Moreover, he had no problem killing as many Shinra soldiers as he needed to in order to get himself and Cloud out of Nibelheim.ĭid that line mean anything? 'The price of freedom is death?' 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty?' 'Sometimes you gotta kill other people if you want to stay alive?' For what it's worth, I don't think Zack was deliberately going out there to sacrifice himself any more than Aerith went to the Ancient City to sacrifice herself. In other words, he wasn't exactly what you'd call self-aware. He could whoop like a kid at a funfair while mowing down whole squadrons of Wutai warriors, but then find he couldn't bring himself to kill the lone helpless survivor, for reasons he himself didn't really understand. He never seemed particularly troubled in his conscience about killing people, except towards the end, in pre-inferno Nibelheim, when he showed an inkling that he was killing on the orders of a entity whose motives and objectives he didn't even begin to understand. Much as I love Zack, he always struck me as a bit of a simpleton - more brawn than brains. So the price he was talking about might as well be that paid in other people's blood, rather than his own. I mean, I always thought dying doesn't make much sense as the 'price of freedom ' he didn't go into that fight *intending* to die, he just knew he might. But I tend to think that, not having amnesia in the way and not being as naturally good at anger as Cloud, killing Shinra troops has to bother him. He seems dumb and shallow a lot, but he isn't always. Zack is in a weird place where his experience of pain and guilt is central to his own arc, but from outside those points in his storyline he's expected to be reliably upbeat, and it's really hard to tell how seriously he's going to have thought through any specific thing, or how much a given death is going to shake him.

Because they're trying to take his and Cloud's freedom away.

He used to be one of them, and Cloud did, and they were both good kids, and watching his people die fighting terrorists and monsters was the worst thing back then-but he still kills them. And Zack's final battle in Crisis Core is just-he knows his opponents aren't evil.

Fighting the Wutai War doesn't make a villain of Angeal even though it was an evil war. Fighting for Shinra doesn't make all the people Cloud kills over the course of the game evil.

The price is steep download free