[POLL] BATTLE OF FINAL FANTASY LEADING MEN, FF7 & FF8!

I like to imagine that, early in FF8's development, a group of Japanese businessmen sit dejected around a table. Then, one jumps up, runs to a dry erase board, and quickly sketches a gun and a sword. Everyone looks confused. Then, he places a plus sign between them, and they give him a standing ovation for three hours straight.

Ah okay, thanks for clarifying.

author=kory_toombs
Though if I remember correctly there was something in FF8 that makes you invincible for a short period of time (that's not paralleled in FF 7.)

I think it was an item called Holy War-trial? Something like that. There was another item (Holy War?) that hit the whole party with invincibility for a short while. I believe Great Gospel, or whatever Aeris' final Limit Break was called, made the entire party invincible for a short while.

Quick rundown of their respective abilities

Weaponry

Both characters have preposterously implausible weapons. Cloud's is larger and heavier and thus probably the stronger of the two, but Squall's weapon never misses and can crit 100% of the time if he uses the trigger properly, and his Renzokuken can be used repeatedly if he's at low health. I give advantage to Squall.

Armor

Cloud can equip bangle and accessories to shore up his defenses and protect him from status effects. Squall relies on Guardian Forces for defense, able to junction magic to his defense stat, and can summon GFs to take damage for him. Tough call but I think Squall has a slight advantage here, mostly because letting a GF take damage for him lets him survive even devastating Limit Break Attacks.

Physical Abilities

Augmented by Mako energy, Cloud is one tough son of a bitch. Not only can he swing the Buster Sword around like it's nothing, but we observe him demonstrating superhuman levels of durability. He has survived falls of hundreds of feet without serious injury, survives being totally impaled by Sephiroth, and even survived being fully immersed in the lifestream.

We don't see Squall accomplish anything close to this. As others have observed, Squall's ability to tolerate injury doesn't appear to be any greater than a normal human's, GFs be damned.

Cloud holds a monstrous advantage in this category.

Supernatural Abilities

Cloud can use Materia to cast spells and unlock new abilities. He can equip as many of these as he has slots in his weapons and armor. These materia do have negative effects on his stats, but the benefits generally outweigh the drawbacks.

Squall uses GFs to unlock new abilities, can summon them in battle, and can draw magic with their power. This gives him the ability to cast magic almost infinitely, but his selection is limited by what he can draw from his enemies or environment. Squall can equip as many GFs as he likes. The primary drawback of GFs are memory damage, which are not germane to this battle.

At the start of their adventures, Squall has Shiva and Quetzalcoatl available, and Cloud has the Ice and Bolt materia. If we give them both the fully developed versions of those, Squall holds the advantage here.

Personality

Cloud is a profoundly broken individual, having a hard time understanding who or what he is. He is easily misled or confused. He has few driving forces in his life besides defeating Sephiroth and protecting the planet. Without friends to back him up, Cloud is prone to severe depression and mental breakdowns.

Squall lives his life by a principle of self-reliance. He too is rather broken but not nearly as badly as Cloud. Squall always does his best to accomplish his mission, even if he doesn't agree with it. He eventually comes to trust and rely on his friends but is capable of functioning without them. Squall's main disadvantage is he is terrible at communicating on a personal level and lacks empathy or the ability to understand other people's feelings.

Both pretty much suck at this, but Squall sucks slightly less. However, there's a catch here that will come back to haunt him.

Combat Experience

Cloud's entire life is a lie and he actually has much less combat experience than you might think. He was never actually in SOLDIER. He learned most of his fighting style by stealing it from his friend Zack.

Squall has been training to be a soldier for several years and has participated in multiple drills and actual live combat scenarios. He knows the value of following orders.

Both are thrust into leadership roles they're not comfortable with, but eventually become reasonably good at it. But only Squall gives commands and orders during an actual military confrontation.

Again, Squall holds the advantage here by actually having combat experience.

So who wins?

As we can see, Squall holds a small advantage in many categories, but Cloud has one key advantage in that his Mako augmentation makes him really hard to actually put down. Even Sephiroth couldn't do it. In the end I think Squall puts up a good fight but even with two GFs backing him, Cloud's superior strength and durability are just too much.

There's one category where Squall could win out, and that would be to fight Cloud psychologically and try to trigger a breakdown episode. Unfortunately for Squall, this happens to be one of the things he's the worst at.

I give the fight to Cloud.

Cloud's symptoms resemble severe PTSD.

He has low self-esteem growing up. This affects the way he copes with the trauma from the events in Nibelheim. Although at the time he acts on the "fight" survival response (confronting Sephiroth in the reactor), he's probably unable to even begin processing the trauma itself for five years while he's in that stasis tube.

At the start of the game he's only recently escaped from Nibelheim and his brain is just doing what it must for him to survive. His replication of Zack's identity and repression of his own is sort of a partial recovery from the catatonia (stupor) he'd been experiencing while Zack was helping him get to Midgar. Believing he is more like Zack than himself would give him distance from the pain and horror of what happened, including Zack's murder, and allows him to function.

When he discovers his new identity isn't real, he goes back into catatonic shock with even more trauma, as he just witnessed Aeris' murder, and was mind-controlled into helping Sephiroth summon the meteor.

The scene inside Cloud's mind could symbolize the end process of trauma integration. The mako stream gives Tifa psychic (I'm guessing) access to Cloud's brain. With Tifa's help, Cloud reconciles with the memories he had been repressing, and is able to live from then on more as himself rather than with parts of Zack.

Catatonia, amnesia and unconscious altering of identity are forms of dissociation that can be related to trauma. Cloud also has flashbacks & a desire for revenge against Sephiroth, both of which are more symptoms of PTSD. They've been condensed and bastardized to fit into a science fantasy video game narrative, but PTSD would describe Cloud's experiences more closely than just depression or dissociative identity disorder*.

Regardless of his condition, he's able to lead & fight for almost the entire game and his breakdowns are triggered by specific things, so I don't know why it should be relevant. Especially when he's superhuman and Squall is just an ordinary dude (for Final Fantasy). For Squall to try to antagonize Cloud's mental illness to gain an advantage over him, he'd have to be a supreme asshole. He isn't, so it's moot.

*My unqualified opinion, obviously

Oh, someone's going to use game cheapshots to win this argument! Let me just leave this right here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2aVkFk9nOw

author=Solitayre

author=suzy_cheesedreams
For Squall to try to antagonize Cloud's mental illness to gain an advantage over him, he'd have to be a supreme asshole. He isn't, so it's moot.

Coming from someone who generally likes Squall, he's a pretty major asshole for most of the game.

He is, but not in a sociopathic manipulator way. He's just antisocial and puts up a lot of walls.
worth noting that in the Japanese text squall is constantly saying "sorry..." not "whatever..."
He's very bad at talking shit. He is never shown trying to get a psychological edge on an opponent, ever, even when he has dirt on them (Seifer.) He probably wouldn't say one word to Cloud.

Also worth nothign that psychological manipulation doesn't work on Cloud as often as some people here seem to think. He is very specifically mentally undone by Sephiroth, because Sephiroth is literally able to take control of Cloud's body and make him do things against his will. He's constantly hearing voices from his "real" personality prior to getting dunked in Mideel. yes, he's messed up, but this is never ever shown to affect his combat proficiency.

The only time someone successfully Cloud, during the entire game I think, is when Hojo calls him a failure. He seems pretty upset about this, but at the time he is in the middle of being controlled by Sephiroth and I believe this is also directly after Sephiroth reveals that a huge majority of his past is a lie.

I think Solitayre put it really well in terms of the personalities of the two characters.

From Disk 1, Squall was a highly-trained combat individual with a strong sense of duty. If someone like Headmaster Cid told him to do it, he'd probably beat the shit out Cloud just because he was asked to....whereas Cloud would be like "Gimme Gil LOL"

Also the Junctioning is a really good point. Plus, Squall could obtain his ultimate weapon on Disc 1, and he can R1 on attack for massive damage with each hit. Cloud needs to get that dumb Knights of Round summon to do anywhere near that kind of damage. So I think it's a no-brainer.

author=CAVE_DOG_IS_WRONG
Also, when they get stuff on each disk is also irrelevant and yellow magic is going to be exiled from the FF/warhammer RP guild for this. first of all when they obtain things has no bearing on the characters themselves. it's not because of squall or cloud's 'ability' that they get things when they do. that's just where the items are placed in the rpg world for some reason. secondly, a 'disk' is a measure of data, not time. each game's 'campaign' takes an unknown amount of time, possibly several months, possibly just weeks. thirdly, and most importantly, none of the above matters because we are either taking them both at the beginning of the game or both of them at the end of their respective games.

I think it's very important when they get the items: The question isn't "who is more able", it is who would win in a fight. Sun Tzu-sama said in one of his books somewhere that "Preparation is the key to victory" (Did you know? Abraham Lincoln cited that too), hence the obvious winner between the two would be who gets prepared the fastest.

I think it is fair to say that both campaigns take place with roughly identical intervals of time between exposition scenes (there's no big time skips or anything are there, hence because of how quickly Squall could obtain a Lionheart versus Cloud's "Ultimate Weapon", Squall would have the advantage in terms of a pre-emptive strike.

Alternatively if Squall put aside his need for a fair fight, instead opting for the least risky way to GET THE JOB DONE (his trademark thing), he could just ambush Cloud when he's in his PTSD wheelchair-bound state.

The numbers don't like CAVE_DOG...or should I say CAVE_DUNCE *Won't be fooled again*

ADDENDUM:

thirdly, and most importantly, none of the above matters because we are either taking them both at the beginning of the game or both of them at the end of their respective games.

Why? Who makes these rules?? If it doesn't come from Vince McMahon it doesn't count

If they live on different planets and don't go anywhere (one planet to the other or vice-versa), how are they even supposed to fight? I call shenanigans. What a farce.