Visual aids to "Cloud on the Couch"

Cloud Strife, protagonist and subject of "Cloud on the Couch" (click to view full-size image):

Top: Tetsuya Nomura hand-drawn artwork
Above middle: Polygon model (for use in-game)
Immediate above: CG rendered model (for use in FMV)

Here we see Cloud striking the same pose, in three images of different media, with his trademark Buster Sword (phallic symbol!) in hand. As you can see, I do not exagerrate the remarkable size of this weapon. You will notice that Cloud is not a particularly muscular guy, but he has no problem wielding Buster Sword. He is also at one point able to pull himself and Tifa up out of danger WITH ONE ARM in the situation depicted below (from an FMV):
In other words, Cloud is supernaturally strong. That's the power of the Jenova/Mako treatment for ya'! The Mako infusion, incidentally, is why Cloud's eyes are a luminescent greenish-blue, as depicted here in this handrawn concept-art portrait by Tetsuya Nomura, in which Cloud stares into your soul:

Sephiroth, the first father-figure Cloud ever knows:

Top: Tetsuya Nomura hand-drawn artwork
Immediate above: Polygon model (for use in-game)

Here we see Sephiroth striking the same pose, in two images of different media, with his trademark Masamune (phallic symbol!). Again, I was not exagerrating the remarkable size of this weapon--it's longer than he is tall! Below are some stills from some of the game's FMV. See what I mean about "big eyes" and "sharp, delicate features?"
Notice also that Sephiroth's eyes have the same Mako gleam that Cloud's do.

Tifa Lockheart, Cloud's love-object:
























Above: Tetsuya Nomura hand-drawn artwork
Right: Polygon model (for use in-game)

Well, here's Tifa. Comments about her prominent bust have been running since Final Fantasy VII came out, so I can't really say anything on that matter which hasn't already been said. I just want to take this opportunity to point out that she has really big FEET, too!

Zack, Cloud's surrogate male role model:

Pictures of Zack are really hard to come by. For such an important character, he really has very little screen time. But, then again, he is really only important to Cloud's backstory, and not to the external plot action of the game, so it's understandable. Here is a portrait of Zack done as concept art by Tetsuya Nomura:
Here is the photo taken at the start of the ill-fated Nibelheim mission (left to right--Zack with Buster Sword, Tifa, Sephiroth):
And finally, we have a photo of Zack, in-game, which I took with my digital camera. Take a look, it is absolutely craptacular:
That's Zack, front and center, with Buster Sword strapped to his back.

"Why I Wrote 'Cloud on the Couch'"

When Final Fantasy VII came out, I was in ninth grade, and my sister and I were still playing through our first game in Final Fantasy VI. I loved FF6. To this day, I would still say that it’s my favorite game. So naturally, I wanted to play the next game in the series. The problem was that I didn’t have a Playstation, and didn’t have the money to buy one. Furthermore, I had been incorrectly told that the rumor about a release of a Windows 95 version of FF7 was completely false, so, since I wasn’t anticipating and “looking out” for it, I didn’t even know that this version was actually released until years later.

So I didn’t buy the game back in 1997. But that was OK, because the next school-year, I lost a lot of interest in video games, and extracurriculars came to take up a lot more of my time. I started playing video games again in college, but I guess I’m just an old-school gamer at heart, because I was mostly playing NES and SNES games. My attitude at the time was, why do I need to play new games when I still haven’t played all of the good old ones?

Fast forward to the summer of 2004, last summer. I came to feel as if I had exhausted the pool of good RPGs for the SNES, and I was ready to move forward. My sister had bought a used Playstation and some used games about three years before, and she had just bought a PS2. I asked if I could borrow her Playstation and her games for it, and she agreed. My first pick was FF7, which, of course, I had been wanting to play since it had come out, but never had the chance.

I had just graduated from college (with a degree in psychology…surprised? J ), I was living with my parents, and I had no job. Although job-hunting and helping my dad handle my recently-deceased grandmother’s estate took up quite a bit of time, I still had enough time to become completely immersed in a game, and FF7 was that game.

I went into it expecting it to be good, but I was skeptical that it could be better than FF6. I came away with extremely ambivalent feelings about it. The things FF7 did right, it did SO RIGHT. For instance, revealing that Cloud was really the Shinra regular at Nibelheim was a STROKE OF GENIUS. It exploits your assumption that a character without a given name and without his own sprite is unimportant, and I never saw it coming. Looking back, I am surprised that, even though I played the game SEVEN YEARS after it was released, none of the surprises had ever been spoiled for me. For me, the defining moment of the game is that ONE INCREDIBLE SCENE at the end of Disc 1. I was caught TOTALLY OFF GUARD…and I am not exaggerating when I say I couldn’t stop thinking about it for THREE DAYS.

But what turned me off was how confusing the plot was, and how it simply didn’t seem to hold together. I also did not think that Cloud was a psychologically believable character. And I was angry. I SO WANTED to like this game, because so many things about it were wonderful, but I simply could not accept (what seemed to me) an incoherent storyline and an implausible protagonist. So when I finally beat the game, I set it aside, having determined it to be very good in some ways and very poor in others.

In February of 2005, this year, after having been working at my current job for over three months, I moved into my own apartment. I also picked up FF7 again at about that time, because I wanted to give the game a second chance. There were so many things I liked about it, and I hoped that after a second playthrough, both Cloud and the plot would make more sense. One of the things I noticed the second time through how much of a vegetable Cloud was when he and Zack escaped from Hojo, which I guess I hadn’t realized before. Before I had even completed the game for the second time, I was inspired to write up a timeline to help me form a complete mental picture of the game’s backstory. I starting drafting one, but I needed to review the dialogue in the game to get a bearing on what happened when. I didn’t want to have to start a new game and take notes the whole time, so I looked around online to see if anyone had typed up the script of the game. Someone had (thank you, Little Chiba!), and I found that someone had also beaten me to the punch and written a timeline of the game (thank you, Maou!). What’s more, someone had written up a timeline-cum-analysis (thank you, falsehead!). After reading these, I became convinced that the plot of FF7 held together…barely. It’s coherent, and it makes sense, so it’s not “bad,” but even to this day, I think it is too muddled to be “great.” In other words, it’s only just “good”.

Like I said before, I hadn’t noticed on my first playthrough how zombie-like Cloud was when he and Zack escaped from Nibelheim. When I did pick up on this, I began to see how Cloud’s memories from that time could be so distorted. Also, I got to thinking about why Cloud was the way he was. I thought falsehead’s answer was reasonable: that Cloud had an egotistical streak that prevented him from fitting in with his peers during childhood, and which made the experience of failure all the more painful to him. I am still inclined to accept Cloud’s social isolation during childhood as a major contributing cause of his “inferiority complex” (and I am indebted to falsehead for pointing this out), but I got to thinking about it as a sort of chicken-or-the-egg problem: was Cloud isolated because he thought he was better than his peers…or did he think he was better than his peers because he was isolated (i.e., as a psychological defense mechanism)? I am inclined to accept the former, but I think the latter is a possibility, and I discuss it in endnote #5 in my article. Even so, in the back of my mind, I wondered: does the root of Cloud’s problems go back even further in his development?

Also, there was one thing that I had difficulty understanding: if Cloud was so insecure, why did he apparently repress his memory of defeating Sephiroth? After all, if I thought I was a big wussie, and then I apparently killed the baddest motherfucker on the planet in single combat, you better believe I would remember that! It really bothered me that this didn’t make sense. I figured that the experience must have been traumatic for Cloud, but I couldn’t figure out why.

I had an epiphany while reading through the dialogue of the Kalm flashback to Nibelheim. Could it be that Cloud is messed up because he grew up without a father? I knew enough about the risk factors of fatherlessness for boys to know that this was potentially the root of any boy’s problems. As it would turn out, taking this perspective helps to explain why defeating Sephiroth was so traumatic for Cloud. Indeed, a discussion of Cloud’s lack of a male role model during childhood is the starting point of the article.

The article takes a decidedly Freudian perspective in explaining the importance of male role models to boys’ psychological development. I generally take Freud’s ideas with a grain of salt, particularly because many of his theories are virtually impossible to empirically test, and some even have been tested in the laboratory and fail to stand up. However, even an orthodox reading of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex provides an effective explanation for why male role models are important for boys. Freud was the first thinker to clearly say that every boy needs a father to teach him right from wrong and to teach him how to be a man; indeed, almost any theorist that attempts to explain the development of male gender identity from a psychodynamic perspective necessarily uses Freud as a starting point, even if the conclusions they reach are different from his. In the present case, the framework Freudian theory lends to the interpretation of Cloud as a character has considerable explanatory power (though it has its flaws!).

While I was writing this essay, I came across two ideas online that were helpful, and I just want to mention them briefly. First was Squall of SeeD’s well-argued assertion that Jenova is the “puppet-master,” and that Sephiroth is merely one facet of Jenova. The second was ToasterThief’s observation that in FF7, what we see as Sephiroth during the “present” of the game is a psychic projection, but what the characters actually fight is a part of Jenova.

Anyways, sorry this got so long. Thanks for reading all of it. Please enjoy in the article in the prior post below!

My response to the question, "is FF7 overrated?" (spoiler alert!)

If anything, FF7 is UNDERrated...it's even better than the fanboys say! :)

...But seriously, while FF7 is one of my favorite games, it is not without its flaws. The graphics, while good for their time, are not impressive by today's standards (or even by the standards of the later portion of the PS1 era!). More importantly, the game's storyline is not one of its strong points, either. Don't get me wrong--the ideas behind the plot were okay, and I really loved the surprises they threw in. I never played FF7 until the summer of 2004, and I consider myself very lucky in that no one EVER spoiled any of the surprises for me! I was caught TOTALLY off-guard by what happened at the end of Disc 1, and the idea of having Cloud turn out to be one of the anonymous Shinra troopers at Nibelheim five years prior was a STROKE OF GENIUS. Even so, the plot was too muddled to be any more than "good"...although it holds together, barely, you don't know everything that's going on unless you pay VERY close attention...for some people, I think, the storyline just degenerated into a hopeless mess of mako, materia, Ancients, SOLDIER, Shinra, Meteor, Jenova, Sephiroth, clones, WEAPONs, etc. I think the FF7 team tried to make the plot of FF7 too many different things, and it doesn't wind up successfully being anything. Is it a cyberpunk-type tale? Is it a swords-and-sorcery adventure? Is it a love story? A mystery? A psycho-drama? A messianic story with religious overtones? A horror story (to the tune of Frankenstein)? A Buddhist allegory? To be sure, it is all of these things to some extent, but like I said, I think the FF7 team simply tried to do too much, which wouldn't have been a bad thing, except that they didn't always do a good job of explaining things.

I point out the problems I have with FF7 because some of the game's fans talk about it as though it were perfect, and I take issue with that point of view. That kind of fanboyism pushes discussion of the game to an extreme, and people with moderate opinions of the game find themselves having to bash it in order to counterbalance the fanboy rhetoric and pull the discussion back to a middle ground (however, let's not forget that there will always be a significant minority who considers itself "rebellious" and "individualistic" by hating on something that's popular--the "lol FF7 sux am i cool yet?" crowd). Rampant fanboyism is a major reason why so many people say that FF7 is overrated!

With that said, I want to make clear that I consider FF7 nothing short of a work of art. The attention to detail in the game is commendable. You ever notice that the reason why Aeris' church is trashed is because one of Shinra's experimental rockets came through its roof? Or that Aeris is examining a leaky mako pipe in the opening sequence? The game's music is gorgeous, and there is plenty of gameplay with variety with all of the minigames. Most importantly to me, Cloud Strife is quite possibly the most complex videogame character there is. I, of course, take an orthodox Freudian view in explaining why Cloud is the way he is. When I was discussing my interpretation with some friends, one of them asked, "do you really think that Square intended to put such Freudian themes into the game?" My answer is no, I don't, but FF7 is open to interpretation like a work of literature, and the fact that we are having discussions like this, eight years after the game came out, is a testament to what Square accomplished--a work of art, indeed!