The two warriors stood a fair distance from each other. Link, the hero of Hyrule wielding his iconic Master Sword and Hylean shield. And Cloud Strife, the former soldier wielding his fully-assembled Fusion Sword. Cloud then flew forward at the younger hero, the two locking blades for a moment before Link backflip-jumped back and fired 2 energy waves from his sword, which Cloud easily stopped with one swing each, before doing a frontflip-jump and bringing his sword down on the ground, sending a much larger, more powerful wave of energy from his sword at Link, who was blasted back despite blocking it.
The young hero quickly recovered in midair, landing on his feet and skidding back a bit, readying himself as Cloud flew forward again. As he was about to reach the hero of Hyrule, Cloud quickly separated one of the blades from the Fusion sword, now wielding 2 large blades, which Link slightly struggled against, before rolling out of the way as Cloud quickly reconnected the swords and executed his Cross-slash attack and with a powerful strike, Link knocked Cloud forward a few feet, before the former-soldier recovered, faced his opponent and fired blasts of lightning from his sword, which Link mostly managed to stop except for the last one, which connected with him and spun him out of control. Link managed to land on his feet and continued running as Cloud did so as well, noticing he was now surrounded by the spheres of lightning, but with a clever jumping and spinning attack, he managed to avoid the blasts.
Cloud then jumped high into the air and fired down a much larger lightning sphere, but Link managed to catch it with his sword and throw it back at Cloud, knocking him back through the air. Link then fired a number of arrows at Cloud, who managed to block them with ease, before landing and rushing in again. Link then fired an arrow at Cloud and froze him with ice magic put into the arrow from one of his amulets, but thanks to his ribbon, Cloud was immune to being frozen and broke free a second later. Link blocked his next attack and threw his boomerang, Cloud separating a blade from his sword and dual-wielding again, cutting deep wounds into the hero and sending lines of blood everywhere, before Link uneasily rolled out of the way, dodging his next attack and blocking as Cloud used his Climhazard attack and managed to disarm Link of the Master Sword. Cloud then unleashed another powerful barrage of attack, which Link managed to block with his shield before the boomerang came back, hitting Cloud in the back of the head and stunning him for a moment, allowing Link to pull out his hookshot and fire towards the Master Sword. However, Cloud recovered just when Link stuck his arm out to fire the hookshot and with one swing, he sliced the arm off at the elbow. Link shouted in pain at this as Cloud swung the other sword upward and left a deep upward gash across Link's chest, stopping just before his neck. Cloud then swung his sword upwards again, Link managing to block the attack with as much strength as he could muster, but the strike knocked him into the air and ripped the Hylian shield from his weakening grip.
"This ends now!" Cloud said, his sword separating into its 6 blades, energy forming around them. Cloud dashed from sword to sword, slashing Link each time he passed him, an energy duplicate of himself at each blade, before the real Cloud flew higher into the air above the hero of Hyrule and flew downward, the energy duplicates rushing in first and each unleashing a devastating slash before Cloud himself came down at high speeds and cleaving the young hero in half. Cloud landing on the ground as 5 of the blades landed in a circle around him. He then reached his hand up and caught the main blade of the sword as Link's body fell in two pieces around him. "That was a good battle." Cloud said, walking away.
Analysis:
1: The main problem of the Death Battle was, while they included information from Advent Children, they forgot one very important thing: Cloud's Fusion Sword, which he replaced Zack's Buster Sword with, making it a tombstone for Zack. This sword is more advanced than the Buster Sword, as it can separate into as much as 6 blades that combine into one to give Cloud more power. He can also at any point in a battle separate some of the blades to dual-wield, giving him twice the striking speed and power and making him a much more difficult opponent for Link to deal with.
2: Also, while I know the fight doesn't determine the outcome of said battle, in the original fight, they clearly showed Cloud hitting Link a decent number of times with his sword and taking little to no damage. I don't care what armor you're wearing, if you get hit by a sword that big, you are in pieces at best. Death Battle also has a history of displaying damage differently from universe to universe: one character takes life-threatening hits from bladed weapons and bleeds, while others look like they just got hit with a bat or something. This fight is a perfect example: Cloud hit Link many times with no blood to be shown, but Link hits Cloud and blood comes right out. And again, I know the fight doesn't really matter, but a simple boomerang would not stun Cloud very long, if at all considering the handful of other attacks he's taken, certainly not long enough for Link's hookshot to retrieve the Master Sword and pull it back to him before Cloud recovered.
3: While this may not be canon, in Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded, Cloud is capable of both blocking and taking hits from Hercules and even hitting him hard enough to force both of them back. Hercules is strong enough to easily throw the mountain-sized Rock Titan out into the distance to the point he does that cartoon star disappear thing. Applying that to real life actually means he just threw him hard enough to reach escape velocity, meaning he threw him at AT LEAST 25,020 miles per hour, certainly putting him above the strength Link has with his golden gauntlets, meaning Cloud, while not necessarily as strong as Hercules, is still at least physically stronger than Link with said gauntlets.
4: Ultimately, Cloud's physicality is actually more than Link can handle and his Fusion Sword makes him far less predictable than what Wizard and Boomstick originally shown him as. Also, to my knowledge, Link has not fought very many dual-wielders and as such, would have quite a difficult time handling one as skilled and powerful as Cloud.