Omicron: "The time has come to take on WEAPON!"
*beat*
Omicron: "Damn, weapon got hands."
This amused me, because come FFXIV and Emerald Weapon really
does have hands. Like eight of them, all ready to pound you to pulp.
But he was nowhere to be found. Instead, I found you, collapsed inside. I felt saving you was far more important than going after Sephiroth. There were several others that were still alive inside, but I was only able to save you.
Minor weirdness with the translation: the Japanese script just says there were "others" alive in the area, without any comment on the number. So the word "several" is something the translator put in, implying more than just Cloud and Zack.
This letter is weird; part of it is written as if it were written directly after the events of the Nibelheim Incident, part of it as if it were written later, and while it clarifies some aspects of Tifa's survival, not all. Zangan… Rescued her from the reactor, stabilized her with Cure (hey, magic used in the narrative! At last!), then left to Midgar to find a doctor, and then… What? Tifa woke up, he wasn't there, so she just… Left? Also to Midgar? And Zangan came back to Nibelheim and couldn't find Tifa anywhere? What's the time frame here? He says "several years have passed." I'm honestly more confused than I was before reading this. My best guess is that the letter was written on two separate occasions - one after the Nibelheim Incident, left behind as an explanation to Tifa in case she woke up and Zangan was gone, and another years later when he came back to Nibelheim and decided to add an addendum to the old letter that had never been found in case Tifa came around again.
My interpretation, both from the English translation and the Japanese text, is that this letter was written quite recently, and left in Tifa's house sometime after Shinra rebuilt the village. The stuff from "I remember trying to get people out of the flames" up until "I'm worried about you, but I can't settle down in one place for very long" was describing the events of That Day In Nibelheim, and everything after that is back in the "present day" of Zangan writing that letter, when he visited Nibelheim and found it rebuilt by Shinra.
Again, the translation is wonky, possibly because there was no explicit indicator of
tense in the Japanese script. So "I'm worried about you, but I can't settle down in one place for very long" should have been "I was worried about you, but I couldn't settle down in one place for very long". Or, given the context of the rest of the lines, more like "I'm not the type who can settle down in one place for very long".
Thus, the sequence of events when Zangan rescued Tifa was that he carried her down from the Mount Nibel to Nibelheim, casting Cure all the way, and then continued carrying Tifa to Midgar, still casting Cure. Zangan felt the need to emphasize in his letter that he does not like Midgar, but he headed there anyway for Tifa's sake. The line "I didn't like that city, and my Cure spells weren't helping" should be "I didn't like that city, but my Cure spells weren't helping", maybe with a translation-added clarification "so I didn't have a choice".
At Midgar, Zangan left Tifa with a doctor he could trust, and then continued on his journey, hence the "I'm not the type who can settle down etc". Sometime later, perhaps years later, Zangan returned to Nibelheim, saw the Shinra actors pretending to be townspeople, and decided to write that letter and leave it in Tifa's house.
Now I'm curious if the original Japanese/Retranslation mod still have Cure mentioned, or if it's just something this translator slapped in that they thought made sense.
It does, yes. As in specifically the Final Fantasy spell Cure, which has been consistently (throughout all the games) written as "ケアル", pronounced "kearu". (Regular "cure" in katakana would be "キュア", "kyua", like in Pretty Cure.)
So Zangan was explicitly casting the Cure spell on Tifa, and implied to have done so all the way to Midgar.
Driver: "What're you yappin' about? You're still young ain't ya? Young folks should try everything! You gotta pay your dues while you're young. Go out and look for what you really want."
Zack: "Try everything… That's easy for him to say."
[Zack starts doing squats.]
Zack: "HEY! Of course! I got more brains and skill than most other guys! That settles it! I'm gonna become a mercenary! Yeah! Thanks Pops!"
This is actually a little hilarious, because the Japanese script relies on wordplay that simply doesn't work in any other language.
When the driver says "Young folks should try everything", the Japanese text is "何でもやってみろ", "nandemo yattemiro". Which does translate to "try everything", or rather "try anything".
Zack, after pondering this a while, latches on to the first few syllables: "nandemo ya". Which is written as "なんでもや", and he turns it into "なんでも屋", where "屋" is also pronounced "ya" and means "shop" or "store", or even "shopkeeper", like how "plumber" can mean both the business and the person. And being "nandemo ya" is what Zack decides to do.
In other words, the driver tells Zack to "try anything", and Zack promptly decides to open a "Do Anything Business". Hence the driver immediately going "that's not what I said, you idiot".
"Mercenary" kind of fits in that a "do anything" business can be said to be "mercenary". However, your description of "jack of all trades" fits much better. If Zack had survived to Midgar and started that business, he might well have named it Zack Of All Trades.
Soldier: "What do you want to do with him?"
Cloud: "...Ah… ughhhh…"
Commander: "Forget it. Just leave him."
[They leave.]
I… don't buy that? Like, why would they go to the trouble of executing Zack and then decide to just leave Cloud be? Even if they think he's dying, they just finished off the other guy. Even if they think he's basically braindead, he's still a body full of active Jenova cells. Does Hojo not want his escaped experiment? I could buy that he's already dismissed Cloud as a failure, but it's not like they have to go to any extra lengths to catch him, he's right there. Cloud is a total freebie and they leave him just… Because.
Another case of the Japanese text being more terse and implicit than the translator could figure out without context.
The commander says "これはダメだな", "kore wa dame da na", which can mean
all sorts of things depending on context. Even narrowing it down to the current situation of whether to execute Cloud, the line could mean either "this here is no good", or "this thing is done for". The translator seems to have gone for the former, as in "it's no good to execute this person, so forget it".
However, I would personally have gone for the latter, where the commander says "this thing" (and the term used is indeed for
things, rather than people) is pretty much dead already, so no point wasting bullets. Still a decision born from laziness that eventually causes Shinra problems in the future, but at least it's a plausible motivation.
They're standard Shinra troopers. We annihilate them within moments. The elevator operator is actually still there (I mean, how could she leave) as the elevator finishes going down. If we talk to her, she does her best to not acknowledge us while clearly mourning these two poor morons.
While the English translation has levity where the lift attendant is disappointed at the "two perfectly good men" being killed, the Japanese text also makes her inwardly
infuriated that these intruders killed her "fans".
This scene is kind of hard to parse, but… I think what's happening here is that - Cloud has never had motion sickness before, as long as he thought of himself as the cool SOLDIER from his memory who did squats in a running truck. Mind over matter. But now that he knows himself as Cloud, the young grunt from the Nibelheim Incident who was sick in the drive to Nibelheim, this old self briefly asserts itself - the submarine is like the cramped interior of the Shinra metal truck with its shitty suspensions over the rocky Nibel roads. Then Yuffie punches the commands, the sub launches forward, and it passes, he's in the moment, focused on the controls, on piloting this rumbling war machine, and the sickness passes.
One good thing about the
Japanese script site (again, spoilers in chapter titles, so Omicron do not click) I've been using is it's essentially a script
dump, as in someone going through the files and extracting the script as is. And immense credit to the site owner in formatting it alongside the English text, and adding notes about whether certain lines were cut from the game and such, thus providing greater context.
This means it's fairly easy to see the variations in party dialogue depending on members present. And for some reason, the devs coded this part weirdly.
What happens when you take over the submarine is every member of the party present will freak out over having hijacked a submarine, then one member of the party will try out the controls, leading to Cloud taking over after that party member assures them that it doesn't seem that complicated. In this playthrough, Yuffie is the one who fiddles with the controls first, before begging Cloud to take over.
Other characters have their own reactions: Barret yells at Cloud to stop whining and man up, Red XIII can't use the controls with his paws, Cait Sith can't fit in the pilot's seat, Cid wishes he was flying, and Vincent tersely tells us that Reno is getting away.
But it's
Tifa who gives the true explanation for this scene: Cloud is indeed motion-sick and claustrophobic, but Tifa suggests that Cloud pilot the submarine, because she's vaguely aware of a rumour that people stop being motion-sick when they're driving. And as it turns out, Cloud indeed stops being motion-sick when he drives.
This is a completely missable explanation of events that depends entirely on trying to figure out the game code, to make sure Tifa is the character programmed to act in this scene.
