Graymouse
Pro Adventurer
Well, Happy New Year! I know this thread has went quiet for a bit but I figured I would share a nice pic of a quiet moment under the Highwind. Or not so quiet moment. ![Cookie Monster :monster: :monster:](/forums/images/smilies/cookiemonster.gif)
![Cookie Monster :monster: :monster:](/forums/images/smilies/cookiemonster.gif)
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Well what kanji/characters are used for the name Maru in Japanese?
I was waiting for someone to do this lol! This club has been way too quiet with all the leaked content we've been seeingIt's been 84 years for me in this club but c'mon Clotis...rise upIt's time to resurrect in time for Rebirth next week lmao
walks into the clubhouse as the double doors slam close and looks around and see noone here....
Club Tifa where yall at?
Have patience, I'm still playing the game!walks into the clubhouse as the double doors slam close and looks around and see noone here....
Club Tifa where yall at?
Lol just received my copy of the game on Friday so still playingwalks into the clubhouse as the double doors slam close and looks around and see noone here....
Club Tifa where yall at?
This is the best write up of the characterisation of Tifa and Cloud I have ever read. Well Done! I need to know what are your predictions or hopes for Part 3? With how much incredible writing we got for them here, I am very excited and think they can add a lot of new stuff.lmao, truly. Why are there five gazillion new pages in the LTD thread and crickets here? This fandom is so silly.
Anyways, 84 hours later, here are some thoughts on Rebirth for me and the wall, I guess.
I thought we were spoiled with Remake, but Rebirth is another level entirely. If Cloud and Tifa's relationship was the subtext in Remake, then it's become the text in Rebirth. You could look at Remake as an extended prologue, but Rebirth is where FF7's story begins in earnest, and it starts by setting up Cloud and Tifa's relationship as the primary emotional driver of the story (and honestly the only source of emotional conflict up through at least Corel).
Like the OG, it begins with Cloud's recounting of the Nibelheim incident, but this time around, Tifa immediately expresses her doubts, and Sephiroth immediately tries to get in the way. This entire game is like a slow roll of the Northern Crater scene in the OG (which might feel a little out of the blue for a lot of players unless you were really paying attention), with Tifa and Sephiroth the angel and devil on Cloud's shoulder. Anytime Cloud and Tifa get a bit closer to the truth on their own, Sephiroth/Jenova is just around the corner to throw another obstacle in their way.
Why don't their memories align? And why does Sephiroth care so fucking much? (up through Ch. 9, almost every time he appears it's to sow doubt in Cloud's mind about whether or not this Tifa is real/whether he should believe her. We see it in Kalm, on the ship, Corel, and of course, Gongaga.) This is the core mystery that propels the narrative forward, that demands resolution. The game makes us want to see the two of them share scenes together, if only so we can figure out what the hell is going on.
Which isn't to say that it's all plot and angst. There's so much depth and dimension to their relationship in this game.
Take the moment at the inn in Junon. Maybe it's just the ceiling fan (emphasizing the passage of time, elongating the distance they both want to close but cannot), but it reminded me of the scene at the bar before the Sector 5 mission in Remake, where Tifa is saying one thing out loud (that she's in a pinch) but really meaning something else (does Cloud remember their promise)? But this time Cloud catches on immediately, and it's kind of an awkward moment because like in Kalm, Tifa is doubting/testing Cloud, but unlike in Kalm, neither of them wants to end the night that way. Their 24 hour breakup was hell for them (and the rest of the party it seems), so they put their doubts to rest for now, until the next time they have a chance to talk.
But it's the way that the scene ends that's just delightful -- Tifa joking about making Cloud spill his guts, Cloud joking back, but the moment the door closes, the facade drops. Tifa dramatically sighing while leaning against the door, Cloud lingering and looking back before going to his room to do some sit ups. This feels more like a scene out of a domestic drama than a Final Fantasy, in fact, the only other scene like this I can recall is the one in Remake where Cloud stares at the door for like 5 seconds after wishing Tifa goodnight. But as it always is with the two of them, their scenes are not just about what they're saying, but what they've left unsaid.
Post make-up, their dynamic takes such a fun/sweet turn, even if the doubts still remain. From their playful flirting in the frog quest, to their overtly competitive flirting in Queen's Blood, to the casual comfort they have with one another while clearing out fiends around Jules' gym. There's such an ease to their conversations, and their shared past imbues each sentence with so much meaning -- everytime they bring up their childhood, there's this paired undercurrent of 'I wish we were closer back then' and 'but let's make up for it in the future' (which is pretty much explicitly stated in the Fluffy quest.) What a long way we've come from the miserabilia of the Advent Children days.
And then there's Gongaga, which was essentially the Lifestream (Tifa's version) and heavily forshadowing the revelations to come. We have Tifa being the one to shake Cloud out of Mako poisoning, Cloud going completely catatonic when he thinks she's gone.
We get such great insight into Tifa's character when she falls into the Lifestream. When she's starting to see the light, she sees Zangan, Dr. Sheiran, Barret and Aerith reaching out for her, because they need her, because she owes them. Tifa, ever the people pleaser, always worrying about everyone else, always living for everyone but herself.
But that's not how the scene ends, because then we see Cloud walking away, and now Tifa's the one reaching out for him. Because she needs him. Tifa is always catering to everyone else's needs, but now we see what and who she needs, her deepest desire and her greatest fear: it's Cloud, it's losing Cloud.
And so in what should be their lowest moment (like he literally just tried to kill her!), instead Tifa finds clarity and renewed purpose: she wants to be with Cloud, she wants to protect him. From this point on, she becomes much more open about her desires (like when she asks him to stay close to her when they're approaching Mt. Nibel), and the game is also constantly cutting to/emphasizing Tifa's reactions to everything Cloud. Mostly her worrying about his degradation/falling more and more under Sephiroth's influence, but even in the small stuff like Barret joking about Cloud being a loner -- hers is the reaction the game wants us to pay attention to.
Remake established Cloud's desire to protect Tifa, to be there for her, so their bond can be tested and transformed in Rebirth, so that we can understand why that's what Sephiroth uses to try and get him to break. Rebirth is establishing Tifa's desire to protect Cloud, so that in part 3, we can understand why she makes the "selfish" choice to leave the party to stay by his side, and why she is the only one who can save him, but in doing that he saves her too.
Rebirth also does an incredible job of establishing Tifa as the heroine of the story (at least in this telling of it). It's after Tifa falls into the Lifestream in Gongaga that the story introduces the Weapons, and the fate of the planet comes into the fore. It's also here where Sephiroth weakens Cloud enough to begin manipulating him to go after the Black Materia. Tifa is apparently important enough that the Weapons/Sephiroth/the plot ghosts are fighting over her. And thus her desire to stay by the side of her simple country boy becomes intrinsically tied to the fate of the world.
I also loved how early we're learning about the Mt. Nibel incident in the story, because it's there (not the Nibelheim incident, not even the promise) that Cloud and Tifa's story really begins. It's where Cloud develops a complex about his weakness/failure to save his loved ones, but it's also where we first see one of the main themes of the game established - dealing with and accepting death.
Tifa couldn't accept her mother's death and nearly loses her own life because of it. From then on, her life is full of loss and death, her village, her father, AVALANCHE, and while she burns with grief and anger, she accepts it. She knows they're gone.
Cloud never learned how. He never had a chance to grieve his mother -- he was put in a tank for 5 years. He invents a new persona and completely forgets Zack because he's unable to process his death. Now he's deluding himself into believing that Aerith didn't die at all. In fact that's partially what Sephiroth is taunting him about in the Temple of the Ancients -- Tifa is able to grieve while he cannot.
I thought overall the ending was a bit of a clusterfuck that prioritized mystery over emotional clarity and character, but I do like what they're doing with Tifa's reaction. She is the one who lingers by the lake because she knows Aerith is gone and she knows she has to live with that grief. Cloud does not. It's only after the Lifestream that he can finally feel human again, that he can learn to accept loss. Cloud was the one there for her when she was eight. Tifa is going to be the one there for him now. It always starts and ends with each other.
Haha, I don't really do predictions, and honestly I don't think in my wildest imagination could I have predicted what we got in Rebirth, LOL.
Though I am very curious to see how they handle Cloud and Tifa's relationship (mostly coming from Tifa's side) pre-Northern Crater.
One of the few things I loved about the ending was Tifa's reaction, namely her silence. How Tifa reacts to Cloud basically serves as a Cloud-sanity barometer throughout the game. Even through the Temple of the Ancients, where Cloud is clearly not himself and such a fucking asshole, she's still desperately reaching out, trying to ground him, though it clearly hurts her when he physically pushes her away. (But I loved this because I love angst, lol). But after Aerith's death, Tifa can't speak to him, she can hardly even look at him, he's so far gone. She doesn't have a single line of dialogue after the lake (except to kinda scoff/sigh when Cloud's all like "yup! ready to go" when Barret calls them). She's so present throughout the entirety of the game that her silence at the end is especially damning, and the game is definitely trying to draw our attention to that silence.
That's a dynamic I'd like to see play out at the beginning of part three -- Tifa keeping her distance while Cloud is so delusional that he thinks everything is fine. Up until the Northern Crater where Sephiroth's presence/gaslighting activates the Tifa we all know and love.
Another thing I loved about Rebirth is that even when they're emotionally at odds, they're still so physically in-sync. Like during their 24-hr breakup post-Kalm, pre-Junon, I was so shook when Aerith was the first one there after Cloud is taken by the Midgar Zolom (or whatever its name is now), but then in the Turks fight, we have them doing the back-to-back trailer pose, battle coupling it out like usual. Same as in ToTA, they're so in-sync, literally doing their synergy abilities in cutscenes, in the fight against the Red Dragon and the Turks Redux, even if Cloud is a total dick afterwards. It's like even when they're emotionally strained, the game is reminding us that they are uniquely connected on a deeper, subconscious level. So I'd like to see this continue through the angstier bits of part 3.
Other than that, I'm very excited to see how the rest of the party reacts to them. We now have at least two in-universe shippers in the party, but I wonder if they'll come to regret that post-Lifestream, when Cloud and Tifa get so disgustingly mushy that everyone is just begging to get to the final fight with Sephiroth to end their misery, LOL.
And obviously looking forward to the Lifestream scene, which I think will at the very least be as good as the OG (since they only seem to fuck up the big moments that come at the end of the games, lmao), and Gongaga was incredible foreshadowing. That music alone!
Although I'm very much a Cloti (may Meteor rain on the heretics who deny Her Holy Grace), I've never been so invested that I've spent any real time in The Club™.Guys, just a heads up that this is meant to be a spoiler free channel (unlike LTD), just started skim reading but seems like you're discussing specific rebirth events? Do you mind popping it under a spoiler tag? (I'm not a mod, there's just so few spoiler free threads updating atm that I read all of them, since I can't go in spoiler threads yet and I think I just nearly spoiled myself here lol). Can't wait to read everyone's thoughts once I have finished the game though!