Final Fantasy VII is my favorite game, period. It's no news for anyone who knows me. I didn't play it when it released - my experience was with a PS2, when everyone just got their PS3s. It was natural for me to play old ass games, in the 2000's, when everyone was playing PS2, I was burning ROM's to play in my PS1. Maybe that's one of the roots of my affection with retro games - specially the PSX ones. My first experience with FFVII was with a pirated PSX fan-translated copy (I downloaded the ISO's and burned the CD-ROMs myself). I was curious about this game that almost everyone in the internet considered "the best PS1 game ever made", or even dramatic statements like "the best RPG of all time".
I have to be honest that I expected more about the design and the graphics. I thought that this game would be those avant-garde that push the console's graphical chip to the limit. I played this game in the early 2010's. I didn't think it was ugly, but the super deformed blocky character design made me think the game looked funny. The same can't be said about its successor - its realism made the devs explore the PSOne potential (I'm not saying realism = good, cartoon/deformed = bad, please). I thougt that the turn-based combat was pretty average, because I was already familiarized with the genre back then. What catch my attention, from start, was the thematic.
For those who don't know, FF VII tells the story about a small cell of a group "echo-terrorists" called Avalanche, which main objective is to stop a mega company called Shinra from extracting the planet's vital energy - a green ethereal element called mako. Mako is something that is part of the Lifestream of the planet - the never ending cycle of life and death, people are born from the Lifestream and return to it after they die. Memories, histories and feelings are stored into the planet's vital energy. Cloud, our protagonist, is a mercenary who joined Avalanche's fight against Shinra - Cloud is a precious ally, because he worked for Shinra as a SOLDIER (I'm not emphasizing anything, the group's name is written in higher case like that), the company's private army. Cloud joined the fight just for the money (he says that, but actually Tifa - his childhood friend, convinced him).
Cloud is a very misterious character with a very serious personality. Always making direct to the point sentences and being brutally honest about everything, making the other characters unfomfortable sometimes. At the beggining of the game, the only piece of detailed information we get from Cloud is about the day he worked along the villain of the game (Sephiroth), before he drown himself in madness, in a mission at his homeland, Nibelheim. He claimed he was the highest rank inside SOLDIER (1st class) and killed Sephiroth with his own hands after the villain set the village on fire. Also, he met Tifa during this mission. When Cloud tells his story to the group, Tifa acts strange, like some pieces of the story are missing, but she doesn't interrupt Cloud or denies anything. Some moments after it in the game, she start talking to Cloud about that, but she gets interrupted by an event happpening in the town where they are.
THERE WILL BE HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD - IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED THE GAME, PLEASE RETURN HERE AFTER PLAYING IT
Later in the game, Cloud suffers an accident after a battle and falls in some kind of Lifestram lake. He is found at another city in a catatonic state, which was a shock for the team, specially Tifa. She cries over him, thinking the Cloud she knew will never come back. Then, some moments after this scene and after a boss battle, Cloud and Tifa fall into the lifestream. But this time, something different happens: Cloud and Tifa minds start sharing the same stream of consciousness, revisiting again those childhood memories together. We end up finding out how difficult was Cloud's life, how he was seen as the weird and excluded kid. The only one who cared about him was Tifa. Cloud noticed that and started seeking her attention. Then, we get the "Promise" scene we already know, where Cloud promises to Tifa he will become a great SOLDIER just like Sephiroth, and will come for her when she is in danger.
The memories start advancing on time, until Cloud and Tifa start exploring Cloud's memory about his time working for Shinra. Cloud starts narrating the Nibelheim incident as before, but this time, with Tifa's help he starts remembering more details he couldn't remember before. Tifa didn't see Cloud 5 years ago in Nibelheim, there was another guy who was in this mission along with Sephiroth: Zack Fair, a first class SOLDIER. Everything Cloud said he did during his time in Shinra was, actually, Zack's deeds. So Cloud lied about being in Nibelheim during the incident? No, he was there, but not as a first class hero, just as an average Shinra trooper. Cloud knew he was going to see Tifa, but he was so ashamed of himself for not making it though first class (he didn't fulfill the promise) that he kept his identity in secret and wore the trooper helm during all his time at Nibelheim. He only revealed himself after Tifa was stabbed by Sephiroth and she was barely conscious, making it hard for her to remember that Cloud was there. And after it, Cloud got stabbed by Sephiroth, but he was so resilient that he grabbed the blade with his bare hands and threw Sephiroth into the Lifestream below the reactor. Cloud got captured by Shinra scientists and he is put in a experiment pod along with Zack. This makes Cloud suffer from Mako poisoning and he got into the same catatonic state he got later in the game. Since Zack is a genetically enhanced first class SOLDIER, he resists the mako poisoning, and made the both run from the lab. The mako exposure, the injection of Sephroth's cells in the lab and witnessing Zack's death made Cloud create a false persona about himself to protect him from the horrible traumas he just lived, and also, from his shame.
Cloud dissociated. He couldn't bear the person he was for pure shame and pain. He didn't want to live like this. He didn't want his story to end like this. From this indicdent until the third act of the OG game, Cloud was acting as a character that was not him. It didn't hit me that hard back when I was a child. But now I understand how painful and heavy the core of Cloud's character is. And this happens because I know it so well how it means to be a shadow of your true self. The anger, the inconformity and the moments of pain when you feel something you can describe is wrong but you keep living as it is, because you must be the legacy of someone you admire or you need to fulfill the expectations of a person or a group of people. The trans experience is not "ready" to be lived. You don't wake up and get everything together. You have to fight everything you have been told (or you told yourself) about your identity. And in most of cases we need to go through a lot of struggles to find out the truth. The apathy of nothing making sense and the necessity of creating false goals and addictions to your life can drown you to a catatonic inertia if you don't have the right resources and support to leave from it. Although you have to figure out who you are by yourself, you can't traverse this journey alone without people that support you and will respect and love you as you are. Cloud wouldn't make it out from the catatonic state without Tifa's help - she proved him that he didn't need to fulfill any expectations and he just needed to keep living by his own aspirations, the traumas, as much as it hurts, it's part of it, and it isn't worth hiding it. And the only way to find out the roots of our suffering is facing the traumas ourselves. No one can really tell us the truth but ourselves.
Being trans is traumatic. And I'm not talking about the huge amount of bad stuff we have to face after we transition. I'm talking about living years, decades of your life as someone you didn't relate, someone you are ashamed of, or even someone you hate. You didn't choose it, but the environment around you reinforces it in every way posible. This identity - we need to find some way to deal with this pain and this embarassment, that's why in most of cases we create escape mechanisms, one of them is dissociation. We end up detaching ourselves from reality, making it feel fake, something like a stage play. We don't feel like we are the person we are emboding, it's just some sort of character, an actor that has to fulfill a role. Be a good student, partner and worker. That will make it, people will be proud of you. Everything that will make everyone's expectations fulfilled it's enough, because this is the character you need to play. This is the only way to escape your real self that is hiding inside your thoughts. Just like Cloud, we make a prision of the self inside our minds, hidden below many versions and memories of ourselves, which we can attribute many different meanings, and even distortions - in the case of the traumating ones, depending how we feel about them. There, lives our identity. Of course, identity is not something you decide alone and is estabilished instantly. But is something you assume by yourself and represent it to the world around you, making everyone understand it and relate it to you.
Of course Final Fantasy VII wasn't specifically written with these topics in mind. The game don't touch topics of gender and sexuallity (except for the crossdressing scene lol). FF VII is about uncovering reality, going beyond the obvious. It's about the eco-terrorist who is a lovely father, the flower girl who is actually a descendant of a powerful ancient civilization, about Red XIII, a Shinra experiment who actually have a name and a family, about the planet, which screams but nobody hears. FF VII is about who we are and what we are doing in regard. The fact is, I was obsessed with Cloud since I was a child, he resonated so much with me, somehow I understood what was going on in his mind, and I was wishing that the great realization about myself would come. That in the moment of great despair and apathy someone would show suport to me and say that everything is fine as long I am still being myself. That I don't need to act and lie anymore. That after all, I could hang out with a group of misfits that would accept my true story and fight with me against the thing that one day was the source of my fears and frustrations.
