What's the appeal of this character? Why does he have such a dedicated following of obnoxious fanboys...

Yes, or people that pretend Laguna is better than Squall

His game is pretty good.

>does nothing notable

I'll give you the point that his story is all flashbacks in FF7, but have you played the game? His actions indirectly save the world. He saves Cloud's life many times, and then he gives Cloud a persona to aspire towards (which Cloud then copies and makes his own.) If there was no Zack, the world would've been lost.

Granted, Cloud does a whole lot more, but he was Cloud's foundation.

Tpbp

but you also get lost in the sauce

It's sort of a no brainer that a prequel would star the guy Cloud based his persona on. though I think Nomura likes him a little too much considering he had like 10 seconds of screentime in FFVII.

>has like 3 lines of dialogue
>already more popular than the entire cast of FF6 combined

>What's the appeal of this character?
He's a cool guy, a genuine bro in every sense of the word.
>He does nothing notable
Without Zack there's no Cloud, so that's one thing. There's also the whole Genesis faggotry but it's not very good so if you wanted to ignore it I'd understand.

hojo also fucked both cloud and zack

sums up the broad scale of it, but when taken on his own merits he's kind of an obnoxious retard. Zack being such an honest-to-God idealist is endearing when coupled with his other personality traits, and mercifully in a way that just barely avoids Sora levels of autism.

He's "hard work and guts" personified and very self-determined, but obviously childish and naive (he enlists at least at the age of 16, and it's his naivete that lets him reach as high and touch as many soldiers as he does). If you had to pick between him and Cloud at most points of Cloud's development, Zack wins.

Zack's arc thankfully has more to it than just becoming disillusioned with Shin-Ra as well, and he sacrifices being the moral leader of SOLDIER and literally taking on missions with Shin-Ra's biggest war heroes after himself serving in Wutai. In addition to this, he places himself on an opposing side from the Turks, and his life reaches its obvious conclusion of dying to protect others (in keeping with his entire "hero" ethos).

He's a retard, but he's the kind of retard that makes you tear up when you hear he hurt himself trying to save a baby bird.

Zack is the noob saibot of FF7, an easter egg copy of the real playable character

I don't know much about FF7 beyond some surface level over the years but hearing this makes him sound like a Jonathan Joestar kind of hero, and I really like those kinds of characters. So I see the appeal.

Honestly it's his mocap and actual dialog that annoy me, but I still enjoy him as a character. He's definitely not as collected (dissociated from his entire fucking being) as Cloud, but when you chill out and start treating Crisis Core as an E10+ shounen game instead of 90s cyberpunk, it becomes a fun romp.

Agreed on the Jonathan archetype, will extend to include All Might from MHA. Characters that risk it all protecting others in adherence to a strong moral code to protect/inspire others and the tragedy that always follows is enjoyable to me. I love seeing everything ripped away and then the challenge overcome by force of will.

Part of why I don't like Crisis Core is because of how much they built Zack up to be the embodiment of shonen-style idealistic heroism when in the original title, he's built up to be more of an alpha dude with balls of steel and a heart of gold that happens to have a bit of a womanizing streak (much to Aeris's chagrin) that had a momentary lapse in judgement that got him killed while he tried to pick up his buddy. A tragic fate feels a lot more heavy when the character in question has genuine human qualities that aren't necessarily clean-cut protagonist material. That's why Cloud was such a fascinating character, and I'm kind of bummed that they made Zack considerably less so for maximum FEELS when the resident golden boy died in a far more hollywood/anime fashion.

Watching some random mook magdump a dude who was just trying to take care of the only friend he has left in the world was the perfect amount of disquieting, and did a far better job of contextualizing how much it further broke Cloud than JPop possibly could.

Attached: ZackCloud.jpg (600x333, 49K)

True, and honestly I'm happy enough with what we got at the end of the day. I just hope they preserve Cloud's cocksuredness in the remake and how cold/wise-cracking/tough he was.

He'd gladly go toe-to-toe with Barrett at any moment and REALLY had to be dragged into the main plot by Aeris. I don't know that he would have stuck with AVALANCHE, even for Tifa, and even if he had then "unga bunga, me blow up reactor" can only be repeated so many times. He no doubt would've been content wasting away as a nameless mercenary, and he had the grit to match.

When this softens towards the end of the game and he takes on the leadership role, it's hype as fuck. I HATE how they butchered his entire fucking character development with Advent Children by making him into fucking Squall.

>Hurr, muh geostigma
>Can't let people see me sick, muh noble quiet suffering
>Best girl has to slap his shit in front of Reno and Rude to the point where they ask midway if they should even be there as he gets ripped a new asshole for being an emo little bitch
>Forgetting this bitch literally rebuilt your shattered ego after going comatose from swimming in Uranium-238.

Ignoring all the sequels/prequels, Zack is part of an interesting change of tone near the end, where the trumped-up heroism of Cloud's memories melts away and we're left with a guy who got his ass handed to him by Sephiroth, another guy who's completely lost his identity, and a hero getting gunned down on the side of the road. It was pretty shocking back when the game was new, and I think Zack stands out because the whole Mideel flashback sequence stands out.