Dude, by the time I got to the end of this I had totally forgotten what the original question was. It wasn't that long a discussion, so I must ask, which one of you sucked out my brain?
Hilarious, Tres. I am wiping tears from my eyes, that was some good satirical parody of OtWtaS right there. I call that Win.
Alright, the original point of this topic now. I too thought SOLDIER fought in small squads and units. I kinda saw them freely moving through a battlefield, using their superior strength and skill to support normal troops, allow injured grunts to be pulled out for treatment and evac, and such, while also spearheading drives into enemy fortifications and such. Missions to retrieve stolen gear or track down specific individuals... isn't that one of the things Turks are for? Seems like, if SOLDIER got this kind of mission, it would've been SOLDIER who came to collect Aerith rather than Tseng.
Still, members of SOLDIER are supposedly so far beyond a normal combatant that I suppose I could see them doing exactly what I described alone or in pairs. Still leaves no explanation for why, when you see dead SOLDIERs they tend to be piled on top of each other.
Anyway, I personally was shocked to see Zack so powerful. From the Nibelheim flashbacks (where Cloud was a stand-in for Zack) I kind of assumed Zack was a puny LV. 1 who couldn't put up a fight against a Nibel Dragon and would die if he got hit with a weak attack like "Lay Flat". And of course, the original shows only a handful of Shinra grunts blasting him to death, which just looks soooo damn weak. And then in Crisis Core we see him as a total badass, taking down whole forts alone, fighting and defeating Genesis and Angeal who were up there with Sephiroth himself in terms of power and skill (to be fair, skill is a little different when you shapeshift into a monster). He even holds his own against Sephy, though in the end he gets smashed out of the Jenova room just the same. Which annoyed me, cause I had a preconceived notion that Zack was kind of a weakling.
On the other hand, I must say one thing for CC that made me like it. Zack appeared so infrequently and with such brevity in FFVII itself that I never had time to get used to him. His puppy-like enthusiasm and personality just irritated me. In CC, on the other hand, I had time to get used to that side of him, and see him in a different atmosphere as well. And y'know, I found myself liking him enough to actually be sad when he died this time, instead of laughing when the grunts shot the hell out of him. I still have trouble putting "Weak as hell Zack" and "So badass it takes Sephiroth a whole battle to beat him Zack" together, but either way the game did let me get to know, and in knowing, like the guy.
Its still a continuity nightmare though.
