A frenzy swept the nerd world when the official Final Fantasy VII Twitter account sent out a fairly simple yet powerful tweet: “Happy birthday, Cloud Strife!” The slickest visual featuring the spiky-haired icon of gaming stood beside the text, and the internet caught fire. I’m telling you, the hype here is at least as high as the Mako Reactor explosion.
The game’s followers got swamped with birthday meme requests and demands for ports and remakes. One gamer under the name @DeschainGames begged for a Switch 2 port sprinkled with enough injured eye emojis for anyone to understand the sentiment. Then came @tonyriosx888 to provide a Spanish-to-English translation: “Please we need a good port on Xbox Series X don’t lower the resolution like they did with FF16.” Oof. That Xbox port for FF16 still stings, huh?
Lots of love for this very special kind of birthday! @joeyjordisonx gave him a “pretty boy” with heart emojis (accurate), while @cloudlovesaeris declared him “one of the most goated mfs in gaming history.” Facts. Absolute facts. Considered “goated” indeed. Players that still haven’t stepped into FF7, such as @NeoReXX, admitted that they would buy the remake “someday,” mostly because it looks so good. Welcome to the family, pal. We’ve got chocobos.
That’s when it got good: amid all that birthday cake emoji spam and sword gifs, the very talk of the Xbox port began bubbling up like Phoenix Down. @evorexwolf actually went the whole nine yards asking why third-party games keep skipping Xbox. @DDubgaming answered: “All that’s on Xbox is 3rd party games,” and… okay, well, that’s a whole other story that we will probably not get into today.
The MVP might be @MarvlousL55921, who, when learning about Cloud’s birthday, decided “worth it”. Imagine finding out that your birthday twin is a dude that literally has a whole ass sword bigger than his body. That would be like winning the genetic lottery for gamers.
And we can’t push the curtain aside without addressing the collective whisper: “@JoshuaA60708550 the reply: ‘Eagerly awaiting Part 3 announcement,'” to which I say, “Same, Joshua. Same.” I mean, we’ve been waiting ever since the PS1; what is a few more years? Square Enix is really having a laugh on us with this remake trilogy.
Hundreds of replies came in within only hours, testament that Cloud Strife still remains the indisputable king of JRPG protagonists almost two decades after his first appearance. Did nostalgia bring you here? Is it remake hype? Or is it just the heat from wing-singing over his anime hair? One thing is for sure; his name will never suffer death by silence.
So, happy birthday, Cloud. Hopefully, Square will finally listen to the plea for the port from Xbox players, no? And why not a little Part 3 teaser before your next birthday? Well, a boy can dream. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to play the original one more time and shed tears all over Aerith. Some traditions never die.
