"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!