anyway since FF7R is gonna be playable for me in about uhhhh 8-ish hours, I actually wanted to talk about Cloud's fighting style in the remake from both a narrative and combat-specific perspective, focusing on his two base stances: Operator and Punisher, or, Chudan and Kasumi

Chudan no Kamae, or simply 'mid-level' stance, is the most basic posture in kenjutsu. It's a very protective stance; it keeps the opponent at a maximum distance possible, a full sword-length away, with the tip aimed directly at their throat.

Chudan is often the very first stance you will learn, not just in Japanese swordsmanship, but also German kriegsmesser and saber fencing. Chudan is extremely versatile, able to easily execute cuts easily along any of the six 'master' lines of attack.

For Cloud in FF7, this is also true of Operator stance; Cloud is at his most mobile and most flexible in this stance, and stylistically, the animation for many of his moves in this form directly emulate Zack's animations from Crisis Core; he's directly emulating his mentor.

Kasumi no Kamae, on the other hand, is a different beast. Kasumi is a heavily counterattacking oriented form; directly translated as the 'mist' stance, or in European fencing as Ochs, the ox-horn guard, it's a 'hanging' stance, wherein the blade tilts slightly downward, edge-up.

Kasumi is used for a variety of purposes, including powerful thrusts, quick slashes at eye level, but most prominently, for its heavy overhand strikes and 'receiving' stroke, wherein the wielder parries an attack and used stored kinetic energy to chamber a counterstroke.

Relative to Cloud, Kasumi, or Punisher form, turns his block into a powerful auto-counter maneuver on melee opponents, and additionally utilizes extremely heavy overhand blows. More notably to his character, Kasumi is the preferred stance of Sephiroth, his former idol & nemesis.

Cloud's not only using tactically-appropriate stances, this also informs who he is as a person; his experience with swordsmanship is based entirely upon the two most prominent swordsmen he knew of, and his fighting style is a self-forged, amateur amalgam of their moves.

in closing, swords are cool, FF7 is good, cloud is a genderqueer icon and don't @ me