I have to say that any time that the developers make it overtly clear that they're designing core gameplay mechanics like the Synergy Attacks (whose inception goes at least as far back as the core of the storyline in
INTERmission) around a storytelling goal for making the characters' relationships with one another a core element that all of the players are going to experience in multiple ways makes me
unbelievably happy. Regardless of how you feel about the system itself, this is EXACTLY how they used the DMW in
Crisis Core with the whole purpose being planned to make the core of the finale more impactful. Given how Yuffie syncs up with Sonon, you could even say the same thing of that synergy mechanic in
INTERmission.
The fact that it's emphasizing their relationships to one another and that's what I was going on about
in my earlier tl;dr post about Vincent's & Cid's position within the party being delayed until the finale of Rebirth makes me feel like they've got an absolutely perfect handle on what they're doing with the narrative arc in this game. The added mysteries of what's going on with Zack definitely add in a different nuance to it, because that's a bond that Sephiroth, Cloud, Aerith, and to some extent Tifa all share with someone whose fate was death due to events that already occurred, and what it would mean if it were possible to subvert that.
Aerith's dialogue in the final chapters of Remake when talking about the Voices of the Planet crying out in pain was pretty clear that undoing something like that would ALSO unwrite all of the decisions and memories that every single person in the world had made past that point, and that you'd essentially be sacrificing the world everyone else currently shares for another one, along with erasing all of those memories as well.
Sephiroth sees this from a perspective where he'd gladly sacrifice this world to be unmade for a Promised Land somewhere else. To echo back to foreshadowing that
Elmyra made about Cloud in Remake about all the members of SOLDIER – they made a trade of a normal life for power – and you HAVE to choose one over the other, because you can't have it both ways. Cloud is repeatedly being pushed father and farther into a position where HE is going to have to choose which one of those paths he takes...
...because Sephiroth is explicitly cooperating and LETTING HIM DO THAT, so
he gives Cloud the 7 seconds needed to make a choice of the world Cloud wants to have. What's more telling is that
this follows EXACTLY how Sephiroth's dialogue in Dissidia FF NT said that when his & Cloud's goals align it would result in their meeting again, and even moreso that
their entire confrontation in Remake starting with that sword strike is an overt mirror of the design themes in that Dissidia FF NT encounter.
The use of the Portal Materia in
Ever Crisis has been overtly clear that it's impossible for anyone to retain memories of going to another "possibility" like that be it in Dissidia's setting OR in the Terrier timeline where Zack survives. This is clearly a core component to the story about Young Sephiroth in
Ever Crisis where
he's socially maladjusted from being raised in isolation as the "hero" face of the SOLDIER program and when asked says that the only thing he wants is, "...I just want to live a normal life." That's why before the missions he
starts out asking if anyone knows about his mother, and then years later when
an older Sephiroth, Zack, & Cloud arrive for the mission in Nibelheim he falls back into doing that same thing before laughing it off and giving up on the conversation – except that that's where he learned the answer he'd given up on and wantonly threw away the entire rest of the world to use his power to be able to create a new world that had what he'd never been able to as a living human test subject – a normal life with his mother.
In the case of Sephiroth, that that decision to have power was one that was made for him before he was even born, which is what makes him an Active Type SOLDIER, unlike the Passive Type SOLDIERs Glenn, Matt, & Lucia who are still just normal humans since the S & G type SOLDIER programs weren't in full effect. The same thing is true of Aerith whose life was a series of tragedies because her mother was the last of the Cetra, but who managed to escape being raised in Shinra at the cost of her mother's life. Cloud's mom died during the Nibelheim incident as a direct result of Sephiroth's actions, despite the fact that Cloud always looked up to Sephiroth as a hero thanks to Shinra using him as a marketing tool to target kids exactly like Cloud towards being recruits into their military force. Cloud is also taken as a helpless subject and turned into something against his will that allows him to play the role of being a SOLDIER like he dreamed of... but that's only the way to have the power to achieve the dream of what he ACTUALLY wanted.
Cloud grew up wanting to be included with Tifa & her friends but always felt socially detached like he was the weird one and thought she hated him. After Tifa's mom died,
not only was he unable to protect her from that grief, he also didn't save her from the injury she got falling off of the bridge at Mt. Nibel. He got away with scraped knees back then, but she ended up in a coma for a week and he took the blame for it despite Tifa being the one who wandered and him just following. That's why even thinking that she wouldn't come,
HE called her to the well to tell her that he was leaving to join SOLDIER and agreed to her making him promise to come help her out some day like a hero. Not just that, but one of the VERY first things that happens when Cloud starts playing the role of a SOLDIER in
Remake is that
he saves a girl who's stuck playing the role of the damsel in distress, and then
saves himself from being injured by a collapsing bridge without needing any help.
Except that the next time he's placed into that EXACT same situation –
he's left helplessly falling off of a Bridge and relying on Barret to take Tifa and escape because he's not strong enough. Then he meets Aerith again and when he doesn't leave like Elmyra asks,
he immediately starts having emotional triggers to parallels from future of someone he's too weak to stop from dying. Aerith makes him stick around to save Tifa from Don Corneo rather than being stuck worrying about her by choosing to go where Cloud needs to. Then once they do and the three of them end up in the Sewers,
Cloud & Tifa cross an unsteady bridge and Aerith has to jump from it as it collapses, and then almost immediately afterward
when Aerith is talking about how the future isn't set in stone, she & Tifa have to save Cloud from a collapsing walkway. Cloud very clearly isn't at the point where he wants to be yet, but he's still trying to be strong enough to do it on his own.
Cloud gets emotionally disrupted when
Biggs dies, and as the former big brother of the Leaf House he notices all the ways that Cloud is still EXACTLY like a kid. He keeps going and
is given hope when he saves Tifa from a collapsing stairway, but then
fails to save Tifa from emotional suffering like when her mom died because he fails to save Jessie – who knows that both of them are still playing roles to help other people. Then, upon failing to stop the Sector 7 collapse resulting in
he & Tifa both re-experiencing a disaster leaving countless dead & losing their home again just like in Nibelheim, and
Aerith being taken by Shinra as an experiment just like he was making him hyper defensive – especially after he already had a flashback about the Cetra where Sephiroth states that this Planet is
his birthright, and then immediately sees Sephiroth in his head saying,
"You have failed again, I see. But through suffering, you will grow strong. Isn't that what you want?"
Because that IS what Cloud wants and he has to walk through the hellish wreckage of the thousands of dead from that failure and then also tell Aerith's mom what happened
because he wasn't able to make that choice for Aerith – she rejected his attempt to just quietly leave her by making her own decision, just like Cloud has to ignore Elmyra again to go save Aerith... ultimately setting her on the path where she goes along to help them. Even later on when Cloud goes up against Rufus 1 on 1 he falls and Tifa has to save HIM and tells him
"You gotta to be better than this... if you're gonna play the hero." which is what he's always doing.
This beings up what the crux of that issue is in
Rebirth which is that at The Temple of the Ancients, Cloud is too weak to stop Sephiroth from taking the Black Materia and
his PTSD flips him into the berserk state and makes him attack Aerith. This is something I'm quite curious if/how
Rebirth is going to cover, given that it is a real-world trauma response symptom of PTSD caused by when your defense mechanisms are so helpless in repeatedly failing that they flip into an inversion state to turn you against the people closest to you. This is an important detail because this trauma response is how people are able to sever ties with a narcissistic abuse dynamic filling in the place of what your family should do where rather than protect you – they just exploit you for their own benefit. This is, at its core EXACTLY what occurs to Sephiroth at the Nibelheim incident and why he becomes unrecognizable to the person he was before and turns on his friends like Zack beyond just the Shinra troops assigned with them, and the civilians he's in charge of protecting. Just like in the original game,
Sephiroth wants the power to create the future, whereas Aerith is opposed because the future isn't his alone to dictate.
Even more than that, how does he do that in the face of the fact that
the reason Aerith ends up at the Forgotten Capitol because she CHOOSES TO GO ALONE because he's still too weak and tells Cloud to stay and take care of himself... the same moment that gave him preemptive triggers of losing someone again because he's too weak. This is why Zack's quote at the end of
Crisis Core comes in
Remake back as the Planet screams about them attempting to defeat the Whispers and make a future that goes against what everyone else has influenced,
"We drag our asses all this way, and this is the welcome we get. Boy, oh boy... the price of freedom is steep. Embrace your dreams. And, WHATEVER HAPPENS... protect your honor ...as a SOLDIER!"
So how does Cloud reconcile his dream of saving the people closest to him with his honor as a SOLDIER? Even though it's something he's only pretending to be, he's still put in a position where he has to make that choice. Even
Advent Children is showing how despite that victory this type of trauma from loss is going to keep coming back to haunt him, and whenever it does,
Sephiroth shows up to make him however strong he needs to be to overcome it because Sephiroth is just that pain and darkness constantly pulled back up from Cloud's own past – which Kingdom Hearts was pretty damned overt about when they showed up in their AC outfits.
This is where I want to mention one other critically important detail about overcoming that type of PTSD that points to the differences in Cloud & Sephiroth's relationship over time as it involves the real-world effects of someone with PTSD seeing people in hallucinations the way that Cloud does.
This happens because they don't see them as human, but regard them as being something totally alien, and terrifyingly unlike themselves.
What this does is that it causes your brain to latch on to the "Us vs. Them" survival mechanisms when there are triggers to that trauma. In Cloud's case
that's typically some form of a collapsing bridge, like after the Mako Reactor No 1 explosion like when he first sees Sephiroth, but also
seeing Aerith being helpless against her own fate, like when he first encounters her and Sephiroth tells him, "You're too weak to save anyone. Not even yourself." What's happening is that regardless of your previous relationship to that person (like Cloud idolizing Sephiroth and leaving to join SOLDIER because of it), because you now see that individual as something that's completely unlike you – they are the core manifestation that appears when your survival mechanisms trigger from the pattern of a learned traumatic danger. Even moreso than that, when you're in a place that you feel strongly emotional about wanting to protect from harm, they ALSO show up there even in the absence of a familiar environmental trigger because that same survival mechanism is being activated in your brain.
The weaker you feel – the most invincible, inhuman & terrifyingly alien that "them" other in your mind becomes, and they appear more frequently in hallucinations as that rift between the "us/them" gets reinforced by your survival response continually experiencing exposure to that during triggers, building up that pattern even deeper. These are all things that
Remake follows when it portrays Cloud's trauma.
The way to get past this is to learn to understand the motivations and actions that caused that individual to do what they did in a way where you don't regard them as being any different than you are. Sephiroth is a damaged, socially maladjusted human experiment living in a fucked up corporate dystopia that he absolutely loathes and just wants to have friends and live a normal life where he gets to help people
instead of being treated like some weird anomaly all the time like happened with his near-friends Genesis & Angeal. That's the same damage as Cloud's experiencing, and understanding that means that instead of treating Sephiroth like a "Them" when his trauma survival response gets activated, if he sees Sephiroth as an "Us"
then Sephiroth can't manifest as something for Cloud to protect AGAINST when his PTSD kicks in because he's not any different.
Also, to reiterate – this is a real thing with PTSD that's detailed in accounts with Vietnam vets by Jonathan Shay – one of the people who helped to research a massive amount of what we currently know about the condition, and where this is used to make people stop seeing hallucinations that they've lived with for
years.
What's important to follow-up with is that just because someone's actions are understandable and they follow a series of causal events that are relatable to what you'd go through if you were in that situation under those same stressors does NOT mean that they can be trusted as an ally. Narcissistic abuse creates survival coping mechanisms that mirror narcissistic behaviour. As I mentioned earlier with Cloud's berserk attack on Aerith, survivors who escape that type of authoritarian abusive environment have to learn to disconnect from familial ties and focus on protecting themselves because the people who are close to them are a source of harm. This means that their survival response gets positively reinforced when cutting themselves off from others – which means that they're more likely to not trust others and only see them as an unreliable temporary resource... which means that in a collective group, they are now treating others with the exact same selfishly hierarchal abuse dynamic that they needed to escape from.
This is why narcissism piles on cognitive dissonance and a rejection around not being exceptional, because they were the ONLY exceptional one who escaped from people who were more powerful than they were... and thus the cycle continues a trauma that spreads feeding on others like Vampirism creating more from everyone it encounter (much as Vincent's own trauma from not taking appropriate actions to prevent the experiment leading to Sephiroth's birth from happening in the first place has him following a lot of those same tropes explored in tragic monsters). Even in
Advent Children there's Cloud feeling helpless that he and the kids he's built into his tiny pseudo family are dying from a disease he can't stop – so he cuts off because he knows he's not strong enough to lose them, but in doing so is only bringing Sephiroth back faster from being caught in that traumatic feedback loop.
This is what makes the story responsibility in
Rebirth so important when it comes to everyone's bonds with one another.
Those collective social bonds are reinforced in the brain by Oxytocin because that's what makes mothers treat children as an extension of themselves to protect, and why infants don't have fear response triggered when their guardian is there to protect them. They have a shared system that alleviates pain and stress through social bonds, and that's something that still exists in adults as it's a core component in all of our social relationships and bonds to one another that allow us not to feel alone and cut off because isolation is a survival threat... Except that Oxytonic bonds are making you more amenable ONLY to the "us" group because it's a binary that ALSO strengthens massive biases against anyone in a "them" group that's a threat.
So,
Rebirth is implementing integrated mechanics designed to build up to a finale of what's always been a deeply traumatic event to make you absolutely HATE someone else and want to seize any power necessary in order to extinguish their threat by obliterating them from existence to keep those people you love safe as intensely as possible.
But even if that person is objectively a threat to the world and they DO literally need to be stopped – revenge alone is an empty victory because that motivation can't prevent that from turning into a persisting trauma that never goes away.
You have to be able to understand that the intensity with which you're turning against them is EXACTLY the same intensity with which they turned against everything else. You're identical. Cloud is a Sephiroth copy. So, does he even have his own motivations? Is the correct answer to just accept Sephiroth's solution and erase this world for one where neither of them have to go through that trauma? Do you have to just accept that that type of trauma is a part of life and those deaths may have resulted from a collection of choices everyone made rather than dictating a solution? Is it evil to try and create a less fucked up world than the one that all of the horrific actions that Shinra took lead to? Is it evil to just shrug and accept that suffering even if the world literally places all of that power directly in your lap to change it somehow and didn't give you the choice to have a normal life at all?
The right answer to the question that
Rebirth is going to leave us grasping at is going to be WAY more difficult than what we initially faced in
Final Fantasy VII, because there's been a quarter century of research and information about what that type of trauma actually IS and how it heals than existed back in 1997. While I don't know what will or won't happen at the Forgotten Capitol – I can confidently say that given what they've done so far and what they're talking about in that interview, you should absolutely trust that they know what they're doing with this story.
(Additionally, this is why my bigger writing project won't actually solidify until the trilogy of games are complete, because while I do think I have a really good knack for speculating, it's no where near as useful as actually having the specific examples to demonstrate things in a direct analysis. Hopefully some of that gushing and whatnot will give a sense of what I've been paying attention to, though).
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