ever at your side

not even joking this is one of the worst possible changes that i could've reasonably conceived of to happen to video games.

Cloud Strife is truly The Character of all time. He’s a government-trained killing machine. He’s a cross-dressing babygirl. He’s a jaded mercenary who never turns down a job because he likes helping people. He’s an amnesic ecoterrorist who’s killed hundreds of people in order to save the planet from capitalism. He was the only child of a single mom and he’s been miserably in love with the girl next door his whole life. The first time he saw her in a swimsuit he forgot how to talk for ten full seconds. He has the personalities of at least three different people stuffed into his head, and two of them are trying to kill each other (Zack just wants everyone to get along). He’s the result of a mad scientist’s experiment that implanted the cells of a genocidal alien in his body. The son of that genocidal alien is psychosexually obsessed with him. So is the local pimp. His eyes glow because of all the radiation exposure, and half the people he meets are like, “Oof, you’re gonna die young, kid.” He’s a 5’7” short king. He’s a puppet built to bring about the apocalypse. He’s even autistic.

Cloud actually did a very bad job emulating Zack's persona, because the defining trait of Cloud-as-Zack is "cool", and Zack wasn't actually cool but he was to Cloud. Zack views Cloud getting to live as a relief and Cloud views it as a curse. Zack thinks saving Cloud was his One Good Thing and Cloud thinks of Zack as the ideal hero and himself as the Mistake. Zack would probably been overjoyed when Cloud recovered his memories because up until his death Zack never really came to terms with The Concept Of Zack Fair, but we know he loved The Person That Is Cloud Strife.