#Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Cait Sith's fortune came true: because throughout the entire game, Cloud was trying to find Sephiroth--which he did in the end--but at the cost of losing Aerith.

...

"Along the road ahead lies something you need. However--in order to claim it, you must lose something that is dear to you."

Final Fantasy VII came out before Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, of course. And this Chain of Memories moment somewhat parallels the above FFVII one, with Sora getting a bizarre "prophecy," that somewhat comes true, about losing someone dear to you in some way.

However, Marluxia is lying when he tells Sora that there's something he needs in Castle Oblivion. He's assuming Sora will think Riku and King Mickey are there (the "something he needs") and fall into his trap--which he does--though, ironically, Riku and the King do eventually end up in the castle, but Sora never meets them there, actually. But he does have interactions with the Riku Replica that Vexen creates. But Marluxia had no idea that that would happen, either. But Marluxia did know that in stepping foot into the castle, Sora would lose memories of the person important to him--Kairi--which was part of the Organization's plan: and so Sora does forget Kairi for a time, as Naminé begins replacing her in his memories:(

[shwoo]

Writing this Final Fantasy 7 fanfic is kind of a weird experience, because I try to stick to the tone of the original work, and Final Fantasy 7 can get darker in tone than what I'm used to. Do I warn for "Canon Typical Hojo"???

Actually, I notice that there's quite a few Final Fantasy 7 stories on AO3 tagged with "Content Warning: Hojo", or "Hojo Being Hojo", so I guess I do? Also, "Bad Dad Hojo", which is relevant since the story is about Chadley. Hojo is not winning any father of the year awards in that one scene in Rebirth where he acknowledges Chadley's existence. Enslaving your kid to work in your evil science lab is also not great parenting.

I don't normally dislike fictional characters, but I think I do dislike Hojo. I don't really... want to look at him. Is this one of those "confront characters" I keep hearing about? It was hard to even analyse him so his actions would make sense in the story. I think he's someone who once experienced not being the smartest person in the room, and made it his life's mission to make sure that never happened again.

This story is also making me like MAI, after being indifferent to her for a while. I'm going with Chadley accidentally creating a person while trying to create an AI assistant, with neither of them having realised it yet. That gives them an interesting dynamic! At least to me.

I just hope I have the energy to edit this story into making sense, so I can finish it. And also to keep playing the original game up to when this story is set. The canon story stuff is happening in the background, and I know roughly what happens, but I really should play through it as well.

[shwoo]

That bit is great because it implies that Chadley has mind-reading powers that he only ever uses to try to impress Cloud. And that maybe Barrett could read Cloud's mind as well, if he wanted to.

The Japanese is a little clearer that he's just reading Cloud's expression, though. It's something like

Detecting bewilderment that says "What are you doing someplace like this?" (どうしておまえがこんなところに？　という　困惑を検知) I am a cyborg manufactured by Hojo, you know. (ボクは　宝条によって造られたサイボーグですよ) It's as simple as reading your emotions. (クラウドさんの感情を読み取ることぐらい簡単です)

he’s my son and I love him

[theghostavocadoe]

something I always think about is these fuckers right here.

These are the Whispers you fight at the end of FF7 Remake. Everybody knows them. And if you've done any amount of browsing on FF7 lore, you might've seen that their fighting styles are based on the Remnants of Sephiroth.

But what people often fail to catch is that these three aren't just based on the remnants, they ARE the remnants.

Each of the whispers have a description that says something along the lines of "It fights to protect the future that gave it shape." And we all know that the whole fight with the whisper harbinger is about the Planet trying to keep fate on it's course.

So these three whispers are the Remnants themselves, fighting desperately to keep the timeline on track so that there's still a future where they exist. They want to live. The Lifestream chose them to fight for the Harbinger because of it.

And the way they fight shows that they still have some kind of conscience/memory from their past lives. Viridi (Loz) targets Tifa and Rubrum (Kadaj) targets Cloud. When you fight Viridi and Croceo (Yazoo) as a duo and one of them dies, the other immediately becomes Enraged and more aggressive.

They are alive, even if they're not their whole selves. And that fucking destroys me.

[phantomyre]

Grim Reaper - Chaos

[divan-daikon]

gays im making an impulsive decision to make a ff7 scrapbook bc it had evolved from hyperfixation to special interest

[altocat]

When's the new chapterrr

Should probably be the week after next. They said mid-January.

I swear to god if they update OG instead to coincide with Yuffie being added I'm going to break something.

[eightb-all]

Brb, shifting to FF7R so I can teach Yuffie to mew

[autistichalsin]

The fact that there is literally a recording of Dave saying the "in my name" line makes me wish so bad we could have had Origin Halsin. It wouldn't even have been that hard to change his plot around.

Just like how, if you do an Origin run, you can just ignore the normal recruitment spot, you'd have a different motivation for entering the goblin pens when playing. Instead of "Halsin and Aradin went off, he got captured by gobbos, please find him" you get "you were captured by goblins and, on orders of Ketheric Thorm, brought to Moonrise where you were tadpoled and then sent away on a Nautiloid that later crashed. You must now return to the goblin camp to stop them from attacking your Grove."

As for why Ketheric would have had Halsin tadpoled, that too would have been simple: he sent the Shadow Druids to target the Emerald Grove precisely because he remembered, 100 years ago, what a formidable fighting force the Druids were. It would not be a stretch to imagine that instead of sending them (or along with sending them), he decided to have their leader tadpoled and turned into a mouthpiece for his cause. Those who would blindly follow Halsin would follow, while those who would have resisted would have stayed under Kagha's leadership and performed the Rite of Thorns. But then the Nautiloid crashed and Halsin retained his free will thanks to the artifact.

Like c'mon, it would require next to NOTHING changing story-wise. You could even use the same "the tadpole did it" excuse Gale and Wyll have to explain why an Archdruid is now level 1. The literal only thing that would have to change is the portal, but even that could be tweaked so that you fight a similar hoard of enemies while you go looking for Thaniel.

(Also, on a shallow note, it would mean I'd get to enjoy seeing Halsin get pegged by Karlach if I chose.)

Maybe in 10-15 years we'll get a remaster/anniversary edition which will have Origin Halsin? *Wistful sigh* I mean, if Square Enix can make an entire trilogy of just remakes of Final Fantasy 7...

[satoshi-mochida]

Some games that are currently stuck on older consoles that I hope get rereleased in some way, Part 2:

Part 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Summon Night series

.hack IMOQ(I somehow forgot about these for the first post)

Xenosaga series(another obvious one I forgot)

Older Fire Emblem games that haven't been ported/remade yet.

Tony Hawk's Underground/Underground 2

Xenoblade Chronicles X

SSX Tricky/SSX 3

Transformers: War for Cybertron/Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

Lufia series

Thousand Arms

Skies of Arcadia: Legends

The Lunar Series(except Dragon Song unless it gets a massive remake)

Many Tales of games.

The Legendary Starfy series.

The Firemen/The Firemen 2: Pete & Danny

Ever Oasis

Koudelka and Shadow Hearts series

Older Atelier games

The Legend of Heroes games pre-Trails, such as the Gagharv Trilogy(shown in correct order).

Radiata Stories

Final Fantasy XIII trilogy(they're all on Steam, but not modern consoles yet)

[shwoo]

...Chadley FinalFantasySevenRemake is is secretly part Cetra isn't he.

Because:

Sephiroth was injected with ancient corpse cells before he was born in an attempt to create a child with Cetra powers. This did not work as intended because it turned out what they had were not Cetra remains. They were John Carpenter's The Thing remains.

After Aerith and Ifalna escaped, Hojo stole Ifalna's body and dissected and catalogued it.

Aerith and Ifalna escaped fifteen years before the events of the game.

Chadley is fifteen years old.

The timeline just works too well. And I'm a bit confused about Chadley claiming to be a cyborg, but also saying he was "created" and wondering if he has a soul, but I assume Hojo had another human kid who he lied to again. That seems more in character for him than making an assistant who happens to be able to perfectly pass as a teenage boy, and also shares his eye colour.

No comment on that protorelic cutscene with Hojo, because it's very ambiguous and I've seen a bunch of very confident sounding interpretations that don't line up with what I got from it at all. I will say that Hojo doesn't talk about Chadley and his "brothers" being full of surprises in the Japanese version. He just says something like "Did you undo your management program when you thought I wasn't looking?"

No comment on where Hojo got another kid either, or how Ifalna's cells got involved. Except that I think there's lines the series wouldn't cross.

The Cetra's abilities involve communicating with the planet, and using its power without materia. As far as I can tell, materia are crystallised lifestream that contain knowledge and experience, through which the user can ask the planet to do some magic for them. Chadley's main gameplay purpose in the first remake game is to develop new materia. He even says that it was thought to be impossible to create artificial summoning materia, but he still manages to do it.

In Rebirth, he branches out into managing Cloud's Queen's Blood career analysing life springs, and never really explains how a very samey button pressing game translates into multiparagraph pause menu lore dumps. Kind of sounds like he's talking to the planet and putting its power into materia. I think his age is better evidence that Hojo was trying to repeat what he did to Sephiroth with an actual Cetra this time, but Chadley is weirdly able to do things with the lifestream that seemingly nobody else can.

Anyway, I think Hojo definitely tried to make a child with Cetra abilities like he meant to do with Sephiroth, and it's probably side content boy.

[flappervcmp]

KYLEE'S 𝑪𝑶𝑴𝑭𝑶𝑹𝑻 𝑳𝑰𝑺𝑻! 🦇👻🧛‍♀️🌙

comfort food(s) :   chicken nuggies, cookies (specifically triple choco chip chips ahoy), salt & vinegar chips, fruit gushers

comfort drink(s) :   tea (any kind), hot choco, ginger ale

comfort movie(s) :   avatar & avatar: way of water, twilight (all of them), pride & prejudice (2005), howls moving castle, labyrinth, crazy rich asians, lord of the rings trilogy (extended edition), beauty and the beast (cartoon)

comfort show(s) :    the vampire diaries, the walking dead, game of thrones (excluding s7-s8), gilded age, downton abbey, chilling adventures of sabrina, buffy the vampire slayer, interview with the vampire (if u havent watch it, u should bc its amazing)

comfort clothing :   a skort and a crop top for at home, or my pjs

comfort song(s) :  espresso - sabrina carpenter, better than revenge - taylor swift, endwalker (footfalls) - masayoshi soken, roses of may - nobuo uematsu, canned heat - jamiroquai, we didn't start the fire - fall out boy cover vers., phantom of the opera - ramin karimloo & sierra boggess, masquerade - phantom of the opera (25th anniversary show vers.), ain't no love in oklahoma - luke combs, 8 dates (demo version) - cast of why am i so single, long face - lestat de lioncourt (played by sam reid)

honestly my music taste is all over the place generally so its a mix of some of my fave songs, along with stuff that im listening to on repeat lately

comfort book(s) :   twilight - smeyer , the vampire diaries -lj smith, the forbidden game series - lj smith, acotar - sarah j maas, ruinous love trilogy (3rd one isnt out yet but i know ill love it) - brynne weaver , phantom of the opera - gaston leroux, vampire academy - richelle mead, lights out - navessa allen, the princess and the grilled cheese sandwich - deya muniz, ice planet barbarians series - ruby dixon

comfort game(s) :   oblivion (the superior elder scrolls), any legend of zelda game (tho OoT is my favourite overall), final fantasy x, final fantasy xiv, final fantasy ix, final fantasy x-2, final fantasy xiii-2, baldur's gate 3, stardew valley, the sims, dragon age inquisition, final fantasy 7 remake (part 1 & 2), vampire the masquerade bloodlines, animal crossing, assassins creed

tagged by the lovely @dopplgaenger 🥰

tagging (ofc feel free to skip if you're not comfortable sharing!) - @broknfeed, @little-miss-buffy, @burninq, @insanislupus, @vervainlacedveins, @wiredcapability, @twiicetheheart

[ladyirisreviews]

Final Fantasy 7 - Review

This is the game that got me into trying Final Fantasy games in the first place. It is often regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time and deemed so important by Square Enix that they made the remake trilogy.

It is by far the one Final Fantasy game most people know about, and also the most talked about, and as the contrarian I was back when I heard of it, I had to give it a go, but not without having a big bias against it.

This time I came back to it with an open mind, and while it was way better than what I remembered, I still find issue in people calling it one of the best ever, but more on that later.

The plot is what I criticized the most the first time I played the game, but I have to give a brief summary of it first.

You play as Cloud, an ex-soldier acting as a mercenary for a group called Avalance, an eco-terrorist organization trying to sabotage the energy corporation Shinra, who are using the vital energy of the planet as an energy source, slowly killing it in the process, with more threats popping up along his journey.

I really don't want to go past that because 1) spoilers and 2) the main focus changes so much from one moment to the next it's really hard to make a summary without it being a summary of half of the game.

Overall, I like the theme of the game a lot, it being the preservation of nature, it really drives it home in showing the consequences of excessive industrialization and how not only does it affect nature but also the people.

In the past, I thought the plot was confusing and nonsensical in some parts, and even though it can and does get confusing, it's not nearly as bad as I remembered.

Other than that I do feel like the characters could have used some more work and fleshing out, there's a point where some characters just stop getting lines or have close to no development, the way the game handles the events hurts it too in my opinion, with almost always your benched party members not being present for plot events inside dungeons.

I think the only point where I haven't changed my mind that much is with the main villain, I do still feel like Sephiroth is a bit flat when compared to other characters in the series, it does a good job at being intimidating but it doesn't really go past that for me, which could be said about most antagonists in the series, the antagonists are not the strong point of Final Fantasy games.

But in general, I think the plot works, it has some very good moments, and I only wish there was more dialogue and interactions between the characters, something I think almost all of the games in this series need.

The character design is great, this is probably the best designer job Tetsuya Nomura ever did. Tifa and Aerith both look like archetypes of female characters but their characterization subverts that expectation pretty well, Sephiroth's design is also iconic, it's probably the most visually interesting villain for me this far, after Kefka, though Kefka only applies if you look at this concept art or illustrations.

But the meaty part of this game is the gameplay.

You guessed it, ATB comes back, and it works basically the same as in the previous game, your party size is now 3 characters as opposed to the 4 we had in the past 2 games, probably because of the deep character customization the game offers, but I will explain that later.

The unique addition in this iteration of the battle system is the limit break system.

Every character has a gauge that fills by a small amount every time they suffer damage, and once it's filled the attack button changes into a limit button, which allows you to unleash a very powerful attack, or in some instances, a pretty strong buff for your party.

There's 4 levels of limit breaks, with 2 limit breaks per level, mostly. You can only have one limit break active in a battle for any character, and the way to unlock higher level limit breaks is either to defeat a certain number of enemies or use a limit break multiple times, with the final one being locked behind a sidequest most of the time.

The system is fun, if a little broken in most situations, you are able to carry over the progress of the limit break bar to the next fight, which if it is against a boss, you could wait until all of your party members have their bars full, and then avoid using the limit break until you reach the boss, which is doable if you have magic or special skills equipped to avoid using normal attacks for damage, and then blast the boss with limit breaks, chopping down a big portion of its HP in the process, but the downside is that you stop grinding limit break uses for the next unlock.

But I don't think it is necessary to use that exploit, since I feel like this is one of the easiest games in the series, not including the super bosses, I never really felt like I needed to either change up my strategy or grind.

The other core system in the game is very flexible enough, the materia system, this is what makes the gameplay stand out and at the same time what can make it so easy.

So characters in this game don't have unique characteristics between each other, only their limit breaks, stat spread, which isn't that different from character to character, and whether their weapon is ranged or not, all the skills come from items called materia, which you equip on your weapons and armor, each weapon has materia slots, and they vary from weapon to weapon, with some having paired slots, where some materia can react to each other.

What materia does varies from type to type, represented by a color, green materia allows you to use different types magic, blue materia can be paired with other materia for different effects, yellow materia gives you new commands, purple materia gives buffs or stat increases, and red materia is used to call summons forth.

Equipped materia can also level up, each level unlocking a new spell, strengthening the effect or increasing uses of that materia, it depends on the type. Also, when a materia reaches max level, you get a level 1 copy of the same materia, which is the only way to get more than 1 copy of some rare materia.

This is the most flexible customization system in the series so far, every character is able to do anything as long as you have the materia and enough slots in your equipment, but I do feel like it makes the characters feel not very special.

Having their only unique characteristic be their limit breaks and weapon range, makes it so the best characters just boil down to who can deal the most damage with their limit breaks, and even if every character is viable, allowing you to beat the game with any combination, I wish it was a bit more like Final Fantasy 6, with characters having actions unique to them, on top of the materia system.

But overall, this is a very good game, if I were ranking all of the main Final Fantasy games I would place it right above the middle, personally.

While it has one of the most solid plots so far, it feels very incomplete in the character department, with Final Fantasy 6 being able to explore more than double the characters while also providing them with arcs and different interactions.

While it has one of the most flexible systems, the difficulty is way too low to truly take advantage of it, even with sub-optimal combinations every main boss is very easy, to the point I never felt the need to use attack spells, normal attacks are the fastest way to win almost every time, and with the limit breaks and you being encouraged to use them as much as possible, a lot of fights pose no threat.

If I could change something about the limit breaks, it would be the bar not carrying over between each fight, and instead starting from 0 every time, and changing the conditions to unlock higher level limit breaks, a sidequest or normal level progression would be better than grinding in my opinion.

The gameplay in general is pretty good regardless of my issues with it, but the dungeon design is quite lacking, probably the worst in the series so far, to be clear, they all look very good and memorable, but there's nothing besides going from point A to point B in them, barely any side paths or puzzles.

Something the game does have going for it is that it has quite a lot of memorable places, setpieces, and minigames that break the normal flow of the game, from the presentation of some areas to the density of NPCs and things to explore in some towns, I think out of any Final Fantasy game so far, this one has the best towns, it makes the places feel more real and the NPCs help flesh out the world a bit more.

So while this game does a lot of stuff very well, the moniker of the best RPG ever still bothers me, not because it's not good but because it makes a bunch of people settle for this game and not look beyond what less popular RPGs have to offer.

They might not have as much iconic imagery but there are games with better gameplay, better plot, better characters and so much more, maybe not with everything at the same time but with settling for one game you can't really visualize what a much better game it could have been with small improvements, like adding more dialogue, adding interactions, finishing character arcs, or making dungeons more than pretty hallways.

I understand very well why so many people like this game a lot, but all I want to say is that I wish more people gave more games a chance because while, again, this is still a very good game, people are missing out on a lot of different experiences the RPG genre has to offer.

[non-sims]

girl I only play sims too busy for other games and no nothing about final fantasy, how are they on 16 but I see you talk about 14 and 7???? Aren't these games supposed to be numbered in order.

😭this does look/sound confusing😔

okay without over explaining:

they are numbered in order it's just that ff7 came out in 1997, and is arguably the most popular one so it has a remake trilogy going since 2020 the latest one rebirth came out earlier this year. (3rd one isn't out yet)

ff14 is a online only mmo that has been going on since 2010. like sims it has expansion packs and the latest one came out in July.

& ff16 is the latest one in the mainline series (final fantasy has spinoffs and other stuff out too) it came out June 2023.

[altocat]

Mfw nearly every official piece of writing, description, and information on Lucrecia just talks about her stupid melodrama with Hojo and Vincent and makes no mention of Sephiroth.

It’s like Square goes out of its way to gaslight the fanbase into thinking the whole sad martyr/guilt complex thing is solely because of Grimoire and/or toggling with Vincent and not, you know, the child she willingly experimented on and left behind in the hands of a madman.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Tifa, dementia, and caretaker trauma.

Spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 original, Remake and Rebirth. Discussions about dementia, mental health, caretaker trauma and events that haven’t been covered in the remake trilogy yet. Also, I am sick and not as eloquent as i like to pretend I am – if this reads like shit, blame the virus. I just can’t get this thought out of my head. The "keep reading" is just before the Rebirth spoilers start if this somehow reached you and you don't want to read about that.

When I think about Final Fantasy 7 I usually don’t think of Tifa. I was never a massive Tifa fan like most people I talk to are.

She’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but I could never quite connect with her when I was a kid, or find her all that compelling. Over time I’ve resigned to thinking it’s because I’m just not super interested in her as a character, since she mostly relates to Cloud while everyone else is doing their own thing. So, when they decided to make a massively expanded Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, I thought this was going to be the perfect opportunity to change my mind. I’m not that much of a hater that I want to dislike one of the most beloved characters of all time.

Remake (the game not the trilogy) came and went and I really like what they did to her as an individual: having more of a relationship with everyone else means I get to look forward to when Tifa talks, especially with Aerith. I think their fast-friends-to-battle-sisters routine rocks and Remake really hammered home how they compliment each other. I especially really like how I can’t always tell if they’ve both teasing Cloud individually or together, on purpose. 

Like, the brother is not going to smash, this feels like it’s all for them. Aerith is even cracking up over it. Gals being pals with their clueless best friend. They have so many good moments together and they really bring out the best in each other. 

But then comes Rebirth and all of a sudden the story is necessarily way darker. Even if Remake involved dropping a city’s worth of metal on top of… well, a city, Rebirth is when shit gets real. Sephiroth’s manipulations come into full force, everyone deals with their traumas and personal quests, and Aerith dies. Even though Rebirth stops short of starting the original’s Disk 2, it still has one hundred and fifty hours of story and character content to bite into. 

And Tifa got a lot more of that this time around. She was given a much more prominent role in this narrative than she used to have: Tifa goes to the Lifestream by herself, Tifa has a whole thing with how she has a scar from her encounter with Sephiroth as a young woman, her relationship with Aerith has never been deeper, meaning that when she dies Tifa is left in shambles, and she’s pretty much the one person in the party who’s never in a position where she’s wrong about something. She’s always the rock everyone can rely on, and she knows that’s her role.  

And then there’s Cloud.

I feel like the thing I’m most fascinated by with Tifa in this franchise is how she’s slowly becoming a caretaker for someone with dementia.

NOW, LOOK.

I’m not saying that’s the literal text, or that we’re going to have bathing and feeding minigames in Mideel. I don’t think the game is actually about dementia proper. But I do think the game, both the OG and the remake trilogy, do make a point about all the ways in which you can lose someone. 

Final Fantasy 7 is a game about identity, environmentalism, loss, riding multicolored giant cocks that are somehow faster than cars – it’s got a lot going on and people have been interpreting its text for decades. But one of the things I feel gets mostly ignored is what Tifa is going through when Cloud becomes wheelchair-bound in his post-Crater vegetative state. She leaves the party to take care of him while the rest of the gang goes on to have wacky adventures under Cid’s leadership for a little while. It’s obviously temporary, but as far as Tifa knows, she’s going to spend the rest of her life taking care of the love of her life, never able to actually talk to him again. 

And like, that’s fucked, right? That’s a major life decision that gets talked about way less than what happens right after. And I mean, with good reason – the Lifestream section of the game is one of the most fascinating parts of the experience, and it immediately cancels out what Tifa decided to do, because Cloud comes back. Fully back, too, without any asterisks. But think about what Tifa was ready to do! That’s so much!

The Remake Trilogy elaborates on every singular aspect of the original game, to good and bad results, but this has turned into showcasing Cloud slowly but surely losing his mind over the course of two to three games. What was about three or four moments in the original game that culminated with his pseudo-mental death when delivering the Black Materia is now basically two hundred full hours of Cloud becoming progressively more violent, progressively more unhinged, and progressively less connected to his friends and the world around him.

Cloud starts talking to himself through extreme headaches, he starts seeing things that aren’t there, he actually even raises his weapon at Tifa due to being convinced by the voices in his head that she’s somehow not real. And throughout it all, Tifa is begging him to come back to normal, to be the guy she remembers him as. She never leaves his side, she never gives up on him, but she also doesn’t know what to do to make him stop.

But of course, we know that’s not all she does. Throughout the games, we see Tifa actually playing along with a lot of Cloud’s delusions a lot of the times. She lets him believe his version of the events of Nibelheim because she’s scared of what will happen to him if he realizes he’s remembering everything incorrectly. She lets him lie about Zack drowning in the river – lie to himself, no less – because the lie keeps him under control. When something bad happens to Cloud, Tifa takes on a caring attitude, not necessarily a correcting one. When Aerith does it, it’s for the sake of the World. When Tifa does it, it’s for the sake of their relationship, which has to last through this latest breakdown, there is simply no other choice from her perspective.

This feels so familiar. I used to care for people with dementia professionally. Not literally every night, but for enough. Watching Tifa go through Cloud’s worsening mental state reminds me so much of watching someone progressively lose their minds, with nothing you can do for them other than making them comfortable. 

Tifa’s arc of wanting to be there for Cloud but having no idea of what she can actually do for him climaxes, for me at least, with Cloud being fully engulfed in the lies he tells himself after Aerith’s death in Rebirth. He has done this before; he lies to himself so hard about who Zack is that he creates fake memories in the room he slept in in order to make sense of reality. Cloud has basically fully divorced himself from the linear progression of events in his life; he will not live a life where bad things happen to him, no matter who has to suffer for it.

And when Tifa sees him obviously going through it again, clearly not reacting to the things around him and letting himself go more and more, getting stronger headaches and becoming less reliable and less able to take care of himself…

He’s doing it again, she must be thinking. He’s never gonna stop doing it; he can’t stop doing it. This is the rest of her life. This is the man she wants to spend her days with, and every passing day, he’s less and less of himself. Cloud is not here anymore. And as far as she knows, he might never be here again.

Tifa in the original was a cool girl who was willing to do whatever she needed for her friends and chosen family, and that included staying with her beloved even when his body betrayed him. Tifa in the remakes is someone watching her loved one wither away due to something she can’t help him with, needing more and more help to communicate and work. And he needs her help, specifically, because he’s surrounded by people who came into his life without necessarily expecting to carry him through it. She’s all he’s got. Now that Aerith is gone, more than ever, she’s all he’s ever going to have.

It’s becoming more and more obvious. Barret can see it, and is visibly disturbed by it. Yuffie can see it, but she’s too young to understand. Nanaki can see it, but he’s going through the ringer himself, the world is on his back as the Guardian of the Canyon and he doesn’t know if that journey will always overlap with his friends’. Aerith could see it, but now she’s gone, and everything is worse. 

Everyone asks him to please take care of himself, they keep asking him if he’s okay and if he needs a break, and he keeps just moving on because self-care would imply there’s something wrong with him, and there’s nothing wrong with him, Aerith is alive and well and she’s going to work with us and I can see her, I can see everything the way it should be–

By the time Cloud starts talking about his visual hallucinations, Tifa doesn’t even say anything anymore. It’s just another day when Cloud fades a little more, replaced with this bossy, awful person who keeps killing people while saying a bunch of nonsense, and she has to figure out a new way to keep him calm and in working condition so they can save the world or whatever. But fuck, at this point she must be starting to wonder, why bother saving the world if she’s just going to have to take care of him after that, too? 

I see so much more doubt in Tifa about whether or not what she’s doing is making a difference this time around. Tifa in the OG was resolute, but also barely affected things compared to Aerith or Cloud himself. In this, Tifa is the last voice of reason in the man’s life. When everyone leaves – and they will leave, eventually – she’s the one who is going to stay behind and figure out where to go from here. 

And there’s just such tragedy about the fact that she doesn’t know things will get better. She’s imagining how she’s going to keep him contained while they fight now, being so weak herself after Aerith’s demise. She’s beginning to realize this is it for the long haul and that people are starting to move away when Cloud starts talking crazy. Cloud keeps lying, to her face, and there’s nothing she can even say at this point, because everyone only hears the lies. Why correct him? Why bother demanding to be treated well if he doesn’t even live in the same reality that she does, at this point? How do you even ask for help if you don’t know what would help?

And, like, look, this reading has problems and it only goes so far – dementia is not something you “treat” and it doesn’t magically get better just because you fall into the manifestation of all the life on the planet. At least I don’t think that’s proper FDA-approved yet. 

But I really think making Cloud’s mental breaks so much more clearly outside of his own control and even knowledge makes for a much more harrowing portrayal of a life being lost slowly. In the original, you can never really tell how much is Cloud just “pretending” he’s Zack and how much is Hojo’s experiments on him doing it. And, for the sake of my sanity, I’m not counting Crisis Core’s weird explanations here. But in Remake it’s… genuinely a man losing his sanity and his identity, and he doesn’t even know it.

And without knowing that herself, all Tifa knows is that the man she loves needs help. Forever. But who’s gonna help her now that Aerith is dead? 

To finish this ramble, there’s this moment in Rebirth’s Cosmo Canyon section that I think really nails what they’re doing with Tifa.

Cosmo Canyon has been reimagined as a place of religion– while in the original Bugenhagen was a wise mentor with all the answers about the cosmos and honestly, kinda felt like he was a man of science to me, in the remake trilogy he’s basically a cult leader. He’s very smart, obviously, but he very specifically keeps being dismissive of Tifa’s questions about the Lifestream, a place she has been to and he hasn’t.

There’s a lot you can read here – how blind faith numbs you to others and not just the truth, how even wisened individuals aren’t always the ones you want to go to with your problems, or just, hey, don’t join a fucking cult just because it seems harmless. Even Barret, who was incredibly excited to go to the place, becomes immediately disappointed at how people there react to his work and his opinions. He wants to actually save the planet, they want to just talk about doing it and then charge their root chakras with mako or some shit.

But anyway, Tifa goes to a meeting with a bunch of other cult members after being told this was the place where she could get some answers. She sits down and listens to people’s problems and thoughts like they’re in a support group. Everyone has anxieties, doubts and things they want to share. Finally, a place where people listen! 

It’s now Tifa’s turn, and she decides to share what she’s been through. Specifically how she’s anxious about the future after her experiences with the Lifestream, and how this relates to her personal history and fight for a better tomorrow.

They don’t even react.

There’s no jeering or booing or anything, there’s just silence. No one really expected her to talk about real things they could be doing, or how it has affected her daily life. This is a group for people who want to say they’re going to help, not actually do anything.  

And listen, it’s a plot moment, she’s talking about the plot – but she’s also being told that her story matters, only for her to get shot down when looking for help. She keeps talking about how people need to fight back against adversity, how this planet and everyone in it is all we have, and how we have to team up and gang together and take care of each other, take care of the planet, but she doesn’t know how to do that! She’s doing her best and she just wants some pointers here, because she doesn’t feel like she’s doing it 100% correctly! Bad things keep happening to her! Is it her fault?

I really read that as her asking if things are bad because she’s not doing enough. No one elected her a hero, and it’s as much her responsibility to take care of the planet as is anyone else’s. But… if it is partially her responsibility to take care of the Planet, and the Planet is dying, what other responsibilities is she not doing properly? Is she failing the Planet? Is she failing Cloud? Is she failing herself?

And then she immediately apologizes that she’s being a bother, and tells people to forget about it. Some polite clapping ensues, and a wisened old man gives her a generic answer about challenging herself, without really engaging with what she said.

Tifa looks like she’s been alone in every room she’s walked into when she starts talking about her feelings and her doubts. There’s no one there for her. The professionals don’t care, her living friends have no idea, and she doesn’t know what to do. But someone has to do something. 

Then it hit me, why I like this version of Tifa so much more: Tifa is someone who has to do something. I think that’s a really good way to expand on her character from the original. It may have also broken my heart about how much doing something is destroying her. Because at the end of the day, Tifa takes care of everyone, but no one really takes care of Tifa.

Well, anymore.