As someone who genuinely spent an atrocious amount of time in the year 2000 debating Cloud and Tifa shippers (yuck!) on Final Fantasy VII forums, you have no idea how happy I am to hear — ***seventeen years later!*** — that the Japanese version of this game favored my preferred pairing for Cloud.

My next two episodes are all about this, though the summary is: whoa it is definitely very much mutual / two-sided in Japanese.

With respect, Crisis Core also depicted Zack flirting with Cissnei and one of the ultimanias even referred to both women as his girlfriends (in Japanese: ガールフレンド) asking the reader “which girlfriend” Zack was going to meet up with when he was leaving with Cloud. So that complicates things even in Crisis Core.

Furthermor…

Yeah but in the following line, Cloud asks if they were together (“dating”), and she denies it, saying “I just thought it would be nice”. It was a one-sided crush.

You mean that dumpster fire on PSP where Nomura basically turned one of Sakaguchi’s greater works into a soapy mess a la Kingdom Hearts?

I much prefer my approach where Advent Children, Crisis Core and all the other insults to VII are nothing more than deformed nightmares born of a fever dream so severe it would require hospitalization.

That may be so! Though I’m lookin at the original Japanese version of the original game, over here . . .