After meandering through the comments on
the Reddit thread version of this to get some additional context on what's been shared about this, while I do think that there's almost certainly some direct inspiration from that title,
especially in terms of the catfight probably inspiring the Tifa & Scarlet slap-off to be a bit, I don't think it's really that big of a deal. That sort of prolific cross-pollenation between (at the time) contemporary Japanese media character designs is basically just par for the course of artists being inspired by the themes & ideas that they found compelling from games or media that they played. Most of them started making their own stuff because they were inspired by various works and wanted to tell stories that captured those types experiences that they had. Plus, it's not like they stopped consuming media when they started making their own, and oftentimes just became more & more surrounded by it.
The cumulative density of that influence in Japan with a huge media market in a very population-dense collectivist culture specifically is a big factor to how & why Japanese media has a very consistently recognizable visual design language for its storytelling. That collective influence builds a strong resemblance across multiple works of media that don't have direct ties to one another nor do they share a setting, but instead those things serves as a means to implicitly reinforce an underlying character theme more as a sort of visual design language.
For example: The emotionally-charged, unnaturally-strong rebel berserker vs. the emotionally-detached, elite-warrior establishment leader present in the designs for Cloud & Sephiroth follow design elements that can easily be found in the portrayal of Sasaki Kojiro & Miyamoto Musashi, Yasha & Taishakuten, Conan & Thulsa Doom, Guts & Griffith, Gohan & Cell, etc. because there are parts of
FFVII's story that touch on ways where those characters' conflicts have echoes that reinforce the audience's emotional connection to the experiences in this story. That's a character dynamic that's got roots in Japanese history, Hindu mythology, Western cinema, & Japanese pop culture, so there's an inextricable level of syncrotism which you're bound to find in the visual designs in ways that are inextricably intertwined to the character themes they represent when exploring what those individuals are like in their respective narratives.
It's why things like
Sarutobi Sasuke as THE quintessential hero ninja places that recognizable legacy of a character like that into the "elite-warrior" category, so that when
Naruto positioned its ninja hero as the "brash unnaturally strong rebellious teen spiky blonde hair" archetype, his foil & rival was "Sasuke"
named after that same individual in its setting. I bring this up as it makes for an easier way to point out the emphasis on the classroom setting dynamic – because not dying your hair dark to match others & being bad at school activities is the type of signature rebelliousness that kids in Japanese society are familiar with in an everyday setting that's not limited to fantasy and which defines the same type of real-world societal pressures that are why this type of storytelling has a particular impact in Japan.
So, even while those blonde spikey haired designs with Cloud ALSO align to the sort of Super Saiyan elements of Gohan facing off against Cell are echoed in the way Cloud faces off against the multi-form mutating Jenova-Cell-Sephiroth, it's equally important to look at how those dynamics are equally linked into a deeper part of the sort of every day culture of teenagers in Japan beyond just anime/game pop culture media. This is a point that a commenter in the Reddit thread pointed out about Aoyama Misao & Tifa's looks both being like those of the popular musical artist
Shizuka Kudo, something which we also know is true of artists like Gackt having a visual influence on
Final Fantasy protagonists like
Cloud &
Squall just as much as any fictional character did – because visual music artists have a strong overlap as a bridge between those elements in Japanese society.
The looks of characters aren't just from a singular piece of media, but rather they're built of a cumulation of things that were present at the time that shared elements of them along with various unique details that the creators came up with. This culmination of influences also allow the audience to easily recognize the differences between various series' similar characters & relationships that they have with one another but especially ones which are unique to those stories. Essentially the similarities form a foundation to permutate from, while any differences strongly reinforce what the important parts of those characters are which make them into someone unique to that story – because they're not just knock-offs or a copy/paste from other preexisting media the way that posts like this will often try to frame them as in a diminishing context.
Lastly, this also means that there are a lot of times when there is a strong correlative link between things that genuinely don't have any direct influence, but they often still end up being similar because unique works can share external influences coming from
so many different directions. Other times there are just flat-out pure coincidences like Theozilla mentioned with Guts in
BERSERK which also happened to that character having similarities to Ash from
Evil Dead. There are plenty of times when themes or ideas can come from a totally different place and still have a startlingly aligned number of details.
That all being said, do I think that the timing of
Can Can Bunny Extra coming out in 1993, the particular game genre for the dating mechanics and other things that Normua has mentioned influencing
FFVII, and the shared character design themes & situations make it fairly likely that some elements of Tifa were initially inspired by Aoyama Misao? Almost certainly.
Is that significant in any meaningful way...? Not any more than any of the other references I mentioned for Cloud & Sephiroth. (Which is that it's a good excuse to consume the original media and try to pick up on some of the shared themes as a fun way to better understand more about which particular moments feel significant to making their overlapping design when portraying something that they share as characters, and which differences emphasize what makes them distinct from one another).
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