Final Fantasy VII Lore | Psychology & Story of Cloud

[Music] oh Final Fantasy 7 was nothing short of a landmark in the history of video gaming nothing like it had existed prior and video gaming changed forever afterwards a game on such a scale with such a strong narrative pushed the conversation of video games as an art form the game was also a risk the future of squaresoft and to some extent the budding PlayStation console itself rested upon its shoulders its experimental nature made sure it was anything but a safe bet but for one of those very rare times in video gaming history the game not only lived up to the hype but the finished product actually far exceeded it it pushed the jrpg genre through the stratosphere cementing it into popular culture and enthralling a generation of Gamers that success was in no small part more than a little attributed to the game's protagonist Cloud Strife first he was the poster boy for the game then he was the poster boy for the PlayStation console itself alongside the likes of Crash Bandicoot and later Solid Snake now he remains the poster boy for the jrpg genre as a whole Gamers across the world found a lot that they could relate to in Cloud Beyond his compelling design being one of the first truly three-dimensional or complex characters in console gaming subsequent Final Fantasy 7 media has augmented the character compared to what we saw of him in the original game and he has developed a reputation for having a more morose and Melancholy disposition and lost some of the complexity however this is beyond the scope of this video I wanted to explore and discuss the psychology of cloud in the original 1997 Final Fantasy 7 to look at where his motivations and character traits come from and how he develops as a character throughout the course of the game starting from his childhood through the neheim incident past the events of the main game where his identity becomes confounded with Zach and reuniting with his real identity again in the live stream we will explore how the events in Cloud's life shaped his psychology and how they have dictated his actions however I don't intend to do a full forensic psychological history of cloud firstly because we don't have enough information about him to do so and further the developers of ff7 almost certainly weren't professional psychologists or psychiatrists so attempting to do that would end up with a hyper analysis but that's not to say that they didn't write him with care drawing from natural intuition and life experiences on what makes a person tick and how they develop their identity before launching into the video proper for those who aren't familiar with ff7 or need a little refresher here's a brief synopsis of events particularly pertaining to Cloud you play 90% of the game from the perspective of the main protagonist Cloud stri he represents himself to be an ex-member of a Special Forces Unit named soldier in a flashback sequence told by Cloud we see how 5 years previous to the game events he returned to his hometown on a mission led by the war hero Sethro whilst there seph learns that he was created in an experiment involving an extraterrestrial being named goova by the science wing of the world's most powerful Corporation Shinra seph destroys the town and kills most of the inhabitants cloud is unsure how he survived but vows to settle the score with SEO you travel the globe pursuing the reemerged SEO battling both him and the Shinra Corporation as time passes doubts and inconsistencies appear regarding cloud and who he says he is this begins to Crescendo when it appears Sethro is able to control Cloud against his will at certain points Cloud's confusion reaches a climax whereby he loses his identity completely due to physical and mental manipulation from Sethro and cloud is lost to the rest of the characters for some time with his fate being unknown he is found later however now being in a catatonic State following this cloud and his childhood friend Tifa both fall into the life stream a well of the planet spiritual energy in this metaphysical plane Tifa and Cloud slowly piece together a Cloud's true identity and the truth of what took place in neheim 5 years previous during this it is revealed that cloud never made it into Soldier like he claimed however he did return to his hometown 5 years ago but as a lowly infantryman in the Shinra Army not as an elite soldier so he used the mask of his uniform to hide his identity from everyone in the town following the neheim incident Cloud was experimented on whereby he was injected with goova cells and remained in containment until not too long before the beginning of the game's events Cloud believed he has been pursuing Sethro all this time for Revenge but with this Revelation that he has goova cells within him it becomes harder to disentangle that from his biological compulsion to attend the Genova reunion once escaping containment Cloud due to his experimentation with Jova cells is in a vegetative state his mind attempting to reform his identity after all the insults it has undergone confounds his identity and past with that of his friend and fellow escap Zach Zach was the soldier who came to neim with Sethro in the past not Cloud after finding himself in the Life stream cloud reconciles with his fractured identity and rejoins the rest of his team and leads them to a eventually defeat Sethro in order to try and save the [Music] world Cloud was born in neheim 21 years before the beginning of the game we know that his father died when he was very young but do not know any further details Cloud there was raised in a single parent family by his mother we do not know the effect the absence of a father had on cloud from the way he describes it we can infer he doesn't even really remember his father perhaps having no siblings and being the man of the house in the absence of his father from a young age he had to fulfill a certain role within the household younger than he would have liked perhaps he was also often lonely as his mother was busy providing for them both this in turn could have made Cloud lonely growing up making him feel like an outsider of course a lot of this is just conjecture and also I am no way insinuating that anyone who grows up in a non-traditional mother father household has an increased propensity to develop any psychological deficits or any of that nonsense in fact from what little we see of her Cloud's mother seems to be very caring and emotionally available to her son Cloud describes her as full of energy and she gives him lots of words of affirmation expresses interest in his life and lets him know she worries about him and will always be there for him all in all a paradigm of the perfect parent if we look at the interior of Cloud's house we can see that it is smaller than all the other houses in neheim it is the only house with only one floor and it is just one open planned space with no separate rooms like the other houses with some of the belongings simply being stored in wooden crates also compared to the other houses in neheim the moo conduit that we see in a lot of houses in the world of ff7 is turned off in Cloud's house suggesting that they are not wealthy enough to have it running often given this and the fact that the world of Final Fantasy 7 seems to be in the latter half of its first century of industrialization and capitalism not having a male bread winner in the family probably took a heavy toll on The Strife household cloud and his mother were at the lower end of the socioeconomic Spectrum within the village of neheim and probably had little social Equity or standing this is compounded by the fact that we can see that the world has slipped into a measure of Ruthless capitalism Barrett mentions at the beginning of the game his savings are for Marlene to be able to go to school so in a world where even a child's education must be paid for it is fair to assess the stries were struggling although perhaps things work differently out in the sticks than they do in the Metropolis of midgar speaking of the sticks let's discuss what we know of Cloud's Hometown and its place within the world although Cloud's past detailing the neheim incident is fabricated we can disentangle some truths from it by paying attention the old man who owns the Inn discusses the past of neheim and although we know that cloud would have not actually have spoken to this old man at the Inn as to conceal his identity we can infer that cloud made up this conversation using genuine knowledge of the history of the Town also it acts as a vessel for the player to gain more knowledge about the world and there isn't any reason for this information to be false or misleading neheim is doubtlessly a village in Decline it once flourished during the building of the maker reactor in Mount neble even having a mansion constructed especially for Shinra employees to stay in and in fact we can infer that the reactor at Mount Neel was the first ever maker reactor as Sethro refers to it as reactor number one when reading the books in the library we we also know that midgar has a reactor called reactor number one but I think this is a different nenat to coincide with the sectors of midgar it wouldn't make sense for the Genova project to be shipped between reactors furthermore we see that that Genova project took place in neheim during Vincent's flashback in lucre's cave the old man goes on to describe that those were affluent times but as it seems with Mako reactors once built they don't seem to require much Staffing or maintenance and as well as the decline of all the plant life from the mountain so too did the affluence of the village decline seeing perhaps a slight Resurgence during the Genova project we also know that the truck at the entrance to neheim that has fallen into disrepair is the only one in the village another sign of The Village's economic and cultural deprivation looking at the position of melheim on the world map we can see it resides in somewhat of a remote dead end behind it sits Mount neble of which it is said that no one crosses alive as is mentioned when TAA and Cloud recount the day that tifa's mother died furthermore it is somewhat cut off by a large river to the South that cannot be traversed by foot cloud and Tifa never mention or show any indication that they have ever heard of Cosmo Canyon in the South or rocket town on the other side of Mount neble to the north by all accounts giving the impression of an isolated Backwater Village it is worth noting however that of course video game locations and depictions of locations are actually abstractions of more dense and complex locations it helps to think of video game locations the same as the concept of the cortical homunculus the cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body to proportionally represent how much of the brain is dedicated to the motor and sensory functions of a particular portion of the body as you can imagine certain body parts are accentuated greatly when compared to the realistic proportions video game abstraction of geography can be viewed the same way we are not supposed to believe that the ff7 world has only 20 locations of interest and less than a dozen settlements these areas are accentuated as they are vastly more relevant to the plot of the game whilst other areas that supposedly exist or admitted entirely zangan himself describes how he has 128 students in places all over the world so perhaps the neble area of the world map has more towns and Villages within it and is not so utterly remote but we don't know moreover it is unlikely that the village of neheim has literally only six houses it is of course an abstraction to represent a larger settlement a six house Village wouldn't warrant a general store or an inn furthermore the inkeeper and the general store owners also need somewhere to live there are five children in neble home that we know of when cloud and Tifa were children and they would have each had a house with the rest of their family somewhere and on and on with examples like this the F map of neheim is also a condensed faximile of the real neheim with important points of interest given representation Tifa does State however that she's the number one tour guide in the town implying the town is big enough to have more than one tour guide but further implying that neheim does get some visitation from tourists however this could of course be a factious remark from Tifa given everything we've discussed so so far what do we know about a young cloud and how can we see why he was the way he was at 8 years old and prior Cloud described himself as rebellious and stubborn two traits that combined with what we learned before about his home life are not conducive to making friends he mentions that he always felt awkward around other people as well perhaps Cloud was always busy helping his mom to become comfortable socializing with other people we can also gain some insight into what the other people in the village thought of cloud when Tifa and Cloud fall from the Rope Ridge in Mount neble they immediately assume it was Cloud's fault and that he brought Tia there they also just leave without taking cloud with them having no concern for his safety given his personality traits and the probable social standing of the family Cloud seems not to have been thought very well of in the community given this perception of cloud within the community we see the beginnings of him developing an inferiority complex believing himself to be weak because of his his unsociable traits we then very quickly see that he begins to compensate and cover for this inferiority complex with a superiority complex even though he so desperately wanted to be included with the other children he convinced himself that he thought of them as idiots and immature also perhaps because of his home circumstances Cloud was forced to grow up faster than other children and was less able to Revel in childhood as we sometimes see in children in real life living in difficult circumstances so by comparison the other children seemed immature however at the same time he coveted this immaturity and wished himself to be able to play like the other children despite these traits I think we can also infer that a young Cloud was also deep down a caring and empathetic child the first time he actually attempts to hang out with the other kids is the day that tifa's mother dies why did Cloud pick this day could it be because he heard of what had happened and having had lost a parent himself sought to see if there was anything that he could do to make her feel better I think you could make a strong argument for this When the Children set off over the mountains with Tia as she wants to try and find her mother's Spirit Cloud also demonstrates greater bravery than the other children as one by one they turn around to go home with only Cloud sticks behind following Tifa this is despite it being known by the children as a scary place where people have died and having the mono of the mountain that no one crosses alive after this Cloud demonstrates great altruism by deciding to put his own life at risk in attempt to save Tifa when she falls from the bridge it is also worth noting here that cloud demonstrates amazing physical resilience a person who would later become for all we know the greatest practitioner of martial arts in the world is rendered comos for a week and almost dies from the fool here Cloud on the other hand only scrapes his knees at this point when he was 8 years old we have the first inciting incident that changed the course of Cloud's behavior and psychology he blamed himself for not being able to reach Tifa in time and stop her from fooling blamed his own weakness this manifested into anger and frustration and Cloud began getting into fights with anyone probably as a form of self-punishment but also as a way to try and prove to himself that he was strong shortly after this Cloud first heard about Sethro the hero of the war Sethro became his Idol something to Aspire to he felt that if he could become strong like Sethro then other people would accept and take notice of him especially Tifa the next knowledge we have of cloud we fast forward to him being 14 years old and leaving home to attempt to join Soldier we can assume that Cloud's relationships and standing within the village did not improve within the past 6 years as Tifa recalls this is her first memory of him also she notes that he was short for his age back then this probably did nothing to help cloud with his inferiority complex Cloud asserts that he's not like the others and aims to be the best of the best another demonstration of his superiority complex masking his inferiority complex following this meeting at the water tower Cloud travels to midgar in an attempt to join Soldier we know that he fails to get in instead becoming a regular Shinra infantry man the details of the selection process for Soldier are not known but Cloud later states that only the strong will can enter Soldier whether or not Cloud was truly weak or what exactly Cloud's weakness was we'll have a dedicated section later in the video however I think an element of Cloud's weakness was that as he perceived himself to be weak despite having attributes that suggest to the contrary his belief that he was weak became a self- filling prophecy when discussing the neheim incident we know at this point that cloud is an unrel reliable narrator because who he was in The Narrative is untrue however we know that cloud was actually there and I think it's safe to assume that the developers of the game intended many bits of information we get during it to be true one of the first things that we noticed is that cloud suffers from motion sickness something that he probably didn't know about until he left home and decided to travel to midgar this probably did nothing to stem his perception that he was a weak person especially compared to Zach who we can infer from what we see of this time that cloud had also began to look up to as well as seph of cloud felt so ashamed that he didn't make it into soldier that he wore his helmet and mask so that no one would recognize him when he returned to neheim if we pay close attention to this scene at the entrance to neheim watch how the character who is actually Zach practices his signature pose with the unnamed soldier on the left this animation of one foot coming forward and the opposite arm resting on the hip watch how the Infantry man who we know to be Cloud on the right also pays attention and copies this pose this demonstrates how cloud is already silently looking up to Zach and trying to emulate him also however very subtly notice that during the events of the main game in the present day whenever Cloud strikes this pose he is going into full Zach emulation mode with his behavior becoming more confident and cocky if we speak to the Infantry man we know to be Cloud throughout the incident he constantly describes being nervous he plays his off to Zach as if he's nervous about a monster showing up but I think he is masking the fact that someone might find out his identity he is also nervous of course because he's working alongside his Idol seph if we read the letter from Tia's friend who has also left town for midgar we can learn that people's opinions on cloud have not much changed from childhood but also that the person writing the letter has failed to get a job and in fact couldn't even get a job working for Shinra although failing to get into Soldier we know that cloud at least outperformed this other neble Heim boy because he did get a job with Shinra talking to the residents of neheim after seph gives us leave to do so we can get insight into how Cloud wanted to be thought of by the residents of his hometown as we know that these people would not have had these conversations with Zach and that cloud wasn't around for them we can assume that these are madeup conversations for which Cloud wished the people of neheim would think of him they tell him you've really made something of yourself you've grown up strong you've really moved up in the world in this fantasy the people of neheim are giving Cloud the attention and plaudit he felt he deserve and has proved himself in their eyes however I think we can infer that the scene that takes place between cloud and his mother genuinely happened Cloud remembers it as the last time he slept in a proper bed when he stays the night at arth's house it demonstrates that he felt close enough with his mother to reveal himself to her also it is likely that cloud decided to reveal to his mother that he wasn't actually in Soldier during one line of Di dialogue his mother asks him is that what a soldier uniform looks like Cloud replies Mom listen I and then the scene changes as we the player are not supposed to know yet that cloud never made it into Soldier so even though he was very ashamed he didn't make it he felt comfortable to confide in his mother and tell the truth giving us further insight into their relationship and in the subsequent seets between them it appears it does not bother her at all another Testament to her character if we move forward from here to after Sethro decides to destroy the town and Slaughter the town's people we next see cloud laying injured outside his mother's house the obvious implication is that cloud attempted to protect his mother from seph's murderous intent however he was unable and his mother is killed we see that he's trying to get up but cannot and all he can say is seph cloud then pursues seph to the reactor somewhat behind Tifa and Zach he manages to surprise Sethro and runs him through with Zach's Buster sword this was probably helped by Sethro being distracted by first meeting his mother goova and also as we know the Buster sword had preemptive material on it for a bit of diagetic game design Cloud then cares for Tia who is badly wounded and confronts Sethro once again this time it is cloud who is skewed on the injured Sethro sword however unbelievably Cloud takes hold of Sethro sword turning the tables and lifts seph up by it and flings him off the gangway into the moo beneath the reactor this short chain of events is a testament to not only the physical potential and resilience of cloud but once again a testment to his bravery that we also saw from when he was a child the saying goes never meet your Heroes and this couldn't be any truer for cloud who witnessed his childhood hero Massacre everyone in his village despite witnessing this cloud found the resolve to continually pursue SEO and defeat him there exist lots of theories as to how exactly Cloud was able to defeat Sethro on the reactor gang way some people believe that cloud reached limit break as is described in beginner's Hall some believe it was the adrenaline of the situation that allowed him to do such a feat other people believe it was the rage he felt at the destruction wrought by seph all of those theories could lend themselves to the truth but we can't know for certain as the game never informs us either way however I think this scene exists to demonstrate to us the player that perhaps Cloud was never as weak as he thought he was and in this pivotal moment he showed us his true potential so now we finally actually move on to discuss the present day Cloud that we see from when we press new game in the main menu unbeknownst to us in the 5 years since the neheim incident and after being Gravely wounded cloud has been experimented on by Hojo by using goova cells and has probably spent a lot of that time not even being conscious Zach and Cloud escaped from the lab from where they were being experimented on but due to the strong reaction cloud has had to the Genova cells he is basically catatonic we can see that whilst in this state traveling with Zach Zack regales cloud with tales about himself of his past and his ideas for the future it is not until he was found by Tifa at the sector 7 train station after Zach's death and being left for dead just prior to the beginning of the game that Cloud's mind manages to Rouse itself from its stuper once we start the game it is equipped to represent Cloud as both cocky and apathetic in equal measure he seems to not care for the mission or the people with him just the money he'll receive however if you actually pay close attention to the script this Persona of clouds actually begins to dampen down during the second bombing mission to reactor 5 and once the plot really picks up pace around the time of Shinra scheme to drop the sector 7 plate cloud has become a much more balanced and neutral in his dialogue and his actions I understand the reasoning behind this after the first couple of hours of the game Cloud's Persona has been fully established and as he is the avatar for the player to learn more about the people in the world around him he is more the conduit through which we receive information especially as The Story begins to go at break next speed cloud is more reacting to events and asking questions rather than pushing his personality in his dialogue that's not to mention that it would start to become irritating for the player if Cloud was constantly represented as someone inherently unlikable or constantly seeming disinterested and arrogant perhaps also with the passage of time since recovering from his vegetative state cloud is slowly putting his mind back together and the cocky Zach esque personality recesses more and more by the time of the closing of the Temple of the Ancients where Sethro first begins to try and control Cloud the cocky Persona has evaporated entirely and Cloud begins to admit to feeling afraid speaking of the Zach esque personality as I previously mentioned take note of cloud emulating Zach's signature pose when we play through the early portion of the game when cloud is most embodying Zach's personality he also strikes exactly the same pose when he feels he needs to exude confidence in a certain situation or his Persona gets called into question his body language changes and the Zach Persona comes out in full force so with this fabricated backstory was Cloud lying I think there is sometimes some understanding or whether Cloud consciously constructed the person he is during the larger half of the game I think it's safe to infer in any conscious sense Cloud was not lying having been experimented on with moo and goova cells for 5 years and as we know having a strong reaction to it his sense of self was shattered we can see that the other Sethro copies are husks of people who can only talk about Sethro and do his bidding just prior to this experimentation he went through a series of traumatic events he has to return to his hometown ashamed that he didn't meet the aspirations he set for himself his hero Sethro raised his village to the ground killing most of the inhabitants including Cloud's mother who he was unable to protect the girl he cared about most that seemed to be fatally wounded and Cloud himself suffered a horrendous injury due to these physiological and psychological stresses Cloud's mind slowly pieced together a fake persona and personal history doing it best to become whole again and protect cloud cloud obviously mixed in his life story with Zach's as Zach talked endlessly about himself on their journey to midgar whilst Cloud was mentally lost and catatonic and this confounding also helped him turn away from his shame at not making it into Soldier I think it is hard to argue that someone who reacts like this when undergoing a cognitive dissonance is simply lying however we could argue that cloud was lying to himself in a way by not being more proactive in confronting the truth throughout the first third of the game cloud is often visited by his inner self often in moments when he is alone or his Persona is vulnerable during times of reduced [Music] Consciousness over the course of a few few scenes it gently and then more proactively tries to get Cloud to confront the in congruencies in his character and gaps in his memory to his credit Cloud mostly tries to engage with these voices but then quickly forgets and tries to reinforce his Persona The Voice urges Cloud to seek help both from within and from other people [Music] things come to a climax in a couple of scenes within the Temple of the Ancients where the three-way tug of war between Cloud's fabricated Persona his true identity and the power of the Genova cells within him begins to physically manifest the final time we see Cloud's inner self before piecing his psyche back together in the live stream towards the latter third of the game is when we see it physically represented as Cloud's child self as he urges himself not to be afraid of Sethro demonstrating the inner bravery we can recall from his childhood following giving Sethro the black material against his will cloud is so utterly confused and frustrated at his lack of understanding of his mind that he lashes out and begins to assault aith following this Cloud's mind actually actively confronts the fractured nature of his mind perhaps he put it off as he knew how upsetting and scary an experience it would be as he confesses to Tifa and Barrett in the following seen only at this point does cloud finally allow himself to begin listening to his subconscious however stubbornly he is still sticking to his belief that he is an EXs Soldier and instead of trying to internally confront this dissonance he misguidedly and speciously externalizes it by deciding to continue to pursue Sethro for answers this is not unlike people who try to solve issues they are having in real life instead of seeking change from within they externalize that change deflecting the fact that the Genesis of their problem lies within themselves consider when in reality people will often geographically move during hardship to make a fresh start of things the only problem with that is no matter where you go there you are a common interpretation of what cloud goes through during this time is that people ascribe him to specific mental illnesses although I understand why people do this I think it is most mostly incorrect mental health diagnoses have long since permeated popular culture as a way of labeling certain behaviors often as Hyperbole and often become mutated into being something different than the strict medical definition I'm sure that you know of someone and perhaps even you yourself who likes to have things ordered and tidy and they describ themselves as oh you know I'm a little OCD chances are they definitely do not have obsessive compulsive disorder as someone who is currently working on a psych tietry rotation a manifestation of OCD is actually much more intrusive and dehab simply liking things neat and tidy a common diagnosis ascribed to cloud is that he is suffering from schizophrenia the understanding of which within popular culture tends towards some sort of split personality presentation actually schizophrenia is actually quite different from this and Cloud will be suffering from much more dehab militating symptoms if he had it the other condition commonly ascribed to Cloud is that he has PTSD and again I would have to disagree with this yes cloud has some traits or symptoms of PTSD but not enough to Warrant a diagnosis this isn't helped by the fact that Cloud's psychological problems are heavily influenced by science fiction elements in the plot which makes translation into real life conditions much more difficult also we need to remember the kind of world that ff7 takes place in it is a world much more harsh and dangerous than our own the world has only just recently come out of a large global conflict the only two characters whose childhoods we have knowledge of both lost parents before they were teenagers in this world it is not unusual for people to leave home at 14 to join the armed forces or make a life for yourself elsewhere people have to lock themselves in their homes for fear of attack from Monsters or quit their place of work because it becomes infested with monsters you cannot Journey from one section in midgar to the the next without fear of being mugged or attacked by a murderous transforming house you cannot travel from midgar to calm without being accosted by roaming packs of Thieves and wolves therefore the people of the world of ff7 are probably far more resilient to traumas than we are in our comparably much more safe and comfortable existence someone suffering from pdsd or schizophrenia would be very unlikely to be able to fight in one battle let alone the hundreds of battles the characters get themselves into over the course of the game they simply wouldn't be able to face such adversity being in such a fragile state however with that all said that is absolutely not to say that what cloud goes through in Final Fantasy 7 is not allegorical and symbolic of mental illness in general nebulous parallels can definitely be drawn with any condition which makes us question our sanity our Identity or our [Music] mood so as previously mentioned Cloud's personality seems to change after the first time sephra takes control of him understandably after this point Cloud becomes filled with more self-doubt and The Confident Persona has almost vanished entirely he expresses fear about the part of himself he doesn't understand with each subsequent encounter with sephra Cloud spirals further into despair he admits to being afraid of losing himself perhaps that why he still clings so tightly to the idea that he is an ex Soldier this reaches a climax when in the Whirlwind maze Sethro takes advantage of Cloud's uncertain memory of events and doubts about his identity manipulating him into believing that he is a Sethro copy created by Hojo 5 years ago and that all of his memories are false Cloud's fragile mentality shatters under this weight and he submits to being controlled by his goova cells and hands SEO the black Materia cloud is then lost from the story at this point until later when he is found by Tifa after having washed up far away and is in a catatonic State due to Moo poisoning and he does not rejoin the party until him and tia fall into the life stream during a natural disaster and his identity has been correctly mended within a metaphysical plane by both himself antifa the events of the reforming of Cloud's mind have previously been covered in the video so then we turn to what cloud becomes going forward once he has once again become his real self the differences are actually quite subtle and Cloud's overall personality doesn't differ from what we see for most of dis one I.E after the wall Market section up until the Temple of the Ancients Barett even affirms this after Cloud speech explaining himself to the party after regaining his identity this leads us to believe that Cloud's illusion always borrowed far more from Zach's backstory than ever it did from his personality this is except in certain instances already mentioned furthermore the apathetic and uncaring part of Cloud's personality that is demonstrated at the beginning of the game we come to find is not really an aspect of Zach's personality at all during the flashback where we see Zach in the back of the truck chatting to a catatonic Cloud Zach has much more of a cheerful goofy Persona and actually comes across quite caring in his speech in the briefing room of the high wind we can see that cloud has reached a cathis with his failings and what he perceives to be his weakness he is also much more in touch with his flaws like when in the submarine we see him having a miniature freak out due to his motion sickness and claustrophobia from being in the submarine Cloud's reasons for fighting have also shifted firstly he cites the reason of making amends for being the reason meteor is being summoned his motivations have also evolved beyond that of simple revenge and settling the score with seph although he does site that Sethro needs to answer for what he's done and that this is a deeply personal reason for him this reasoning of seph paying for for his crimes is more nuanced than simple Revenge also he explains that he doesn't want erth's sacrifice to be in vain and his desire to save the planet is now just as strong as a purpose as getting back at sephra he also becomes a more well-rounded empathetic leader he implores the rest of the party to go and think about their reasons for fighting and to go see those that they care about before the final battle we can also see how he helps yaffi with her motion sickness by drawing on experiences from one of his own Pur CE weaknesses his reassurance to Tia in the scene beneath the high wind is that they must believe in themselves and if they do they can find the answers someday perhaps Cloud's biggest weakness all along was his lack of self-belief cloud at various points in the game describes himself as weak and blames some events he was unable to change on his weakness and this is Central to his character and psychology but what exact was Cloud's weakness Cloud originally had the idea to get stronger after failing to save Tifa when she fell from the mount neble rope bridge but evidence to the contrary demonstrates that Cloud's weakness was never a physical one as an 8-year-old he fell from a great distance and only ever scraped his knees whilst Tifa went into a coma as a 16-year-old he fell from the same Bridge again and the other Shinra infantry man who was with him did not survive but Cloud did also Cloud was defeated by Sethro outside his mother's house but not killed he was also able to heft and wield the Buster sword to stab Sethro he then went on to lift Sethro up by his own sword after being ped by it and flinging him across the room it is worth noting that at this point he had not been experimented on and had no enhancements beyond that of a normal person Cloud even as a child was physically very strong and durable it is likely he misunderstood his mental weaknesses and misinterpreted them as a physical weakness this manifested into needing to prove how strong he was by always getting into fights and pursuing a career in joining soldier at 14 we know that cloud never made it into Soldier but we know nothing about the selection process and how Cloud failed to make it given what we know about his physicality it was likely that it was a psychological screening that cloud didn't manage to pass Cloud states that only the strong will can enter Soldier but was Cloud not strong willed we can see that from his life up until 14 in neheim he demonstrates bravery compassion and is very motivated When comparing him to Zach who we know made it into soldier in a similar story to clouds we can see that cloud was not as good around other people and also suffered from motion sickness and did not exude a natural confidence like Zach however I don't think these traits alone would be enough to preclude one from joining Soldier I I think Cloud's weakness was a prison of his own making because of his lack of social skills and failing to save Tifa he believed he was weak as a consequence of this he developed an inferiority complex which he tried to cover with a superiority complex this belief he was weak became a self-fulfilling prophecy and hampered cloud from fulfilling his potential because of this he struggled with having a strong sense of identity not being sure of who he was and had no strong self-belief in himself self to succeed this is why he didn't make it into Soldier we know that the process for creating soldiers is to bathe them in moo and inject them with goova cells we know that moo poisoning could make someone catatonic probably because LIF stream contains elements of the consciousness of all the people who have ever lived and died so it is possible for one to lose their sense of identity from exposure to it compounding this is having the cells of an extraterrestrial within oneself which May itself have its own form of sentience this is evident from the Sethro copies we see throughout the game perhaps these procedures make the person undergo a form of ego death and they must be strong willed enough to find themselves again therefore the process of becoming a soldier could be seen to be analogous to when in real life a person takes hallucinogenics when a person takes hallucinogenics it is commonly believed that a person can either have a good trip an eye openening pleasantly experience or a bad trip an oppressive nightmare the distinction between people who have good trips and bad trips is often posited to be whether they have a good understanding of themselves and are at peace with most elements of their psyche people who have skeletons in their closet issues about themselves that they have yet to work through or cognitive distances about their sense of self are more likely to have a bad trip when screening for Soldier candidates it is likely they picked up on these issues with identity with cloud and therefore deduced he wouldn't be able to handle it but we must also remember that cloud was not as utterly weak as he supposed although he did initially have an extreme reaction to being experimented on eventually he managed to scrape together a Persona and start functioning as a human being again he was also largely able to resist being controlled by Sethro for some time this is evident when we compare Cloud to the other Sethro copies who never regain any sense of identity and become mumbling slaves to seph even ex Soldier members are susceptible as we see the former Soldier member turned shop owner in junun begin to wear a black cape at the climax of cloud and Tifa finding Cloud's true identity in the final third of the game it is revealed that cloud defeated Sethro single-handedly whilst wounded I think this feat is a symbolic representation of the game demonstrating to us that in actuality Cloud was never weak the resolve needed to accomplish this feat is astounding Cloud's weakness was a self-imposed lack of self-belief and confidence in his identity he always had the potential for great strength of Will and in overcoming Sethro here against impossible odds demonstrates that I began by saying that cloud was the poster boy of Final Fantasy 7 and was a vital component to the success of the game how however I don't think it was because of his eye-catching hairstyle badass sword or early game Mr Cool personality it was more due to the fact that the story arc of Cloud Strife is fundamentally a story of identity no matter where you are from or how old you are this is an inherently relatable human issue we all must reconcile who we are with the influences that shaped us in our formative years both positive and negative reconcile who we are with those who we we aspire to be reconcile who others identify us as compared to how we identify ourselves and try to be more defined by our strengths than our weaknesses after the dust has settled and the party has defeated saraf Sethro in the final epic battle for the fate of the Earth the rest of our heroes file out hoping that they have done enough to save the world however for cloud the fight is not yet over Cloud's final confrontation was never going to be on some Grand Battlefield contested over strength it was always going to be a battle of wills due to his vengful Spirit strong will and goova cells a remnant of seph's Consciousness stubbornly remains within the life stream Cloud's Consciousness senses this and he is transported for a final showdown cloud is uniquely perhaps the only entity that exists that is capable of definitively destroying Sethro he like Sethro has goova cells within him he also has been a traveler of the life stream like Sethro overcoming his severe makco poisoning and perhaps now being resilient to it and now is the only person to have ever existed who has defeated Sethro before sephra the person who Cloud aspired to be that then destroyed everything in his life and then manipulated and controlled him had perhaps the strongest influence on Cloud's identity only by definitively destroying Sethro his Dark Shadow can Cloud's character Arc end and he can solidify his sense of identity Cloud Narrows his eyes with determination as he sees Sethro awaiting him in the live stream during this star down the game incrementally gifts us with Cloud's final limit break omnis slash even if we have not taken the steps to acquire it before this [Music] point using this limit break this representation of his newly found willpower Cloud overwhelm Sethro destroying him once and for all and overcoming his [Music] [Music] weaknesses the saying goes some are born great some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them the former represents Sethro born as the result of a science experiment to create people with the power of the cetra the intervening represent Zach another of Cloud's influences who with a similar background to Cloud achieved Greatness by becoming a soldier first class something Cloud attempted and failed at the latter and personally I feel to be the most compelling those you have greatness thrust upon them represents cloud cloud was a victim of circumstance he had no choice in whether to lose everything in the neheim incident or whether to be experimented on and injected with goova cells however in the end he overcame the machinations of sephra and Shinra Rose to Greatness and saved the [Music] world [Music]

Channel: The First Lore

Views: 16,280

Keywords: FF7, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy VII, FFVII, Cloud Strife, Cloud FF7, Lore, Video Game Lore, Final Fantasy 7 Lore, FF7 1997, FF7 OG, FF7 Original Game, Final Fantasy, Lore Video, Story, Psychology

Id: rcHthM54cT0

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024