What about those four years when they were floating side by side in two giant test-tubes? Plenty of time for Zack to talk to Cloud then. He had nothing else to do to pass the time.
It's another thing that's unclear. As mentioned, there's the scratched glass, but I have trouble seeing how they could have been communicating verbally given that they're inside glass-tubes filled with mako. The very fact that they scratched the glass seems to indicate a difficulty to communicate verbally while inside the tanks.
If they did both, that in and of itself would be another indicator of questionable quality of writing.
Several days, if not a week, passed between the scene in the reactor between Zack and Sephiroth and Sephiroth's final rampage. Zack might very well have discussed this scene with Cloud, maybe in the evening over a pint of beer at the inn. He may also have shared his concerns over the fact that Sephiroth had locked himself in the basement to read and was having an nervous breakdown. It's not impossible that they got a chance to talk about "what the hell happened in there?" before Hojo put them into their respective test-tubes.
This works for some scenes but not for the scene I'm talking about.
When Cloud tells the story of going to the reactor to confront Sephiroth for the first time, this is him basically relaying what Zack was doing. Cloud entered after that to find Tifa wounded when Zack had already run into the inner chamber to face Sephiroth.
Cloud should have no recollection of what was being said in that inner chamber, Sephiroth walking into the chamber, or cutting down Tifa, but he does.
It's unlikely that Zack would have told him these things because it's such an unnatural conversation to have, especially for Zack to have with a comatose Cloud in the back of a truck, or anywhere else for that matter.
The Compilation explanation is, if nothing else, consistent with what the OG says Jenova can do.
I'm not so sure that's the right way to put it. It's more accurate to say "the compilation's explanation is
possible given what we know of Jenova", because we don't really know what the game entails with the idea of Jenova herself and her ability to read minds. After all, we don't even know if it's really a "she" in any meaningful sense.
To put it differently :
The game says Jenova can read minds - it doesn't say Jenova's cells can read minds. It doesn't even specify whether Jenova is best thought of as a being, or as a kind of virus, or cluster of cells.
My point here is that, for instance, if Jenova is a being with a brain, then the statement could be taken to mean "Jenova the being" would be able to read minds. That does not necessarily mean or express intent to describe Jenova as something that can read your mind simply by virtue of the fact that you have her cells in you.
To say cells can read your mind is in and of itself kinda nonsensical.
What it certainly does not say is that Jenova can read the minds of people she doesn't have cells in, relying only on a small amount of cells in a different person.
There's just very little to no proper details on exactly what Jenova is or how she works in the OG to make much out of that statement.
This is why I don't like the direction they took with the compilation in this regard.
The implication of Jenova cells being able to remotely read Tifa's mind is a whole lot more disbelief shattering IMO than just imagining Cloud pieced stuff together on his own at best, or at worst, by the main body Jenova exerting control over him using the cells in his body, and maybe having used the same technique to transplant memories from Zack, since Zack was also injected with them.
What do you think happens in
this scene? This is my take:
We have a persona-less Cloud who's unable to do a thing, then Tifa interacts with him and he gets what's needed for a persona and becomes active again. Obviously J-cells are at work here, so at best we'd be arguing whether Cloud only inherited Tifa's impressions of Cloud/SOLDIER, or some of her memories as well. OG Sephiroth says memories. External material says memories. This makes no plot hole. With this, Cloud-Zack memories are also easily explained without any direct confirmation in OG.
Weren't they comatose all those years until Zack woke up and broke out?
That was the scene I referred to in my post.
In the ultimania, if I remember correctly (I'd have to go back and read it again, but it's a pain to look it up so give me some time on that) this is described as Jenova remotely reading Tifa's mind.
Broken Cloud sees Tifa, and immediately begins to work in this new identity as a response to his past with her, his trauma, his lack of confidence, prompted by Jenova who fills in the blanks for him based on what she can read off of Tifa, and what she read off of Zack.
My problems here are two-fold -
Firstly, there's no direct evidence in the scene to suggest that Jenova is doing something here. This could easily have been made apparent by having a boxless dialogue flash across the screen with an unknown voice going "you're Cloud, SOLDIER 1st Class" or something to that effect.
Secondly, as I've said earlier, is that the OG never really outlines Jenova's ability to read minds in detail (we know "she" can read minds, but not her cells) and we know she can assert control via her cells (in what fashion is uncertain; whether it reflects Jenova actually having a mind, or whether it's more like a virus that merely pushes people like an instinct towards reunion).
What's more, the OG also explicit has Cloud tell us how he constructed his lies and nowhere does he speculate that some of his memories must have been planted by Jenova or Sephiroth since he couldn't have seen or heard them himself. That seems an odd choice in terms of writing because that would be the best place and timing to clarify this and remove any ambiguity on the issue.
The problem isn't that we cannot infer possible explanations that can work around the holes - the problem is that the text is silent in addressing them, making it all speculation if we attempt to do so. It's way to easy to be caught up in motivated reasoning here and end up doing the author's job for them.
To consolidate my thoughts on this :
I find it likely, especially given
1. interviews detailing how Jenova was conceived having been inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, my own chat with some of the creators of the game, and
2. What Cloud says, and the lack of proper insight into how Jenova supposedly reads minds, and
3. How small and relatively unimportant the minor discrepencies are for the plot
that ultimately when the game was original conceived they had only really thought of Cloud's process of creating his new identity as psychological issue internal to Cloud - a persona born from, as he said, stuff he saw, stuff he heard from Zack, and a dream of what he wanted to be but could never become triggered by his sudden meeting with Tifa who was a childhood sweetheart that he would be ashamed to admit the truth to.
Jenova's exertion, on the other hand, was a separate issue altogether dealing primarily with reunion, and explaining Sephiroth's means of manipulating Cloud and peering into his mind.
The tiny inconsistencies we see are merely reflections of imperfect writing, which exists in all media.
My own speculation then is as follows :
We get the compilation, where returning creators (again like with most media and art) feel desire to address inconsistencies and vagueness in their old work, and they set out to make explanations that iron out the kinks.
They did so by mixing these two facets of the story together and inserting Jenova as a larger presence in the process of shaping and control Cloud's narrative.
This irons out the minor inconsistencies in the story, but I personally dislike this choice because it inserts an additional and unnessecary layer that detracts from the character study of Cloud - where on one view Cloud is largely responsible for his own delusions, born from normal human trauma and character flaws, and where the other is one where some of this is shifted over to an external agent that Cloud has had no choice with or control over.
I find that this clashes with the themes and other character studies of the game - Barret, Cid, Vincent, Nanaki, Aerith, Tifa, Reeves, Dyne etc. they're all allowed to be flawed entirely on their own merits as humans, whilst Cloud is not.
Secondly, while it irons out kinks in the story, it presents new problems by implication of this new fact.
If Jenova can remotely read minds through Cloud with her cells, I am sure you can sift through tons of scenes in the game that just begs the question why Jenova isn't doing it in other places, or to a more pronounced degree.
It also strongly implies Jenova has a more structured sentience than I am comfortable attributing to her.
Given how quiet Jenova is for most of the game, given how much of what "she does" seems to be in direct support of Sephiroth, not the other way around, and given the heritage of the idea of Jenova, it just seems to be a stretch to imagine Jenova as sifting through memories in Cloud's head and inserting in bits and pieces to help him make sense of stuff. It just seems way to structured for what throughout most of the games seems like a fairly simple and virus-like life-form.
Jenova is just a whole lot more freaky and imposing as an alien force when she's not really a being, as much as virus-like entity of unknown quanity and ability.
Finally, I find that in giving Jenova too much agency in the story, you again start screwing with the themes of the game.
The overarching theme of the game is "humanity/technology versus the planet", within which Jenova is a cog as a piece in the scientific horror of Shinra/Hojo and Co.
Once you make Jenova something more than that, the grounded thematic of "humanity versus the planet", or the "artificial versus the natural", is replaced by an unrelatable "non-thematic" - namely "alien versus man", and that seems a huge stretch to me.
Consider how strongly this is reflected in the symbolism of the final battle in the game :
You fight Jenova first (the catalyst for "the crisis"), then Bizarro Sephiroth (Symbolic of Sephiroth turned mad due to the influence of Jenova),
then Safer Sephiroth (symbolic of Sephiroth ascending beyond Jenova after his voyage through the lifestream and becoming the image of a god that he desires to be - the one winged angel being a symbol for lucifer, and therefore human vanity and narcissim and greed)
and finally, the human Sephiroth and the heart of the lifestream (finally displaying that the true villain was "humanity" all along).
This final progression of scenes basically recaps the entire series of events of the game, Sephiroth's arc, and reasserts the basic theme of the game as established in its opening hours. There's very little room for a mastermind sentient Jenova in all of this IMO.
