Cloud

©1997Square

Cloud
Cloud Strife (Japanese: クラウド・ストライフ, Hepburn: Kuraudo Sutoraifu) is a fictional character and the main protagonist of Square's (now Square Enix's) 1997 role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII, its high-definition remake, and several of its sequels and spinoffs. In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud is a mercenary claiming to be formerly of SOLDIER, a group of elite supersoldiers employed by the Shinra Electric Power Company, a megacorporation responsible for draining the life from the planet. Fighting against Shinra in the resistance group AVALANCHE, and driven by a feud with the primary antagonist, Sephiroth, Cloud learns to accept his troubled past and adapts to his role as a leader.

Concept and Design:

In contrast to Final Fantasy VI, which featured multiple "main characters", Square's staff decided at the outset of Final Fantasy VII's development that the game would follow a single identifiable protagonist.[2] 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".[3] After a pause in development so that the team could help finish Chrono Trigger, Square began experimenting with next-generation hardware.[3] A small group including Kitase and Nomura worked in secret to develop a demo for a Nintendo 64 emulation kit running on an SGI Onyx.[3] In addition to testing models ported from Square's 1995 SIGGRAPH demo, Nomura and a handful of other artists created new characters, including an early design of Cloud.[3]

Voice Actors:

For the Ehrgeiz fighting game, Kenyu Horiuchi provided Cloud's voice in the arcade version while Nozomu Sasaki replaced him in the home console version.[54] Teruaki Sugawara, the voice director behind Kingdom Hearts, recommended Takahiro Sakurai, Cloud's Japanese voice actor, to Nomura for the role.[55] Nomura had originally asked Sakurai to play the protagonist of video game The Bouncer, Sion Barzahd, but found that his voice best suited Cloud after hearing him speak.[55] Sakurai received the script without any accompanying visuals, and first arrived for recording under the impression that he would be voicing a different character other than Cloud.[56] For Advent Children, Nomura wanted to contrast Cloud and Vincent's voices given their similar personalities.[57] As a sequel to the highly popular Final Fantasy VII, Sakurai felt greater pressure performing the role than he did when he voiced Cloud for Kingdom Hearts. Sakurai received comments from colleagues revealing their love of the game, some of them jokingly threatening that they would not forgive Sakurai if he did not meet their expectations.[56]