Cloud Strife (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
weakerprey) wrote2020-06-15 01:01 pm
weakerprey) wrote2020-06-15 01:01 pm
TLV app
Note: the English translation of the original game is notoriously bad. When I quote from the script here, I’ve left the wording unaltered, but I’ve cleaned up some of the punctuation, mostly removing extra ellipses and other relics of bad 90s JRPG translations. It’s also worth mentioning that there are technically two translations, one from the original Playstation version and one from the later PC port. Both are equally janky, just in different ways, so I tend to use whichever I think flows better or more accurately reflects the nuances. It rarely makes a difference as to the meaning.
Useful Abbreviations:
OGC = original game canon, i.e. the original FFVII
ACC = Advent Children Complete, the movie sequel
User Name/Nick: Marvel
User DW:tinyangryblonds
E-mail: phoenixjrising@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Cloud Strife
Series: FFVII Compilation
Age: 24
From When?: Post-ACC
Inmate/Warden: Warden.
Cloud is the hero and protagonist of FFVII, but living up to that role is a constant struggle for him and his relationship to it is complicated. He definitely sees himself as someone in need of redemption, but two of Aerith's lines from ACC are important here: when Cloud tells her what he wants more than anything is to be forgiven, she quips, "By who?" Later, she observes, "Isn’t it time you did the forgiving?" Later, Cloud asks Vincent if sins can ever be forgiven, Vincent replies that he's never tried. Cloud ends the scene by saying, "Well, I'm gonna try."
He's done a lot of things he's not proud of, and has spent much of his life being mentally weak, desperate for approval, disdainful of others, and easily manipulated. While having a mental breakdown, he directly and knowingly enabled the villain to perpetrate a near-apocalyptic calamity on the planet, killing thousands. On the one hand, yes, he was being partially mind-controlled by a malevolent alien and her murderous once-human avatar at the time, but on the other hand, he wouldn't feel so guilty about it if his own issues hadn't left him particularly open to that type of control. He's also killed quite a lot of people, though mostly in battle situations or out of genuine necessity, and he was the main muscle behind an ecoterrorist cell for a while there. This included blowing up a couple of mako reactors, causing untold property damage as well as injuring and probably killing large numbers of nearby civilians. ...Does it help if the planet was actually, literally dying and the aforementioned reactors were the main cause? How about if he was only in it for the money? No?
The point is: Cloud knows what it is to be weak. He knows what it is to give into that weakness and do things you later regret. He also knows that the only way out is through, and that growth means owning yourself, including your weaknesses and flaws. Since reclaiming and stabilizing his own identity, he has chosen to do whatever he can to protect and defend his planet and the people who live there, often facing his own formidable demons in the process. He knows what it is to be hurt, jaded, and cynical, and he also knows what it is to move on and learn how to fight for more than just one's own survival. It's not his place to hand out forgiveness to anyone else, but he can help them work through bearing the weight of their sins and learning to forgive themselves.
Item: A colorless orb of materia that glows with a pale white, swirling light. Using the materia causes a tendril of light to shoot out and spiral off in the direction of the inmate. If the inmate is dying, the orb will turn a deep, dark red. If dead, the materia goes dark and lifeless.
Abilities/Powers: The world of FFVII includes genetically modified and enhanced super soldiers; Cloud has identical enhancements despite not... technically being one of them (it's complicated--see history). His body has been exposed to both high levels of mako (essentially refined life energy) and Jenova (alien) cells. The canon is a little vague as to the exact results of this, but we know that it includes significantly enhanced speed, strength, agility, stamina, and senses, as well as accelerated healing. Cloud wields large broadswords that would probably be ridiculously unwieldy for someone not so enhanced, and he can take hits that would kill or severely injure a normal person with only mild negative effects. His sword at his current canon point is a customized "fusion sword" that splits into multiple separate swords or combines to form one big sword, like so. Don't ask me what he's compensating for; the answer is "many, many things."
In addition to this... well, he's a JRPG protagonist. He's pretty overpowered, particularly after honing his skills via continuous combat throughout the game. At a post-ACC canon point, he's basically the most powerful person currently living on his planet. That said, he's no more overpowered than your average JRPG/shonen/superhero/etc. protagonist, so there are still plenty of characters who would be able to keep up with him. He's also fairly reliant on his sword, with little to no training or experience with hand-to-hand, so being separated from his blade cripples him significantly.
Cloud makes use of materia, which are the FFVII universe's compromise between magic and technology. These are smooth, round crystals a little smaller than a baseball, which come various colors corresponding to their function. They are formed out of crystallized lifestream, i.e. the life energy contained within the planet. Materia require a certain amount of skill and training to use, and their effectiveness depends on the user's magical aptitude, but theoretically anyone can use them. However, assuming Cloud would be allowed to have materia on the barge, it's worth mentioning that this is only true of people from Gaia (Cloud's planet). Gaians are made from lifestream; it flows through them and they return to it when they die. It makes sense, therefore, that they'd be able to unlock the energies contained within crystallized lifestream--but those not from Gaia may find themselves unable to get any response out of Cloud's materia at all, even if they were trained.
Materia mechanics vary by game (FFVII, FFVII: Remake, and Crisis Core all have their own systems), but there's a fair amount of general overlap. Here are some examples of materia and the kinds of things they do:
- GREEN MATERIA grant the ability to cast various kinds of magic, including:
--- elemental magic (fire, ice, etc.)
--- healing and revival magic
--- poisoning magic
--- cleansing magic (removing poison and other detrimental statuses)
--- time magic (speeding up allies, slowing down enemies or "stopping" them entirely for brief periods)
--- sealing/binding magic (putting enemies to sleep or silencing them so they can't cast spells)
--- mystifying magic (causing confusion or uncontrolled aggression)
--- transformation magic (shrinking enemies or turning them into frogs)
--- barrier magic (erecting magical barriers around allies to offset incoming damage)
--- destruction magic (destroying magical barriers erected by others)
- BLUE MATERIA augment the aforementioned magic materia in various ways, enabling spells to hit multiple targets or imbuing weapons with elemental aspects
- YELLOW MATERIA are functionally similar to green materia except that the abilities they grant are technically "skills" rather than magic, such as:
--- the ability to sense/assess enemies, identifying weak points and elemental strengths/weaknesses
--- the ability to mimic certain enemy skills
--- the ability to briefly manipulate an enemy and cause them to take a particular action
--- the ability to steal items from enemies
- PURPLE MATERIA grant passive effects, such as:
--- attribute enhancement: increased vitality, luck, speed, magical aptitude, etc.
--- the ability to take damage in place of another character
- RED MATERIA give the wielder the ability to perform summons
--- summoning materia is naturally occurring and in fact cannot be manufactured (unlike most materia), so these entities might be thought of nature spirits or the like; they are summoned for a limited period of time to assist the summoner in battle, and when their time is up they perform an "ultimate attack" and then disappear as quickly as they came.
Cloud travels with a set of materia on him at all times, and he has a pretty big stash of them at home. If he'd be permitted to have them in this setting I can submit a list of the exact ones he'd have on hand and how they work.
Personality: Cloud makes for an interesting and unusual Final Fantasy hero for one reason in particular: he’s so very, very bad at it. He starts out as an awkward, socially isolated kid from a remote mountain village, determined to prove himself by joining the Shinra military and becoming a SOLDIER. Instead, he gets mixed up in a corrupt system and experimented on for several years, after which he develops an alternate personality based on his skewed hero-worship of his best (read: only) friend, is controlled like a puppet on a string by the resident psychotic villain until he’s not even sure if he’s real at all, and eventually gets his original personality back just in time to save the world… kinda. In the end the planet essentially has to save itself, ushering in a near-total apocalypse in the process, and Cloud settles down among the ruins of civilization to try to build a new life while being wracked by guilt over the people he let die.
…At least he tries really hard? Anyway, all this is to say, Cloud is a mess of identity issues and contradictions, both internal and external. He is both weak and strong, fragile and resilient, withdrawn and engaged, shy and assertive. Sometimes he's a hero and sometimes he's a dumpster fire. Often, he's both at the same time.
He can be highly empathetic and sensitive, but he has trouble translating feelings into words and often ends up unintentionally closing himself off even with those he most wants to get close to. He's socially awkward, never quite knowing to react or what to say, as if he missed out on some kind of script that everyone else got a copy of. Despite this, he’s actually very good at reading people; he's terrible at offering words of comfort, yet he somehow has a knack for making others feel seen and understood when they most need it. This is a running joke in the fandom after Remake: Cloud will just say someone's name in a particular tone--and nothing else--when he’s trying to offer support, because he doesn't know what else to say yet is clearly aware that he should be saying something. And even though Remake so far only covers early OGC when his facade of "durr hburr I'm definitely a big bad SOLDIER what about it" is still firmly in place, his sensitive, empathetic nature bleeds through frequently regardless. He's constantly trying to support the people he cares about... and, as it turns out, he cares about a lot of people.
Though he can mask it somewhat with aloof bluntness and a slow but prickly temper, Cloud's low self-esteem remains his obvious tragic flaw. It’s no secret that Cloud thinks of himself as a weak person: he says so multiple times in the original game alone, and he created a whole other personality for himself after Zack’s death, escaping into the skin of someone he saw as competent and capable: a SOLDIER First Class. He kept up this facade for a very long time, despite part of him knowing all along that it wasn't real:
Cloud
Everyone... I'm sorry. I don't know what to say...
Nanaki
Don't say anything, Cloud. All you've been doing is apologizing.
Cloud
I never was in SOLDIER. I made up the stories about what happened to me five years ago, about being in SOLDIER. [...] I was so ashamed of being so weak; then I heard this story from my friend Zack... and I created an illusion of myself made up of what I had seen in my life... and I continued to play the charade as if it were true.
[...]
I'm... Cloud. The master of my own illusionary world. But I can't remain trapped in an illusion any more... I'm going to live my life without pretending.
Even several years after the game's end, he’s still grappling with his own feelings of being a weak and ineffective person--and so he eventually becomes convinced that he can’t help anyone, not even himself, and falls into depression. Again.
Herein, however, is the paradox: what's particularly impressive about Cloud is that, despite his self-esteem issues, he manages to get shit done. In Nibelheim, when the things he cares about most (Tifa, Zack, and his childhood home) are threatened, he not only confronts the biggest bad of the entire game as a sixteen-year-old infantryman, he throws him off a ledge into a mako reactor using the sword he’s currently impaled upon as a lever. He slips into the role of a leader like a second skin when called upon to, and his allies come to trust his judgement implicitly, allowing him to make the important decisions despite being intimately acquainted with his many failings. During ACC, he adopts a kid who is sick with Geostigma and takes it upon himself to research the disease until he finds a cure. Cloud hates to see the things he cares about threatened, and will do anything to save them. It’s not terribly difficult to make a list of “things Cloud cares about,” either, since Cloud is basically a marshmallow wrapped in coping mechanisms. His iconic line from ACC, spoken while fighting Sephiroth, says it all:
Sephiroth: Tell me what you cherish most. Give me the pleasure of taking it away.
[...]
Cloud: I pity you. You just don’t get it at all. There’s not a thing I don’t cherish!
Cloud takes the well-being of the things he cherishes extremely personally, and it's the resultant fear of failing that can be paralyzing, causing him to freeze up and become unable to take action. And his fears are, unfortunately, both potent and well-founded given what he's experienced. Cloud has a colorful history of trauma, and not the kind of stuff you process and move on from like nothing happened--the kind that takes hold and shapes your personality in consistent, inescapable ways, changing the kind of person you develop into as an adult. Any serious discussion of his personality has to cover that... and, well. Here we are.
We don’t get a lot about Cloud’s childhood from OGC, but what we do get is pretty telling. His dad died when he was very young, and he was raised by his mom, but the two don’t seem close; when the party asks about his family early on, he says, “I don't know if you could call it a ‘family’.” The scene that follows shows him visiting home, where his mom frets and fusses over him, with him alternating between ignoring her and brushing her off. He didn’t have much in the way of friendships, either:
Cloud
Tifa always used to have her own group. [...] I thought they were all… stupid. [...] You were all childish, laughing at every little stupid thing. [lit. translation of the Japanese: “laughing at things I didn’t care about”]
Tifa
But we were children then.
Cloud
...I know. I'm the one that was stupid. I really wanted to play with everyone, but I was never allowed into the group. Then later... I began to think I was different... That I was different from those immature kids.
Already, it's easy to start putting the pieces together. Cloud was a sensitive kid, sharper than most of his peers, with a yearning to be recognized and accepted yet little ability to relate to others. It's unclear if the social ostracization--never being "allowed into the group"--was intentional or accidental, but the damage was done regardless. Being unable to fit in with other kids left Cloud extremely socially isolated, as Nibelheim was not a large town, so he sidestepped the issue by telling himself he didn't need acceptance, instead focusing in on the idea that he was different--special, even. When he runs off to join SOLDIER at 14, it's with this in mind:
Tifa
Now that you mention it, why did you want to join SOLDIER in the first place? I always thought it was a sudden decision you made...
Cloud
...I was devastated. ...I wanted to be noticed. I thought if I got stronger I could get someone to notice...
The adults in his life, unfortunately, did not help his feelings of loneliness and desperation. When a young Cloud follows Tifa into the (extremely dangerous) Nibel mountains, concerned for her safety even after all of her other friends have long since turned back, this happens:
Cloud
Tifa missed her step. I ran to her... but didn't make it in time. Both of us fell off the cliff. Back then, I only scarred my knees, but...
Tifa's father and another man run up to the pair. The other man gathers Tifa while Tifa's father stands over Cloud shaking a finger.
Tifa's Father
Cloud! Why'd you bring Tifa to a place like this! What the hell's the matter with you!? What if she dies!?
Everyone walks off, leaving Cloud behind.
Cloud
Tifa was in a coma for seven days. We all thought she wouldn't make it. If only I could've saved her... I was so angry... Angry at myself for my weakness. Ever since then, I felt Tifa blamed me... I got out of control... I'd get into fights not even caring who it was. [...] That was the first time I heard about Sephiroth. If I got strong like Sephiroth, then everyone might...
Cloud, all of 8 or 9 years old, is yelled at, blamed for “bringing” Tifa to a dangerous place, and left behind to find his own way back through said dangerous place despite his own injuries. He becomes convinced that it's his fault: if he were just stronger, better, he'd be able to win the approval of peers and authority figures that he so desires. Later, when he’s sixteen and returns to Nibelheim for the first time since failing to make SOLDIER, Tifa’s father does not appear to have softened on him. He tells Cloud explicitly: “I want you to stay away from my daughter.” It's a short side conversation that is easily missable and never elaborated on, unfortunately. We don't know for sure if this is how most adults treated him, but given the fact that Tifa's father is the mayor of Nibelheim--and it's a very small town--it wouldn't be particularly surprising.
These are the childhood memories that Cloud has to work through in order to break through the persistent dissociative state he spends most of the game in and reclaim his original identity. And these are the issues that, at his current canon point, he's just barely begun to work on. He lost 5 years of his life to the lab and his subsequent catatonia; though technically 21 at the start of OGC, he hasn't had the chance to emotionally mature past 16. Now, at 24, he's starting to catch up on life--but at the same time, these issues haven't gone away.
His tendency to define himself based on who he wants to be rather than who he is, identifying desirable others and trying to emulate their traits, seems to be lessening with time--though it may never be gone completely. His new and fragile sense of self seems largely based on who he's around at the time, making him capable of striking attitudinal shifts depending on who he's talking to. Funnily enough, despite this internal tumult, others generally see him as pretty consistent, if a little weird. "Cloud’s a royal pain in the ass, like always," Yuffie complains at the end of ACC. "Cloud is Cloud," Tifa says fondly.
I'll close this out with another line of Tifa's from ACC:
Tifa: Stop running! I know. Even if you find the kids, you might not be able to help them. Maybe something could happen that can never unhappen. That scares you, doesn't it? But you need to think about now. Really take it in! Look at you: you think you've got it so damn hard. Well, you hate being alone, so let people in!
For Cloud, relating to others often puts him right back to being that misunderstood kid, terrified and vulnerable. He still yearns for attention and affection, yet he's paralyzed by the fear of being seen and found wanting, or of experiencing another devastating loss. As Tifa says, he hates being alone, yet he self-isolates whenever things get hard, so wrapped up in feeling ashamed of the past and fearful of the future that the present passes him by entirely. He buys into the idea that he is always essentially, inescapably alone, even when surrounded by people trying desperately to break down the walls he's built up around himself. Still, brick by brick, his maladaptive coping mechanisms are starting to be dismantled--at the end of ACC, he's been reminded that he is not alone, and he's started to accept the support system around him as something solid and reliable rather than precarious and liable to disappear out from under him at any moment. Tifa observes in On the Way to a Smile that running a delivery service has been good for him, since it's allowed him to get comfortable dealing with a lot of different kinds of people in various situations, encouraging him to begin emerging slowly from his shell. Progress is slow, but Cloud is resilient, and he doesn't give up easy--not when he's got people around him to remind him what he's fighting for.
Barge Reactions: Cloud is used to a fair amount of weird shit, though the existence of other universes and planets so completely different from his own will throw him for a loop. It'll take a while for him to get his head around it, if he does at all. He's likely to find himself questioning, off and on, if this isn't just a particularly creative hallucination being fed to him by his mako-addled brain; there's certainly precedent. But he'll throw out the idea each time--his hallucinations are, unfortunately, pretty predictable in their contents. The Barge is not. He couldn't make this shit up if he tried.
Most likely, he'll just accept that it's one of those things that's outside his understanding, and he'll take each of the other characters as they come. That's not to say he'll always believe what they say, being a wary person by nature, but he'll assume they're operating in good faith unless given a reason to think otherwise.
He will have a lot of feelings about being a Warden rather than an Inmate. Cloud has chronically low self-esteem and definitely sees himself as someone in need of redemption, and at this canon point, he's just emerged from a deep depression in which he was convinced of his own weakness and inability to help anyone. Cloud has accepted that the only one who still blames him for his sins is himself, but he's still incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of serving as a "good example" to others. Surely there must be better candidates. So he'll be struggling with that.
His primary concern during ports, floods, and breaches will be 1) protecting and supporting his inmate, especially if they lack combat capabilities, and 2) offering what protection and support he can to others. If he's gonna be a warden, he might as well try to live up to it, and he knows that there are plenty of people who don't have his capabilities. So he'll do what he can. Get to know people. Keep an eye out. Look for things he can do to help when shit goes down.
Deal: Cloud wants all traces of Jenova and her cells removed from the lifestream.
History: The FF wiki's story section for Cloud is pretty reliable as far as the facts are concerned.
Remake, however, introduced a pretty big question, which is how much of Remake continuity one considers "canon."
FFVII: Remake is not really a remake so much as it is a reimagining of the original game canon. Parts of it are explicitly alternate timeline (e.g. anything to do with the Whispers), whereas other parts simply flesh out the original--which, as a janky 90s game with a bad English translation and a much lower budget than the kind of things Square produces now, had a lot of holes in terms of worldbuilding and character development. RP-wise, Remake is of interest because it adds a plethora of character-building details for both major and minor characters, adds and expands upon some minor characters who had previously either not existed or only existed in various side materials, and in some cases makes minor adjustments to the order of events and the details regarding them (e.g. how, exactly, Cloud came to put on a dress and sneak into Don Corneo's mansion).
My stance on it is: the additional character and worldbuilding details are fantastic, and largely complementary to original game canon rather than contradictory. Therefore, I plan to incorporate as much of it as I can reasonably get away with. So, Cloud would know characters like Marle and Madam M even though they do not appear in OGC, and would remember Remake-specific interactions between himself and other characters so long as those interactions could just as easily have happened in OGC without changing anything. However, for things like Wedge surviving his fall from the pillar, I defer to OGC (which is to say: nope, as far as Cloud remembers, he died), because that's an explicitly contradictory change that only happens due to the aforementioned alternate timeline shenanigans.
Sample Journal Entry: TDM threads with Bill and Misty.
Sample RP: TDM threads with Rita, Tess, and Xigbar.
Special Notes: thanks for coming to my TED talk about post-traumatic stress disorder here's a present
Useful Abbreviations:
OGC = original game canon, i.e. the original FFVII
ACC = Advent Children Complete, the movie sequel
User Name/Nick: Marvel
User DW:
tinyangryblondsE-mail: phoenixjrising@gmail.com
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Cloud Strife
Series: FFVII Compilation
Age: 24
From When?: Post-ACC
Inmate/Warden: Warden.
Cloud is the hero and protagonist of FFVII, but living up to that role is a constant struggle for him and his relationship to it is complicated. He definitely sees himself as someone in need of redemption, but two of Aerith's lines from ACC are important here: when Cloud tells her what he wants more than anything is to be forgiven, she quips, "By who?" Later, she observes, "Isn’t it time you did the forgiving?" Later, Cloud asks Vincent if sins can ever be forgiven, Vincent replies that he's never tried. Cloud ends the scene by saying, "Well, I'm gonna try."
He's done a lot of things he's not proud of, and has spent much of his life being mentally weak, desperate for approval, disdainful of others, and easily manipulated. While having a mental breakdown, he directly and knowingly enabled the villain to perpetrate a near-apocalyptic calamity on the planet, killing thousands. On the one hand, yes, he was being partially mind-controlled by a malevolent alien and her murderous once-human avatar at the time, but on the other hand, he wouldn't feel so guilty about it if his own issues hadn't left him particularly open to that type of control. He's also killed quite a lot of people, though mostly in battle situations or out of genuine necessity, and he was the main muscle behind an ecoterrorist cell for a while there. This included blowing up a couple of mako reactors, causing untold property damage as well as injuring and probably killing large numbers of nearby civilians. ...Does it help if the planet was actually, literally dying and the aforementioned reactors were the main cause? How about if he was only in it for the money? No?
The point is: Cloud knows what it is to be weak. He knows what it is to give into that weakness and do things you later regret. He also knows that the only way out is through, and that growth means owning yourself, including your weaknesses and flaws. Since reclaiming and stabilizing his own identity, he has chosen to do whatever he can to protect and defend his planet and the people who live there, often facing his own formidable demons in the process. He knows what it is to be hurt, jaded, and cynical, and he also knows what it is to move on and learn how to fight for more than just one's own survival. It's not his place to hand out forgiveness to anyone else, but he can help them work through bearing the weight of their sins and learning to forgive themselves.
Item: A colorless orb of materia that glows with a pale white, swirling light. Using the materia causes a tendril of light to shoot out and spiral off in the direction of the inmate. If the inmate is dying, the orb will turn a deep, dark red. If dead, the materia goes dark and lifeless.
Abilities/Powers: The world of FFVII includes genetically modified and enhanced super soldiers; Cloud has identical enhancements despite not... technically being one of them (it's complicated--see history). His body has been exposed to both high levels of mako (essentially refined life energy) and Jenova (alien) cells. The canon is a little vague as to the exact results of this, but we know that it includes significantly enhanced speed, strength, agility, stamina, and senses, as well as accelerated healing. Cloud wields large broadswords that would probably be ridiculously unwieldy for someone not so enhanced, and he can take hits that would kill or severely injure a normal person with only mild negative effects. His sword at his current canon point is a customized "fusion sword" that splits into multiple separate swords or combines to form one big sword, like so. Don't ask me what he's compensating for; the answer is "many, many things."
In addition to this... well, he's a JRPG protagonist. He's pretty overpowered, particularly after honing his skills via continuous combat throughout the game. At a post-ACC canon point, he's basically the most powerful person currently living on his planet. That said, he's no more overpowered than your average JRPG/shonen/superhero/etc. protagonist, so there are still plenty of characters who would be able to keep up with him. He's also fairly reliant on his sword, with little to no training or experience with hand-to-hand, so being separated from his blade cripples him significantly.
Cloud makes use of materia, which are the FFVII universe's compromise between magic and technology. These are smooth, round crystals a little smaller than a baseball, which come various colors corresponding to their function. They are formed out of crystallized lifestream, i.e. the life energy contained within the planet. Materia require a certain amount of skill and training to use, and their effectiveness depends on the user's magical aptitude, but theoretically anyone can use them. However, assuming Cloud would be allowed to have materia on the barge, it's worth mentioning that this is only true of people from Gaia (Cloud's planet). Gaians are made from lifestream; it flows through them and they return to it when they die. It makes sense, therefore, that they'd be able to unlock the energies contained within crystallized lifestream--but those not from Gaia may find themselves unable to get any response out of Cloud's materia at all, even if they were trained.
Materia mechanics vary by game (FFVII, FFVII: Remake, and Crisis Core all have their own systems), but there's a fair amount of general overlap. Here are some examples of materia and the kinds of things they do:
- GREEN MATERIA grant the ability to cast various kinds of magic, including:
--- elemental magic (fire, ice, etc.)
--- healing and revival magic
--- poisoning magic
--- cleansing magic (removing poison and other detrimental statuses)
--- time magic (speeding up allies, slowing down enemies or "stopping" them entirely for brief periods)
--- sealing/binding magic (putting enemies to sleep or silencing them so they can't cast spells)
--- mystifying magic (causing confusion or uncontrolled aggression)
--- transformation magic (shrinking enemies or turning them into frogs)
--- barrier magic (erecting magical barriers around allies to offset incoming damage)
--- destruction magic (destroying magical barriers erected by others)
- BLUE MATERIA augment the aforementioned magic materia in various ways, enabling spells to hit multiple targets or imbuing weapons with elemental aspects
- YELLOW MATERIA are functionally similar to green materia except that the abilities they grant are technically "skills" rather than magic, such as:
--- the ability to sense/assess enemies, identifying weak points and elemental strengths/weaknesses
--- the ability to mimic certain enemy skills
--- the ability to briefly manipulate an enemy and cause them to take a particular action
--- the ability to steal items from enemies
- PURPLE MATERIA grant passive effects, such as:
--- attribute enhancement: increased vitality, luck, speed, magical aptitude, etc.
--- the ability to take damage in place of another character
- RED MATERIA give the wielder the ability to perform summons
--- summoning materia is naturally occurring and in fact cannot be manufactured (unlike most materia), so these entities might be thought of nature spirits or the like; they are summoned for a limited period of time to assist the summoner in battle, and when their time is up they perform an "ultimate attack" and then disappear as quickly as they came.
Cloud travels with a set of materia on him at all times, and he has a pretty big stash of them at home. If he'd be permitted to have them in this setting I can submit a list of the exact ones he'd have on hand and how they work.
Personality: Cloud makes for an interesting and unusual Final Fantasy hero for one reason in particular: he’s so very, very bad at it. He starts out as an awkward, socially isolated kid from a remote mountain village, determined to prove himself by joining the Shinra military and becoming a SOLDIER. Instead, he gets mixed up in a corrupt system and experimented on for several years, after which he develops an alternate personality based on his skewed hero-worship of his best (read: only) friend, is controlled like a puppet on a string by the resident psychotic villain until he’s not even sure if he’s real at all, and eventually gets his original personality back just in time to save the world… kinda. In the end the planet essentially has to save itself, ushering in a near-total apocalypse in the process, and Cloud settles down among the ruins of civilization to try to build a new life while being wracked by guilt over the people he let die.
…At least he tries really hard? Anyway, all this is to say, Cloud is a mess of identity issues and contradictions, both internal and external. He is both weak and strong, fragile and resilient, withdrawn and engaged, shy and assertive. Sometimes he's a hero and sometimes he's a dumpster fire. Often, he's both at the same time.
He can be highly empathetic and sensitive, but he has trouble translating feelings into words and often ends up unintentionally closing himself off even with those he most wants to get close to. He's socially awkward, never quite knowing to react or what to say, as if he missed out on some kind of script that everyone else got a copy of. Despite this, he’s actually very good at reading people; he's terrible at offering words of comfort, yet he somehow has a knack for making others feel seen and understood when they most need it. This is a running joke in the fandom after Remake: Cloud will just say someone's name in a particular tone--and nothing else--when he’s trying to offer support, because he doesn't know what else to say yet is clearly aware that he should be saying something. And even though Remake so far only covers early OGC when his facade of "durr hburr I'm definitely a big bad SOLDIER what about it" is still firmly in place, his sensitive, empathetic nature bleeds through frequently regardless. He's constantly trying to support the people he cares about... and, as it turns out, he cares about a lot of people.
Though he can mask it somewhat with aloof bluntness and a slow but prickly temper, Cloud's low self-esteem remains his obvious tragic flaw. It’s no secret that Cloud thinks of himself as a weak person: he says so multiple times in the original game alone, and he created a whole other personality for himself after Zack’s death, escaping into the skin of someone he saw as competent and capable: a SOLDIER First Class. He kept up this facade for a very long time, despite part of him knowing all along that it wasn't real:
Cloud
Everyone... I'm sorry. I don't know what to say...
Nanaki
Don't say anything, Cloud. All you've been doing is apologizing.
Cloud
I never was in SOLDIER. I made up the stories about what happened to me five years ago, about being in SOLDIER. [...] I was so ashamed of being so weak; then I heard this story from my friend Zack... and I created an illusion of myself made up of what I had seen in my life... and I continued to play the charade as if it were true.
[...]
I'm... Cloud. The master of my own illusionary world. But I can't remain trapped in an illusion any more... I'm going to live my life without pretending.
Even several years after the game's end, he’s still grappling with his own feelings of being a weak and ineffective person--and so he eventually becomes convinced that he can’t help anyone, not even himself, and falls into depression. Again.
Herein, however, is the paradox: what's particularly impressive about Cloud is that, despite his self-esteem issues, he manages to get shit done. In Nibelheim, when the things he cares about most (Tifa, Zack, and his childhood home) are threatened, he not only confronts the biggest bad of the entire game as a sixteen-year-old infantryman, he throws him off a ledge into a mako reactor using the sword he’s currently impaled upon as a lever. He slips into the role of a leader like a second skin when called upon to, and his allies come to trust his judgement implicitly, allowing him to make the important decisions despite being intimately acquainted with his many failings. During ACC, he adopts a kid who is sick with Geostigma and takes it upon himself to research the disease until he finds a cure. Cloud hates to see the things he cares about threatened, and will do anything to save them. It’s not terribly difficult to make a list of “things Cloud cares about,” either, since Cloud is basically a marshmallow wrapped in coping mechanisms. His iconic line from ACC, spoken while fighting Sephiroth, says it all:
Sephiroth: Tell me what you cherish most. Give me the pleasure of taking it away.
[...]
Cloud: I pity you. You just don’t get it at all. There’s not a thing I don’t cherish!
Cloud takes the well-being of the things he cherishes extremely personally, and it's the resultant fear of failing that can be paralyzing, causing him to freeze up and become unable to take action. And his fears are, unfortunately, both potent and well-founded given what he's experienced. Cloud has a colorful history of trauma, and not the kind of stuff you process and move on from like nothing happened--the kind that takes hold and shapes your personality in consistent, inescapable ways, changing the kind of person you develop into as an adult. Any serious discussion of his personality has to cover that... and, well. Here we are.
We don’t get a lot about Cloud’s childhood from OGC, but what we do get is pretty telling. His dad died when he was very young, and he was raised by his mom, but the two don’t seem close; when the party asks about his family early on, he says, “I don't know if you could call it a ‘family’.” The scene that follows shows him visiting home, where his mom frets and fusses over him, with him alternating between ignoring her and brushing her off. He didn’t have much in the way of friendships, either:
Cloud
Tifa always used to have her own group. [...] I thought they were all… stupid. [...] You were all childish, laughing at every little stupid thing. [lit. translation of the Japanese: “laughing at things I didn’t care about”]
Tifa
But we were children then.
Cloud
...I know. I'm the one that was stupid. I really wanted to play with everyone, but I was never allowed into the group. Then later... I began to think I was different... That I was different from those immature kids.
Already, it's easy to start putting the pieces together. Cloud was a sensitive kid, sharper than most of his peers, with a yearning to be recognized and accepted yet little ability to relate to others. It's unclear if the social ostracization--never being "allowed into the group"--was intentional or accidental, but the damage was done regardless. Being unable to fit in with other kids left Cloud extremely socially isolated, as Nibelheim was not a large town, so he sidestepped the issue by telling himself he didn't need acceptance, instead focusing in on the idea that he was different--special, even. When he runs off to join SOLDIER at 14, it's with this in mind:
Tifa
Now that you mention it, why did you want to join SOLDIER in the first place? I always thought it was a sudden decision you made...
Cloud
...I was devastated. ...I wanted to be noticed. I thought if I got stronger I could get someone to notice...
The adults in his life, unfortunately, did not help his feelings of loneliness and desperation. When a young Cloud follows Tifa into the (extremely dangerous) Nibel mountains, concerned for her safety even after all of her other friends have long since turned back, this happens:
Cloud
Tifa missed her step. I ran to her... but didn't make it in time. Both of us fell off the cliff. Back then, I only scarred my knees, but...
Tifa's father and another man run up to the pair. The other man gathers Tifa while Tifa's father stands over Cloud shaking a finger.
Tifa's Father
Cloud! Why'd you bring Tifa to a place like this! What the hell's the matter with you!? What if she dies!?
Everyone walks off, leaving Cloud behind.
Cloud
Tifa was in a coma for seven days. We all thought she wouldn't make it. If only I could've saved her... I was so angry... Angry at myself for my weakness. Ever since then, I felt Tifa blamed me... I got out of control... I'd get into fights not even caring who it was. [...] That was the first time I heard about Sephiroth. If I got strong like Sephiroth, then everyone might...
Cloud, all of 8 or 9 years old, is yelled at, blamed for “bringing” Tifa to a dangerous place, and left behind to find his own way back through said dangerous place despite his own injuries. He becomes convinced that it's his fault: if he were just stronger, better, he'd be able to win the approval of peers and authority figures that he so desires. Later, when he’s sixteen and returns to Nibelheim for the first time since failing to make SOLDIER, Tifa’s father does not appear to have softened on him. He tells Cloud explicitly: “I want you to stay away from my daughter.” It's a short side conversation that is easily missable and never elaborated on, unfortunately. We don't know for sure if this is how most adults treated him, but given the fact that Tifa's father is the mayor of Nibelheim--and it's a very small town--it wouldn't be particularly surprising.
These are the childhood memories that Cloud has to work through in order to break through the persistent dissociative state he spends most of the game in and reclaim his original identity. And these are the issues that, at his current canon point, he's just barely begun to work on. He lost 5 years of his life to the lab and his subsequent catatonia; though technically 21 at the start of OGC, he hasn't had the chance to emotionally mature past 16. Now, at 24, he's starting to catch up on life--but at the same time, these issues haven't gone away.
His tendency to define himself based on who he wants to be rather than who he is, identifying desirable others and trying to emulate their traits, seems to be lessening with time--though it may never be gone completely. His new and fragile sense of self seems largely based on who he's around at the time, making him capable of striking attitudinal shifts depending on who he's talking to. Funnily enough, despite this internal tumult, others generally see him as pretty consistent, if a little weird. "Cloud’s a royal pain in the ass, like always," Yuffie complains at the end of ACC. "Cloud is Cloud," Tifa says fondly.
I'll close this out with another line of Tifa's from ACC:
Tifa: Stop running! I know. Even if you find the kids, you might not be able to help them. Maybe something could happen that can never unhappen. That scares you, doesn't it? But you need to think about now. Really take it in! Look at you: you think you've got it so damn hard. Well, you hate being alone, so let people in!
For Cloud, relating to others often puts him right back to being that misunderstood kid, terrified and vulnerable. He still yearns for attention and affection, yet he's paralyzed by the fear of being seen and found wanting, or of experiencing another devastating loss. As Tifa says, he hates being alone, yet he self-isolates whenever things get hard, so wrapped up in feeling ashamed of the past and fearful of the future that the present passes him by entirely. He buys into the idea that he is always essentially, inescapably alone, even when surrounded by people trying desperately to break down the walls he's built up around himself. Still, brick by brick, his maladaptive coping mechanisms are starting to be dismantled--at the end of ACC, he's been reminded that he is not alone, and he's started to accept the support system around him as something solid and reliable rather than precarious and liable to disappear out from under him at any moment. Tifa observes in On the Way to a Smile that running a delivery service has been good for him, since it's allowed him to get comfortable dealing with a lot of different kinds of people in various situations, encouraging him to begin emerging slowly from his shell. Progress is slow, but Cloud is resilient, and he doesn't give up easy--not when he's got people around him to remind him what he's fighting for.
Barge Reactions: Cloud is used to a fair amount of weird shit, though the existence of other universes and planets so completely different from his own will throw him for a loop. It'll take a while for him to get his head around it, if he does at all. He's likely to find himself questioning, off and on, if this isn't just a particularly creative hallucination being fed to him by his mako-addled brain; there's certainly precedent. But he'll throw out the idea each time--his hallucinations are, unfortunately, pretty predictable in their contents. The Barge is not. He couldn't make this shit up if he tried.
Most likely, he'll just accept that it's one of those things that's outside his understanding, and he'll take each of the other characters as they come. That's not to say he'll always believe what they say, being a wary person by nature, but he'll assume they're operating in good faith unless given a reason to think otherwise.
He will have a lot of feelings about being a Warden rather than an Inmate. Cloud has chronically low self-esteem and definitely sees himself as someone in need of redemption, and at this canon point, he's just emerged from a deep depression in which he was convinced of his own weakness and inability to help anyone. Cloud has accepted that the only one who still blames him for his sins is himself, but he's still incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of serving as a "good example" to others. Surely there must be better candidates. So he'll be struggling with that.
His primary concern during ports, floods, and breaches will be 1) protecting and supporting his inmate, especially if they lack combat capabilities, and 2) offering what protection and support he can to others. If he's gonna be a warden, he might as well try to live up to it, and he knows that there are plenty of people who don't have his capabilities. So he'll do what he can. Get to know people. Keep an eye out. Look for things he can do to help when shit goes down.
Deal: Cloud wants all traces of Jenova and her cells removed from the lifestream.
History: The FF wiki's story section for Cloud is pretty reliable as far as the facts are concerned.
Remake, however, introduced a pretty big question, which is how much of Remake continuity one considers "canon."
FFVII: Remake is not really a remake so much as it is a reimagining of the original game canon. Parts of it are explicitly alternate timeline (e.g. anything to do with the Whispers), whereas other parts simply flesh out the original--which, as a janky 90s game with a bad English translation and a much lower budget than the kind of things Square produces now, had a lot of holes in terms of worldbuilding and character development. RP-wise, Remake is of interest because it adds a plethora of character-building details for both major and minor characters, adds and expands upon some minor characters who had previously either not existed or only existed in various side materials, and in some cases makes minor adjustments to the order of events and the details regarding them (e.g. how, exactly, Cloud came to put on a dress and sneak into Don Corneo's mansion).
My stance on it is: the additional character and worldbuilding details are fantastic, and largely complementary to original game canon rather than contradictory. Therefore, I plan to incorporate as much of it as I can reasonably get away with. So, Cloud would know characters like Marle and Madam M even though they do not appear in OGC, and would remember Remake-specific interactions between himself and other characters so long as those interactions could just as easily have happened in OGC without changing anything. However, for things like Wedge surviving his fall from the pillar, I defer to OGC (which is to say: nope, as far as Cloud remembers, he died), because that's an explicitly contradictory change that only happens due to the aforementioned alternate timeline shenanigans.
Sample Journal Entry: TDM threads with Bill and Misty.
Sample RP: TDM threads with Rita, Tess, and Xigbar.
Special Notes: thanks for coming to my TED talk about post-traumatic stress disorder here's a present