TheTrin said:
The past with tifa totally confused me. I still don`t understand it. She first says he couldn`t be the Cloud she knew, but then..he was? What?
It's actually really straightforward!
Presented linearly in time:
- Cloud and Tifa grow up in Niblheim; at first they aren't friends but after she almost dies they get close.
- He leaves to become a SOLIDER, but scrubs out and winds up as one of those anonymous uniform dudes.
- He, with actual SOLDIERs Sephiroth and Zach, comes back to Niblheim.
- Sephiroth finds out about his secret origins, goes crazy, slaughters the town.
- Tifa goes after him, gets sworded, Cloud flips the **** out and throws him into the reactor.
- Cloud and Zach are both captured and subjected to Mako treatments, which **** up their minds.
- They both escape, but Zach is gunned down outside Midgar.
- Cloud, in a daze, takes Zach's sword and wanders into Midgar; thanks to his injuries, his belief that he's lost his hometown and family, and his Mako-addled nature he transposes many of Zach's memories onto himself.
- Tifa finds Cloud, who she didn't ever think she'd see again, and at first is excited, but then she's confused because his description of the events at Niblheim fails utterly to line up with hers -- but she wants to know the truth, so she doesn't say so.
- Cloud knows something is wrong with his memories, so when Sephiroth tells him he's just a clone who adopted the identity of the real, now-dead Cloud based on Tifa's memories he initially believes him.
- Later, Tifa goes into Cloud's mind, they figure out together what really happened in Niblheim, and by Cloud sharing a memory that Tifa never told anyone about they both prove that he's been the real Cloud all along.
- Now Cloud's memories are fixed and he can kick ass.
It did take three playthroughs to piece this together well enough to explain it, but there you go.