Cloud Strife’s muscle mass on PS5: a very important investigation

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Square Enix just announced Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, a PS5-enhanced version of FF7 Remake that includes graphical improvements like “improved textures, lighting, and background environments.” But some users on ResetEra noticed one other potentially huge graphical upgrade: Cloud’s famously skinny arms may have gotten a bit beefier.

Did Cloud get more swole for next-gen, like the PS5 itself?

Clearly, this warranted a full investigation.

Check out this image, from user Tyaren:

And this GIF, from user Rickenslacker:

Convincing, right? These two images make a strong argument. But my Verge colleagues and I weren’t totally sure. Like our brothers in arms at Reddit suggested, it could be a trick of the improved lighting or slightly different angles in the images.

We needed sturdier evidence, and because we’re professional journalists here at The Verge, we knew we had to dig in deep to try to solve this question — like we did when comparing the tall lady in Resident Evil Village to other tall things. So we’ve spent the better part of an hour arguing about the issue in Slack, zooming in super closely on photos of Cloud’s arms, and poring over trailers frame-by-frame to find a noticeable difference in a video game character’s nonexistent muscle mass.

Unfortunately, a few side-by-side images from Square Enix itself made it harder to settle the argument. See for yourself in these screenshots captured from this official Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade video.

We needed proof, darn it. Thankfully, my colleague Mitchell Clark had the powerful idea to colorize