LogFAQs > #914185658

^ These are the main reasons, but I would also add...

If you played FF7 back in the day, everyone at school who was a gamer would be talking about it. Ocarina of Time was usually a footnote of "oh, yeah, that game was pretty good too" before returning to discussing FF.

This in no way meant Ocarina of Time was any lesser than FF7, just that there was nothing to talk about - no epic moments, memorable songs or jaw-dropping cutscenes. It was just a really well-polished, middle-of-the-road video game.

FF7, for a lot of people, was a new level of storytelling not seen before in video games. You could argue that other games did it first, but FF7 was the one that hooked everyone into a deep and intricate story line that gamers weren't used to seeing in games. Unfortunately, there's a drastic difference between FF7 Cloud and compilation Cloud, which most people are more familiar with the latter.

One of my favourite scenes in building Cloud's character was his return to Nibelheim, where Tifa comes to the front gate and the first thing Cloud does is run and get his helmet to hide his face. After all, he promised Tifa when he left, that he would be become a big, badass SOLDIER, but only succeeded in becoming a ShinRa grunt. He was embarrassed, as anyone would be.

His whole story, you could argue, was about how strong and cool Cloud was, except that in reality, he was just a starry-eyed kid whose life since he left his hometown was a constant lesson in disappointment and failure. And who wouldn't identify with that? For all it's complexities, FF7 was a really simple story at heart.

When they recreated this scene in Crisis Core, shot for shot, the only thing that was missing was Cloud getting his helmet. SquareEnix does not know what made Cloud likeable, or what made FF7 good. Everything they've done with his character since has shown that.

I could write a heck of a lot more than this, but this is already getting long enough as is. And that's kind of that point. You could write a character bible on Cloud. Link is just a faceless avatar for the player. Some people even renamed Link every chance they could get.