Cloud Strife
Cloud Strife is a character in the media franchise Compilation of Final Fantasy VII by Square Enix. He is the protagonist of the role-playing video games Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, as well as the animated film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, with appearances in several other installments in the wider Final Fantasy series. He has also appeared in other media, including the Kingdom Hearts series by Square Enix and The Walt Disney Company and the Super Smash Bros. series by Nintendo.
Throughout Final Fantasy VII and its compilation that expands its universe, Cloud Strife is portrayed as a revolutionary working for the eco-terrorist group AVALANCHE in their efforts against the Shinra Electric Power Company, a mega corporation who plans to drain the world of its lifestream. Cloud experiences internal struggles in confronting his own traumatic past, including his history with former colleague Sephiroth.
Cloud was designed by Tetsuya Nomura, a character artist for the Final Fantasy series, whose role expanded to include supervision over Cloud's personality. Yoshinori Kitase, director of VII, and Kazushige Nojima, an events planner, developed the story and wanted to create a mysterious character who acted atypically for a hero. Nomura redesigned Cloud for Advent Children, giving him a more realistic appearance, along with new weaponry and a new outfit. For Remake, the team aimed to adapt his classic design for a more realistic art style.
Cloud has garnered generally positive reception from critics and is considered to be one of the most iconic video game protagonists. He has also been cited favorably as an example of complex character writing in video games, as one of video game's first unreliable narrators, and for the game's depiction of his mental disorder. Additionally, he is seen as a messiah figure in both the game and film for opposing Sephiroth's schemes with support from his allies.
Concept
In contrast to Final Fantasy VI, which featured multiple "main characters", Square's staff decided in the beginning of Final Fantasy VII development that the game would follow a single identifiable protagonist. In Hironobu Sakaguchi's first plot treatment, a prototype for Cloud's character belonged to an organization attempting to destroy New York City's "Mako Reactors". Kitase and Nomura discussed that Cloud would be the lead of three protagonists, but Nomura did not receive character profiles or a completed scenario in advance. Left to imagine the stories behind the characters he designed, Nomura shared these details in discussions with staff or in separately penned notes. Frustrated by the continued popularity of Final Fantasy IV characters despite the release of two sequels, Nomura made it his goal to create a memorable cast. The contrast between Cloud, a "young, passionate boy", and Sephiroth, a "more mature and cool" individual, struck Amano as "intriguing", though not unusual as a pairing. When designing Cloud and Sephiroth, Nomura imagined a rivalry mirroring that of Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojirō, with Cloud and Sephiroth representing Musashi and Kojirō, respectively.Kitase and Nojima developed Cloud's backstory and his relationship to Sephiroth. While drafting the game's scenario, Nojima saw a standing animation created by event planner Motomu Toriyama that depicted "Cloud showing off". The animation impressed Nojima and inspired the idea that Cloud had developed a false persona. This later led Nojima to create Zack Fair, a SOLDIER whom Cloud aspired to be like, to expand on the mystery of Cloud's past. Nojima left the unfolding of events regarding Cloud's identity unwritten, and Kitase was unaware of the significance of Zack's addition until playtesting. Kitase reviewed Nojima's scenario and felt that Cloud, who was neither single-minded nor righteous, offered a fresh take on a protagonist. The love triangle between Cloud, Tifa Lockhart, and Aerith Gainsborough was also viewed as novel for the series. Nojima likened Cloud and Tifa's relationship to one of friends since nursery school, and he compared Aerith to a transfer student arriving mid-term.
In early versions of the script, Sephiroth deceives Cloud into thinking that he had created him, and he has the ability to exert control over Cloud's movements. Cloud also somehow injures Tifa prior to the game's events, leaving her with memory loss of the event and a large scar on her back. As in the finished game, Cloud discovers that Shinra's experiments and his own insecurities made him susceptible to Sephiroth's manipulation. Kitase rejected a proposed scene written by Masato Kato involving Cloud and Tifa walking out of a Chocobo stable the morning before the final battle, with Tifa following only after checking around. Kitase found it "too intense" and Nojima described the proposal as "extreme"; however, Kitase maintained a toned-down scene written by Kato depicting the night before, which has Tifa speak a risqué line of dialogue before a fade to black. According to Nojima, none of the staff expected that the scene, despite dialogue, "would be something so important".
Nojima wanted to write scenes in such a way that players themselves could decide what Cloud was thinking. Nojima used Cloud's foggy memories as a device to provide details about the world that would be unknown to the player but considered common knowledge to its inhabitants. To emphasize Cloud's personality, event planners repeated elements they found interesting, such as Toriyama's standing animation and Cloud's use of the phrase "not interested".
In retrospective, Nomura and Final Fantasy VII Remake co-director Naoki Hamaguchi have described Cloud as a "dorky character". According to Nomura, although post-Final Fantasy VII titles featuring Cloud have emphasized his "cool side", "in the original game, Cloud had many comical or lame moments". Nomura believes that the reason Cloud became popular with audiences is due to the impact his personality made on Nojima's scenario.
Designs
In addition to testing models ported from Square's 1995 SIGGRAPH demo, Nomura and several other artists created new characters for Final Fantasy VII, including an early design of Cloud. Impressed with Nomura's illustrations and detailed handwritten notes for Final Fantasy V and VI, Sakaguchi tasked him with designing Final Fantasy VII main characters.Nomura's notes listed Cloud's job as magic swordsman. Cloud's design underwent several revisions. Nomura's first draft of Cloud featured slicked-back black hair to contrast with the long silver hair of the game's primary antagonist, Sephiroth, and to minimize the model's polygon count. However, to make Cloud stand out more and emphasize his role as the game's lead protagonist, Nomura altered Cloud's design to give him spiky blond hair. Nomura also made Cloud taller than he appeared in the SGI Onyx demo, while a discarded iteration drawn "more on the realistic side" depicted Cloud with a taller head and body and more muscular physique.
Yoshitaka Amano, who handled character illustrations for previous Final Fantasy titles, painted promotional images for the game by taking Nomura's "drawings and put own spin on them". According to Amano, because of the hardware limitations of the PlayStation, the platform Square had settled on for Final Fantasy VII, characters could not be rendered realistically. Amano thought that Cloud's baggy pants, which taper at the bottom, reflected a "very... Japanese style", resembling the silhouette of a hakama.
Early renditions of Cloud's weapon, the Buster Sword, depicted a smaller, thinner blade. Variations included additions such as a small chain connected to the pommel, magnets securing the blade to Cloud's back, and a more detailed design resembling a "Western-style sword". The Buster Sword's blade grew in subsequent illustrations, and Nomura called it "the Giant Kitchen Knife", envisioning it as unrefined steel. Square's staff conceived of a minigame involving Cloud driving a motorcycle at the start of the game's development, and Nomura's illustrations included Cloud riding a "Hardy-Daytona", a Shinra motorcycle based on a real-life motorbike, the Yamaha VMAX.
Further development
''Advent Children'' characterization
For Advent Children, Nomura agreed to direct the project, largely because of his attachment to Cloud's character. Although Nomura stated that Cloud was a more positive character in Final Fantasy VII than in Advent Children, he did not believe that such an "'upbeat' image of him is what stuck in the minds of the fans", and the script was written to explain why Cloud returned to a state of mind "consistent with the fans' view of him". Nomura describes Cloud's life as peaceful but one which he grew scared of losing, hurt by the losses he experienced during the original game. Blaming himself for things outside of his control, Cloud needed to overcome himself, Nomura elaborated. In contrast to other heroes, who Nomura see as typically possessing character defects amounting only to quirks, he believed Cloud's weakness to be humanizing.Nojima viewed the theme of the story as one of forgiveness, which he believed required hardship; by taking up his sword and fighting, Cloud struggles to achieve it. Nojima sought to establish Cloud's withdrawn personality by depicting him as having a cell phone but never answering any calls. He originally intended for Aerith's name to be the last one displayed in the backlog of ignored messages that appear as Cloud's cell phone sinks into the water, but the scene was altered because it "sounded too creepy". The wolf, which Cloud imagines, "represents the deepest part of Cloud's psyche" and "appears in response to some burden that Cloud is carrying deep in his heart", vanishing at the film's end. One of the film's final scenes, in which Cloud smiles, is cited by Nomura to be his favorite, who highlighted the lack of dialogue and Cloud's embarrassment. The scene influenced the film's score, written by composer Nobuo Uematsu, who grew excited after coming across it in his review of the script and commented on the difficulty players who had finished Final Fantasy VII would have had imagining Cloud's smile.
Nomura sought to make Cloud's design distinctly different from the other characters. About thirty different designs were made for Cloud's face, and his hair was altered to give it a more realistic look and illustrate that two years had passed since the game's conclusion. The staff attempted rendering Cloud based on the game's original illustrations, but concluded that doing so left his eyes unrealistically big, which "looked gross". Further revisions were made to Cloud's face after completion of the pilot film, which featured a more realistic style. In contrast to his hair, Cloud's clothes were difficult to make in the film. After deciding to give Cloud a simple costume consistent with the concept of "clothes designed for action", the staff began with the idea of a black robe, eventually parring it down to a "long apron" shifted to one side.
Cloud's weaponry was based on the joking observation that because his sword in the original game was already enormously tall, in the sequel, he should use sheer numbers. Referred to as "The Fusion Swords" during the film's development, early storyboard concepts included Cloud carrying six swords on his back, although the idea was later modified to six interlocking swords. While the idea was not "logically thought out" and the staff did not think that they could "make it work physically", it was believed to provide "an interesting accent to the story". Cloud's new motorcycle, Fenrir, was designed by Takayuki Takeya, who was asked by the staff to design an upgraded version of Cloud's "Hardy-Daytona" motorcycle from Final Fantasy VII. The bike got bigger as development continued, with Takeya feeling its heaviness provided an impact that worked well within the film. In the original game, Cloud's strongest technique was the Omnislash. For his fight against Sephiroth in the film, Nomura proposed a new move, the Omnislash Ver. 5, a faster version of the original Omnislash. The staff laughed at the name of Cloud's move during the making of it, as Nomura was inspired by a sports move from Final Fantasy X, in which the protagonist, Tidus, explains the addition of a more specific name would make people more excited.
Themes expanded upon in the director's cut Advent Children Complete include Cloud's development with links to other Final Fantasy VII media in which he has appearances. To further focus on Cloud's growth, Square decided to give him more scenes when he interacts with children. Additionally, the fight between Cloud and Sephiroth was expanded by several minutes and includes a scene in which Sephiroth impales Cloud on his sword and holds him in the air, mirroring the scene in the game where he performs the same action. The decision to feature Cloud suffering from blood loss in the fight was made to make his pain feel realistic.