn, too."
Tifa: "The only truck in town. It's been here since we were little kids, right?"
Tifa: "This is the Nibelheim you remember, right? It's the same as my Nibelheim. That's why this is… our Nibelheim."
As Tifa says this, a Cloud appears, though he's sitting on the ground and unresponsive - but the fact that he appeared at all is itself possibly a good sign! Tifa says that five years ago, Sephiroth and "a young and vibrant soldier" came to town, and asks Cloud to tell her again what happened; as Cloud stands, his head slumped down and staring at the ground, the by now familiar scene of Sephiroth walking up to the entrance of the town and waxing nostalgic about hometowns plays out again.
Tifa says that when she saw "the Great Sephiroth" for the first time, she found him cold, and foreboding - quite unlike Cloud's description of him, but not unlike what we did see of Sephiroth in that flashback, beyond Cloud's own narration.
Cloud appears, as he did in the first flashback, and phantom!Cloud approaches him and fuses into him - but then Tifa tells him, gently but firmly, that no, this isn't the truth.
Tifa: "I've been hiding it for some time, afraid that if I told you… something terrible might happen."
Tifa: "But, I'm not going to hide anything anymore."
Tifa: "You weren't here. Cloud did not come to Nibelheim five years ago."
Tifa: "I… waited. But, Cloud… never came."
Tifa: "The two that were ordered here were Sephiroth and another person…"
[Zack emerges at the bottom of the frame, and the memory ends.]
Cloud, it seems, is regaining some measure of awareness - he's not fully there yet, but he's capable of formulating sentences and questions; Tifa, however, tells him that there's nothing she can say, and he has to find the answer for himself - but to take his time, and do it slowly.
It's… interesting the role Tifa has taken. The tragedy at the North Pole had her so thoroughly shaken the whole time that she was unable to effectively help Cloud in any way as Sephiroth pulled traumatic reveals one after the other, and after that she was just deeply depressed, and had no idea how to help Cloud while he lied suffering from Mako poisoning. So she was kind of… Useless? That's not a criticism, she just didn't have the tools or knowledge to do anything, and couldn't have just conjured them up out of the aether. The thing about Tifa is that her personality is caring and protective, but her skillset isn't particularly great at any part of that which isn't 'protective' (and even so, while a powerful fighter, her stats are saying something interesting about her, in that she's primarily an offensive striker with very high Strength but low HP). So she can watch over the injured Cloud, but not heal him.
…at least, until we enter the Lifestream mind-meld and being a healer is no longer about having healing skills, but about emotional intelligence, empathy, and an ability to guide another person through a messy, difficult mental process of recovery. And here, it turns out that Tifa is genuinely good at this, when she's not in frantic damage control mode against White-Haired Satan breaking someone in front of her.
It's genuinely a great mirroring effect: Sephiroth's strategy to hurt Cloud was to throw at him a jumble of revelations, without full context, possibly lying about some of it, assuming a position of superior knowledge, and doing it so hard and so fast that Cloud would overwhelm and snap. Meanwhile, Tifa's approach is to slowly walk Cloud through his memories, side-by-side, not forcing him to see things her way but instead guiding him to put it together step by step.
The next memory is the starry night at the well.
Cloud: "That starry night at the well… and our promises… WHat if the memory was all just a lie?"
Tifa: "Don't hurry, Cloud… Don't answer too quickly. Just keep checking all those small emotions and it'll come back… Slowly… little by little…"
Tifa: "Right… like the sky that night… the heavens were filled with stars…
Tifa: "That's you, too. You were so small then…"
Tifa: "...and cute."
Tifa: "Sephiroth once said… Cloud made up his memories by listening to my stories… Did you imagine this sky? No, you remembered it."
[She sits down next to her childhood self.]
Tifa: "That night the stars were gorgeous. It was just Cloud and I. We talked at the well…"
Tifa: "That's why I kept thinking you were the real Cloud. I still believe you're the Cloud from Nibelheim…"
Tifa: "But you don't believe in yourself… These memories aren't enough."
[The flashback ends.]
…you know, when Sephiroth said Cloud was a clone shaped by a mix of Jenova and Tifa's memories, I had assumed he meant those memories had been, like, magically extracted and infused into him. If he meant it figuratively as "Tifa talked to Cloud about stuff and he remembered it as his past" then the odds that the 'clone' thing was bullshit have just gone up tremendously, just because it seems so unlikely Cloud would form such accurate memories based on words alone.
This time, though, the Cloud phantom isn't responsive, and Tifa is left musing about 'memories,' and then we get some… Awkward dialogue, which is unfortunate because it's meant to be a breakthrough.
Tifa: "Cloud, what about your other memories?"
Tifa: "No, not memories. A memory is something that has to be consciously recalled, right? That's why sometimes it can be mistaken or wrong."
Tifa: "It's different from a memory that's locked deep inside your heart. That's why it must be a fake. If he could recall up that memory…"
Tifa: "If I say something, you can't remember it. But if you say something, and I remember it, too… Then we'll know that's a memory."
Tifa: "Talk to me. About anything, some important memory to you…"
You can sorta parse what the game is going for here, right? Like, if I were much younger, I might get confused as hell by some of the phrasing there, but reading it now and knowing the translation job was rushed, I can see the shape of what it's trying to actually say and get the meaning fine, but… That's because I'm more literate than I was as a child. Taken at face value, ines like "If I say something, you can't remember it" or "That's why it must be a fake" that are completely disconnected from the sentence right next to them just create confusion.
What Tifa is saying here is quite simple, but is also the best way to cut through the entire fog of 'what if Cloud isn't real': Any memory that Tifa would ask about might only prompt the Jenova-Tifa Memory Gestalt to produce a convincing facsimile. If Tifa asks Cloud to come up with a memory of his own, that she doesn't share, and he provides that memory, that will show that he's a real person with memories separate from Tifa's own. JUST LIKE I SAID ABOUT VISITING HIS MOM. I'm a genius.
Tifa: "Now that you mention it [ND: Nobody mentioned anything, this is totally unprompted.], why did you want to join SOLDIER in the first place? I always thought it was a sudden decision."
Cloud: "...I was devastated. …I wanted to be noticed. I thought if I got stronger someone would notice."
Tifa: "Someone to notice you? …Who?"
Cloud [Voice-over] Who? You know who! …You, that's who.
Cloud: "You…"
Tifa: "Me? Why!?"
Cloud: "Tifa… Did you forget… about those days?"
Tifa: "Look… I… I'm sorry… But what are you talking about?"
[A new, different version of Child!Cloud appears then.]
Child!Cloud: "No… It's all right. You were having a hard time back then. You were so busy with your own things, it's only natural you don't remember me then."
Tifa: "'Then'?"
Child!Cloud: "It's important to me… I hate to say it, but it's a very important memory. Do you want to see it?"
We are led to the third and final spoke of the memory wheel, one which shows a house's window; the phantom Cloud in front of it whispers "A sealed up secret… wish… Tender memories… no one can ever know." This is the first memory-place whose appearance is not immediately obvious from flashbacks, although as an FMV plays out entering the window, it quickly becomes clear what the place is.
Tifa's bedroom, in Nibelheim.
At first, it's just Tifa, a phantom Cloud sitting listlessly in a corner, and Child!Cloud talking, saying this was his "first time" in Tifa's bedroom, which he'd only looked up at from the outside before; then, a number of children appears - Tifa, sitting in the center of a small group of kids.
Tifa is with some of her friends, and Cloud approaches her house. Even though they lived next door to one another, he'd never visited her; and, as he tells her, he didn't know her that well. This surprises Tifa, who protests that they knew each other since they were children and she always thought they were close.
So, remember way back in the Nibelheim Flashback, when we read that letter on Tifa's desk from another childhood friend of hers who talked about how everyone had a crush on her and how Cloud was a weird loner that nobody really liked? This is that friend group. Child!Tifa had her own circle of friends, and Cloud wasn't part of it. Still, just like seemingly every other kid in Nibelheim, he too had a crush on her and looked at her from her window, but they didn't really know each other well. And, whatever feelings Tifa's friends might have had towards Cloud, he returned them well, in a bit that honestly hit a little close to home.
Child!Cloud: "Tifa always used to have her own group."
Tifa: "...That's right."
Child!Cloud: "I thought they were all… stupid."
Tifa: "What!?"
Child!Cloud: "You were all childish, laughing at every stupid little thing."
Tifa: "But we were children then."
Child!Cloud: "...I know. I was the stupid one. I really wanted to play with everyone, but you never let me in the group."
Child!Cloud: "Then later… I started thinking I was different… That I was different from those immature kids. That then… Maybe…"
[A new, shadowy version of Cloud appears.]
Shadow!Cloud: "Just maybe, they would invite me in. I thought that might happen, so I hung around."
Child!Cloud: "I was so prejudiced. …And weak."
Shadow!Cloud: "That night I asked Tifa to come to the well… I thought to myself Tifa would never come… that she hated me."
Tifa: "...It was so sudden. I was a bit… Surprised."
Tifa: "But… It's true we weren't THAT close, but… After you left town, I really thought about you a lot. I used to wonder how Cloud was going. I wondered if you were able to get into SOLDIER? I started reading the newspapers, thinking I might see an article about you."
Child!Cloud: "Thanks, Tifa. Tell him what you told me, later. He'll probably be so happy."
This captures… Such an important feeling. The way some children, when they struggle to fit in, when they struggle to be accepted, whether because other children are actively rejecting them or because they're too shy or socially awkward to actively approach them, end up rationalizing their isolation as the result of their superior maturity and looking down on other children for being children. I've been that child; I've told myself that I was smarter and more mature than other kids to cope with my social difficulties, that the kind of book or movie was better, more elevated than my peers', and so said something about me, about my intelligence and maturity. There is a genuine form of arrogance that arises from it, and which makes it even harder to form connections because the other children correctly identify that you're looking down on them and they reject you even more as a result. Even if this attitude manifests as a response to rejection first, it's maladaptive. It will only isolate you further, while also leaving you potentially open to manipulation by adults who play into that sense that you're different, smarter and more mature than everyone else, and therefore it's natural for them to give you their attention.
But how could you know better? You're a child. That's the whole point. You don't understand yet how this attitude is screwing you over and making you vulnerable.
Also, this may just be how their children's models look, but I think they might have made Child!Cloud a little… chubby? It would fit the vibe.
This is a memory Cloud could not have drawn from Tifa. Something she could never have known. She remembers her childhood differently. Because she never did hate Cloud, she doesn't particularly remember them being distant, and she thinks they were closer than they were, especially after the promise at the water tower made Cloud loom larger in her mind than he used to. It was a big, bold, foolish gesture, and it immediately made an impression on her; and once she had that impression, it was easy to remember everything before that as them being close friends, because it would be weird for Cloud to tell her he was going to join SOLDIER and promise to be her hero when she was ever in trouble if they hadn't been close before, wouldn't it? It just makes more sense that way.
In a way, Cloud wasn't the only one who rewrote his own memories of his childhood. Only Tifa (probably) didn't need any magic to accomplish this, just ordinary human psychology.
The depth of psychological nuance at work here is genuinely miles beyond anything even VI, which had some strong character work, ever attempted.
Tifa asks Cloud why this day was so special, why this was the first time he actually visited her in person, and that's when we learn why the memory-Tifa, throughout this whole scene, is sitting on the ground curled up into a ball: This was the day her mom died.
Child!Tifa says aloud she wants to see her mom, then gets up and runs out of the room. Fade to white, and fade again on Mt Nibel, with all the children having gathered at the foot of the mountains.
The children talk about Mt Nibel as a mountain that no one crosses alive, and Tifa asks if the dead, like her mom, have passed through it, and then decides to head for them. It's… weird. I think the idea here is that in Tifa's child logic, if no one alive crosses the mountains, the spirits of the dead still might, and so if she crosses the mountain herself, she'll see those spirits and see her mom again? Kind of like how in some older mythologies the underworld lies beyond a mountain range at the edge of the world? I suppose it doesn't really need much interrogating, it's just weird child magical thinking to cope with grief.
Also, does the 'no one crosses the mountain alive' mean that this predates the construction of the Nibelheim Reactor? That makes its construction a pretty short time frame in the overall plot, not sure what to think of this.
Either way, Tifa has taken a look at the Mountain That Kills People, and decided to just rush straight there. This does cast an interesting light about her being, a few years later, "Nibelheim's best guide" - she learned the paths of this mountain the hard way, from a young age, by going there and surviving. Which is an edge of recklessness that she doesn't often look like she has, but which is consistent if you look past the surface at stuff like her membership in Avalanche or, hm, her grabbing Masamune and bum-rushing Sephiroth in anger.
Tifa heads for the mountain, and at first her friends follow her, but then one by one they seem to get scared and turn back, while from far behind, Cloud approaches, catching up with her.
Then, we move to a white space, where Child!Cloud and Child!Tifa are both lying on the ground unconscious while Tifa, Phantom!Cloud and Shadow!Cloud are looking at them (man there are a lot of Tifas and Clouds in this scene).
We don't see how, but at one point, Tifa and Cloud both fell off a cliff. Adults from Nibelheim, likely alerted by Tifa's other friends, arrive and pick Tifa up - and her father immediately proceeds to scold Cloud, assuming that he's the one who brought her there and that this whole thing was his stupid idea.
Note how he's not even helping up a child who just fell off a cliff and is instead yelling at him while he's still half-knocked out on the ground. I do not like Tifa's dad.
Unfortunately, Tifa isn't awake to clear up the truth (they probably wouldn't believe her anyway). She spends seven days in a coma, and everyone in Nibelheim thinks she's going to die - and Cloud blames himself for not being able to help or protect her, and is full of anger at what he perceives as his weakness. And he proceeded to project that guilt, convincing himself that Tifa blames him as well like the rest of the village did, and started spiraling, getting into constant fights with other kids, "going out of control" as he puts it.
Then he heard about Sephiroth, and he thought, if he was as strong as him, maybe Tifa would notice him.
Man. What a hot mess of a psychological drama.
To clarify, because the game never puts dates to any of what it's talking about here and is playing loose with linear time, my understanding is that things unfolded in that order:
Cloud suffers social rejection -> Cloud copes by developing a superiority complex and contempt for other, 'immature' children -> Cloud develops a crush on Tifa which is simultaneous to his maturity complex -> Tifa's mom dies -> Cloud goes to Tifa's house for the first time to offer his condolences or his presence -> Tifa heads for Mt Nibel and Cloud follows after her -> They fall, Cloud is blamed for it, Tifa spends days in a coma -> Cloud turns to aggression and violence out of a chaotic jumble of guilt, adults blaming him, other children rejecting him, and his crush on Tifa that he doesn't know how to act on -> Cloud hears about Sephiroth and develops the idea of joining SOLDIER -> Cloud asks Tifa to join him at the water tower and there, tells her about his plans and makes his promise to help her one day -> Cloud leaves Nibelheim.
Which is a fairly coherent timeline and series of events, but one that is made trippier by the choice of presentation, the unlabeled chronology, the multiple versions of Cloud hanging around in his mindscape and taking turns talking, and the poor translation. I can easily see how a young player would come out of this whole sequence just feeling confused.
There is another aspect to this, though. Everything that Cloud just said existed entirely in his own head, and Tifa was completely oblivious to his internal teenage drama, both as a child and as an adult.
Which means that knowledge can't come from her.
Which means this Cloud couldn't have been made five years ago nor have imprinted his memories entirely based on her.
Which means I fucking called it.
Tifa: "Sorry, Cloud. If I had only remembered more clearly what happened, I could have done something sooner…"
Cloud: "It's not your fault, Tifa."
Tifa: "But, I remember back when we were eight! That's it! Now I know! You weren't created five years ago. My childhood memories weren't all made up! Hang in there Cloud! Just a little longer! You've almost found the real you! Let's go back to Nibelheim again!"
At this point, Shadow!Cloud and Phantom!Cloud merge together, which seems to represent the fractured parts of his psyche fusing back together as he collects the pieces of his past that he forgot, and Cloud and Tifa together head back to the Nibelheim shard of his memories - and running through Nibelheim, towards their memory of the Reactor, and the final confrontation with Sephiroth.
Again, we see Sephiroth wrest Masamune away from Tifa and slash her, then Tifa fall down the stairs - only now, instead of Cloud, it's the Black-Haired Man entering the scene - and at last, we have in-character confirmation of his identity.
Zack. Aerith's ex-boyfriend. We already knew that, and if we didn't know I think I made a convincing argument that we would have guessed by that point, but here we have in-character confirmation and the characters themselves knowing it. Then Zack heads into the Jenova chamber and comes flying back out, struck by Sephiroth, and his body collapses onto one of the vats.
But then Tifa wonders - how did Cloud know about the parts after she was struck and passed out? Did he "see it all"?
The answer is yes. Of course. As soon as the game clarified earlier in this update that the earlier bullshit about being "born from Tifa's memories" was meant to allude to a much more realistic "Cloud thinks he remembers things because Tifa told him about them" process rather than suggesting Cloud magically pulled knowledge out of Tifa's mind through Jenova weirdness, it became obvious that this couldn't be how he formed his ultra-realistic memories of the Nibelheim Incident, and therefore Cloud had to be physically present for all of this.
And there we get to the part I'm so mad about because I saw this coming but I didn't say. It fit together so neatly that instead of thinking "oh, this explains everything," I second-guessed myself and thought "I'm probably going too far with this guess" and didn't put it explicitly in the update and merely said "the Nibelheim Incident happened and he went on the run" because I wanted to remain conservative and avoid looking like a total fool if truth turned out completely unlike my theories. But I should have known. I should have had confidence. I knew it the entire time.
Wait a second… Let me just pull up a line from a couple of updates ago…
YEAH YOU CAN'T PULL THE WOOL OVER MY EYES THAT EASILY
CLOUD WAS ONE OF THE SHINRA SOLDIERS ACCOMPANYING ZACK AND SEPHIROTH.
It all just makes perfect sense! It means he was actually physically present to observe all the events of the flashback, which is why he knows about the stuff Tifa wasn't there for or that Zack didn't observe directly! It explains the visit to his mom. The only obstacle to this is 'well okay but if so why did Tifa think he wasn't in Nibelheim at the time' and the answer was already pretty visible several updates ago but is even more obvious now that we've seen how much shame/guilt/a desire to be strong drove Young Cloud to his actions: He was ashamed he never made it into SOLDIER, so he didn't want anyone in Nibelheim to know he was there.
How many times have I brought up the face-concealing Shinra helmets making it comically easy for people to disguise themselves as Shinra soldiers and hide their identities even from people who have seen them in person before? The way Cloud was able to take part in parade activities right in front of Rufus and Heidegger without them being any wiser was foreshadowing this entire time.
God, I'm not going to pretend that FF7 doesn't have writing issues at times and frustrating low points and some stuff that doesn't make sense or fit together but when it is cooking it is cooking.
Cloud says "I saw everything" as the shadowy soldier in the flashback pauses near Zack's body, picks up the Buster Sword, and heads into the Jenova chamber.
Cloud: "I had so much respect for you… I admired you…"
And there, Cloud rushes him while his back is turn, and strikes before Sephiroth can think to defend himself. Amazingly, Sephiroth slumps over and falls, seemingly unconscious. Slain by a surprise blow by an angry young man (or not, as we'll see soon). The Shinra soldier turns around, slowly walking towards the camera, and takes off his helmet, revealing the truth we already know.
And then, a montage of several scenes from the Nibelheim flashback play out, with Cloud in each one replaced by Zack, and the camera moving slightly to focus on the Shinra soldier who was always there, this entire time.
More specifically, Cloud was the soldier that 'Cloud' talked to about having motion sickness in the original flashback. When the first sentences out of Cloud's mouth in that flashback was saying he never had motion sickness! Zack even does that same 'doing pushups in the middle of a running car because I'm too hyped up' that Cloud did in the flashback! He's completely projected himself onto Zack - rewritten his memory to occupy the place Zack did in the past.
God, that's fucked up.
We see the group arrive at the town, only this time there's a difference - Tifa is sitting at the gates of Nibelheim; when they arrive; Cloud sees her from a distance and, struck by shame at never making it into SOLDIER like he'd so boldly proclaimed, puts his helmet back on, while Zack watches him do this oddly and shrugs; when Tifa looks at the group, and sees that Cloud isn't with them, she runs away. Then we go through the burning of Nibelheim…
…and it turns out not all of Cloud's memories of his interactions with Sephiroth was displacement; Sephiroth does turn towards him and has the line asking how it feels to be back in his hometown for the first time.
So Flashback!Cloud was some weird merging of both the real Cloud of back then, and Cloud's memories of Zack.
…
In a way, isn't Zack the one who's been robbed the most in all this?
Zack has had almost no lines so far, even as we start to see the truth of his presence at the Nibelheim Incident. Not none - he asks Cloud why not take his helmet off if he's sick - but he's been almost completely silenced. It's not like we can blame Cloud for this, it wasn't a conscious effort, but… With the burning of Nibelheim, with Cloud's memory issues, who even remembered that Zack existed? That he died fighting Sephiroth to save the town (maybe)? Tifa and Sephiroth and that's pretty much just them, and Tifa started doubting her own memories. Cloud erased him from his memory, and therefore, from history. Even Aerith only knew he left on some mission one day and then she never heard of him again.
God, Aerith.
She died before she could know any of this. Before she could learn that Zack had never abandoned her for 'some woman', that he died in Nibelheim, that Cloud's memories were twisted. This feels so tragic, so… Like twisting the knife in the wound of her death.
We see the burning of Nibelheim only briefly, to show that Cloud was actually that 'dead' soldier in the center of town, only in reality he got up, and headed for the reactor - picked up the sword, headed into the Jenova chamber, stabbed Sephiroth. Then he came out of the chamber, and his first action (but not before confronting Sephiroth, notably) was to pick up the wounded Tifa and placing her seated against one of the vats. He did the same thing in the original flashback - the only difference being the uniform he wore.
And that leaves me to wonder: Did Tifa see this? Was the reason she hesitated to challenge Cloud's retelling of the Nibelheim Incident because she did remember, if hazily, being picked up and carried away by Cloud, and so she wasn't sure if maybe she wasn't the one whose memories had something wrong with them? I don't know.
This screenshot was brought to you by YouTube, because it turns out that the dialogue boxes during this entire sequence advance of their own and I didn't realize that, so when I tabbed out to scream at people about Cloud being the masked soldier I actually missed that whole bit and had to review it on YouTube.
…
With that said the whole 'Cloud picks up Tifa' has always been, and continues to be, one of the weirdest and weakest parts of this whole sequence, whether that's in the original flashback or in the true recounting of the events. The first time I saw this scene, I assumed that it was framed as a failure; when Tifa murmurs "You promised you'd come when I was in trouble" I had thought it was accusatory, that she was saying Cloud failed to protect her and now she was bleeding to death from Sephiroth's sword blow. But now instead she's saying "So you really did come when I was in trouble," as if that scene was Cloud saving her, which he… isn't?
She just got slashed in the chest by Masamune, and what Cloud does is… Pick her up, and rest her against one of the vats. He doesn't bandage her or anything, he doesn't cast Cure (see, here is one moment where you could have had a character use Materia Magic, it would fit into the plot, it would make sense, and it wouldn't contradict anything about which Materia you equipped the PCs with because it's in a flashback sequence!) he literally just moves her out of the way. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.
Then it turns out Sephiroth wasn't dead after all. He's injured, visibly struggling to get up at first, but he can walk, and he does walk out of the Jenova chamber… carrying her head and saying one truly baffling line:
I knew the missing Jenova head would be relevant. Relevant to what, I don't know yet, but relevant!
I have no idea what this 'Just like you' is supposed to mean and I am pretty sure it's just a translation error. In the Retranslated mod, Sephiroth instead says "Did you honestly believe the likes of you could..?" which, if closer to the Japanese script, seems to indicate where the fault lies - Sephiroth has an unfinished sentence which is meant to be 'Did you think someone like you could actually kill me?' or something to that effect that trailed off mid-sentence, which is a pretty standard shounen villain line, only the translator was confused by the line being incomplete and translated it as literally as he could. Probably.
Sephiroth doesn't stop to take revenge on Cloud; he leaves the room carrying the head. It's Cloud who pursues him, and Zack, speaking one of his rare lines, who asks Cloud to kill Sephiroth.
That's a pretty tall order, man. I mean, I assume part of the reason why Cloud was able to land such a solid hit on Sephiroth was because he was already tired from fighting Zack, and now he's severely injured to boot, but still; Cloud is an unaugmented human at this stage.
Yet still, Cloud decides to try. He pursues Sephiroth onto the bridge leading to the reactor, where he calls out to him; Sephiroth pauses in his stride, and as Cloud throws himself at him…
"Don't push it" seems to suggest that, even in the midst of his psychotic break and after getting stabbed with the Buster Sword, Sephiroth had first made a deliberate choice not to kill Cloud while escaping the Reactor. I think he may have been genuinely fond of him.
….Sephiroth impales him on Masamune, then lifts him bodily in the air on his sword.
But then, against all odds… Cloud grabs the blade in his hands, pushes himself down until his feet are on the ground, and then lifts Sephiroth in the air, while still impaled on the sword. In true anime fashion, Sephiroth shouts "It can't be!" even as it, indeed, is.
Tifa's father's body is notably absent from this scene even though he should still be there, but I am making an executive decision to believe that's just a presentation choice to cut down on visual clutter rather than spiral into more Theory Hour based on this singular fact.
A moment of impossible resolve (which I'm pretty sure doesn't work mechanically, as a Cloud suspended in the air would lack any means of pushing himself down to the ground, the leverage doesn't exist, but we'll ignore that), following which Cloud manages to hurl Sephiroth down into the Lifestream.
Check your "obligatory Star Wars reference" boxes, people.
…
Is that why Sephiroth enjoys fucking with Cloud so much? Why he's made it his life's mission to ruin Cloud's?
Because Cloud is in fact the one who killed him?
Which Cloud didn't even remember doing.
Incredible.
I'm not sure what I think of this bit. It's emotionally compelling but it also has some serious Resurrection of F 'Goku gets killed in one laser pistol shot to the back because he wasn't paying attention' energy. Sephiroth is simultaneously the ultimate super-soldier capable of wiping out a town single-handedly but also an ordinary human teenager can kill him by having a surge of shounen resolve. I don't know.
Did Sephiroth actually, physically die here, though? That's harder to tell. He was injured, and bodily thrown into the Lifestream, but that doesn't mean he died as such. Only for some purposes.
But now a lot of other things are starting to make sense. There's something I've been wondering - the site of the Planet's injury that requires all its strength to heal is at the Northern Crater, but Jenova is explicitly called out as the reason the Planet isn't healing and Jenova hasn't been at the Northern Crater for thousands of years; she was stopped elsewhere on the Planet when the Cetra sealed her, and found by Shinra later. So why is it that when we get to the Crater, Sephiroth's physical body is already there, inside a giant Materia at the center of a weird root system?
And I think the answer is the same thing happened to him as did to Cloud. When he was sent down into the Lifestream, he drifted, and eventually came out at a point of major Lifestream surge - only where Cloud emerged near Mideel, Sephiroth emerged at the greatest convergence of Lifestream energy: The North Pole.
And there I want to say his original, wounded/dead body fused with the Jenova head? Or his body was destroyed and he made a new one from the Jenova head? Something like that. Either way, that's how Sephiroth's physical self ended up in the Crater.
And there it is. That's where the new flashbacks end. We are returned to the mindscape, where Child!Cloud is telling Tifa that this is goodbye for now, and then all three phantom Clouds keeping guard on each memory gather and merge together.
Then the larger, looming Cloud in the sky fuses into the Cloud merge as well, and Cloud falls to the ground, whimpering, and his overlapped translucent form fuse back into a normal-looking Cloud.
Tifa: "Oh, Cloud! It's really you, isn't it?"
Cloud: "Yeah… Tifa… We finally… Meet again…"
Tifa: "You stupid jerk!! You had us all worried sick!!"
[Cloud bends over in sudden pain, letting out a wordless grunt.]
Tifa: "Cloud!? Are you all right!?"
Cloud: "V, voice… their…"
Tifa: "I see. We're… in the Lifestream, aren't we?"
Tifa: "Everyone's waiting. Let's go back, Cloud. Back to everyone…"
Cloud: "Yeah, I guess so… Come on, Tifa. Let's go home…"
Does this answer the question of the Backseater? If you'll recall, that was my nickname for the voice that talked to Cloud in his head early on in the game, gently prodding him with some questions and advice. Was it just one of the fractured parts of Cloud's psyche - his sealed-away memories, directly talking to him? It's hard to say because that specific form of positive intrusive thoughts haven't featured for the last twenty updates, briefly appearing after the Nibelheim flashback to ask Cloud why he didn't hang out with Tifa like he did with his mom (and now we know the answer; he was hiding his presence in Nibelheim from Tifa, but for whatever reason, he did feel comfortable enough with showing himself to his mom). Then that presence disappeared entirely without any mention.
Diegetically it's possible the answer is that "as Sephiroth/Jenova's influence grew stronger over Cloud's mind, they cut off his contact with the Backseater." Non-diegetically, though, it feels more like the writers weren't satisfied with that particular gimmick and so dropped it, or plain just forgot it, partway through the writing process. We'll either get an answer to that question (and I have my suspicions), or we won't, in which case that probably means it was a discontinued plot thread.
Both Tifa and Cloud open their eyes inside the Lifestream, and rise to the surface, then wake up… In the ruins of Mideel?
I love it when our heroes have gone through a powerful emotional journey together and they wake up surrounded by their friends, it's a great bit.
Tifa: "Barret… You came back. I… Cloud… Where is he?"
Barret: "Don't worry about him. He's a tough one."
Tifa: "Barret… I… When I was in the Lifestream, I saw the real Cloud. I mean, I didn't really find him. Cloud… he found himself…"
Barret: "Alright, I know… I shouldn't have doubted. But I can't win against you. You're some kinda lady."
Tifa: "People have so many things pent up inside of themselves… So many things they can never forget. Strange… isn't it?"
Barret: "Yo, Tifa! Snap out of it!! Tifa!?"
[She passes out.]
I don't know if this is meant to be a fakeout 'oh no did Tifa also get Mako poisoning', but it's immediately revealed that she's fine, as we fade in to the Operations Room of the Highwind, where Cloud is back on his feet, and we are back in control of him.
Cloud: "Everyone… I'm sorry. I don't know what to say…"
Red: "Don't say anything, Cloud. All you've been doing is apologizing."
Cloud: "I never was in SOLDIER. I made up the story about what happened five years ago and my being in SOLDIER. I left my village looking for glory, but never made it into SOLDIER… I was so ashamed of being so weak. Then I heard this story from my friend Zack… And I created an illusion of myself made up of what I had seen in my life… And I continued to play the charade as if it were true."
Barret: "Illusion, huh? Pretty damn strong for an illusion."
Cloud: "Physically, I'm built like someone in SOLDIER. Hojo's plan to clone Sephiroth wasn't that difficult. It was just the same procedure they use when creating members of SOLDIER."
Cloud: "You see, someone in SOLDIER isn't simply exposed to Mako energy. Their bodies are actually injected with Jenova cells… For better or worse, only the strong can enter SOLDIER. It has nothing to do with the Jenova Reunion. But weak people… Like me, get lost in the whole thing."
Cloud: "The combination of Jenova cells, Sephiroth's strong will, and my own weakness are what created me. Everyone knew that. I'm… Cloud."
Cloud: "...the master of my own illusory world. But I can't remain trapped in an illusion anymore… I'm going to live my life without pretending."
Tifa: "You're sure messed up, Cloud!"
Barret: "That means he ain't no different from before!"
Cait Sith: "By the way, Cloud. What are you going to do now? Don't tell me you're going to leave the ship?"
Cloud: "...I'm the reason Meteor is falling towards us. That's why I have to do everything in my power to fight this thing."
Barret: "Good!! Then you're gonna keep fightin' to save the Planet!?"
Cloud: "It's like you always told me, Barret."
Barret: "Oh, uh, you mean that!"
Red: "What? I don't understand!"
[Everyone together:] "There ain't no gettin' offa this train!"
Echoing Barret's own words from earlier in the game, in case that wasn't clear.
And there we are. We take control of Cloud again, and our adventure resumes.
…
I don't know how I feel about 'all SOLDIERs are actually Jenova cell recipients.' I probably could have guessed this ahead of time but it felt… unnecessary? Like, 'some people get Mako enhancement and some people are implanted with Jenova cells without their knowledge and some people get both' functions just fine at creating various levels of enhanced soldiers with varying degrees of physical and mental problems. It doesn't even make Shinra particularly more evil given that we already knew Mako enhancement has possible dangerous side-effects and Mako poisoning is a thing.
It does explain why there were so many Sephiroth Copies at the Crater… Some of them were probably SOLDIERs, not intended to serve as Copies, who degenerated and fell under Shinra's influence.
No, wait, I do see what this actually brings to the table: It means SOLDIER can't protect Shinra against Sephiroth. Their science division has, either unwittingly or not depending on whether Hojo foresaw it or just didn't care, made Shinra's most powerful elite of super-soldiers with a procedure that makes them inherently vulnerable to takeover by Sephiroth/Jenova, leaving the corporate hegemon of the world totally open to sudden collapse from internal sabotage.
What did I say ages ago during the Mako Reactor #5 raid…
So not so much an 'internal power play' after all as, following the Nibelheim Incident, somebody realized that just maybe stuffing their super-soldiers full of Jenova cells and turning them into Jenova Frequency Receptors wasn't a very good idea. Obviously they're still using them, as we end up running into SOLDIERs in the Shinra Building and Junon Harbour, but they might not be making (as many?) new SOLDIER members, or perhaps they're relegating them to less sensitive positions, which is why we run into more robots, tame monsters and unenhanced humans during major ops.
Not convinced? Well, allow me to present some special evidence.
Do you remember this guy?
Old man in a Junon Harbour shop? SOLDIER veteran who retired and opened a store? We had a discussion at the time regarding what it means - whether he was actually in SOLDIER or just puffing himself up, whether the SOLDIER program had a history of ramping up its protocols from what used to be merely a mundane spec ops organization like Navy SEAL before the introduction of human enhancement…
Well, I totally missed this at first because I was too lazy to explore Junon, but let's head back briefly, just to check up on him.
Well then. I think that about sums it up.
…
Cloud's newly restored memories stop short of explaining everything, at the point where everyone involved in the Nibelheim Incident is effectively left for dead. But it's not difficult to connect the dots from there: Shinra and Hojo come in to clean up the disaster, and they find that Cloud and Zack, while severely injured, are both alive. They're both captured and placed in the glass cells in the basement of the Shinra Mansion, and experimented on. The treatment fails to take on Zack, but Cloud does get to 'join SOLDIER' after all - by being injected with Jenova cells. Eventually, Zack breaks them out, and dies holding the line to allow Cloud to escape. Eventually, Cloud, his mind deteriorating from treatment and Jenova alteration, makes his way to Midgar, where Tifa finds him.
There's about five years lost somewhere in the process, give or take depending on how bad Cloud's memory is, but we'll overlook it for now. Quite possibly he just spent that long inside of a jar.
At some point during this process, Tifa is… Rescued? Either Shinra finds her also near-death and she is sent for actual medical care rather than mad science for whatever reason, or Zangan, who doesn't seem to have died in Sephiroth's attack, finds her and extracts her, sparing her Hojo's attention.
Or she died from her injuries, and the Tifa we know is a clone. This has sort of been a possibility on my mind ever since I remarked that the modern Tifa should have visible scarring from being incapacitated by a direct hit from Sephiroth then just left leaning on a vat before everyone who could have given her first aid died or was severely injured, but I have always rated that possible twist fairly low and I still do. It feels like at this point we're kind of full up on clone twists.
There's more we'll see, I'm sure; I've said that Zack has been silenced in the process of Cloud's memory-editing trauma, and I highly doubt he'll stay that way. We're almost definitely looking at more flashbacks clarifying Zack's personality and how he and Cloud escaped and how he died.
Notably, in all this, Tifa hasn't talked about Zack at all.
Like, that's weird, right? I understand that just getting to the point of 'Cloud clearly remembers his own past' is a big achievement and enough for the day, but now that we've clarified that past, it means that Tifa talked to Zack. He was the SOLDIER she was guiding through the mountains! She must have had some kind of opinion about him, even if they didn't talk much. But she conspicuously hasn't broached the subject at all - and I'm pretty sure it won't stay that way.
When Cloud lays out the facts in the Operations Room, he blames himself and his own weakness for all of it. He created an 'illusion' of a different past. His mind drifted out of a combination of Jenova's cells, Sephiroth's will, and his weakness. He was the 'master' of his 'illusory world.'
And I don't think that's true. There's more to it, and it's going to come with us finding out more about Zack, I'm pretty sure - about his relationship to Cloud, to Sephiroth, possibly to Tifa, and I mean, to Aerith, surely?
For a character who has had two spoken lines, was dead years ago, and whom we didn't even know existed, he sure seems like he matters more than we could have expected.
…
…
Man, Aerith and Tifa are such a tricky balancing act for the game to be playing.
What I mean is, though there's a small degree of 'dating sim' to the early game with the dialogue choices leading to the date and some dialogue changes depending on whether you favor Aerith or Tifa, the game is strongly biased in favor of Aerith being centered as Cloud's love interest, and their budding romance as the core romantic arc of the story… And then Aerith dies, and Tifa becomes the new love interest. I don't want to use a loaded expression like 'take Aerith's place,' because that implies a kind of opportunism that Tifa doesn't have, rather the tragedies that have unfolded have forced her to start the process of unlocking and accepting her own feelings, and as part of that process she helps Cloud navigate his memories, and they discover that she was, in a way, his first love (although they were children then), a crush he'd buried and forgotten, and it's all.. It's a real tightrope to walk, to introduce and then kill off the first love interest, and have a second love interest instead of just grief and loss for the rest of the story. It would be really easy to fuck up. I don't think the story does? I think it handles it fairly well. But there are so many elements of Aerith's backstory that come front and center after she dies, that it contributes to making her death a defining aspect of the narrative - the way so much of the context around her is introduced when it's too late for her to talk about it, or to learn about it. Her mother and father, the true reason for the disappearance of the Ancients, the fate of her boyfriend… So much of it happens in the wake of her disappearance. And so much of Tifa and Cloud's relationship is shaped by her death having traumatized Cloud and prompted a change of attitude in Tifa.
Which makes me really wonder where the Remake trilogy is going, if it actually pulls the trigger on some changes that have been theorized or rumored about. Especially because the Tifa/Aerith relationship feels like such a defining element of the Remake, whereas in the original, they're friends, but they don't have that much mutual interaction that isn't mediated through their mutual feelings for Cloud in some fashion.
Man.
What a sequence. There may be more to say, but I'm all tapped out for today at 9k words. A lot of this sequence confirmed things I already suspected and theorized, and damn it's a good feeling to have manage to guess the shape of the picture before it was revealed, but also a lot of it was new, unexpected, and all of it really interesting. That kind of 'journey to the center of the mind' plot can be done very poorly, resulting in weird asspulls or confusing metaphor fests that don't gel into a coherent narrative, but this one, I think, is pretty good and clear… Once you get past the translation's many (increasing?) mistakes and confusions and oddities.
Anyway, the point is, I'm a genius.
Thanks for reading.
Next Time: The Underwater Reactor.
Last time, an earthquake destroyed Mideel and Cloud and Tifa fell into the Lifestream.
Which seems bad. Of the things you do not want to fall into, the giant torrent of raw energy that breaks your soul is one of the main ones. Unless you're Sephiroth, then it makes you into a psychic Force Ghost with godlike power I guess.
They both sink, drifting into the green flow. But, if the Lifestream is the souls of the departed, if it's a flow of knowledge, then it follows logically that for two persons to be immersed in it could create the environment for a kind of direct spiritual communication unlike anything that could be experienced outside of it… And indeed, that's exactly what happens.
There's a long shot of Tifa turning on herself, unconscious, in the darkness (which, considering the environment she's physically in is anything but dark, is probably taking place inside her mind), until finally she wakes up.
At first, she asks where Cloud is, and then seems to respond to a voice telling her things by saying "You're wrong" and "It wasn't me" and "I'd never do anything like that"; she's being accused, but of what and by whom, that's not clear. It seems like the game is supposed to be playing a weird medley of sounds like a tuning radio and a barking dog that grows increasingly louder, but in my version the game is completely silent during that scene.
Eventually, the assaults of whatever voices she's hearing proves too much for Tifa, and she starts running away while covering her head and calling for help, eventually falling to her knees and screaming… And as she does, the darkness clears up, and she finds herself in a very strange place.
OH YEAH BABY, IT'S TIME FOR A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE MIND
I dig that there are just… Planets drifting inside Cloud's mindscape/the Lifestream. What are they even representative of? Possibly they are "other minds" within the Lifestream, possibly they're a metaphor for his efforts to try and save the Planet.
Tifa turns her head up, looking at the larger of the phantom Clouds who is looming over the whole scene.
Tifa: "Cloud!? What is it, Cloud? What is this? Is this the inside of your dreams? Or is it… your… subconscious?"
Tifa: "You're searching, aren't you Cloud? Searching… for yourself… I can help, too. We'll work together to try and get the real you back!"
Tifa: "But… where do we start?"
This is where we take back control of Tifa. We are on a central platform, and there are three spokes radiating out of it, each one with the path forward blocked by a Cloud, each one standing in front of a fragment of Nibelheim; one mutters about the promise under the starry night, another about 'a sealed up secret wish, tender feelings that no one can ever know,' and the last one is standing in front of the gates of Nibelheim, and interacting with him moves us to the next scene.
Tifa: "Let's go have a look, Cloud. I know it's not easy… I'll be here for you…"
[The camera moves and the scene shifts to Nibelheim.]
Tifa: "Cloud… look."
Tifa: "Here's the well…"
Tifa: "And that's Gramps' inn, too."
Tifa: "The only truck in town. It's been here since we were little kids, right?"
Tifa: "This is the Nibelheim you remember, right? It's the same as my Nibelheim. That's why this is… our Nibelheim."
As Tifa says this, a Cloud appears, though he's sitting on the ground and unresponsive - but the fact that he appeared at all is itself possibly a good sign! Tifa says that five years ago, Sephiroth and "a young and vibrant soldier" came to town, and asks Cloud to tell her again what happened; as Cloud stands, his head slumped down and staring at the ground, the by now familiar scene of Sephiroth walking up to the entrance of the town and waxing nostalgic about hometowns plays out again.
Tifa says that when she saw "the Great Sephiroth" for the first time, she found him cold, and foreboding - quite unlike Cloud's description of him, but not unlike what we did see of Sephiroth in that flashback, beyond Cloud's own narration.
Cloud appears, as he did in the first flashback, and phantom!Cloud approaches him and fuses into him - but then Tifa tells him, gently but firmly, that no, this isn't the truth.
Tifa: "I've been hiding it for some time, afraid that if I told you… something terrible might happen."
Tifa: "But, I'm not going to hide anything anymore."
Tifa: "You weren't here. Cloud did not come to Nibelheim five years ago."
Tifa: "I… waited. But, Cloud… never came."
Tifa: "The two that were ordered here were Sephiroth and another person…"
[Zack emerges at the bottom of the frame, and the memory ends.]
Cloud, it seems, is regaining some measure of awareness - he's not fully there yet, but he's capable of formulating sentences and questions; Tifa, however, tells him that there's nothing she can say, and he has to find the answer for himself - but to take his time, and do it slowly.
It's… interesting the role Tifa has taken. The tragedy at the North Pole had her so thoroughly shaken the whole time that she was unable to effectively help Cloud in any way as Sephiroth pulled traumatic reveals one after the other, and after that she was just deeply depressed, and had no idea how to help Cloud while he lied suffering from Mako poisoning. So she was kind of… Useless? That's not a criticism, she just didn't have the tools or knowledge to do anything, and couldn't have just conjured them up out of the aether. The thing about Tifa is that her personality is caring and protective, but her skillset isn't particularly great at any part of that which isn't 'protective' (and even so, while a powerful fighter, her stats are saying something interesting about her, in that she's primarily an offensive striker with very high Strength but low HP). So she can watch over the injured Cloud, but not heal him.
…at least, until we enter the Lifestream mind-meld and being a healer is no longer about having healing skills, but about emotional intelligence, empathy, and an ability to guide another person through a messy, difficult mental process of recovery. And here, it turns out that Tifa is genuinely good at this, when she's not in frantic damage control mode against White-Haired Satan breaking someone in front of her.
It's genuinely a great mirroring effect: Sephiroth's strategy to hurt Cloud was to throw at him a jumble of revelations, without full context, possibly lying about some of it, assuming a position of superior knowledge, and doing it so hard and so fast that Cloud would overwhelm and snap. Meanwhile, Tifa's approach is to slowly walk Cloud through his memories, side-by-side, not forcing him to see things her way but instead guiding him to put it together step by step.
The next memory is the starry night at the well.
Cloud: "That starry night at the well… and our promises… WHat if the memory was all just a lie?"
Tifa: "Don't hurry, Cloud… Don't answer too quickly. Just keep checking all those small emotions and it'll come back… Slowly… little by little…"
Tifa: "Right… like the sky that night… the heavens were filled with stars…
Tifa: "That's you, too. You were so small then…"
Tifa: "...and cute."
Tifa: "Sephiroth once said… Cloud made up his memories by listening to my stories… Did you imagine this sky? No, you remembered it."
[She sits down next to her childhood self.]
Tifa: "That night the stars were gorgeous. It was just Cloud and I. We talked at the well…"
Tifa: "That's why I kept thinking you were the real Cloud. I still believe you're the Cloud from Nibelheim…"
Tifa: "But you don't believe in yourself… These memories aren't enough."
[The flashback ends.]
…you know, when Sephiroth said Cloud was a clone shaped by a mix of Jenova and Tifa's memories, I had assumed he meant those memories had been, like, magically extracted and infused into him. If he meant it figuratively as "Tifa talked to Cloud about stuff and he remembered it as his past" then the odds that the 'clone' thing was bullshit have just gone up tremendously, just because it seems so unlikely Cloud would form such accurate memories based on words alone.
This time, though, the Cloud phantom isn't responsive, and Tifa is left musing about 'memories,' and then we get some… Awkward dialogue, which is unfortunate because it's meant to be a breakthrough.
Tifa: "Cloud, what about your other memories?"
Tifa: "No, not memories. A memory is something that has to be consciously recalled, right? That's why sometimes it can be mistaken or wrong."
Tifa: "It's different from a memory that's locked deep inside your heart. That's why it must be a fake. If he could recall up that memory…"
Tifa: "If I say something, you can't remember it. But if you say something, and I remember it, too… Then we'll know that's a memory."
Tifa: "Talk to me. About anything, some important memory to you…"
You can sorta parse what the game is going for here, right? Like, if I were much younger, I might get confused as hell by some of the phrasing there, but reading it now and knowing the translation job was rushed, I can see the shape of what it's trying to actually say and get the meaning fine, but… That's because I'm more literate than I was as a child. Taken at face value, ines like "If I say something, you can't remember it" or "That's why it must be a fake" that are completely disconnected from the sentence right next to them just create confusion.
What Tifa is saying here is quite simple, but is also the best way to cut through the entire fog of 'what if Cloud isn't real': Any memory that Tifa would ask about might only prompt the Jenova-Tifa Memory Gestalt to produce a convincing facsimile. If Tifa asks Cloud to come up with a memory of his own, that she doesn't share, and he provides that memory, that will show that he's a real person with memories separate from Tifa's own. JUST LIKE I SAID ABOUT VISITING HIS MOM. I'm a genius.
Tifa: "Now that you mention it [ND: Nobody mentioned anything, this is totally unprompted.], why did you want to join SOLDIER in the first place? I always thought it was a sudden decision."
Cloud: "...I was devastated. …I wanted to be noticed. I thought if I got stronger someone would notice."
Tifa: "Someone to notice you? …Who?"
Cloud [Voice-over] Who? You know who! …You, that's who.
Cloud: "You…"
Tifa: "Me? Why!?"
Cloud: "Tifa… Did you forget… about those days?"
Tifa: "Look… I… I'm sorry… But what are you talking about?"
[A new, different version of Child!Cloud appears then.]
Child!Cloud: "No… It's all right. You were having a hard time back then. You were so busy with your own things, it's only natural you don't remember me then."
Tifa: "'Then'?"
Child!Cloud: "It's important to me… I hate to say it, but it's a very important memory. Do you want to see it?"
We are led to the third and final spoke of the memory wheel, one which shows a house's window; the phantom Cloud in front of it whispers "A sealed up secret… wish… Tender memories… no one can ever know." This is the first memory-place whose appearance is not immediately obvious from flashbacks, although as an FMV plays out entering the window, it quickly becomes clear what the place is.
Tifa's bedroom, in Nibelheim.
At first, it's just Tifa, a phantom Cloud sitting listlessly in a corner, and Child!Cloud talking, saying this was his "first time" in Tifa's bedroom, which he'd only looked up at from the outside before; then, a number of children appears - Tifa, sitting in the center of a small group of kids.
Tifa is with some of her friends, and Cloud approaches her house. Even though they lived next door to one another, he'd never visited her; and, as he tells her, he didn't know her that well. This surprises Tifa, who protests that they knew each other since they were children and she always thought they were close.
So, remember way back in the Nibelheim Flashback, when we read that letter on Tifa's desk from another childhood friend of hers who talked about how everyone had a crush on her and how Cloud was a weird loner that nobody really liked? This is that friend group. Child!Tifa had her own circle of friends, and Cloud wasn't part of it. Still, just like seemingly every other kid in Nibelheim, he too had a crush on her and looked at her from her window, but they didn't really know each other well. And, whatever feelings Tifa's friends might have had towards Cloud, he returned them well, in a bit that honestly hit a little close to home.
Child!Cloud: "Tifa always used to have her own group."
Tifa: "...That's right."
Child!Cloud: "I thought they were all… stupid."
Tifa: "What!?"
Child!Cloud: "You were all childish, laughing at every stupid little thing."
Tifa: "But we were children then."
Child!Cloud: "...I know. I was the stupid one. I really wanted to play with everyone, but you never let me in the group."
Child!Cloud: "Then later… I started thinking I was different… That I was different from those immature kids. That then… Maybe…"
[A new, shadowy version of Cloud appears.]
Shadow!Cloud: "Just maybe, they would invite me in. I thought that might happen, so I hung around."
Child!Cloud: "I was so prejudiced. …And weak."
Shadow!Cloud: "That night I asked Tifa to come to the well… I thought to myself Tifa would never come… that she hated me."
Tifa: "...It was so sudden. I was a bit… Surprised."
Tifa: "But… It's true we weren't THAT close, but… After you left town, I really thought about you a lot. I used to wonder how Cloud was going. I wondered if you were able to get into SOLDIER? I started reading the newspapers, thinking I might see an article about you."
Child!Cloud: "Thanks, Tifa. Tell him what you told me, later. He'll probably be so happy."
This captures… Such an important feeling. The way some children, when they struggle to fit in, when they struggle to be accepted, whether because other children are actively rejecting them or because they're too shy or socially awkward to actively approach them, end up rationalizing their isolation as the result of their superior maturity and looking down on other children for being children. I've been that child; I've told myself that I was smarter and more mature than other kids to cope with my social difficulties, that the kind of book or movie was better, more elevated than my peers', and so said something about me, about my intelligence and maturity. There is a genuine form of arrogance that arises from it, and which makes it even harder to form connections because the other children correctly identify that you're looking down on them and they reject you even more as a result. Even if this attitude manifests as a response to rejection first, it's maladaptive. It will only isolate you further, while also leaving you potentially open to manipulation by adults who play into that sense that you're different, smarter and more mature than everyone else, and therefore it's natural for them to give you their attention.
But how could you know better? You're a child. That's the whole point. You don't understand yet how this attitude is screwing you over and making you vulnerable.
Also, this may just be how their children's models look, but I think they might have made Child!Cloud a little… chubby? It would fit the vibe.
This is a memory Cloud could not have drawn from Tifa. Something she could never have known. She remembers her childhood differently. Because she never did hate Cloud, she doesn't particularly remember them being distant, and she thinks they were closer than they were, especially after the promise at the water tower made Cloud loom larger in her mind than he used to. It was a big, bold, foolish gesture, and it immediately made an impression on her; and once she had that impression, it was easy to remember everything before that as them being close friends, because it would be weird for Cloud to tell her he was going to join SOLDIER and promise to be her hero when she was ever in trouble if they hadn't been close before, wouldn't it? It just makes more sense that way.
In a way, Cloud wasn't the only one who rewrote his own memories of his childhood. Only Tifa (probably) didn't need any magic to accomplish this, just ordinary human psychology.
The depth of psychological nuance at work here is genuinely miles beyond anything even VI, which had some strong character work, ever attempted.
Tifa asks Cloud why this day was so special, why this was the first time he actually visited her in person, and that's when we learn why the memory-Tifa, throughout this whole scene, is sitting on the ground curled up into a ball: This was the day her mom died.
Child!Tifa says aloud she wants to see her mom, then gets up and runs out of the room. Fade to white, and fade again on Mt Nibel, with all the children having gathered at the foot of the mountains.
The children talk about Mt Nibel as a mountain that no one crosses alive, and Tifa asks if the dead, like her mom, have passed through it, and then decides to head for them. It's… weird. I think the idea here is that in Tifa's child logic, if no one alive crosses the mountains, the spirits of the dead still might, and so if she crosses the mountain herself, she'll see those spirits and see her mom again? Kind of like how in some older mythologies the underworld lies beyond a mountain range at the edge of the world? I suppose it doesn't really need much interrogating, it's just weird child magical thinking to cope with grief.
Also, does the 'no one crosses the mountain alive' mean that this predates the construction of the Nibelheim Reactor? That makes its construction a pretty short time frame in the overall plot, not sure what to think of this.
Either way, Tifa has taken a look at the Mountain That Kills People, and decided to just rush straight there. This does cast an interesting light about her being, a few years later, "Nibelheim's best guide" - she learned the paths of this mountain the hard way, from a young age, by going there and surviving. Which is an edge of recklessness that she doesn't often look like she has, but which is consistent if you look past the surface at stuff like her membership in Avalanche or, hm, her grabbing Masamune and bum-rushing Sephiroth in anger.
Tifa heads for the mountain, and at first her friends follow her, but then one by one they seem to get scared and turn back, while from far behind, Cloud approaches, catching up with her.
Then, we move to a white space, where Child!Cloud and Child!Tifa are both lying on the ground unconscious while Tifa, Phantom!Cloud and Shadow!Cloud are looking at them (man there are a lot of Tifas and Clouds in this scene).
We don't see how, but at one point, Tifa and Cloud both fell off a cliff. Adults from Nibelheim, likely alerted by Tifa's other friends, arrive and pick Tifa up - and her father immediately proceeds to scold Cloud, assuming that he's the one who brought her there and that this whole thing was his stupid idea.
Note how he's not even helping up a child who just fell off a cliff and is instead yelling at him while he's still half-knocked out on the ground. I do not like Tifa's dad.
Unfortunately, Tifa isn't awake to clear up the truth (they probably wouldn't believe her anyway). She spends seven days in a coma, and everyone in Nibelheim thinks she's going to die - and Cloud blames himself for not being able to help or protect her, and is full of anger at what he perceives as his weakness. And he proceeded to project that guilt, convincing himself that Tifa blames him as well like the rest of the village did, and started spiraling, getting into constant fights with other kids, "going out of control" as he puts it.
Then he heard about Sephiroth, and he thought, if he was as strong as him, maybe Tifa would notice him.
Man. What a hot mess of a psychological drama.
To clarify, because the game never puts dates to any of what it's talking about here and is playing loose with linear time, my understanding is that things unfolded in that order:
Cloud suffers social rejection -> Cloud copes by developing a superiority complex and contempt for other, 'immature' children -> Cloud develops a crush on Tifa which is simultaneous to his maturity complex -> Tifa's mom dies -> Cloud goes to Tifa's house for the first time to offer his condolences or his presence -> Tifa heads for Mt Nibel and Cloud follows after her -> They fall, Cloud is blamed for it, Tifa spends days in a coma -> Cloud turns to aggression and violence out of a chaotic jumble of guilt, adults blaming him, other children rejecting him, and his crush on Tifa that he doesn't know how to act on -> Cloud hears about Sephiroth and develops the idea of joining SOLDIER -> Cloud asks Tifa to join him at the water tower and there, tells her about his plans and makes his promise to help her one day -> Cloud leaves Nibelheim.
Which is a fairly coherent timeline and series of events, but one that is made trippier by the choice of presentation, the unlabeled chronology, the multiple versions of Cloud hanging around in his mindscape and taking turns talking, and the poor translation. I can easily see how a young player would come out of this whole sequence just feeling confused.
There is another aspect to this, though. Everything that Cloud just said existed entirely in his own head, and Tifa was completely oblivious to his internal teenage drama, both as a child and as an adult.
Which means that knowledge can't come from her.
Which means this Cloud couldn't have been made five years ago nor have imprinted his memories entirely based on her.
Which means I fucking called it.
Tifa: "Sorry, Cloud. If I had only remembered more clearly what happened, I could have done something sooner…"
Cloud: "It's not your fault, Tifa."
Tifa: "But, I remember back when we were eight! That's it! Now I know! You weren't created five years ago. My childhood memories weren't all made up! Hang in there Cloud! Just a little longer! You've almost found the real you! Let's go back to Nibelheim again!"
At this point, Shadow!Cloud and Phantom!Cloud merge together, which seems to represent the fractured parts of his psyche fusing back together as he collects the pieces of his past that he forgot, and Cloud and Tifa together head back to the Nibelheim shard of his memories - and running through Nibelheim, towards their memory of the Reactor, and the final confrontation with Sephiroth.
Again, we see Sephiroth wrest Masamune away from Tifa and slash her, then Tifa fall down the stairs - only now, instead of Cloud, it's the Black-Haired Man entering the scene - and at last, we have in-character confirmation of his identity.
Zack. Aerith's ex-boyfriend. We already knew that, and if we didn't know I think I made a convincing argument that we would have guessed by that point, but here we have in-character confirmation and the characters themselves knowing it. Then Zack heads into the Jenova chamber and comes flying back out, struck by Sephiroth, and his body collapses onto one of the vats.
But then Tifa wonders - how did Cloud know about the parts after she was struck and passed out? Did he "see it all"?
The answer is yes. Of course. As soon as the game clarified earlier in this update that the earlier bullshit about being "born from Tifa's memories" was meant to allude to a much more realistic "Cloud thinks he remembers things because Tifa told him about them" process rather than suggesting Cloud magically pulled knowledge out of Tifa's mind through Jenova weirdness, it became obvious that this couldn't be how he formed his ultra-realistic memories of the Nibelheim Incident, and therefore Cloud had to be physically present for all of this.
And there we get to the part I'm so mad about because I saw this coming but I didn't say. It fit together so neatly that instead of thinking "oh, this explains everything," I second-guessed myself and thought "I'm probably going too far with this guess" and didn't put it explicitly in the update and merely said "the Nibelheim Incident happened and he went on the run" because I wanted to remain conservative and avoid looking like a total fool if truth turned out completely unlike my theories. But I should have known. I should have had confidence. I knew it the entire time.
Wait a second… Let me just pull up a line from a couple of updates ago…
Article: [Sephiroth is] content with just saying 'you were never there, it was this guy,' without bothering to even say who 'this guy' is (well, actually, he never says 'you were never there;' he lets Cloud say it, while Sephiroth himself only says stuff like 'this is the reality' and 'finally you understand' and 'look at this picture').
YEAH YOU CAN'T PULL THE WOOL OVER MY EYES THAT EASILY
CLOUD WAS ONE OF THE SHINRA SOLDIERS ACCOMPANYING ZACK AND SEPHIROTH.
It all just makes perfect sense! It means he was actually physically present to observe all the events of the flashback, which is why he knows about the stuff Tifa wasn't there for or that Zack didn't observe directly! It explains the visit to his mom. The only obstacle to this is 'well okay but if so why did Tifa think he wasn't in Nibelheim at the time' and the answer was already pretty visible several updates ago but is even more obvious now that we've seen how much shame/guilt/a desire to be strong drove Young Cloud to his actions: He was ashamed he never made it into SOLDIER, so he didn't want anyone in Nibelheim to know he was there.
How many times have I brought up the face-concealing Shinra helmets making it comically easy for people to disguise themselves as Shinra soldiers and hide their identities even from people who have seen them in person before? The way Cloud was able to take part in parade activities right in front of Rufus and Heidegger without them being any wiser was foreshadowing this entire time.
God, I'm not going to pretend that FF7 doesn't have writing issues at times and frustrating low points and some stuff that doesn't make sense or fit together but when it is cooking it is cooking.
Cloud says "I saw everything" as the shadowy soldier in the flashback pauses near Zack's body, picks up the Buster Sword, and heads into the Jenova chamber.
Cloud: "I had so much respect for you… I admired you…"
And there, Cloud rushes him while his back is turn, and strikes before Sephiroth can think to defend himself. Amazingly, Sephiroth slumps over and falls, seemingly unconscious. Slain by a surprise blow by an angry young man (or not, as we'll see soon). The Shinra soldier turns around, slowly walking towards the camera, and takes off his helmet, revealing the truth we already know.
And then, a montage of several scenes from the Nibelheim flashback play out, with Cloud in each one replaced by Zack, and the camera moving slightly to focus on the Shinra soldier who was always there, this entire time.
More specifically, Cloud was the soldier that 'Cloud' talked to about having motion sickness in the original flashback. When the first sentences out of Cloud's mouth in that flashback was saying he never had motion sickness! Zack even does that same 'doing pushups in the middle of a running car because I'm too hyped up' that Cloud did in the flashback! He's completely projected himself onto Zack - rewritten his memory to occupy the place Zack did in the past.
God, that's fucked up.
We see the group arrive at the town, only this time there's a difference - Tifa is sitting at the gates of Nibelheim; when they arrive; Cloud sees her from a distance and, struck by shame at never making it into SOLDIER like he'd so boldly proclaimed, puts his helmet back on, while Zack watches him do this oddly and shrugs; when Tifa looks at the group, and sees that Cloud isn't with them, she runs away. Then we go through the burning of Nibelheim…
…and it turns out not all of Cloud's memories of his interactions with Sephiroth was displacement; Sephiroth does turn towards him and has the line asking how it feels to be back in his hometown for the first time.
So Flashback!Cloud was some weird merging of both the real Cloud of back then, and Cloud's memories of Zack.
…
In a way, isn't Zack the one who's been robbed the most in all this?
Zack has had almost no lines so far, even as we start to see the truth of his presence at the Nibelheim Incident. Not none - he asks Cloud why not take his helmet off if he's sick - but he's been almost completely silenced. It's not like we can blame Cloud for this, it wasn't a conscious effort, but… With the burning of Nibelheim, with Cloud's memory issues, who even remembered that Zack existed? That he died fighting Sephiroth to save the town (maybe)? Tifa and Sephiroth and that's pretty much just them, and Tifa started doubting her own memories. Cloud erased him from his memory, and therefore, from history. Even Aerith only knew he left on some mission one day and then she never heard of him again.
God, Aerith.
She died before she could know any of this. Before she could learn that Zack had never abandoned her for 'some woman', that he died in Nibelheim, that Cloud's memories were twisted. This feels so tragic, so… Like twisting the knife in the wound of her death.
We see the burning of Nibelheim only briefly, to show that Cloud was actually that 'dead' soldier in the center of town, only in reality he got up, and headed for the reactor - picked up the sword, headed into the Jenova chamber, stabbed Sephiroth. Then he came out of the chamber, and his first action (but not before confronting Sephiroth, notably) was to pick up the wounded Tifa and placing her seated against one of the vats. He did the same thing in the original flashback - the only difference being the uniform he wore.
And that leaves me to wonder: Did Tifa see this? Was the reason she hesitated to challenge Cloud's retelling of the Nibelheim Incident because she did remember, if hazily, being picked up and carried away by Cloud, and so she wasn't sure if maybe she wasn't the one whose memories had something wrong with them? I don't know.
This screenshot was brought to you by YouTube, because it turns out that the dialogue boxes during this entire sequence advance of their own and I didn't realize that, so when I tabbed out to scream at people about Cloud being the masked soldier I actually missed that whole bit and had to review it on YouTube.
…
With that said the whole 'Cloud picks up Tifa' has always been, and continues to be, one of the weirdest and weakest parts of this whole sequence, whether that's in the original flashback or in the true recounting of the events. The first time I saw this scene, I assumed that it was framed as a failure; when Tifa murmurs "You promised you'd come when I was in trouble" I had thought it was accusatory, that she was saying Cloud failed to protect her and now she was bleeding to death from Sephiroth's sword blow. But now instead she's saying "So you really did come when I was in trouble," as if that scene was Cloud saving her, which he… isn't?
She just got slashed in the chest by Masamune, and what Cloud does is… Pick her up, and rest her against one of the vats. He doesn't bandage her or anything, he doesn't cast Cure (see, here is one moment where you could have had a character use Materia Magic, it would fit into the plot, it would make sense, and it wouldn't contradict anything about which Materia you equipped the PCs with because it's in a flashback sequence!) he literally just moves her out of the way. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.
Then it turns out Sephiroth wasn't dead after all. He's injured, visibly struggling to get up at first, but he can walk, and he does walk out of the Jenova chamber… carrying her head and saying one truly baffling line:
I knew the missing Jenova head would be relevant. Relevant to what, I don't know yet, but relevant!
I have no idea what this 'Just like you' is supposed to mean and I am pretty sure it's just a translation error. In the Retranslated mod, Sephiroth instead says "Did you honestly believe the likes of you could..?" which, if closer to the Japanese script, seems to indicate where the fault lies - Sephiroth has an unfinished sentence which is meant to be 'Did you think someone like you could actually kill me?' or something to that effect that trailed off mid-sentence, which is a pretty standard shounen villain line, only the translator was confused by the line being incomplete and translated it as literally as he could. Probably.
Sephiroth doesn't stop to take revenge on Cloud; he leaves the room carrying the head. It's Cloud who pursues him, and Zack, speaking one of his rare lines, who asks Cloud to kill Sephiroth.
That's a pretty tall order, man. I mean, I assume part of the reason why Cloud was able to land such a solid hit on Sephiroth was because he was already tired from fighting Zack, and now he's severely injured to boot, but still; Cloud is an unaugmented human at this stage.
Yet still, Cloud decides to try. He pursues Sephiroth onto the bridge leading to the reactor, where he calls out to him; Sephiroth pauses in his stride, and as Cloud throws himself at him…
"Don't push it" seems to suggest that, even in the midst of his psychotic break and after getting stabbed with the Buster Sword, Sephiroth had first made a deliberate choice not to kill Cloud while escaping the Reactor. I think he may have been genuinely fond of him.
….Sephiroth impales him on Masamune, then lifts him bodily in the air on his sword.
But then, against all odds… Cloud grabs the blade in his hands, pushes himself down until his feet are on the ground, and then lifts Sephiroth in the air, while still impaled on the sword. In true anime fashion, Sephiroth shouts "It can't be!" even as it, indeed, is.
Tifa's father's body is notably absent from this scene even though he should still be there, but I am making an executive decision to believe that's just a presentation choice to cut down on visual clutter rather than spiral into more Theory Hour based on this singular fact.
A moment of impossible resolve (which I'm pretty sure doesn't work mechanically, as a Cloud suspended in the air would lack any means of pushing himself down to the ground, the leverage doesn't exist, but we'll ignore that), following which Cloud manages to hurl Sephiroth down into the Lifestream.
Check your "obligatory Star Wars reference" boxes, people.
…
Is that why Sephiroth enjoys fucking with Cloud so much? Why he's made it his life's mission to ruin Cloud's?
Because Cloud is in fact the one who killed him?
Which Cloud didn't even remember doing.
Incredible.
I'm not sure what I think of this bit. It's emotionally compelling but it also has some serious Resurrection of F 'Goku gets killed in one laser pistol shot to the back because he wasn't paying attention' energy. Sephiroth is simultaneously the ultimate super-soldier capable of wiping out a town single-handedly but also an ordinary human teenager can kill him by having a surge of shounen resolve. I don't know.
Did Sephiroth actually, physically die here, though? That's harder to tell. He was injured, and bodily thrown into the Lifestream, but that doesn't mean he died as such. Only for some purposes.
But now a lot of other things are starting to make sense. There's something I've been wondering - the site of the Planet's injury that requires all its strength to heal is at the Northern Crater, but Jenova is explicitly called out as the reason the Planet isn't healing and Jenova hasn't been at the Northern Crater for thousands of years; she was stopped elsewhere on the Planet when the Cetra sealed her, and found by Shinra later. So why is it that when we get to the Crater, Sephiroth's physical body is already there, inside a giant Materia at the center of a weird root system?
And I think the answer is the same thing happened to him as did to Cloud. When he was sent down into the Lifestream, he drifted, and eventually came out at a point of major Lifestream surge - only where Cloud emerged near Mideel, Sephiroth emerged at the greatest convergence of Lifestream energy: The North Pole.
And there I want to say his original, wounded/dead body fused with the Jenova head? Or his body was destroyed and he made a new one from the Jenova head? Something like that. Either way, that's how Sephiroth's physical self ended up in the Crater.
And there it is. That's where the new flashbacks end. We are returned to the mindscape, where Child!Cloud is telling Tifa that this is goodbye for now, and then all three phantom Clouds keeping guard on each memory gather and merge together.
Then the larger, looming Cloud in the sky fuses into the Cloud merge as well, and Cloud falls to the ground, whimpering, and his overlapped translucent form fuse back into a normal-looking Cloud.
Tifa: "Oh, Cloud! It's really you, isn't it?"
Cloud: "Yeah… Tifa… We finally… Meet again…"
Tifa: "You stupid jerk!! You had us all worried sick!!"
[Cloud bends over in sudden pain, letting out a wordless grunt.]
Tifa: "Cloud!? Are you all right!?"
Cloud: "V, voice… their…"
Tifa: "I see. We're… in the Lifestream, aren't we?"
Tifa: "Everyone's waiting. Let's go back, Cloud. Back to everyone…"
Cloud: "Yeah, I guess so… Come on, Tifa. Let's go home…"
Does this answer the question of the Backseater? If you'll recall, that was my nickname for the voice that talked to Cloud in his head early on in the game, gently prodding him with some questions and advice. Was it just one of the fractured parts of Cloud's psyche - his sealed-away memories, directly talking to him? It's hard to say because that specific form of positive intrusive thoughts haven't featured for the last twenty updates, briefly appearing after the Nibelheim flashback to ask Cloud why he didn't hang out with Tifa like he did with his mom (and now we know the answer; he was hiding his presence in Nibelheim from Tifa, but for whatever reason, he did feel comfortable enough with showing himself to his mom). Then that presence disappeared entirely without any mention.
Diegetically it's possible the answer is that "as Sephiroth/Jenova's influence grew stronger over Cloud's mind, they cut off his contact with the Backseater." Non-diegetically, though, it feels more like the writers weren't satisfied with that particular gimmick and so dropped it, or plain just forgot it, partway through the writing process. We'll either get an answer to that question (and I have my suspicions), or we won't, in which case that probably means it was a discontinued plot thread.
Both Tifa and Cloud open their eyes inside the Lifestream, and rise to the surface, then wake up… In the ruins of Mideel?
I love it when our heroes have gone through a powerful emotional journey together and they wake up surrounded by their friends, it's a great bit.
Tifa: "Barret… You came back. I… Cloud… Where is he?"
Barret: "Don't worry about him. He's a tough one."
Tifa: "Barret… I… When I was in the Lifestream, I saw the real Cloud. I mean, I didn't really find him. Cloud… he found himself…"
Barret: "Alright, I know… I shouldn't have doubted. But I can't win against you. You're some kinda lady."
Tifa: "People have so many things pent up inside of themselves… So many things they can never forget. Strange… isn't it?"
Barret: "Yo, Tifa! Snap out of it!! Tifa!?"
[She passes out.]
I don't know if this is meant to be a fakeout 'oh no did Tifa also get Mako poisoning', but it's immediately revealed that she's fine, as we fade in to the Operations Room of the Highwind, where Cloud is back on his feet, and we are back in control of him.
Cloud: "Everyone… I'm sorry. I don't know what to say…"
Red: "Don't say anything, Cloud. All you've been doing is apologizing."
Cloud: "I never was in SOLDIER. I made up the story about what happened five years ago and my being in SOLDIER. I left my village looking for glory, but never made it into SOLDIER… I was so ashamed of being so weak. Then I heard this story from my friend Zack… And I created an illusion of myself made up of what I had seen in my life… And I continued to play the charade as if it were true."
Barret: "Illusion, huh? Pretty damn strong for an illusion."
Cloud: "Physically, I'm built like someone in SOLDIER. Hojo's plan to clone Sephiroth wasn't that difficult. It was just the same procedure they use when creating members of SOLDIER."
Cloud: "You see, someone in SOLDIER isn't simply exposed to Mako energy. Their bodies are actually injected with Jenova cells… For better or worse, only the strong can enter SOLDIER. It has nothing to do with the Jenova Reunion. But weak people… Like me, get lost in the whole thing."
Cloud: "The combination of Jenova cells, Sephiroth's strong will, and my own weakness are what created me. Everyone knew that. I'm… Cloud."
Cloud: "...the master of my own illusory world. But I can't remain trapped in an illusion anymore… I'm going to live my life without pretending."
Tifa: "You're sure messed up, Cloud!"
Barret: "That means he ain't no different from before!"
Cait Sith: "By the way, Cloud. What are you going to do now? Don't tell me you're going to leave the ship?"
Cloud: "...I'm the reason Meteor is falling towards us. That's why I have to do everything in my power to fight this thing."
Barret: "Good!! Then you're gonna keep fightin' to save the Planet!?"
Cloud: "It's like you always told me, Barret."
Barret: "Oh, uh, you mean that!"
Red: "What? I don't understand!"
[Everyone together:] "There ain't no gettin' offa this train!"
Echoing Barret's own words from earlier in the game, in case that wasn't clear.
And there we are. We take control of Cloud again, and our adventure resumes.
…
I don't know how I feel about 'all SOLDIERs are actually Jenova cell recipients.' I probably could have guessed this ahead of time but it felt… unnecessary? Like, 'some people get Mako enhancement and some people are implanted with Jenova cells without their knowledge and some people get both' functions just fine at creating various levels of enhanced soldiers with varying degrees of physical and mental problems. It doesn't even make Shinra particularly more evil given that we already knew Mako enhancement has possible dangerous side-effects and Mako poisoning is a thing.
It does explain why there were so many Sephiroth Copies at the Crater… Some of them were probably SOLDIERs, not intended to serve as Copies, who degenerated and fell under Shinra's influence.
No, wait, I do see what this actually brings to the table: It means SOLDIER can't protect Shinra against Sephiroth. Their science division has, either unwittingly or not depending on whether Hojo foresaw it or just didn't care, made Shinra's most powerful elite of super-soldiers with a procedure that makes them inherently vulnerable to takeover by Sephiroth/Jenova, leaving the corporate hegemon of the world totally open to sudden collapse from internal sabotage.
What did I say ages ago during the Mako Reactor #5 raid…
Article: Where is SOLDIER? Like, there was a number of reasons that made sense for them not to be on site the first time we attacked Shinra, but they clearly ramped up their security protocols here, yet their elite task force is nowhere to be seen - instead they are deploying some kind of advance super-robot which Cloud treats with contempt at the very idea it might be related to SOLDIER.
I'm starting to wonder if there isn't some kind of internal power play or purge and if SOLDIER isn't being phased out in favor of more reliable machines.
So not so much an 'internal power play' after all as, following the Nibelheim Incident, somebody realized that just maybe stuffing their super-soldiers full of Jenova cells and turning them into Jenova Frequency Receptors wasn't a very good idea. Obviously they're still using them, as we end up running into SOLDIERs in the Shinra Building and Junon Harbour, but they might not be making (as many?) new SOLDIER members, or perhaps they're relegating them to less sensitive positions, which is why we run into more robots, tame monsters and unenhanced humans during major ops.
Not convinced? Well, allow me to present some special evidence.
Do you remember this guy?
Old man in a Junon Harbour shop? SOLDIER veteran who retired and opened a store? We had a discussion at the time regarding what it means - whether he was actually in SOLDIER or just puffing himself up, whether the SOLDIER program had a history of ramping up its protocols from what used to be merely a mundane spec ops organization like Navy SEAL before the introduction of human enhancement…
Well, I totally missed this at first because I was too lazy to explore Junon, but let's head back briefly, just to check up on him.
Well then. I think that about sums it up.
…
Cloud's newly restored memories stop short of explaining everything, at the point where everyone involved in the Nibelheim Incident is effectively left for dead. But it's not difficult to connect the dots from there: Shinra and Hojo come in to clean up the disaster, and they find that Cloud and Zack, while severely injured, are both alive. They're both captured and placed in the glass cells in the basement of the Shinra Mansion, and experimented on. The treatment fails to take on Zack, but Cloud does get to 'join SOLDIER' after all - by being injected with Jenova cells. Eventually, Zack breaks them out, and dies holding the line to allow Cloud to escape. Eventually, Cloud, his mind deteriorating from treatment and Jenova alteration, makes his way to Midgar, where Tifa finds him.
There's about five years lost somewhere in the process, give or take depending on how bad Cloud's memory is, but we'll overlook it for now. Quite possibly he just spent that long inside of a jar.
At some point during this process, Tifa is… Rescued? Either Shinra finds her also near-death and she is sent for actual medical care rather than mad science for whatever reason, or Zangan, who doesn't seem to have died in Sephiroth's attack, finds her and extracts her, sparing her Hojo's attention.
Or she died from her injuries, and the Tifa we know is a clone. This has sort of been a possibility on my mind ever since I remarked that the modern Tifa should have visible scarring from being incapacitated by a direct hit from Sephiroth then just left leaning on a vat before everyone who could have given her first aid died or was severely injured, but I have always rated that possible twist fairly low and I still do. It feels like at this point we're kind of full up on clone twists.
There's more we'll see, I'm sure; I've said that Zack has been silenced in the process of Cloud's memory-editing trauma, and I highly doubt he'll stay that way. We're almost definitely looking at more flashbacks clarifying Zack's personality and how he and Cloud escaped and how he died.
Notably, in all this, Tifa hasn't talked about Zack at all.
Like, that's weird, right? I understand that just getting to the point of 'Cloud clearly remembers his own past' is a big achievement and enough for the day, but now that we've clarified that past, it means that Tifa talked to Zack. He was the SOLDIER she was guiding through the mountains! She must have had some kind of opinion about him, even if they didn't talk much. But she conspicuously hasn't broached the subject at all - and I'm pretty sure it won't stay that way.
When Cloud lays out the facts in the Operations Room, he blames himself and his own weakness for all of it. He created an 'illusion' of a different past. His mind drifted out of a combination of Jenova's cells, Sephiroth's will, and his weakness. He was the 'master' of his 'illusory world.'
And I don't think that's true. There's more to it, and it's going to come with us finding out more about Zack, I'm pretty sure - about his relationship to Cloud, to Sephiroth, possibly to Tifa, and I mean, to Aerith, surely?
For a character who has had two spoken lines, was dead years ago, and whom we didn't even know existed, he sure seems like he matters more than we could have expected.
…
EXCEPT IN THE REMAKE ZACK IS ALIVE!?
That's Zack, in the Remake, during the final "Escape from Midgar" sequence, with the dome formed by Whispers in the background, being cornered by a bunch of soldiers (or SOLDIERs?) whom he then proceeds to single-handedly defeat against all odds, leaving him very much alive as the Whisper dome scatters.
So what's going on? What's the point of divergence? If Zack survived the events of Nibelheim, would Cloud still be the way he is even after that? If not, does that mean we're not actually dealing with the Zack of this timeline? What are the writers cooking?
God I need Rebirth so badly.
That's Zack, in the Remake, during the final "Escape from Midgar" sequence, with the dome formed by Whispers in the background, being cornered by a bunch of soldiers (or SOLDIERs?) whom he then proceeds to single-handedly defeat against all odds, leaving him very much alive as the Whisper dome scatters.
So what's going on? What's the point of divergence? If Zack survived the events of Nibelheim, would Cloud still be the way he is even after that? If not, does that mean we're not actually dealing with the Zack of this timeline? What are the writers cooking?
God I need Rebirth so badly.
…
Man, Aerith and Tifa are such a tricky balancing act for the game to be playing.
What I mean is, though there's a small degree of 'dating sim' to the early game with the dialogue choices leading to the date and some dialogue changes depending on whether you favor Aerith or Tifa, the game is strongly biased in favor of Aerith being centered as Cloud's love interest, and their budding romance as the core romantic arc of the story… And then Aerith dies, and Tifa becomes the new love interest. I don't want to use a loaded expression like 'take Aerith's place,' because that implies a kind of opportunism that Tifa doesn't have, rather the tragedies that have unfolded have forced her to start the process of unlocking and accepting her own feelings, and as part of that process she helps Cloud navigate his memories, and they discover that she was, in a way, his first love (although they were children then), a crush he'd buried and forgotten, and it's all.. It's a real tightrope to walk, to introduce and then kill off the first love interest, and have a second love interest instead of just grief and loss for the rest of the story. It would be really easy to fuck up. I don't think the story does? I think it handles it fairly well. But there are so many elements of Aerith's backstory that come front and center after she dies, that it contributes to making her death a defining aspect of the narrative - the way so much of the context around her is introduced when it's too late for her to talk about it, or to learn about it. Her mother and father, the true reason for the disappearance of the Ancients, the fate of her boyfriend… So much of it happens in the wake of her disappearance. And so much of Tifa and Cloud's relationship is shaped by her death having traumatized Cloud and prompted a change of attitude in Tifa.
Which makes me really wonder where the Remake trilogy is going, if it actually pulls the trigger on some changes that have been theorized or rumored about. Especially because the Tifa/Aerith relationship feels like such a defining element of the Remake, whereas in the original, they're friends, but they don't have that much mutual interaction that isn't mediated through their mutual feelings for Cloud in some fashion.
Man.
What a sequence. There may be more to say, but I'm all tapped out for today at 9k words. A lot of this sequence confirmed things I already suspected and theorized, and damn it's a good feeling to have manage to guess the shape of the picture before it was revealed, but also a lot of it was new, unexpected, and all of it really interesting. That kind of 'journey to the center of the mind' plot can be done very poorly, resulting in weird asspulls or confusing metaphor fests that don't gel into a coherent narrative, but this one, I think, is pretty good and clear… Once you get past the translation's many (increasing?) mistakes and confusions and oddities.
Anyway, the point is, I'm a genius.
Thanks for reading.
Next Time: The Underwater Reactor.
Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
The thing I love most about this is that Sephiroth would have survived if he just let go of his damn sword. What a weeb.
Incidentally now up to episode 29 of the abridged series without spoilers now. For a fun bonus go back and watch episode 11 (aka the Nibelheim flashback) and pay attention to which of the faceless Shinra mooks "Cloud" is constantly verbally abusing for being weak! Yeah...
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- Location
- Ireland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
fucking legendary hater behavior, cloud punked sephiroth once and sephiroth dedicated as much energy towards "fuck with this blond twink" as he did "become god", absolutely iconic
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I'd completely forgotten Sephiroth survived the initial stabbing and had to be thrown off a walkway. Probably because it doesn't make as much sense that way.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What's funny is that Sephiroth's dunk in the lifestream has been revisited by FF7 adjacent media several times, and none of them are remotely similar to one another on how things happen, other then the basic beats that Sephiroth, Zack, Tifa, and Cloud are present.
In Last Order, Sephiroth pastes Zack and fights impales Cloud twice before willfully jumping into the Lifestream, in Jenova's chamber.
In Crisis Core, Zack fights Sephiroth on the catwalk to a draw and both are injured, Sephiroth knocks Zach down, and Cloud finishes Sephiroth off atop the Mako Reactor, throwing him into a conduit which sets the man ablaze as he drops into the Lifestream.
The subsequent adaptations don't agree with each other at all where the deed happened, what order things happened, or even whether Sephiroth was thrown or jumped.
It's just wild to me that this pivotal moment in FF7's backstory has no good answer on what actually happened.
In Last Order, Sephiroth pastes Zack and fights impales Cloud twice before willfully jumping into the Lifestream, in Jenova's chamber.
In Crisis Core, Zack fights Sephiroth on the catwalk to a draw and both are injured, Sephiroth knocks Zach down, and Cloud finishes Sephiroth off atop the Mako Reactor, throwing him into a conduit which sets the man ablaze as he drops into the Lifestream.
The subsequent adaptations don't agree with each other at all where the deed happened, what order things happened, or even whether Sephiroth was thrown or jumped.
It's just wild to me that this pivotal moment in FF7's backstory has no good answer on what actually happened.
Lol. This almost feels like unconnected teams writing the same thing at the same time, but wasn't ff7 made before the rest were even started, by a long shot?
Ah well the Crisis Core version is the best anyways so I can't really complain
somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
Flashback Boi's squatting, not doing pushups.
This is what makes the fact that you need the squatting minigame explained to you and that you can fail it foreshadowing.
Final Fantasy VII and minigames is truly its the greatest and truest OTP!
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Compilation of FF7 started after FFX, along with FFX-2. The post merger management turned to direct sequels for the first time as a way to utilize assets and design ideas that they had already paid for as time between mainline titles increased.
You might remember this flashback from the remake?
So, note that
Just cause Seph's a super soldier doesn't means he's super tough, and can just face tank being impaled with a metal surfing board, or ignore his own weight.
So, in the reactor, in the underwater part (spoilers, I guess?) there's a random enemy (you might need to grind to find 'em), that drops a key item if you kill him with the morph materia. I highly recommend doing so - it's the only key item to require it.
(if you already did - IIRC, you can just go back)
Another thing to check - now that Cloud remembers, you might wanna comb Nibelheim.
My questions about that (admittedly cool) sequence of events is less "How is he alive?" and more "How is he still capable of standing after taking a sword the size of a child to the back?"
Because even forgetting the very probable spinal trauma there is the whole structural bit where Sephiroth should have folded in half like an old lawn chair when the muscles that keep humans in the upright posture were severed.
somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
Well, the man isn't exactly human to begin with...
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I did a replay in uni where I was like "let's have Cloud pick Yuffie for the Gold Saucer Date" and accidently turned myself into a genuine partisan Cloud/Yuffie shipper
A bold proclamation for someone who we've watched through six and a half Final Fantasy games at this point, that's for sure.
So what I'm getting from this is, as an apology for not giving us the Team Leader Tifa Arc, FFVII is instead going to give us Super Psychic Lifestream SOLDIER Tifa. A fair tradeoff, I suppose.
...Yeah, I get the distinct feeling this bit might hit home for more than a few readers (or really, people who hang around on an internet forum in the first place).
When FFVII hits its shots, it absolutely knocks them out of the park. Like, all memes and "DAE FFVII OVERRATTED/BEST GAEM???" aside, it clearly had to be doing something right to explode the way it did, and one of those things it does right is often the character moments like these.
Well hey, you don't have to worry about liking him, because you know he gets brutally murdered within the next decade!
Yup. Cloud has too many of his own memories to actually be nothing more than a clone, that was just Sephiroth practicing his good ol' Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss routine.
And here we go, the dots connect...
...and I guess that makes you a genius, figuring it out.
Man, now I'm just wishing you had voiced said theory at some point just for the raw "DOES HE KNOW???" energy that would immediately envelop the spoiler thread.
What a way to go, punked by a goddamn Shinra Grunt.
Yup! Sephiroth got his clock cleaned so hard by a literal nobody, that he's been having salty runbacks across dozens of media appearances for over twenty-five years. It's genuinely fucking hilarious once you have the context of this scene for why he's such a bitch to Cloud at every single turn.
WELL SHIT.Old man in a Junon Harbour shop? SOLDIER veteran who retired and opened a store? We had a discussion at the time regarding what it means - whether he was actually in SOLDIER or just puffing himself up, whether the SOLDIER program had a history of ramping up its protocols from what used to be merely a mundane spec ops organization like Navy SEAL before the introduction of human enhancement…
Well, I totally missed this at first because I was too lazy to explore Junon, but let's head back briefly, just to check up on him.
Well then. I think that about sums it up.
I'm sure someone or other will mention it at some point, so I'll just be the first: now that you've got Cloud back with his full memories, might I suggest a revisit to Nibelheim?
Have we actually seen any sign of Zangan outside of the Nibelheim flashback? Like supposedly great martial arts master, trained Tifa, helped save some of the townsfolk and stuff... and then he just vanishes from the story.
Sabin theory: was totally him getting lost between dimensions during the one year time skip for World of Ruin, then wandering right back to FFVI shortly after this to go Bum Rush the hell out of Kefka.
To be... "fair", although we've just talked about how Materia has basically zero actual story connection to casting magic, Sephiroth does have some healing materia slotted in during the Nibelheim sequence.
So, you know, if the game actually used things like that in the plot, he could have maybe patched himself back up slightly.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sephiroth holding a grudge over bring killed like that is my personal answer to the "how much is Sephiroth and how much is Jenova at this point" question. The preference for a particular look and burning restless undead type grudge against Cloud (and preference for that particular look) are Sephiroth, everything else is Jenova.
That is, that Sephiroth is just abs and a desire to avenge himself against the unworthy mortal who dared kill him pasted onto The Thing From Another World in the present day.
That is, that Sephiroth is just abs and a desire to avenge himself against the unworthy mortal who dared kill him pasted onto The Thing From Another World in the present day.
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Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
I think there's also a degree of "This baseline joe shmoe human got me once, and now he's actually mako enhanced. Better not let him get his mental footing." mixed in with his "THIS MOTHERFUCKING BITCH!!!"
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Everybody, please say thank you to the PS1 polygons for preventing this highly dangerous and emotional journey from starting with a gratuitous upskirts shot of Tifa.They both sink, drifting into the green flow.
- Location
- East Coast
Regarding Zack, Sephiroth and Cloud, the impression I get is that Zack was the one fellow member of SOLDIER who could crack through Sephiroth's icy exterior and wound up his buddy. He took a shine to Cloud, and became his buddy as well, and Sephiroth was vaguely interested in this kid who his one friend liked, and so, if wasn't Cloud's friend exactly, was a friendly acquaintance.
ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
Other than that, at the time when you talked about Hojo backing up Sephiroth's story, I noticed that if you disregard the weird 'clone' phrasing, you'll notice that Hojo doesn't actually back up Sephiroth's account, it just sounds like he does from our perspective. He doesn't mention anything about Tifa's memories, only saying he 'created' the clone with JENOVA cells and Mako five years ago.
So knowing what SOLDIERs (and thus the 'clones') actually are, personally I think that Hojo didn't even communicate with Sephiroth, he's just a weirdo who sees people who he experiments on as things he creates
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