#LET HIM RETURN TO HIS NEW MOM AND DAD (zack and aerith)!!!! GIVE HIM HIS LITTLE BROTHERS BACK!!!! GIVE HIM FUCKING FREE WILL!!!! FUCK!!!!!

[lecliss]

OO has me in a fucking vice grip with the urge to lunge at Seph's throat!!!!!!! I can't fucking believe he convinced Kadaj to join him!!!!!! I'm gonna go fucking feral!!!! Leave my sonboy alone!!!!! He has no free will!!! He keeps being used for what Jenova wants cuz of the cells and he keeps being used by Seph as a remnant!!! Daj can never truly have something of his own accord cuz of the very meaning of his existence!!!!! He can never be an individual cuz of them, but without them he wouldn't exist!!!! LET HIM BE HIS OWN PERSON!!!!

And to top it off, Team Ninja dangles a Loz and Yazoo tease in my face after I just said I need Kadaj to have his real brothers back!!!! FUCK!!!! I FUCKING HATE FINAL FANTASY!!!!!!!

#i love kaien trying to help even tho this has nothing to do with him. thank you grandpa 🥺 #kadaj and repliku would be a match made in heaven. i want them to talk and go on a murder spree for funsies together #im gonna kill seph so fucking hard. i hate it here!!!!!! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 #at least now i know why kadaj and seymour team up to be ducklings to weiss. tho im not caught up to know how/why they leave seph yet #im just. im gonna die man. im so happy OO added kadaj and gave him so much development and i love that the game takes characters seriously #but god. do they have to keep tormenting MY FUCKING SON!?!?!?! #LET HIM RETURN TO HIS NEW MOM AND DAD (zack and aerith)!!!! GIVE HIM HIS LITTLE BROTHERS BACK!!!! GIVE HIM FUCKING FREE WILL!!!! FUCK!!!!! #its such a good time to be so abnormal about a 2005 one off sequel movie villain. genuinely. it just hurts at the same time #i also like how everyone's fine with kadaj and is even trying to help him cuz despite being morally gray. at least hes against seph. #so hes a good kid in their books 🥺 #brb gonna go speedrun the og 7 real quick so i can beat seph's ass in the name of my best boy #also when we get loz and yazoo i wonder if theyll be a joint unit like in brave exvius of if theyll be seperate but released back to back #like reno and rude 🤔 #i was expecting sonon or nero next but i do think they wont come until after part 2. while i want genesis most then. i would actually rather #have the baby bro duo if it means they have a real chance of getting in. i didnt actually believe it would be possible. but no it looks real

[im-totally-not-an-alien]

Final Fantasy prompts no 53

1. Cloud is immortal and has lived for tens of thousands of years. He has watched his friends and enemies get reincarnated over and over again. He would always interfere and save the day when things got bad, prompting legends and myths of a golden haired hero with glowing blue eyes who swore to return whenever the world was in peril.

But thats not the end.

He took great care to find his friends and keep an eye on them, watching over them as a guardian angel of sorts. When he came across Sephiroth again, he expected a battle, but seeing the dull eyes of a broken teenager staring up at him as he layed battered and bruised by his own parents? It made him realize that Sephiroth wasn't born evil.

The blond added Sephiroth to his list of people to protect.

Cloud often removed Sephiroth from the abusive households he was born into by exposing the parents for their crimes and harassing them as an anonymous individual.

Once the silverette was out of the home he would manipulate circumstances so that he would come to live with Zack or one of his other former friends.

Once he hit a certain age, he would find people Sephiroth was romantically compatible with and play puppeteer until one of them married the silverette. Cloud had done this so many times that he practically became an expert. Strangely, in the recent past lives the marriages ended in amicable divorce. He didn't know what he did wrong, so the blond began expiramenting with Sephiroths "types" again, trying to find a perfect match.

This life however, Sephiroth refused to so much as hold hands with someone romantically and Cloud is about ready to rip his hair out in frustration.

The man walked down a busy street, thinking about what to do next when Sephiroth himselfed grabbed his arm.

Startled, Cloud stared up at him.

"It's you." Sephiroth muttered reverently, as though he couldn't believe his eyes.

Cloud never made contact with these people, he had learned his lesson after the fifth time he lost Zack. He let them live out their lives, only interfering to stop something negative from happening. The blond never showed Sephiroth his face since his ninth life.

So how did Sephiroth know who he was?

2. Cloud nearly giving Denzel "The Talk"

3. Denzel accidentally calling Cloud "Dad", calling Tifa "Mom", and Marlene "my sister" until he was eventually like, screw it, and called them that without hesitation

4. Denzel got in trouble at school for beating up a group of boys that were bullying another kid.

He gets suspended and Cloud takes him out for an awesome ride on Fenrir as a reward, followed by fighting lessons from both him and Tifa, then ice cream.

5. Au where Hollander was murdered by Hojo long ago. Degradation is running rampant through Shinras SOLDIER program, killing several and weakening many more.

Genesis is determined to find a cure, after all, his life is on the line. He's eventually cornered by Angeal and Sephiroth, who pull the truth out of him, and begin aiding him in his search.

They discover AC Cloud, who is from a different dimension/timeline whose very body contains the cure.

Cloud was no longer human, and had developed new organs of unknown purpose, his body having disposed of the unnecessary organs such as lungs, gallbladder, and pancreas, and modifying the ones it kept, such as the digestive track. The catch? Now he needed to feed on large amounts of natural Mako every month to survive.

Genesis sees no problem with this and asks for the blond to save them. Cloud, however, refused, not knowing what was happening to him and knew spreading it would be the bad idea of the century.

Genesis doesn't take "No" for an answer.

Hojo finds out the blond was essentially a second Jenova and had a mini lifestream inside him and becomes desperate to get his claws on him.

6. Jenova haunts Clouds dreams, filling him with dread. Not because she was tormenting him, no. It was the opposite.

In the dreams, she held him like a loving mother. Her gentle embrace warmed him, her soft words brought him comfort, made him confide in her. That's why he was afraid.

Cloud was beginning to love her, and it terrified him.

7. Zack Fair is hereby prohibited from using any form of glitter or glue.

Why? It's Classified.

8. Au where Lazard freed Zack from under the nebilheim mansion, but also dragged him outside, leaving Cloud behind.

He lied to Zack when he woke up, telling him the infantryman was dead. He believed that Zacks chances of survival would be infinitely higher if he left the boy behind, which he would never do if given a choice. So Lazard made that choice for him.

So Zack made it to Midgar on his own.

Cloud was found by Sephiroth months later. The blond had no fight left in him and tried to merge with the other Sephiroth clone, unfortunately since his cells were mutated, Cloud could not merge with Sephiroth.

The silverette had planned to abandon this failed clone until Cloud nuzzle his face against Sephiroths gloved palm. From then on out, Cloud followed Sephiroth everywhere, doing the cooking and the laundry or whatever he could to make himself useful. He would beg the former General not to abandon him, as everyone else had done in the past.

That, admittedly pulled on his heartstings a bit. Sephiroth had also been abandoned and betrayed by his two closest friends. By the company and people he foolishly devoted his entire life to.

So Cloud stayed. His master taught him how to fight, how to care for his gear, and they bonded over shared experiences and silent companionship.

It was during that final battle, where Zack and AVALANCHE slew Sephiroth, that Cloud, hidden somewhere out of sight, swore vengeance against the man who pretended to be his friend, who he believed abandoned him and left him to rot in that hellhole after he had sworn for years that they'd get them both out, that he would save Cloud, (Cause that's what heros do!) only for him to murder the first person other than his mom to ever care about him.

Clouds body held both S and J-cells, and though they may be mutated, he could still call for Reunion. Something Zack couldn't sense due to him being an A-type SOLDIER instead of an S-type like himself.

The blond could cultivate the summoned J-cells and make them multiply under his care. He knew the best revenge was patience, after all, so long as Cloud lived, Sephiroth would never truly die.

All he had to do was stay hidden. Know one could know of him, not that they were looking for a supposedly dead man, even if they were, they would never find him in his hidden underground bunker since no one with more then three brain cells would go near the Northern Crater.

9. Sephiroth drops blatant innuendos and pickup lines all throughout his fight with Cloud, but the blond thinks he's just imagining it.

Seph actually manages to escape that time, but after the fight, his friends point out all the questionable things the silverette said.

Cloud wasn't sure if he should be relieved that he wasn't hallucinating it.

10. Tifa caught Denzel and Marlene "interrogating" a doll that was tied to a tree.

They were hitting it with sticks and yelling, "Who's your source?!" At it.

Needless to say, Reno is no longer allowed to around the children without adult supervision.

11. Kunsel began fiddling with a laser pointer, absent-mindedly tracing large slow circles on an opposing wall. He kept thinking back to all the laser pointer related incidents from the past few weeks until he noticed, much to his horror, that a few of his fellow SOLDIERS in the mess hall were tracking the little red dot with laser focus.

Pun intended.

12. Aerith had long since faded into the lifestream where she belonged, but that's not what this story is about.

Thousands of years have passed since the events of MeteorFall, and Gaia is nearly overflowing with mako energy.

Cloud felt as Gaia began remaking her WEAPONS, and couldn't help but wonder as to why. After about a year of searching he found Vincent again and asked him.

The truth was disturbing. Gaia's lifestream had outgrown the planet, and was preparing a new Omega WEAPON to suck the life out of this one and travel back to the "Mother planet"

Cloud eventually found out about Gaias plans for him by eavesdropping on conversation between Gaia herself and the Cetra from the "Mother planet". You see, Cloud has a unique relationship with the planet. He was modified using Jenovas Eldrich powers, and over time, developed his own. The blond allowed Gaia to use his body/very being as a sort of ward against all things Eldrich, and has worked spectacularly well.

Gaia planned to keep him alive as she traveled through the cosmos. That wouldn't be a problem, no the problem was that she planned to encase him in crystal and keep him there for the rest of eternity. When the Cetra mentioned breeding him so that other planets would have a ward, he nearly gagged.

He told Vincent about everything and admitted he was afraid. The only reason he remained sane all these years was because he could travel and have new experiences. He couldn't do that if he was trapped.

Vincent suggested a rocket, to which the blond revealed that Gaia herself always sabotaged the rockets and space programs. For obvious reasons. They were stuck and didn't know what to do now that it was literally them against the world. So when Vincent suggested reviving Mako energy and the SOLDIER program until they could find a way off of Gaia, Cloud didn't dismiss it.

13. Another summoning gone wrong Au where Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud who are in the normal modern universe and are lovers in a poly relationship, decide to mess around with a spellbook Zack picked up in a shop. They were saying spells out loud and making fun of them, they also did the wierd little ceremonies and made "potions" and had a good time.

Nothing happened, until they woke up the next morning to the chocobo frantically patting them awake with his hands, stunned silent.

There, in their king sized bed, were their trans-dimensional alter-egos, done up with swords and pauldrons and...is Sephiroth wearing a fetish outfit? Said silverette poked his alter-ego with a ruler a few times to confirm he was out cold.

What were they supposed to do now?

14. Final Fantasy 7 and LoZ: Breath of the Wild crossover

Cloud lands in a new reality, but he's too focused on trying to fight the new breeds of monsters and surviving the desert heat to ponder the situation for long

And then there's all those things that keep trying to electrocute him...Clouds not having a good day.

On the other hand he has plenty of things to take his anger out on.

Also, Cloud meeting a horse! Which are critically endangered on Gaia!

15. Genesis finds Cloud post DoC and begins taunting him, but gasps dramatically when he learns the blond has never tasted Banoran apples/apple products. He drags Cloud along to get a taste. Weirdly, they get along.

#cloud strife #sephiroth #sefikura #ff7 #zack fair #sephiroth+x+cloud #genesis rhapsodos #ff7 story prompts #ff7 prompts #final fantasy 7 story prompts #final fantasy 7 #final fantasy story prompts

[jameshateseverything-blog]

Your Childhood (Actually) Sucks

I’m always worried when I say this; but Final Fantasy 7 is the most overrated game of all time. That, however, isn’t the point. How good it is is less important than how good people remember it being. Because the way people remember things is more important than the way things actually are.

  I spend a great deal of time thinking about being thirteen. Probably more than I should, to the point it borders on an addiction. My best friend and his newfound girlfriend decided Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” would be “their song.” I had placed second at the district chess tournament being held at my school. And I had been playing Final Fantasy 10 for the first time. It was not the first game in the series I had played, that goes to 7. What it was, however, was the first game in the series I have ever experienced.

  When I initially set out to write this essay I wanted to merely make an argument as to why Final Fantasy 7 isn’t good (or at least not as good as everyone seems to tell me it is). I had planned out several points as to why other entries in the series trumped it. Namely in the storytelling and gameplay departments. I decided to give 7 another playthrough, however. After spending some time with the game, which I concede holds up better than most Playstation 1 titles, I have come to realize something; maybe Final Fantasy 7 is not just the most overrated game of all time. Maybe, just maybe, the entire series is one of the most overrated gaming franchises ever. For those of you (which I assume is most) that have never played 7, 10, or any Final Fantasy, I am going to do my best to cover the story of those two specific games. I chose 7 and 10 because (a) the original argument was based on 7 and (b) though I wouldn’t say 10 is the best, I would say it is my personal favorite.

  Our story opens up with edgy ex-corporate mercenary Cloud Strife working alongside terrorist movement AVALANCHE to take down a Mako reactor. Mako being the life force of the planet and what is used to run all machinery. It is essentially crude oil that has the latent ability to grant certain people magical powers, like shooting fireballs or summoning ancient gods. But Shinra faces the problem that Mako energy is beginning to run low and their only hope is to find an ancient promised land. A promised land that is rumored to have Mako flowing endlessly beneath it. The dilemma, only an extinct race of people, the Cetra, know how to find this fossil fuel Mecca.

 As the game progresses you assemble a team of unlikely heroes including emo boy Cloud. A revenge-fuelled Barrett who has a gun for a hand and a deep-seated hatred for Shinra’s use of technology. The last remaining Cetra, Aeirith. There’s also a pseudo-vampire, a talking lion wolf, and a marshmallow plush controlled by a cat. Shinra has their eyes set on Aerith, they manage to capture her, and so begins the quest for renewable energy. Cloud and crew go to rescue her and this is when the true villain is introduced. Pretty boy and fan favorite Sephiroth is a one-winged semi-clone of a deity that fell from the sky as a meteor thousands of years prior. Sephiroth is one blatant metaphor for a Christian guilt complex. Sephiroth (who is also the god Jenova) wants to summon another meteor to destroy the planet so he can absorb all the Mako and become one with it. When Cloud and friends try to stop him, he manages to mind control Cloud. Then Convinces Cloud that he’s a clone of Sephiroth with the memories of some guy named Zack planted in him. Cloud has a mental breakdown, becomes catatonic, falls into the planet’s lifestream with his childhood friend, and sorts out his existential crisis like some bad acid trip. After he spends 10 minutes getting his shit together, the gang flies into the crater where Jenova initially crash landed Lord Xenu style. They do battle with Sephiroth, who is also Jenova, who is also the ancient entity known as Meteor. They kill him with the help of a deceased Aerith, and the world returns to its beautiful dystopian self. Minus the evil conglomerate monopoly of Mako Shinra once had. Convoluted enough for you? I didn’t even touch on the movie, four spin-off games (two on cell phone), or the racing of giant chickens to learn to summon King Arthur’s henchmen.

 Let us compare 7’s convoluted mess of a story to 10’s. Final Fantasy 10 follows Tidus, a young man with an Oedipus complex. One night, during a game of underwater space soccer [read: Blitzball], Tidus is interrupted by a colossal parasitic winged slug destroying the city of Zannarkand. Tidus and a friend of his father try to fight the creature but are ultimately defeated and Tidus wakes up in a completely different world. In this new world, a few things overlap. Space Soccer is larger than the super bowl, the city Zannarkand still exists though it is in ruins, and the giant slug unironically named Sin. Sin is the driving force for the game’s narrative. The creature is an evil that reincarnates itself and is allegedly a manifestation of what happens when man uses technology rather than prayer. So I guess Sin is just another Christian guilt complex villain.

 Throughout the story Tidus befriends an unlikely group of heroes including a subpar Blitzball player who has a deep-seated hatred (bordering on racist) for the machine using Al-Bhed. There is a summoner on a pilgrimage to sacrifice herself to stop Sin for another couple dozen years. A biped lion wolf, and a few other JRPG tropes.

 As the story progress you find out that Tidus’ father helped on the previous summoner’s pilgrimage and became Sin. Tidus finds out he isn’t real, and that if they defeat Sin he will fade into a literal dream. Tidus spends 10 minutes sorting out this existential crisis. There is some whistling. The party goes inside of Sin. Father, son, and not-so-holy ghost all die. The world falls back into its primitive state now liberated and free to use their technology as they please.

 The games are pretty damn similar when reduced to the lowest common denominator. I have time and time again praised 10 while putting down 7. And if you have played both of them you would be quick to see how they are inherently different. But this is how I remember those games. And how I imagine many others remember them to some degree, minus a few scenes left out for brevity.

 I was 13 and sitting in the back of my step-father’s Lincoln Navigator. There was a PS2 set up to the small screen and I was playing Final Fantasy 10; nearing the end. My step-dad just bought a “new car” scented car freshener. To this day I associate that smell with my favorite game of all time. This phenomenon, my addiction, to me is one of the most fascinating tricks the mind plays on us. Nostalgia, coming from the greek words nostos and algos translating to “homecoming pain.” There was a time it was used by the Swiss military where they thought the only treatment for the condition was to send the mercenaries home. Now we see there is something universal about “the better days.”

 After discussing the concept of nostalgia with a handful of people I have noticed people tend to fall into two different camps. Some, myself included, look at nostalgia with joyous sorrow. As though there are memories, emotions, and sensations that can never be duplicated. Think back to a favorite Christmas or birthday present, remember how you felt? Even though I believe that feeling itself can be replicated, the way you remember that feeling is encapsulated in that moment and forever gone. In this first camp, there is a fear that if we don’t cling to those memories we may lose a piece of our identity with them. The second camp tends to view nostalgia pejoratively. Longing being some type of weakness. Even if there were  “good ol’ days” you can’t ever get them back so why waste time trying? Now whether either of these mentalities is objectively more correct than the other, impossible to say. I’m more just fascinated that everybody feels homecoming pain. I did notice, however, that people more invested into games (video or sport) tend to sit in the former camp with myself. I think that is where Final Fantasy, especially 7, begins to fall apart. Am I using Nostalgia to say that Final Fantasy 7 is bad, even subjectively? No, not really. Instead I’m calling into question why it is important. Not important for gaming, but important to the gamers who believe it is the high bar for the series, or even games in general.

 A few hundred words ago I drew attention to the similarities between 10 and 7. And I would like to narrow that down to just the two protagonists; Cloud and Tidus. At face value these characters are different. Tidus is a young, naive, hot-headed sports star trying to live up to a father he resents. Cloud is a battle-hardened soldier whose idol turned out to be a monster. We are supposed to identify as these two. Our perspective is limited to theirs. Both are detached from a larger picture that they inevitably find themselves the center of. So even if Cloud and Tidus are different from one another, their general arcs manage to remain the same. This is why people (myself included) find these games to be important in their lives. Both of their lives are lies. One is a fleeting dream of the gods and the other a blonde husk with a brunette’s memories. Neither character has any reason to exist.

 Usually, if you listen, when people talk about their favorite music, movies, games it often is something from their childhood. You favorite Final Fantasy is most likely the first one you played. If it isn’t, your favorite was probably played around the ages of 13-16.  Even if you have never played these games I want you to take a moment to just stop. Take a nice long hit of that homecoming pain. Go back, try to remember being 9, or 13, or 16. Try to remember who you were as a person. Sorry if you were awkward, but that awkwardness is kind of the point. These transitional points in our lives, they are moments when we are developing responsibilities and learning who we are. Whether it is your first day home without the babysitter, or a first day of high school, those periods are when we can exist outside of our parents and act as yourself. I remember once breaking down in front of my parents proclaiming I did not know who I was. I didn’t belong. I had no reason to exist. I was the same as Cloud or Tidus.

 I suppose when I hate on Cloud as a character, or when others shun Tidus, what we are really doing is collectively hating how annoying and whiny younger versions of ourselves were. But it wasn’t always that way. Sure, we didn’t have to come to terms with being a clone. But maybe, like Tidus, we discover some aspect of our life is a lie. Santa isn’t real. We can’t all be astronauts. These tiresome characters are just us as tiresome teenagers. And it is hard not to look back and cling to that notion, a moment where we didn’t have to feel so alone. At that age it is nice to be understood.

 So do I hate Final Fantasy 7? No, of course not, I’m mostly enjoying my third playthrough. But the story doesn’t speak to me like it did when I was a kid. I’m not sure it is supposed to either. This idea that no Final Fantasy will ever capture the same magic as the old ones is toxic. It is only going to hurt the growth of the series in the future. Nothing revolutionary can come of trying to capture the old while moving on to the new. 7, 10, 13, these games aren’t terrible by any means. But they are the Donald Trump of gaming. Maybe we can’t make Final Fantasy great again. Maybe it never was that great.

#Final fantasy x #final fantasy vii #writing #personal #ffvii #ffx #final fantasy #nostalgia