Cloud has personality.Ĭloud Strife is NOT a generic avatar. Essentially, Black Mage has not been the face of the franchise, especially moving forward. His entry in the Super Smash: Flash has solidified this among many but he actually has a lot of issues which may prevent his representation. Sure, he was in Mario Sports Mix, but that doesn’t mean he’s super iconic. Black Mage has been elevated within the Smash community due to the false pretense of characters needed to having a strong relation to Nintendo. Cloud was also the top 20 in my own Perception of Smash DLC in Japan, Redux. In Guinness Book of World Records, 2010 edition … Cloud Strife was voted as the #5 most iconic character. Searching “Final Fantasy” on Google’s image search brings up a ton of pictures of Cloud and Lightning. When people think of Square-Enix, they think of Final Fantasy and Cloud. In fact they used the title card for Final Fantasy VII. Look at the reveal trailer…nowhere did they ever reference the older Final Fantasy games. The whole logic that “Final Fantasy has its roots in Nintendo, so it’s okay that Cloud got in, the rule still stands!” is based on twisted logic. I feel like I’m going to be saying this for a long time as it’s so ingrained in the community. Heihachi being considered for Smash arguably should have killed it, but people were/are still in denial. With Cloud’s representation mostly based on FFVII, I think it’s safe to say this fan rule is finally dead. Nowhere in other interviews, or in other responses did he ever say that it was a requirement. During Brawl’s development, Sakurai wrote a reader response in which he stated that it might be something like a courtesy to appear on a Nintendo hardware. This has been a common misconception in the speculation community. 1.Third party characters DO NOT need to be associated with Nintendo. This was the reason Cloud got into Smash.

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