During the latest and final Super Smash Bros presentation, series director Masahiro Sakurai went into greater detail to explain the ins and outs regarding November’s bombshell announcement of Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud joining the fray. First and foremost he went into a breakdown of Cloud’s moveset:
Standard Attack – Blade Beam
Side Special – Cross-Slash
Up Special – Climhazard
Down Special – Limit Charge/Finishing Touch
Final Smash – Omnislash
The Down Special is of particular note. Normally it will begin charging Cloud’s Limit Break gauge, which will also charge gradually as he gets hit, similar to Little Mac’s KO-Punch gauge. Once his Limit Break is ready, however, he will begin to glow and is allowed one special attack that will be powered up substantially. While in Limit Break mode, his Down Special changes to Finishing Touch, which only deals 1% damage but has massive launch capability.
Moving on to the Midgar stage, summon materia will drop randomly and can be picked up and used by any fighter, working just like pokéballs.
As shown off in Cloud’s reveal video, the summons you can expect to see here are Ifrit, Ramuh, Odin, Leviathan, and Bahamut ZERO. Ifrit creates an inferno that moves the terrain and damages foes that touch the flames. Ramuh manipulates floating terrain by attacking with lightning. Fighters can pass through electrified platforms, but they will sustain damage. Odin cuts the stage in half, and characters caught in the slice are instantly KO’d. The stage eventually repairs itself, and anyone caught in between the two halves when it re-forms will also be taken down. Leviathan floods the stage with water, flowing from right to left. Fighters with high damage percentages will flow further and faster. Finally, Bahamut ZERO fires a devastating attack from orbit, causing massive area-of-effect damage.
The character art illustration for Cloud was actually created by his original character designer, Tetsuya Nomura himself.
Cloud and Midgar will be available for download later today, but don’t worry if the download takes a while to go through; there will certainly be high traffic for a character of this caliber.
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