AJ Papa’s Blog

Gamers bring yourselves back 10 years as I revisit my past and my adolescence. I was a 13 year old naive boy gracing the halls of Black Mountain Middle School. Like boys of my age and fitting to the fine public educational institution I attended, my friends and I were discussing and debating the finer points of life that were relevant to our lives at the time. We wanted to know if Scotland should have voted on creating its own Parliment after 290 years of union with England? I’m kidding. F*ck that. We debated if damn Cloud loved Tifa or Aeris –characters in our beloved role playing game at the time, Final Fantasy VII.

To bring up this argument again seems almost juvenile doesn’t it? I mean if you just search and dredge up Internet web archives on this subject matter, you will find plenty of bickering between kids –yes I said kids– on the matter. It has been more than a decade since the game’s release –I certainly was a kid when I played this game. The thing you have to take into consideration is as kids we are more in tune to polarization; that is to say, kids are more likely to identify things as clearly bad or clearly good. Sephiroth is clearly bad. Cloud and his party are clearly good. Players are presented a solemn and sad scene in which Cloud grieves the lost of his beloved Aeris. So Cloud must of clearly loved Aeris right? Maybe. To a kid there is not a lot of room for middle subtle details. That is why at the ripe old age of 23 I wanted to revisit this debate; because I feel I have a more mature perspective. In fact, as an aside, if you revisit the stories of some of the games we use to play, you’ll find that a lot of them actually have some adult themes. With new Final Fantasy VII related intellectual properties coming out like Crisis Core and Advent Children, it seems like a ripe old time as any to take a stand no matter how old or juvenile the debate is.

I see no better way to begin my tirade than at the beginning of the game where we find our main protagonist, Cloud Strife, fresh in a convoluted state of mind. If you remember Cloud, nearly catatonic from Mako experiments, had just come from an ordeal of escaping Shinra Mansion and then watching his friend and comrade, Zack, die. It was through this ordeal that Cloud finds himself mixing up Zack’s experiences and persona with his own. Cloud’s personal confusion would become a lasting theme throughout the game as he struggles to find his true self; while he struggles, he crosses paths with the ill faited, innocent Aeris Gainsborough. One significant detail that players don’t realize, either through forgetting or simply missing it, is Zack and Aeris had a romantic relationship prior to Cloud and Aeris crossing paths. It is because of Aeris prior relationship and Cloud’s mix up of Zack’s persona that we begin to see a relationship bloom and nurture as the team went off on adventures to save the world. Aeris saw a bit of Zack in Cloud, and Cloud found someone who saw something in him and believed in him –feelings and sentiments that were missing to Cloud as he grew up. It is my opinion that if Aeris hadn’t died, a real complicated love relationship might of bloomed. I say complicated because deep within Cloud’s convoluted mind, soul, and persona is the nugget of feeling he has kept with him since his childhood.

It is my honest opinion that Cloud truly loved Tifa Lockhart. Later in the game Cloud finally comes to terms with his true self; he accepted that he wasn’t Zack. With his realization he remembers the girl in which he shares a history with. He remembers the girl who he had made a promise to protect as kids. He remembers the reason why he attempted to join SOLDIER in the first place. He remembers in his heart of hearts, Tifa Lockhart (I know that was cheesy =).

A skeptical person in the Aeris camp might ask, why didn’t Cloud take his feelings further if it was the case he did love Tifa? Well like I mentioned earlier, while Cloud had mixed up his persona with that of Zack’s, his feelings for Aeris may have not been entirely artificial. In addition, in the events of Advent Children and On the Way to a Smile, Cloud still has not come to terms entirely with the death of Aeris; he is suffering from a huge case of survivor’s guilt.

Before I get flamed I want to state that the theory that I have presented is nothing more than an opinion. That is the brilliance of it all! Sakaguchi wrote and designed a game that made for an ambiguous conclusion in the never ending love triangle. If someone made the case that Cloud loved Aeris instead of Tifa, I wouldn’t hold it against them; in fact, there is plenty of evidence to support it. The game even had game mechanics that would facilitate a player choosing and developing the relationships on his/her own. Hell, if you told me that Cloud romantically loved Barret, I’d chuckle and wouldn’t hold it against you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Gaming, Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.