Turks (Final Fantasy VII)
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In the Square Co., Ltd. RPG Final Fantasy VII, the Turks (タークス Tākusu?) is the unofficial nickname of the Investigation Division of the General Affairs Department of the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company (神羅電気動力株式会社総務部調査課 Shinra Denki Dōryoku Kabushiki-gaisha Sōmubu Chōsaka?), mistranslated as the Department of Administrative Research in the English localization. They perform covert operations on behalf of the company, including espionage, kidnappings and assassinations. They also scout for potential candidates for Shin-Ra's elite military unit, SOLDIER, and serve as bodyguards for the Shin-Ra executives. Within the game, they serve as recurring antagonists throughout, although they are not above forming temporary alliances with AVALANCHE, the game's group of central protagonists. Final Fantasy VII's prequel, Before Crisis -Final Fantasy VII-, focuses exclusively on the Turks in the years leading up to the events of Final Fantasy VII.
They also appear in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, set two years after the original. Here, they serve as allies of AVALANCHE, as well as bodyguards to Rufus Shinra and aids in his self-appointed mission to restore the world's vitality.
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[edit] Main members
The Turks are comprised of the following individuals:
[edit] Tseng
Tseng (ツォン Tson?) is the stern but polite and calm leader of the Turks. He has long, black hair and what appears to be a tilak in the middle of his forehead. Though he is young, he has been an active member of the Turks for more than 10 years [1], and has known Aerith Gainsborough — for whom he seems to have romantic feelings[2][3] — since she was a child. Despite his long-standing admiration for Aerith, there are hints that his affections later shift to Elena.
Tseng is the only Turk not fought at any point during Final Fantasy VII. He is wounded by Sephiroth during an investigation of the Temple of the Ancients (though, due to his absence from the later stages of the game & a translation error, many thought him dead). However, he re-appears in Advent Children, wherein he and Elena retrieve Jenova's remains from the Northern Crater before being attacked, and subsequently captured, by Kadaj's gang. After enduring torture at the villains' hands, he is rescued — along with Elena — by Vincent Valentine, and the two of them later show up in Edge to rescue Rufus. Tseng is voiced by Junichi Suwabe in the Japanese version of the film and Ryun Yu in the English version.
[edit] Elena
Elena (イリーナ Irīna?) is a junior member of the Turks, and the only female member seen in the original Final Fantasy VII. She is a young woman with short, blonde hair and brown eyes. In Before Crisis, she was a high school student whose father was a teacher in the Shin-Ra Military Academy and whose older sister was a member of the Turks. Though she resented — and wanted no contact with — her sister and the other Turks for outperforming her in their status, an encounter with them convinced her to join the group. Elena then obtained her position as the newest recruit after Reno sustained injuries battling AVALANCHE in Midgar during Final Fantasy VII.
Elena is naive, impetuous and somewhat overeager, with a loose tongue that sometimes causes her to inadvertently reveal secret information. She takes her job much more seriously than Reno and Rude do, and also becomes quite frustrated with their casual attitudes.[4] She also has a crush on Tseng and temporarily holds Cloud's party accountable for the injuries he suffered while investigating the Temple of the Ancients. Elena appears briefly in Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, wherein she is voiced by Megumi Toyoguchi in the Japanese version and Bettina Bush in the English version. Her role is much less prominent than that of her partners, Reno and Rude, spending most of the movie off-camera recovering along with Tseng after being tortured by Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz.
[edit] Reno
Reno (レノ?) is a prominent member of the Turks with a lanky physique, unkempt red hair terminating in a long ponytail and two symmetrical red marks on his cheek bones (apparently tattoos, though popularly believed to be scars). He is always seen wearing goggles on his forehead, an unzipped suit jacket and an untucked dress shirt. He is cocky, cynical, and somewhat lazy, but is highly skilled and takes great pride in his work. In Advent Children, however, he is portrayed as being somewhat less cynical, clumsy and more playful. His fighting skills are obviously far above the level of a normal human, but he is defeated with relative ease by Loz and Yazoo (neither of whom are human, to be fair), in fact he only appears to actually hit them once. In battle, he wields a retractable metallic rod which can deal electric shocks. Reno also has a penchant for gossiping and is a competent helicopter pilot.
Reno is first encountered in Final Fantasy VII when he enters a derelict church in the slums of Midgar's Sector 5 in an attempt to capture Aerith (where he instructs his subordinates to be careful not to step on the flowers after stepping on them himself). Not long after, he activates the bombs that blow up the Sector 7 support pillar before having a brief battle with Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart and Barret Wallace. This fight leaves him temporarily incapacitated, during which time Elena is promoted to Turks status. He later reappears outside of Gongaga with his long-time partner, Rude, having been assigned to intercept AVALANCHE. Despite the rivalry between the two groups, he is not beyond teaming up with Cloud and his companions in Wutai, where both parties had to work together after each had a member kidnapped by Don Corneo - Also in this time, upon encountering Cloud in a bar, and then after dealing with Corneo & receiving new orders to search for Cloud, Reno decides not to fight Cloud as they (Reno, Rude, & Elena) are off-duty.
Reno has a prominent role in Advent Children. Consistent with his attitude at the end of the original Final Fantasy VII, Reno possesses no true hostility towards his former enemies[1]. As of Advent Children, the Turks are on the same side as AVALANCHE and join the fight against the film's villains. Reno and Rude primarily serve as the film's comic relief. His comical role in Advent Children includes being locked out while Cloud and Rufus have an important talk, bringing out his weapon and accidentally whacking Rude in the head, being knocked back several hundred feet by Yazoo and landing on Rude, climbing a building to save Rufus and using Rude's head as support, stepping on and crushing Rude's trademark sunglasses, having a child stick two of his fingers up his nose while trying to rescue him from Bahamut along with Rude, insulting Jenova and then apologising to Loz and Yazoo before he realises what he is saying, and observing that since the bomb in the highway scene was "Shin-Ra technology at its finest", Rude must have made it.
An interesting aspect of Reno's personality is his unique speech pattern. In the original Japanese version of Final Fantasy VII Reno frequently ended his sentences with the phrase "zo, to" or the slightly more formal "yo, to". The closest English equivalent to this pattern is adding "yo" to the end of a sentence. In the Japanese version of Advent Children, fans were able to realize Tifa was talking to Reno in the beginning, because she mimicked his speech pattern when speaking with him ("Oboeteru, zo to").
He is voiced by Keiji Fujiwara in the Japanese version, and Quinton Flynn in the English version.
[edit] Rude
Rude (ルード Rūdo?) is a tall, naturally bald[5] man with a slight goatee. He always wears sunglasses and carries spare pairs with him. Rude is rarely seen without his long-time partner, Reno, and is rather taciturn, tending to relegate the talking to Reno. He also becomes uncomfortable when brought into a conversation, as seen during the meeting with Cloud and later when meeting Yazoo and Loz in the Advent Children movie. Rude is a superb physical combatant and prefers to use his fists in battle. In one of his rare lines of dialogue in Final Fantasy VII, he reveals to Reno that he has a crush on Tifa Lockhart, a skilled martial artist like himself, though nothing ever develops between the two. He has quite a prominent role in Advent Children always seen with his partner Reno. They are mainly used for comical effect, with Reno normally injuring Rude or when fighting Loz a sign drops on him after Reno is kicked into it. During his confrontation with Loz he does seem to put up a better fight than Reno against Yazoo, landing quite a few punches. In the end he and Reno use a massive explosion to take out Loz and Yazoo who somehow survive it and turn up again just after Cloud defeats Kadaj. Years ago, when there was war between AVALANCHE and Shinra, Rude fell in love with a woman named Chelsea. Unfortunately, she was an AVALANCHE spy, who as well fell in love with Rude, but left him because they were on different sides. Rude didn't take it so well, especially since he couldn't even say goodbye to her, since then, he's been rather quiet and refuses to get close to anyone emotionally. He is voiced by Taiten Kusunoki in the Japanese version of Advent Children and Crispin Freeman in the English version.
[edit] Former Turks
- Verdot (ヴェルド Verudo?)[6] (roughly, Vehr-doh) is the previous leader of the Turks. He is very particular on matters relating to succeeding in missions and very unforgiving when it comes to failure. Tseng considers him a role model and eventually succeeds him. Though many of his subordinates are intimidated by his severity, they all deeply respect him. When Heidegger usurps his position at one point during the story, Verdot blackmails President Shinra into returning it. Formerly a resident of the town of Kalm, he had a daughter and wife that he believed perished when the town was razed due to his own misinterpreted commands. In actuality, his daughter survived, and is eventually revealed to be the leader of AVALANCHE, Elfé. He cares very deeply for the Turks, and does not wish for them to suffer any events similar to what he has; he also cares very much for his daughter, defecting from Shin-ra when he discovers she is alive. Verdot appeared only in Before Crisis, but is mentioned in Last Order -Final Fantasy VII-.
- Vincent Valentine (ヴィンセント・ヴァレンタイン Vinsento Varentain?) served as a gunman in the Turks until approximately 30 years prior to the events of Final Fantasy VII. While on a mission in Nibelheim during the later stages of the Jenova Project, Vincent was shot by Professor Hojo, who then used his body for experimental purposes, turning him into the man seen in Final Fantasy VII and its subsequent sequels. The experiments altered his body in many ways, including fixing his physical age. Though he's chronologically 60 years old (In Dirge of Cerberus), he still bears the appearance he held at 27.
- The main characters of Before Crisis are all Turks. The player chooses from eight unnamed characters (four young men and four young women), each with his or her own backstory, personality, strengths and weaknesses. Six of these Turks also appear in Last Order, where they act as support for Tseng, Reno, and Rude, but none are given proper names and few have dialogue. After barely surviving the pre-Final Fantasy VII events of Before Crisis, they make an appearance along with Verdot in Midgar during the coming of the Meteor disaster and assist the other Turks in evacuating civilians. Their whereabouts during the majority of Final Fantasy VII's events are currently unknown.
[edit] Trivia
- A misconception has arisen concerning Tseng — due to an early fan translation of Advent Children — that his name is pronounced "Shion" (shee-ohn) in Japanese. Rather than translating by ear, the Japanese subtitles included on the DVD were used, and "Tson" (ツォン) — the official katakana form of "Tseng" — was mis-read as the similar-looking "Shion" (シオン). As a result, many viewers were confused upon reading "Shion" while seeing Tseng in the film, and attempts to explain the error resulted in the aforementioned misconception. Tseng's name is written "Tson" in katakana due to the fact that his name is Chinese in origin. In Pinyin (a standard system that uses the Roman alphabet to phonetically represent the Chinese language), "e" represents a sound resembling the short "o" of the English language, also approximated in Japanese with an unlengthened "o" vowel. In Chinese Pinyin, his name is written as "Zeng" (曾), which is how it appears in Last Order. Also, in some translations, Elena refers to Tseng as 'senpai' which is a formal way to address elders in Japanese. There is also some minor confusion in some translations where Reno refers to Rufus as 'senpai', given that he is the acting president of Shin-Ra.
- Many fans mistakenly believed Tseng to have died after his encounter with Sephiroth in the Temple of the Ancients due to a translation error[citation needed] in the original English version of Final Fantasy VII. As a result, many were confused by his seemingly sudden appearance in Advent Children, although this can be attributed to the idea for the movie not having been conceived yet. This translation error was corrected in the PC version of Final Fantasy VII.
- Reno possesses a distinct speech pattern in Japanese, speaking in a drawling, slangful manner and — most notably — ending most of his sentences with "zo, to" (ぞ、と), or simply "to" (と). Speech patterns such as Reno's are impossible to translate directly into English and can only be approximated by attempting to capture the same colloquial value as the original (performed through "yo" in several translations of Advent Children), which the English translations of the original game and Advent Children did not attempt to do. The trademark ending of "zo, to" has also been seen as a way to get across the message of, "I was really laid back when I said that." As "yo"s and slang are often used by people who crave to appear cool or 'laid back', the translation seen above is as accurate as it gets.
- Near the end of Disc Two of Final Fantasy VII, the player has the option to fight Elena, Reno, and Rude, or refuse the battle. In either case the Turks survive, so there is no clear canonical outcome to this situation. If the player chooses to fight the Turks, several powerful armours can be stolen from them, including Elena's unique Minerva Band.
- It is believed by some fans that the concept as well as some of the members of Organization XIII in Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II are roughly based on a few members of the Turks, such as Organization XIII's Axel resembling Reno in many ways (due to the red-spiked hair, however this is prominent in Tetsuya Nomura's design), and Elena resembling Larxene. Axel and Reno are also voiced by the same actor in both Japanese and English version of Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Keiji Fujiwara and Quinton Flynn, respectively. They also seem to be the basis for the group in Final Fantasy Agito XIII.
- Although portrayed as a bit cold and ruthless in the English translation of Final Fantasy VII, Reno was in actuality made to be a comical character.
[edit] References
- ^ (2005) Studio BentStuff Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square-Enix, 58. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.
- ^ (2005) Studio BentStuff Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square-Enix, 58. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.
- ^ Reno: "But, poor Elena. She.... you......" / Rude: "No, she likes Tseng." / Reno: "I never knew that! But Tseng likes that Ancient..."(Final Fantasy VII)
- ^ (2005) Studio BentStuff Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square-Enix, 58. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.
- ^ (2005) Studio BentStuff Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω (in Japanese). Square-Enix, 58. ISBN 4-7575-1520-0.
- ^ Massimilla, Bethany (2006). E3 06: Before Crisis -Final Fantasy VII- Hands-On Impressions. Gamespot. Retrieved on 24 May 2006.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω Translations FAQ - Translations from the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Ω
| Final Fantasy VII and Compilation of Final Fantasy VII |
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Advent Children - Before Crisis - Crisis Core - Dirge of Cerberus - Last Order - Lost Episode |
