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You know when you compare the Red Rose Rebellion with other rebel groups like the Returners, AVALANCHE (yes I'm counting them :p ), the Timber Owls, The Dalamscan Rebels, and NORA; it just seems to me that this group got more trout done than the other groups. At least this group isn't guilty of accidentally handing the bad guys ultimate power unless you're one of those people who feel the Emperor planned on getting killed so he could conquer hell. Thoughts?
AVALANCHE technically defeated every Shinra higher-up except Rufus himself and defeated their strongest fighters. For all intents and purposes, they took down Shinra.
Cloud handing the Black Materia to Sephiroth is irrelevant to the AVALANCHE's rebellious success since they are an anti-Shinra movement and Shinra is the actual Evil Empire of VII
Actually, it was Sephiroth who offed President Shinra, and Diamond Weapon (I might have that wrong) who toasted Rufus at Shinra HQ, so it's more like Sephiroth took down Shinra as a side effect, with an assist from Avalanche.
I don't know that AVALANCHE actually created any cracks in ShinRa's power structure. They did a ton of stuff, but right up until Diamond toasted the tower they seemed to be firmly entrenched in their role of running the world.
The Returners on the other hand did all right. They actually faced the Empire in a major battle (Narshe) rather than just guerrilla operations, and caused so much damage to Vector that the Empire had to use diplomacy and subterfuge to get what they wanted instead of just going about their business.
AVALANCHE consists of less tan ten people. They cannot fight a "major battle" with the strongest force in the world. If Shinra were to bring their full arms to bare, nobody could really stop them except Sephiroth or maybe Vincent with his crazy DOC powers
Similarly, Shinra would curbstomp the hell out of VI's Empire.
Also who cares if they didn't kill either of the President Shinra's? Heidegger and Scarlet would have just taken over Shinra Inc and continued wrecking crap. Cloud and co. killed them and stopped that. They also beat the crap out of Palmer and killed Hojo to save Midgar. That's 4 out of 6 high-ranking Shinra folks.
Plus, I never beat VI, but I'm pretty sure Kefka is the one who killed the Emperor so the Returners didn't accomplish anything more than AVALANCHE.
Still though, that's more of a clean up job they did on Shinra. Sephiroth and the Weapons pretty much did most of that leg work themselves regardless of Avalanche's involvement. Not saying this is a strike against FF VII or anything, really the whole point of Avalanche was a plot device to get things rolling rather then be the main focus of the story anyway. :p
And yeah, Returners may have accomplished more of their goal by comparison to Avalanche, but oddly they kind of ended in failure once Kefka made the world go boom.
So yeah, FF II is, at the very least, the only indisputably successful FF Rebel group. :p