#echo-s

And then they fucked.

The romance sub plot of FF7 is wonderfully done because of how understated it is. For disc 1 it almost feels like there's a bit of a love triangle going on between Cloud and Aerith and Cloud and Tifa, the girls are definitely both aware of the others attraction towards Cloud and try to be respectful about it. But for that first part of the game it definitely feels like Cloud and Aerith have more of a connection, right from their first meeting they have a lot of chemistry that Cloud and Tifa simply do not demonstrate due to their mutual baggage and trauma causing them to walk on eggshells. The game heavily favors Aerith for the date scene at the Golden Saucer. Cloud X Aerith feels like the most natural pairing.

And then Aerith dies. And all the what ifs and could have beens are left permanently unanswered.

It's dismissively tempting to say Tifa is just the rebound girl, but that is definitely ignoring the significant amount of development their relationship and overall characters underwent during disc 2. After their trip through the life stream together, it's hard to imagine that they could ever do anything but end up together. They've seen one another with their souls laid bare, the truth of their past and identities exposed. You could never be more intimate with someone than Cloud and Tifa were when they were together in the life stream.

LOOOOOOVE the way Reeve can't keep his voice straight during this scene! This moment is ALWAYS ruined in the localization because they just translate the words literally and fuck up what's supposed to be happening here. In japanese Cait Sith talks in a kansai regional dialect, and Reeve talks in kanto dialect. So what's happening in this scene is he's getting all confused and flustered and speaking in Kansai as Reeve, and kanto as Cait Sith.

The biggest props as always to the voice acting for this mod, they nailed it perfectly by having Reeve start speaking in a scottish accent during this perfectly localizing what's supposed to be happening in this scene.

All the dialog we get from Sephiroth before he goes off the deep end! I think about it constantly. Whenever I see someone talking about The First Soldier or Crisis Core, I think of the flashback scene and how this is all that was ever truly intended to be known about the human man Sephiroth, the legendary SOLDIER. Regardless of your feelings about the voice acting, I do believe this translation is reasonably accurate to the original Japanese script.

I think what's most striking about Sephiroth is how normal he is. He seems like just a chill dude. He's quiet, aloof, a bit of a loner and clearly has some baggage. But he has a sense of humor, he laughs at himself and about things he finds comical from others. He's willing to take "watch" duties and give Cloud his free leave to go reconnect with his family and friends now that they're in his hometown, he's sympathetic towards Cloud's experience of getting to reconnect with his home after years even though it's an experience Sephiroth cannot relate to. He even poses for a photo even though he doesn't seem to want to. How considerate.

When they get to the reactor and "Cloud" wants Tifa to wait outside, Sephiroth citing whatever is inside is "confidential" to Shinra personnel only - that doesn't come off as sincere company man talk to me. It seems like he's offering an official excuse to reasonably bar Tifa from entry BECAUSE Zack "Cloud" doesn't want her going in and being put at risk. He isn't invested himself, I seriously doubt he actually cares if Tifa sees something she's not supposed to and he is definitely strong enough to keep her safe, but he supports his subordinate in a way that gives them plausible deniability which is very emotionally intelligent.

The worst thing he does is say they can't spare time to look for their MIA trooper after the bridge collapses. But he admits that it sounds harsh, he's self aware about how his words and priorities will come off to others. And it IS reasonable and rational, since they're in hostile territory and he is responsible for the safety of the others including a civilian, so the best course of action is to try and just get the mission done quickly so they can return to safety. He isn't heartless or cruel, he's being pragmatic.

Sephiroth wasn't a bad person before he lost his mind. People put him on a pedestal, but he never treated anyone else poorly or as an inferior because of his reputation or his abilities. We come to find he DID have a bit of prodigy syndrome, he believed himself to be special and that contributes to his downfall, but in every way that he interacted with others he seemed. Normal. Just a normal guy, who has his own problems but who doesn't. Not an untouchable god, and not a deranged lunatic teetering on the edge.

Sephiroth fucking loses it. I personally think the voice actor did a fantastic job showing his mental decline. Sephiroth is a big role to have to try and live up to, and I personally feel they really pulled off this one of the most important scenes in the entire game with his performance. This is an excellent mod.

The impact of this moment really needs to be appreciated in its proper context. The Zolom is practically an unwinnable fight, and a road block that forces you to interact with the chocobo ranch. And Sephiroth does THAT to it. Off screen. The characters are horrified, and so are we. If Sephs was capable of doing THAT by himself to a monster that our entire party is utterly helpless against, what possible hope do we have against the man himself?

We finally get to see the REAL Cloud at this point in the game! I really enjoy seeing these moments at last.

For most of the game Cloud isn't actually acting like himself. He's motivated by a lot of guilt and internalized self loathing that was exacerbated by trauma, a survivors complex, and denial as a coping mechanism. So he's just acting like what he thinks is the way a cool guy should be. It's all a façade, modeled after his misrepresented memory of someone he idealized.

So it's funny to me that so many people buy into the front he's putting up x3

It isn't until now that we start seeing the "real" Cloud at last and by then the perception of him being a genuine cool guy has already taken root. But this is the actual Cloud. He starts panicking because of claustrophobia and needs to ask for help from the others to get through the stress of it all. Only after Vincent helps stabilize him a bit can he get his head back in the game.

I'm never going to get over this, the voice acting in this mod is SO good. Everyone is killing it. The mod creators talked about how they want to "remaster" this mod in the aftermath of the Remake games, but I think they knocked it out of the park I wouldn't want them to change a thing.

So here Sephiroth explains his actual evil plan in the broad strokes at least. There's still some details we don't know yet, but he lays most of it out here. Up until this point the gang was operating under the belief that Sephiroth wanted something to do with "the promised land" that Shinra was all about. But nobody even knows if such a thing exists, or what it would mean to find it, so Sephiroth's actual intentions and motivation is a mystery until this point.

But Sephiroth explains his actual plan is to become a god by soul voring every single person on the planet. Like an even more omnigenocidal version of Kefka becoming the god of magic. His method of doing so is by casting Meteo, the most powerful black magic spell in the Final Fantasy series. This is actually a deep cut reference to Final Fantasy 4, and I actually prefer calling the spell Meteo instead of properly translating it as "Meteor" for that reason because otherwise the reference is lost. Meteo is the most powerful and highest MP costing spell in FF4, such to the point that Tellah cannot cast it even though it is in his spell list during all his time in the party until a story important cutscene. Here, the power of Meteo has been elevated even further to apocolyptic proportions.

It should be noted that Meteo's white magic opposite, the most powerful white magic spell in FF4, is Holy.

Importantly, this motivation is a far cry from what Sephiroth said he wanted in the Kalm flashback showing his final moments as a living human who burned down Nebehliem. The man talking to us in this scene explaining his plan is NOT the same Sephiroth who burned down Cloud's home town, who thought himself an Ancient and who wanted to wipe out all life on earth to reclaim it on behalf of his mother Jenova. This Sephiroth instead wants to become a God and merge with the planet to reign over it. What changed? Sephiroth's understanding about the truth of himself and his place in the world has expanded after his death in the lifestream and rebirth by hijacking Jenova cells, but I also believe he has partially merged with Jenova. Jenova, as we come to learn, is an alien parasite entity that seeks to mindlessly wipe out all life on the planet to perpetuate itself, and then replicate and expand across other planets throughout the cosmos. What likely happened is Sephiroth's will and spirit merged with the physical properties of Jenova's alien biology after he and the preserved Jenova specimen were dropped into the lifestream together, aided by the fact that Sepiroth was already a genetic experiment who was spliced with Jenova cells while in the womb.

If you enjoy Crisis Core that's fine, I'm not going to make any kind of editorialized statement against you. You're allowed to like whatever you like for whatever reason you like it. However my standard of media analysis is that a piece of art should be appraised within the context of its original release, rather than incorporating elements invented after the fact in subsequent media releases or even paratextual sources. I do not take anything invented by Crisis Core, a game written ten years after the fact by a completely different creative team who were operating contrary to the standards and values of the most important guiding artist responsible for the original game, into consideration when analyzing this scene from the original Final Fantasy 7 released in 1997. (although the voice acting mod I'm using did decide to throw in a CC reference at the very end there lol oops).

So Zacks. We know precious little about him, up until this point the only real things we knew were tidbits disclosed by Aerith. Zack mostly functions as part of the twist reveal about Cloud not being the person he presented himself as. He matters less as a character in his own right than what his character represents for Cloud's development. Literarily, Zack is a shallow narrative device to enable the story the game is telling about Cloud. But we can still make extrapolations ABOUT his character from this short single scene we have of him.

We know for example that Zack grew up in a backwater town that lived in the shadow of Shinra's irresponsible business practices. Possibly due to Gongaga being centered so primarily around a Shinra power plant, he ended up wanted to become a SOLDIER. The fact that Gongaga was later devastated by Shinra's negligence is thematically appropriate considering Zacks own fate. In fact, timeline wise, Gongaga's reactor most likely suffered its critical meltdown on the day of Zacks death, even more directly tying that theme together for his character. Even before we properly learn about Zack as an individual, he is presented by the narrative as a tragic victim of Shinra who sees individuals and communities as disposable commodities.

Zack joined SOLDIER and eventually rose the ranks to become 1st Classic, just like Sephiroth. But by then, the war with Wutai was already over and there were no more great battles to fight and develop a heroic reputation of his own, something he desired to attain. His youthful excitement and desire for fame is contrasted against Cloud, who never achieved his own dream of even joining SOLDIER, and against Sephiroth who (before he goes insane) is more world weary and grounded about the reputation his exploits have garnered. We also learn from Aerith that he was prone to macking on the ladies, but he had enough charisma that she was serenaded by him despite describing him as a ladies man. Zack is, to a degree, sheltered and naive and perhaps a little full of himself.

That's all what we can glean about him before this scene, by other characters dialog about and in relation to him and from what deductions we can make regarding the content of the Kalm flashback.

In the flashback here, we see Zack and Cloud were experimented on by Hojo in the aftermath of the Nebehliem incident. Zack was uneffected by the experiments, because he was already a SOLDIER who had been subjected to mako before, and thus was able to escape his confinement. Cloud was severely physically augmented by the mako bath and Jenova cell injection, turning him into the equivalent of a SOLDIER who was subjected to the enhancements on a more official capacity, but the experimentation combined with his recent traumatic experience leaves him SEVERELY mentally deteriorated almost in a catatonic state. Despite the fact that Cloud was reduced to the point that many might consider him a lost cause, a shell of a human being, Zack still went out of his way to save Cloud and escape with him even though it decreased the likelihood of his own survival.

Zack manages to secure a ride for himself and Cloud to Midgar thanks to the kindness of a stranger with a truck. During the drive Zack seems oblivious to Cloud's state of mind, but we can easily interpret this as him choosing to overlook that and treat Cloud as he normally would in the hopes that he would recover. (Mirroring the way Aerith talks about Barret during their initial visit to the Golden Saucer). Zack seems to have completely divorced any association with Shinra from his mind - he is on the lamb and is aware of it, trying to formulate a plan of who he might reach out to for support and how he'll be able to financially support himself and Cloud. He humorously takes a very lateral and self serving interpretation from their drivers advice, whether this is because he's so head in the clouds that he genuinely missed the point or because he was deliberately contextualizing the advice in a self serving way is also something we can make up our own minds about.

Zack continues to drag Cloud along with him on his journey to Midgar, even when it becomes apparent they are being pursued by Shinra. Zack tries to fight them off, but ultimately dies. Horribly and brutally being gunned down like a dog, and Cloud being left for dead. The voice acting mod aside, in the text of FF7 Zack has no final words for Cloud. He is gunned down, he dies, and that's that. Cloud takes his Buster sword, and in his fractured mental state he subsumes what he has observed about Zacks personality and his own internalized conception of what a SOLDIER 1st Class should be, and with Zack's final words about becoming a "jack of all trades" in his mind he proceeds to stumble his way into Midgar and is soon found by Tifa whom in meeting her brings him back into lucidity.

And thus ends Zack's presence in the narrative of Final Fantasy 7. And it's fascinating to me how even in this short optional scene, we can make so many conclusions about his characterization such as it is. Zack didn't have to save Cloud. Rationally, it was a mistake to try and do so, since it lowered his own chances for survival and by all appearances Cloud was just a limp body with scrambled eggs for brains. And yet Zack still chose to save him, and in doing so ultimately made it possible for Cloud and his gang to go on to save the planet from Sephiroth. Zacks act of self sacrificial kindness allows him to posthumously become the hero he always desired.

Even in the little material we have in this game, Zack was a sufficiently well rounded character. He had shortcomings and downsides, and virtues and motivations. He made mistakes, and was mistaken about things. His story is tragic, as he will not be known or celebrated the way he had wanted. And yet despite it all, he is more than just a footnote in Cloud's story. He lived, he loved, he fucked up, he persevered, and in the end he dies a hero who is partially responsible for helping to save the world.