Cloud Strife

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Cloud Strife first appears on screen as a mercenary blowing up a power plant for money. He is cold, aloof, and utterly uninterested in the cause he is nominally fighting for. Yet the 1997 role-playing game Final Fantasy VII asks the player to trust him as their window into its world. That trust is precisely what the game will spend dozens of hours dismantling. Who is Cloud Strife, really? What does he actually remember? And how did a character built on a lie become one of the most recognized figures in video game history?

• 2. Building a New Kind of Hero

  ›

  Yoshinori Kitase, director of Final Fantasy VII, and writer Kazushige Nojima set out to create a protagonist who acted atypically for a hero. Frustrated by the lingering popularity of Final Fantasy IV characters despite two sequels having since released, character artist Tetsuya Nomura made it his explicit goal to build a memorable cast. The earlier game in the series, Final Fantasy VI, had spread its focus across multiple main characters. For VII, Square's staff decided from the outset that a single identifiable protagonist would anchor the story.

  Nomura drew the Cloud-Sephiroth pairing with a specific rivalry in mind. He imagined them as mirror images of Miyamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro, two of the most famous dueling swordsmen in Japanese history, with Cloud corresponding to Musashi and Sephiroth to Kojiro. Yoshitaka Amano, who had painted promotional art for earlier Final Fantasy titles, found the contrast between Cloud as a passionate young man and Sephiroth as a more mature and cool figure intriguing.

  Kitase reviewed Nojima's scenario and felt that Cloud, who was neither single-minded nor righteous, offered something fresh. The love triangle among Cloud, Tifa Lockhart, and Aerith Gainsborough was similarly viewed as novel for the series. Nojima later described their relationships in concrete terms: Cloud and Tifa were like friends since nursery school, while Aerith resembled a transfer student arriving midterm.

• 3. The False Persona

  ›

  A single piece of animation changed the direction of Cloud's entire backstory. While drafting the game's scenario, Nojima saw a standing animation created by event planner Motomu Toriyama that depicted Cloud showing off. The image planted an idea: what if Cloud had constructed a false version of himself?

  To build the mystery around that false persona, Nojima created Zack Fair, a SOLDIER whom Cloud had aspired to emulate. Nojima deliberately left the unfolding of events around Cloud's identity unwritten, and Kitase himself was unaware of the significance of Zack's role until playtesting. The reveal, when it arrives in the finished game, shows that Cloud never qualified for the elite SOLDIER unit. He enlisted as an ordinary infantryman and hid that fact from his own hometown out of embarrassment when he returned there on a Shinra mission.

  Following a confrontation at Mt. Nibel, both Cloud and Zack were imprisoned by Shinra's lead scientist, Professor Hojo, for four years of experimentation. When Zack eventually escaped with Cloud, Shinra soldiers gunned Zack down at the outskirts of Midgar. Exposure to Mako radiation and the injection of cells from Jenova caused Cloud's mind to construct an entirely new personality based on Zack's, inadvertently erasing Zack from his own memory. The person Cloud believed himself to be was assembled from the life of a dead friend.

  Nojima wanted players themselves to decide what Cloud was thinking in key scenes. He used Cloud's foggy memories as a storytelling device to reveal facts about the world that would be common knowledge to its inhabitants but unknown to the player, letting the gaps in memory carry double duty.

• 4. A Design Built to Stand Out

  ›

  Nomura's first draft of Cloud gave him slicked-back black hair. The intention was twofold: to contrast with Sephiroth's long silver hair and to minimize the polygon count on the game's models. That version was eventually discarded. To make Cloud stand out as the lead protagonist, Nomura gave him spiky blond hair instead.

  Yoshitaka Amano, working from Nomura's detailed drawings, painted the game's promotional images by putting his own spin on the designs. He noted that because of the hardware limitations of the PlayStation, characters could not be rendered realistically. Amano observed that Cloud's baggy pants, which tapered at the bottom, carried what he described as a very Japanese style, resembling the silhouette of a traditional hakama garment.

  Cloud's weapon, the Buster Sword, started small. Early renditions depicted a thinner, shorter blade before the design expanded into the enormous sword the game is known for. Square's staff had conceived of a motorcycle minigame from early in development, and Nomura's illustrations placed Cloud astride the Hardy-Daytona, a Shinra motorcycle based on the real-life Yamaha VMAX.

  For Advent Children, approximately thirty different designs were created for Cloud's face before the team settled on a look. His hair was reworked to appear more realistic and to mark visually that two years had passed since the events of the game. The staff originally attempted to base his face on the game's original promotional illustrations but concluded the result left his eyes unrealistically large, which they described as looking gross. His iconic cluster of swords for the film grew from a joking observation: since his original blade was already enormously tall, the sequel should simply multiply the number of swords. An early storyboard featured six swords carried on his back; the final design interlocked them.

• 5. Voicing the Silence

  ›

  The original Final Fantasy VII contained no voice acting. The task of defining Cloud's voice in subsequent media fell first to Takahiro Sakurai in Japanese, who was recommended to Nomura by voice director Teruaki Sugawara. Nomura had originally intended Sakurai for the role of Sion Barzahd in The Bouncer, but after hearing him speak, decided his voice suited Cloud better. Sakurai received the Advent Children script without any accompanying visuals and arrived for his first recording session believing he would be voicing a different character entirely.

  For Advent Children specifically, Sakurai found the material emotionally demanding. He recorded most of his work individually but performed alongside Ayumi Ito, who voiced Tifa, for certain scenes. Those exchanges left him feeling deflated, as he described Cloud's dynamic with Tifa as one involving painful honesty that Cloud struggles to handle. Sakurai noted that some scenes required over a year to complete, with directors giving precise guidance and requesting numerous takes. He has said that Cloud's silence conveys more about him than his words do.

  In English, Steve Burton voiced Cloud in most adaptations after being hired when a Square employee noticed his performance in the 2001 film The Last Castle. Burton's work on Advent Children was his first feature-length voice role. He was replaced for Final Fantasy VII Remake by Cody Christian, who used Burton's performances as inspiration and publicly acknowledged that Burton had shaped the character's legacy. For teenage Cloud appearing in flashback sequences, the team cast 13-year-old Yukihiro Aizawa in Japanese to match Cloud's rural upbringing, specifically seeking a child from a rural area rather than a trained actor. Christian later received a nomination for Performer in a Leading Role at the 17th British Academy Games Awards for his work in Remake, and won Best Lead Performer at the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

• 6. Cloud Beyond Final Fantasy VII

  ›

  Nomura redesigned Cloud for his appearance in Kingdom Hearts, giving him a crimson cape and a clawed glove, with the Buster Sword wrapped in bandages. He explained that Cloud's left arm was inspired by the character Vincent Valentine and that he wanted to give Cloud a more demon-like appearance to match his ties to the dark side in that game. Nomura deliberately left open whether Cloud was searching for Aerith, choosing to let players interpret the question for themselves.

  The most consequential extension of Cloud's reach into other game series came through Super Smash Bros. According to director Masahiro Sakurai, Final Fantasy characters had been heavily requested for inclusion in the series, and Cloud received more support than any other candidate. Sakurai settled on Cloud above other Final Fantasy characters because he could not imagine any of them matching Cloud's popularity. Cloud was added as downloadable content in December 2015, accompanied by a stage based on Midgar, and a pair of amiibo figures followed in July 2017. When Sephiroth was later added to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in December 2020, Cloud's Advent Children costumes were updated to include his Omnislash Ver. 5 technique.

  Cloud's likeness has also generated some of Square Enix's best-selling merchandise. At the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, Square Enix's manager of merchandise Kanji Tashiro said the character's likeness had produced some of the company's top-selling items, with the Advent Children figurine and the Final Fantasy VII Hardy-Daytona bike set selling particularly well in European and North American markets. In 2013, blacksmith Tony Swatton built a replica of the Buster Sword for the webseries Man at Arms.

• 7. Reception and Lasting Influence

  ›

  Ron Dulin of GameSpot, reviewing the PC release of Final Fantasy VII, wrote that Cloud is easily the most interesting and complex character ever presented in a game, calling that judgment a simple understatement. Kurt Kalata of Gamasutra identified him as one of the first unreliable narrators in a role-playing video game, while Patrick Holleman argued that no RPG had ever deliberately broken the connection between protagonist and player the way Final Fantasy VII does. The game's handling of memory and identity drew comparisons to films including Fight Club, The Sixth Sense, American Psycho, and Memento, all from 1999 and 2000.

  Sharon Packer identified Cloud as exhibiting dissociative identity disorder, while Katie Whitlock read his fragmented memories as consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. The book Japanese Culture Through Videogames placed him alongside Metal Gear Solid's Solid Snake, Final Fantasy VI's Terra Branford, and Tekken's Jin Kazama as a character defined by identity crisis.

  Cloud's influence spread through the Final Fantasy series itself. Nomura designed Squall Leonhart for Final Fantasy VIII with a similar anti-hero persona after the success of Cloud. For Final Fantasy XIII, Nomura was explicitly tasked with creating a female version of Cloud, resulting in Lightning, whose design he approached with the goal of creating a character loved for a long time, like Cloud. The staff on Final Fantasy X chose to move in a deliberate opposite direction, building Tidus as a more cheerful hero specifically in contrast to Cloud's emotional reserve.

  In Dengeki PlayStation's 2007 awards, Cloud was named best character of all time. In 2010, Famitsu published a seven-page tribute cataloguing his appearances across media. Nomura and Final Fantasy VII Remake co-director Naoki Hamaguchi have since described Cloud, in retrospect, as a dorky character, and Nomura has said that the comical and sometimes lame moments in the original game are precisely what made him connect with audiences.