*head in my hands* Man. Cloud Strife and his insane cocktail of mental illnesses just continues to be handled so much better than you would expect out of a AAA video game.
Remake and Rebirth are really writing down and circling and underlining the sentence "CLOUD STRIFE IS UNWELL. CLOUD STRIFE EXPERIENCES HALLUCINATIONS AND BREAKS IN REALITY THAT NEGATIVELY IMPACT HIS ABILITY TO INTERACT WITH THE WORLD." That by itself is so huge.
We're getting better about depicting psychosis and related disorders in video games outside of ableist set-dressing in horror games, and there's some great work happening in that sphere of representation. But most of the time, if a game's protagonist experiences hallucinations, it is the capital P Point of the story. This is going to be a narrative about living with this condition, and a main focus of the story. Again, super super awesome. FFVII is not a story about having psychosis. It's a game about throwing hands with a corporate middle manager with unresolved mommy issues and an angel complex. And also the main character has hallucinations.
The player itself is not able to cleanly see the lines between real and not-real, either. You're not viewing Cloud's reality breaks as an impassive observer, sometimes they are treated by the game as genuine threats that can hurt you. And if you've played the game and have a level of meta knowledge, you still can't easily disregard the randomly appearing Sephiroths, because some of them are actually real. The player and Cloud are operating in pretty much the same level of buy-in to the hallucinations, in that you both know this is a thing that happens and will usually assume the hallucination is not physically present unless another character also comments on it. But you can never be sure.
And the way the other party members act about it. The remakes are hammering home "No, it's not that the other characters are polite, or oblivious. Cloud is not subtle. Everyone gradually pieces together that this is a thing that happens to him, and they are deeply concerned, but that can't really do anything to help." I so expected, the first time Cloud has a big obvious break in reality, for the rest of the team to question if he was alright, or if he was even fit to be on this journey. Cloud goes tearing off away from the group, chasing a specter none of the rest of them saw, and it's just a quiet conversation of 'hey, no one else saw what he saw, right?' And then they go and get their guy because he probably shouldn't be alone right now. They never attack him for it, or tell him he's going insane.
Everyone takes to it with so much. Grace. Hello, this is our party leader, he's an excellent swordsman and a good friend. Oh yeah, sometimes he sees things that aren't that there or goes into a weird coma state where he chants about reunion and doesn't seem to notice the world around him, so much so that one time he went into shutdown and tried to throw himself off a cliff. That's just. A thing they accept about him.
And especially with the fact that Remake chooses to drop the truth bomb extremely early that, even with his remarkable grip on his mental faculties, Cloud is dying. Couple years, maybe more, maybe less, but. Tifa and Barret (and possibly Aerith?) know that he is not expected to live long. And they still treat him with humanity and they don't try to stop him from going on a jrpg adventure and they don't tiptoe around him like he's fragile. They don't stop loving him, even as he starts to deteriorate.
It's just. Cloud Strife, man.
