Final Fantasy: 10 Incredible Statistics You Won't Believe

Cloud Strife, for people perhaps moreso outside of the FF fandom, became the posterboy for edgelords. His giant hair, his big sword and that wonderfully rendered pout in the likes of Advent Children... despite there being way more to his character than brooding, you can also understand why.

But his Remake incarnation is a lot edgier... in a more literal sense.

One wonderful thing about the ironic non-final nature of the FF series is how it's grown with the industry. Just comparing 1997's Final Fantasy VII with 2020's Final Fantasy VII Remake is a wonderful demonstration of just how far gaming has come. But the thing is, you can of course quantify these leaps in graphical fidelity.

To show just how much more power goes into games these days, all one needs to do is look at Cloud Strife himself. Let’s compare the vertices, which are all the sharp corners of the model that create those points and edges. In the 1997 game, Cloud’s overworld model has 350 vertices.

In the 2020 game, he has 108,000 - over 300 times the amount of his squat older sibling.

What’s interesting is looking at the polygon budget of the model. The majority of these are spent on our protagonist’s face and hair, with far fewer on the actual body. This makes sense since the face is way more important to get right than the costume as that’s where players will be looking. 

And the hair being part of that budget? Well, it’s Cloud Strife - the hair is everything.