In the past year and a bit, there have been three notable video game releases--Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote about Resident Evil 2 Remake back in January 2019 when I finished it for the first time. I have since replayed it a good three or four times, still enjoying it quite thoroughly. In fact, in anticipation for RE3 coming out at the beginning of April, I replayed RE2 and had a great time blasting my way through the infected of Racoon City yet again.
But what I was really waiting for was Final Fantasy VII Remake. I have an enormous soft-spot in my heart for Cloud and his colorful crew--enough that I should maybe expand on some of what I talked about back in January of 2018--and I have been waiting and hoping for this game for over a decade. Really, ever since Advent Children came out, I wanted to see LEGO-style Cloud remade with newer graphics and video game mechanics. When Square Enix announced that FFVII Remake would be a reality and that we need only wait a bit longer, I was skeptical. After a certain amount of time, anticipation far outstrips what can be delivered. (This is the problem with Half Life 3, though there are stirrings about that actually coming to pass…) It's hard not to be excited about something that you're, you know, excited about. But the more I focus on wanting a thing, the less impressive it tends to be when I finally get it. So, I specifically avoided watching trailers (except for a couple of times, when the temptation was too great), and I did my best to think on other things. However, as it got closer, the demo dropped, and I was immediately excited--I played through the demo twice the day I downloaded it. Suffice to say, I have been a rather-pampered gamer in the past little while. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about (I will try to write a review of both RE3 and FFVII in the near future, while the experience playing the games is still fresh): The strange way iterations in the video game medium differ from other media. Make vs. Remake Films are notorious for this: We have classic films that Hollywood knows contain a lot of quality, and they get remade with modern sensibilities, acting styles, costumes, and special effects. Almost always, they are an inferior product. I'm not a huge film nerd, but I can, off the top of my head, list a handful of movie "reboots" or remakes that failed to make a lasting impression. The Mummy, Godzilla, Ben Hur, Clash of the Titans, Total Recall, and Robocop all came and went with hardly a note. In fact, the aborted "Dark Universe" was supposed to be a cinematic contender of the classic Universal monster movies against Marvel's undisputed creations, but fell apart at inception because of many reasons that aren't really relevant here. The point is, with just over a century of film history, we've repeated film ideas constantly. It isn't like film invented this phenomenon, though. Lost to us now, there is a version of Hamlet from the late 1580s (maybe early 1590s?) that we only know about because people wrote about how bad it was. Maybe it was an early draft of the play that Shakespeare himself wrote (which is what Harold Bloom argues), or maybe it was just a trashy version of a familiar story. What Shakespeare went on to write--the Hamlet that has changed the world--is, on a story level, a reboot of the Ur-Hamlet. (And, yes, I would love to read that play.) But even Ur-Hamlet is based upon a Danish story about a prince named Amleth (whose name cracks me up…just relocating the last letter to the front and boom! new name). In fact, almost every story that Shakespeare told was actually a retelling--and he did it better than anyone else. Drama, being the forebearer to film, that makes sense. But even in poetry--arguably our oldest form of permanent communication--we see retellings and reimaginings. While The Aeneid is more of a spin-off from The Iliad, we see Homeric and Virgilian echoes throughout almost all of history. New forms take the epics and uses their tropes to experience the stories again (think, for example, of the experimental novel Ulysses). Even the Bible isn't free from retellings, as the sublime and unsurpassable Paradise Lost shows. What's the reason for this? Being a would-be writer, I understand this impulse. Some stories--and, in many ways, the way the stories are told--have an unexpected influence on a person. A creative person often will take that influential energy and redirect it through their own lens and talents in a hope to glean a piece of the original's power and put it into their own work. I despair of my own writings when I read Steinbeck or It, because I can't reach the level that I see. I want to try my hand at those influential stories--it's the reason I retold Hamlet for my NaNoWriMo 2019--and see if I can "do what they did". But as a consumer, it's a desire to reclaim the awe the original inspired. I envy anyone who gets to come to Paradise Lost for the first time, or experience It without expectations or prior knowledge. There's something inside of these stories that can't be caught anywhere else--but that doesn't mean we don't want to try. Within the Digital I understand why people want to retell and rework and reimagine and remake their stories. What's so fascinating to me about this phenomenon in video games, though, is why they want to try again: The technology has improved. Assuming Bloom is right and Shakespeare decided to try the story of Hamlet again, it wasn't because there was a new innovation in the medium of his story. It wasn't like they discovered they could have stereoscopic sound in the Globe Theatre. There wasn't a technological advancement in printing that made Milton think that the story of Genesis could now be told in epic poetry. (In fact, his choice of epic poetry was a commercial risk, as nobody read or wrote in that format anymore; he was using an antiquated format for his Bible fanfic.) Final Fantasy VII was originally released on the PlayStation because that console had the greatest amount of power available to the developers at the time. They crammed as much content as they could into three CD-ROMs, using every shortcut* they could to be able to tell the story as possible. The limitations of their technology prevented them from doing all that they wished to do. With the continual increase of processing power, photo-realistic graphics, and improvements on acting capture (a level beyond motion capture) technology, video games now have the ability to tell their stories more fully, with greater detail and precision than ever before. The medium itself is changed. So the desire to revisit that which was technologically-confined is, I think, understandable. But what surprises me is that these remakes are, from a standpoint unaffected by nostalgia, superior to the originals that inspired them. And that is a controversial statement. The Power of Nostalgia There's another form of iteration at play here: As rising generations--in this case, the much-maligned Millennials of which I am one--begin to create, they often recreate. It's a call-back to a "simpler" time (simple only because the creator was a child during that time, and most kids have the innocence of childhood to paste over the hard parts of history). I think the best example would have to be Back to the Future, where the modern (1985) clashes with the idyllic (1955). The majority of that film takes place in the fifties, with only the framing concept being in the eighties. The stuff that was modern to Marty Macfly is nostalgic to me now. Stranger Things takes this feeling as the primary part of its appeal (even though it's technically historical urban science fiction--not a particularly large genre, to be honest). It's common for this to happen: Soon enough, early 2000 pop-culture will be used in our stories as creators who have fond memories of a pre-9/11 world will take creative control over our television, movies, novels, and video games and use that nostalgia as fuel for interest in their creations. That is the nature of how we tell stories, I think. Originality is simply a combination of two previously uncombined elements, but those elements still exist. We can find fingerprints of others throughout any story, if we really try. What's happening now in the video game world, though, is that the power of nostalgia is being coupled with outstanding quality. Resident Evil 2 will always be one of my favorite video games. I played it countless times and could probably knock it out in a single afternoon with minimal saves if I really wanted. My long-standing fascination with zombies comes from that video game. (In fact, I tried writing a zombie story in middle school that involved an evil corporation that accidentally turned people into zombies and had to be stopped by the main character, a gun-toting, ponytailed girl who wasn't afraid of the monsters.) I have a huge amount of nostalgic appreciation for that game…but I don't recommend it. Not because of its violence or gore (which is so much worse in the remake), but because it's a product of the times and the technology. The voice acting is bad, the animations strange, the controls a mess…everything that we now use to judge a game's quality** renders Resident Evil 2 as a definite pass. Yes, it's influential and continued the survivor horror genre in video games. It's an important game. But it's no longer a "good" game…at least, not without context. Resident Evil 2 Remake, however, is excellent on almost every front. Again, without the nostalgia-glasses, it deserves the acclaim it's received and could be considered a better game than its original. If you add back in the nostalgia, its power is diminished a bit (since it can't ever be experienced in the same milieu of life in which I experienced the original), but only a bit. Where it fades (the twists and turns of the story aren't a surprise, for example), the nostalgia of being in the Racoon Police Department, hunting for the Diamond Key more than makes up for it. Final Remake Much of what I said about Resident Evil 2--and, by extension, Resident Evil 3--doesn't apply as much to FFVII. That game is still wonderful, and even has a retro vibe*** to it now. In fact, I insisted that my son play FFVII on his iPad before he played the remake on the PlayStation 4, as I didn't want him to create nostalgic memories of something that I didn't have. I wanted, in this particular case, his experience with Cloud to be dictated by the original PlayStation version. And I think I made the right choice (though my other boys won't have that experience, since they've watched me play FFVII Remake and have now started formulating their own childhood memories that will one day bloom into nostalgia). My oldest is at the perfect age to allow these types of memories to shape him and go with him. And while I think FFVII Remake is a remarkable game, the power of the connection between the original and me can't really be undone. I'll never be able to feel about Remake as I did about the nineties' version, because I'm not that person any more. I'm not in middle school in an America that had been at war since before I was born. I'm no longer living in a world with corded telephones and no home internet. What I made out of that game is contingent on when I encountered that game. So of course the remake can't really generate the same sort of feelings. Instead, whenever I play FFVII Remake in the future, it will remind me of this time, of the chaos and strangeness of living in quasi-quarantine as a virus ravages the world. The context of now will continue to affect how I feel about that game, just as the context of then affects me now. Still, it is remarkable to me that the video game industry is able to be iterative in its reiterations. I think there's more to this than happenstance, too, but I won't know for certain until we get remakes of things like Overwatch or Fortnite…and maybe we won't. Perhaps our technology has reached a place that current ideas can be realized fully on the first try (albeit with a patch or two), preventing the necessity of remaking anything. I guess we'll have to wait and see. --- * FFVII had "solved" the problem of not enough processing power by having all of the character models be simple geometric shapes, imbued with a subtlety of movement within their animations to convey their feelings. The other members of Cloud's party would disappear, walking into his body so that the game didn't have to render three characters at once. When they went on to develop Final Fantasy VIII, the developers at Squaresoft wanted to keep the models of the characters the same in the battle sequences as in the world--no more of that blocky, severely deformed character model idea. That desire nearly prevented the game from being completed, as it was one of the most difficult programming feats the developers had to do. ** Not the story, though…I've never seen the caliber of story as one of the graded components of a video game review *** If you were curious, I don't much care for retro aesthetic. I didn't like pixelated video games when that was all I could get. I disliked seeing cover art that looked so dissimilar from the product. Retro gaming doesn't appeal to me because it creates a false impression of nostalgia--it looks like my gaming past, but it's a brand new game that I didn't actually play. Without nostalgia to smooth over the rough (pixelated) edges, I don't get a lot from the game. I beat Final Fantasy VIII for what is, I believe, the third time in my life. The game was released twenty years ago and has been a divisive entry into the franchise's storied history the entire time.
I, a fast and furious fan of Final Fantasy VII, insisted that my mom buy me a copy of the game the day it came out whilst I was still at school, so I could start it as soon as I got home. There are vague memories of my mom giving me a hard time about not being able to find it…or the people at Target not knowing something about it? I can't remember that part; I just recall that I spent a lot of time listening to The Aquabats versus the Floating Eye of Death! album and grinding away with Squall and friends. Maybe the nascent at-home Internet connection led me to some walkthroughs or perhaps it was an actual guide (though I doubt it; I have no memories of using a printed guide), but I recall sitting in my brother's bedroom (where the PlayStation was), one toe on the X button so that the characters would automatically attack the bad guys and my hands would be free to work on my pre-calculus homework. I happened upon a strategy of having Irvine injured so badly that he could automatically use his Limit Break, as well as the Initiative ability so that he would start the round first, then blasting away the mini cactuar monsters in order to give my Guardian Forces extra AP as quickly as possible. I remember getting into arguments with kids at school about how the "fantasy" part of Final Fantasy didn't preclude (not that I used that word) it from being an actual fantasy, despite the high-tech world. Debates about who was better, Cloud or Squall (answer: Cloud), probably also came along with my first experience with Final Fantasy VIII. This was in the beginning of the school year--fall of '99--which also coincided with me finding my first (and only) girlfriend. Gayle was interested in "geeky" stuff, too, so I lent her my PlayStation at one point, during which time she played a lot of Final Fantasy VIII as well (going so far as to rename Angelo "Steve" in honor of me). Bonding over a mutual experience like that, I'm sure, helped to cement the relationship that eventually built into our 14-year-long (and counting) marriage. So I have fond memories of Final Fantasy VIII, a game that I would likely have repurchased had Square Enix ever figured out a way to recreate the files and publish it in HD mobile or PS4 versions. As it stands, I still have my original copy, which has stuck around despite multiple moves and large-scale reorientations of my life. For Valentine's Day, Gayle bought me a book dedicated to the game, which pushed me to slide the black-sided disc back in and revisit Balamb Garden, Esthar, and that theme song that so surprised and delighted me when the lovers were first talking in the Ragnarök. The Story One of the things that I've noticed about my enjoyment of these long-form video games is that it's kind of tricky to remain focused and interested in the story long enough to feel as though a cohesive tale has been told. This is something I've been struggling with in the realm of large, meaty books (though it wouldn't surprise me if I set aside this critique this summer and return to Derry, Maine): Sustained attention. My brain is tired; it's hard for me to really focus on a single thing for prolonged amounts of time, at least when it's during the school year and so much of my mental energy is invested in my students. For me to actually finish Final Fantasy VIII, I had to swear off Overwatch (I gave it up for Lent this year) and only focus on this PlayStation title. Each night, I logged a couple of hours, eventually ending the game a touch under 40 hours. By doing this, I managed to get a much stronger focus on what was actually happening in the game. Yes, I took a couple of side quests seriously, but I ignored my completionist impulse for the most part and pushed through the story in a consistent, about-10-hours-per-disc rate. Though there are still some bits that are confusing (I, for example, never connected that Laguna was Squall's dad, despite the fact that they look similar--I needed the book to draw that line for me), and some of the details are a bit extraneous, I feel that the story is pretty solid. Squall's character really changes a lot from the beginning, when he was too cool and isolated as a person to get into anything approaching a relationship. He eventually learns--most prominently during the scene in outer space where he has to throw himself into the void in order to catch Rinoa--that he truly does care about others, about people, and that he is willing to go to the ends of time to help the woman he loves. There are some contrived moments, that's for sure: That none of the characters recognize each other from their time together as friends at the orphanage until about halfway the story is a bit of a cheat, for example. And, since there's always the option for the player to select who is in the party, my specific experience--having Zell, Squall, and Rinoa as my main crew--is shifted from what others may have chosen to do. It's a single love story about some teenagers (another weird decision, in terms of the kinds of responsibilities that are put on the team, most particularly Squall), but it's told with an ensemble cast. The plus side to this is in the video game world: I can pick and choose who I think is actually on the adventure, rather than having the story dictate that (for the most part). The down, though, is that I never felt as connected to Selphie or Irvine, as I never tried to learn more about them. They were periphery to the main story, and their conflicts always felt tangential--as did Quistis' after she was demoted from being a teacher (how did she get so advanced? We're never told)--so much so that it's only now, as I write this, that I realize the game never explained why Irvine froze up. If he was such a great sniper, but always choked, why was he assigned to the team? And, for that matter, what happened to the icicle through Squall's chest? We never get an explanation to his mysterious healing*. These gaps notwithstanding--as well as the sometimes bizarre shifts in tone, such as the weird zombie attack on the train early on, or the bafflingly advanced technology of Esthar (which breaks down when you need it most) in the midst of magical sorceresses who are bent on using their magic to destroy the world--the story as a whole is exciting, varied, and enjoyable. There's a lot of history that's hinted at, and though the feeling of being the only human on the planet is as pervasive here as it is in the other Final Fantasy titles of this time period, the interweaving of the different times--as well as conversations that drop parts of the past into the narrative--manages to make the story feel as though there are still parts about the world left unexplored by the time Ultimecia is destroyed. I do want to point out one of the things that really worked well for me (and this is definitely a personal weakness**): I really like the manic pixie dream girl trope. Yeah, I know it has a lot of problems. The issue with it, though, is that there's nothing in the girl's life besides helping the morose guy learn how to loosen up and show emotions. In the case of Final Fantasy VIII, Rinoa does have a purpose--she's a military radical that's trying to overthrow the government. Her goal is attained earlier on in the story, but she herself is an interesting character, complete with her own doubts, desires, and skills. She doesn't feel like a walking trope, designed simply to pull Squall out of his cold shell. Instead, she feels to me like a fully-developed person, with different points of view and significant choices to make. There's a symmetry to the beginning of her relationship with Squall that I really like. In the famous dance scene, Rinoa looks over at Squall and smiles, pointing up at the sky. She's excited about the fireworks and is sharing that with him. At the very end--before the credits roll, when it's still a little ambiguous if Squall survived the cataclysmic final fight--we see her standing on the balcony. We can't see who she's talking to, but she smiles and does that same gesture. It's a subtle, beautiful way for us to know that Squall made it and is there, too.*** Influences I have to admit, though, having recently replayed Final Fantasy VII, the influences of the perennial favorite shine through in FFVIII, sometimes beyond the circumstantial. Amnesia plays a massive part in both games, as does the magic system and how it affects the world (though it's more pointed in VII). Both protagonists end up in outer space; both go to great lengths to rescue the damsel in distress (both of whom are unique women whose magical inheritances make them targets of the oppositional forces to the hero). A graduation into different forms of transportation features heavily in both. The list could go on, though I think the point stands. This is something that Harold Bloom talks about in his book, The Anxiety of Influence, and though I don't know the text well enough to see how it might apply to Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, it's clear that the successor was trying hard to hew close to what worked for the predecessor. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--VII is a masterpiece, and it's understandable that they wanted to emulate that. But, at the same time, it made the game feel slightly more iterative rather than innovative--except, of course, the dreaded Draw system. Draw System Compared to the materia system from Final Fantasy VII, the Draw/Junctioning system is…less than impressive. The main issue I had as a teenager was that, if I wanted to have an overpowered attack, I had to use the best magic and, after using that magic, I was no longer as physically strong. This criticism still stands, but it's not as much of a deal-breaker as I used to think. Though it is true that the experience of sitting through endless animations of your characters Drawing magic from their enemies isn't the most thrilling of things to do, I found that there were times when I could do as I did when I was younger: Put my toe on the X button and do something else whilst my characters buffed up with additional Drawn magic. I would fold laundry, read a book, or goof off on Twitter for a few minutes--a pleasant enough way to spend the evening--while a powerful enemy, smitten with silence, failed to cast spells on me and allowing me to get my magic reserves swollen. But what makes the system more interesting to me than it was back then was the risk-reward of magic harvesting that I didn't see until this time around. I found that I could focus more on how to get the most amount of magic with the least amount of damage, the system was more interesting and variegated. Boosting the Guardian Forces was still rather dull, but by the time I got Counter attached to a physical-attack heavy Squall, most of the encounters weren't too painful. And I like that. Once I had some of the Guardian Forces' abilities unlocked, generating the kinds of magic I needed wasn't as tedious. Attaching different magic that I'd found onto defense or weapons made the characters more powerful in ways that I didn't anticipate at first--like when I fought a Ruby Dragon and had enough Firaga equipped to my defense that it healed me instead of hurt me every time it attacked. Where it ended up being the most interesting--and, at times, frustrating--was when I was in the final fight of the game. Ultimecia's attacks would kill off the GF I summoned, so I had to rely on other spells. However, she could also nerf my accumulated magic--once, she took out the spells that boosted my HP, dropping me from over 7,000 to about 3,500. This removal of what I was expecting forced me to reconsider how I was fighting, which order to place my attacks, and tweaked the game on me even in the last moments. That kind of depth would have been fun throughout the game, but at least it happened at some point. Final Thoughts Final Fantasy VIII is, in my mind, the most ambitious of the PlayStation era games. VII was risky; IX was safe. VIII was hoping for something different: It feels like the game was trying to get a strong emotional response. Rather than fridging the would-be girlfriend for shock value (as in FFVII), Final Fantasy VIII wanted to create a relationship on the screen that the characters could care more deeply about. The player who first met Aerith in the slums of Midgar may or may not have cared about Cloud's relationship with her (as in my case; I liked Tifa much more). To prevent that same problem, Quistis, the first female Squall meets in the game, doesn't get to have her name changed. The designers didn't want players to name Quistis after a real-life girlfriend, only to have the real relationship form later on in the game. It's this sort of thoughtfulness that makes me believe that the designers were interested in telling a more complicated, a more emotional, a more…well, ambitious game. For the most part, I think it worked. Not a perfect masterpiece, and not nearly as well done (despite my feelings, the Draw system really did work against it, and the age of the protagonists made it feel more like a high school romance than anything that deserved the amount of passion as some of the characters exhibited) as FFVII, but still an excellent addition. If I had to rank the Final Fantasy games that I've played (which isn't all of them), I'd probably put VII in the top slot, and then VIII either as second or third (X is really impressive and does a lot of things right). It's an impressive piece of work and deserves more credit than it gets. --- * This is nothing compared to the clear, obvious death of Ryu Hyabusa in the first Ninja Gaiden for the X-Box. He's killed--spine severed and gore gushing from the wound--in the prologue of the game. But then, after a tidy cinematic, he's back in fine form and wearing his sexy leather getup. What's up with that? It still bugs me, even after all these years. ** Why is it personal? Well…I kind of married a manic pixie dream girl. Gayle and I were at some con or another and we went to a panel specifically about that and other problematic tropes. She asked what "manic pixie dream girl" means. I explained that it's the optimistic, happy girl whose sole purpose in the story is to make the dour, morose main character see that there's a lot of great stuff in the world and he shouldn't be so gloomy all of the time. "Oh," she said. "So, me, basically." The big difference between the trope and my wife (and, as mentioned above, Rinoa), is that there's nothing wrong with having an optimistic, outgoing person paired up with a reserved, introverted type. That's good storytelling, inasmuch as there's contrast and difference of opinions that lead to conflict (though not antagonism). The problem with the trope is when that's the entire character. If all Rinoa was good for was to get Squall to be happy, then there's a problem. As I argued above, that's not what I see from the game. That being said, Rinoa is put in the damsel in distress position far too often. Despite that, she is capable of a great deal, which I like. But…yeah, she's helpless too much in the story. So that sucks. *** The after-credits final shot, where it has Squall and Rinoa clearly together and smiling and happy, is--to my mind--unnecessary. Perhaps it's because of pushback from the vague, unsatisfying ending to Final Fantasy VII, but it seems like the designers put that in to make sure that no one was misunderstanding what was going on here: The hero of the game and her knight both made it through the ordeal and are happily together. It's a happy ending--not a strong suit of the PlayStation era Final Fantasies, I would argue--and a good one. But it doubts the ability of the player to recognize that action, to see what that smile means. It doesn't trust us to understand the subtle ending already beautifully provided, and that's too bad. Tiny missteps like this one (and the tropes I mentioned above) are what mar the story. Not irredeemably, of course. The game is still brilliant. In lieu of writing some of my early thoughts about Final Fantasy X in my video gaming journal, I thought that I'd throw some of what's occurring to me during the first bit of the game here. But first, some background… My parents were probably right to forbid video games from our home. For many years, I ached with jealousy at the video game collections that my friends enjoyed. I missed the beginning of dinner on multiple occasions because I was busy watching a friend play Super Mario Bros. 3 and being dazzled by the incredible graphics. Eventually, through a process of "give them an inch, they'll take a mile" twists, my brother cracked open the door of owning video game systems. In that way, the original PlayStation came to our home and…well, I've been addicted to games pretty much ever since. In the final gesture of capitulation, my parents bought the family a PlayStation 2 during the first Christmas of my older brother being gone on his mission. This was fitting, as it meant that, after his years of hard work in wearing down their parental resolve, we, the younger siblings, reaped a bountiful harvest. Included in that best-Christmas-of-my-youth was a copy of Final Fantasy X. I had been a fan of the series since VII, and though I really liked VIII and felt obligated to like IX (which I really didn't like at all, but beat anyway), Final Fantasy X looked amazing. Jaw-droppingly cool. It was, after all, a fully Final Fantasy game, but it fit on one disc! Oh, the powers of the DVD were truly a sight to behold. During that break and throughout the next month or so, I played FFX pretty much exclusively. The game had voice overs, more pre-rendered clips, more of basically everything that I could have wanted in a Final Fantasy game--except it doesn't let you fly around the planet. But that's a minor gripe. A couple of my good friends were playing it, too, which gave us plenty to talk about as we swapped ideas for strategies and explanations about weird quirks of the game. That pre-social media socialization of games still exists, and I get to do that with some of my students, which is probably why I think so fondly on some of the biggest titles of my childhood: They were something I could play by myself, but still feel connected to others through a shared gaming experience. Anyway, I beat the game and remember being really confused and kind of disappointed. I believe I played it a second time at some point in my college days, though I can't say for certain. And, despite the fact that I don't love X the way I love VII, I still think of my time in Spira with fondness. Hence the reason I'm playing the game again now. I managed to find an emulator that lets me run the old ISO, which is good because my backwards compatible PlayStation 3 died a few months ago. While I wish I were playing it the same way I did when I was younger, I'm happy to be back with Tidus, Wakka, Lulu, Yuna, Rikku, and that horned guy that I never used. One of the things that I remember appreciating about the game when I played it was the speed. Everything was, of course, shiny and colorful, but it was the speed of the game that impressed me. Fighting was tons of fun, as entering a command led to an almost instant processing of the turn. Indeed, the turn-based strategy for the game--one which is so good that it has been copied and emulated in plenty of other games since then--really stood out back in the early 2000s. After slogging through the lethargy of Final Fantasy IX, this was a beautiful change. And now, eighteen years later, I still like the speed. Yeah, I can go faster with my emulator (and I do), but the game's response to inputs is so nice as it is that, playing it now, I can appreciate its smoothness all over again. Another thing that Final Fantasy does right is the Sphere Grid. The leveling up system is complicated, but not oppressively so (and its layout may not be exactly the same as in other titles, but I've seen similar ideas used in other games). The idea of spreading out the experience over other characters by seamlessly swapping them in and out of battle also allows for a more even distribution of leveling up--a nice change from the previous entries, where I tended to find a group that I liked and basically played with them the entire time (I would reg Cloud, Tifa, and Cid almost every time I hit up FFVII again). I am enjoying the story. By focusing on moving through the game quickly, rather than grinding through, leveling up characters so that they're so strong that hardly anything can stand in front of me, I'm able to get a stronger sense of location, character, and plot. This is the same strategy that I applied to my recent replay of Final Fantasy VII, and I have to say, this story--though weird--is making a lot more sense. Of course, part of that is because I know the ending. And while I'm still not sure how all the piece fit together, and there's definitely a sense of foreboding, considering how it finishes, I'm still excited to see Tidus' journey unfold before me. My recent return to Zanarkand and Spira, seeing these old, familiar faces that were a part of dozens of hours of my late teenage years, is a nostalgic, warm feeling. There's something to be said about exploring and enjoying the new, the challenging, the different. But there's also something to be said for returning to one's roots, to the characters that mattered in whatever way they needed to during that stage of life. It's good to be back. While video gamers still have their pet wars between which brand of video game machine (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft--both PC and Xbox--or, for a while, SEGA), the great "philosophical" arguments I had with friends about which was better have, for the most part, faded into a niche section of gaming's past. Even the idea that games are art doesn't really hold a lot of interest to the culture--now that Roger Ebert's original (and somewhat apologized for) opinion has had its drubbing. The largest third-rail for video game culture has to be diversity and inclusion, two things that matter a great deal to me and, in my view, are the greatest trial that the subculture has to adopt.
However, back in the days where arguments of which console was better because of how many "bits" it was (as if we knew what that meant), the large contenders were Nintendo 64 versus the PlayStation. Nothing would break friendships quite as quickly as staking a side in this war that opposed your friend's. What we intuited as teenagers was that nothing about a console was inherently worthwhile if there weren't games of the best kind on that platform. The Nintendo Entertainment System was nothing without Mario (which held true with the N64 until Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time, and Super Smash Bros. came out). SEGA had Sonic as a direct competitor and mascot. And the newly launched PlayStation had…Crash Bandicoot? Really? Hmm. Not a lot of cultural impact that one. Still, the PlayStation made a big splash, eventually coming into its own with genre-defining games like Metal Gear Solid and, of course, Final Fantasy VII. I haven't talked about Final Fantasy VII here before, and there's a huge amount of that game that needs exploration (haha) and unpacking, so I'm reluctant to jump into it. Nevertheless, I have some extra time today, and the big part about FFVII that matters so much--but went completely unremarked upon in my early days of fandom for the game--is something that I haven't been able to figure out until recently. So I'm gonna give it a go. Before I start, I'm putting up a SPOILER WARNING about the game. It came out 21-years ago this week, and there are multitudinous ways for anyone interested to either read it (via text dumps) or watch it via playthroughs or playing it on any number of devices. So, if you aren't familiar with the game…well, maybe this essay isn't really for you. A Puppet Without Strings Cloud Strife is a complicated guy. Growing up in the FFVII equivalent of the middle of nowhere, Cloud wanted to be important from the time he was a little kid. He eventually left Nibelheim and headed to Midgar, anxious to join the elite private military corporation of SOLDIER, employed by Shinra Electric Company. Sadly, Cloud was also a bit of a loser. He didn't get into SOLDIER in any real way, being a low-level scrub who eventually got tasked with accompanying the much more competent and friendly Zack Fair, as well as the aloof and legendary SOLDIER, Sephiroth. Heading toward Nibelheim on assignment, Cloud's dreams of being an impressive hero and SOLDIER (though he was a soldier) were about to be shown to his hometown as, essentially, empty. Maybe that's part of the reason he's so carsick on the way to Nibelheim. Or, maybe not. It certainly adds to the idea that Cloud was not a remarkable hero. Can you imagine Captain America getting carsick? But all of this is too late in the game and early in the story, which is part of what makes FFVII such a brilliant, beautiful masterpiece. It's the sort of game that needs to be a game on almost every level, if only because of the added complicity that comes about when you, the player of the would-be SOLDIER Cloud, end up fighting a dragon on the way to the Mako reactor in Nibelheim, only to be smashed to pieces in a single attack. Good thing Sephiroth is there to save you. See, by having the player control Cloud through this segment, this flashback that occurs in Kalm, immediately after escaping Midgar, the player is involved in fabricating the story that Cloud is weaving. Up until this point, everything is going along smoothly for our heroes: We know who the bad guys are, we can see that they're mortal (the President of the Shinra has been murdered by the recently returned Sephiroth), and we know that Sephiroth is on his way to something large and heinous. It's not pure vanilla, as the Shinra's role and Sephiroth's switching to his own side is not a common trope, but the story is clear enough at this juncture. So having the player move five-years-ago Cloud through his old house seems a logical thing. We've been in control of Cloud almost exclusively for the majority of the game, thus far, so it's not too unusual for us to view the world--in an almost literal way--through his eyes. But everything that the gamer does in the process of that flashback is a lie. Sometimes it's full-fledged, like the idea that Zack wasn't there at all. Sometimes it's a tweak, like the idea that he went with Tifa to the Mako reactor, but was the security guard outside, rather than the companion of Sephiroth inside. The very fabric of Cloud's reliability as a narrator, as a point of view character, begins its fraying at this moment, even if the player doesn't see it. As Cloud is talking, Tifa keeps quiet, but there are enough subtle clues (an impressive feat, considering the limitations of software and hardware the game has) from her that there's something awry. Yet, what does it matter? There's still a game to play--and the game is fun. The organization of materia, the leveling up of characters, the navigation of the world, all of it adds toward a desire to overlook incongruities, because these plot details are preventing the gamer from getting back to the game. What really strikes me about this is that Cloud is the puppet at the end of digital strings. We, as the gamers, control what he's doing, when he approaches certain problems, certain events. During the flashback to Nibelheim, you can, if you choose, have Cloud enter Tifa's home. She asks if he really did this. By insisting he did, you can make Cloud go deeper into her house, at last ending up at her dresser and rummaging through, only to find "Tifa's Orthopedic Underwear", at which point Tifa gets upset and Cloud decides to pass it off as "only a joke" and the story moves on. Did Cloud really take the underwear? Aside from the creepy undertones, Cloud is lying about it ("it's a joke"), but he's lying about it inside of a lie about his time in Nibelheim. What can we know for certain about what Cloud was doing there? Was he, as a soldier entering his childhood crush's home? Or was it he, a SOLDIER--that is, the false Cloud that we've been controlling since the opening train ride? Because games are about controlling avatars, there's always a puppet-without-strings level to the experience. Gamers are the Gepettoes of the world, making the characters on the strings dance and tell their stories. At this point of Final Fantasy VII, however, it becomes much less clear. Who is being played in this instance? The audience--the gamers--are being fed a lie. The characters on the screen--save for Tifa--are being lied to, too. Cloud is lying his face off…but he doesn't even know it. In this instance, Cloud is like the player, caught up in the story, an imaginative possibility. Crucially, Cloud is so thoroughly convinced about his imagined version of his reality, that confronting his real past becomes a literal struggle for him. See, when Cloud is lost and slips into the Lifestream with Tifa, when the gamer has to put together the true memories of Cloud's past--complete with him remembering how Zack sacrificed his life to protect him--there is a genuine feeling of cohesion and return. After Cloud gives Sephiroth the Black Materia and accidentally releases the Weapons on the Planet, Cloud disappears from the story. As Meteor looms, Tifa and Barrett are being held prisoners by the corporate government of the Shinra Company, waiting to be executed. The threat to some of the earliest characters in the game helps transfer the player's concern and empathy for Cloud--feelings that had been harvested over however long they've been playing--and put them into the other members of the team. Additionally, the player wants Cloud to come back. He's where the focus of the game and the story has been for so long that there isn't a game without Cloud. (I do think, at least subliminally, there's also a worry that Cloud is narratively dead; Aerith is brutally murdered on screen not too long ago, showing that the game is willing to take its unique, brightly colored characters, and kill them off. That's raising the stakes in credible ways, for certain.) The fracturing of the group by losing its leader shows a couple of things. One, Tifa is a capable, strong, and intelligent leader and her focus on helping her friend is part of her motivation. Two, it allows the story to grow larger than a single character. It helps open up the world in a way that all of the exploration could never do. Three, it gives the player some--not as much, but some--time with Tifa, allowing her to be a vessel of the gamer-avatar empathy, thus helping the gamer along with the narrative-drenched segment when Tifa and Cloud have to carefully reassemble Cloud's shattered mind. And that leads back to the in-the-Lifestream moment. The gamer is excited to see Cloud…until we see that he's essentially a vegetable. There's nothing that he can do--he's a puppet with his strings cut. We want to see him return to his normal self, but we don't know how. Why? Because games don't often worry about the internal experience of the avatar. The character itself is far too often a dim shadow, designed so that the gamer can project him/herself into the character instead. (This was one of Hideo Kojima's biggest mistakes with the original conception of Snake in Metal Gear Solid, in my opinion, and--thankfully--the later games in that series showed him that it is far more compelling to have a character be a character, rather than a digital token.) The Lifestream flashback is a comparatively boring moment in the game: There is a lot of reading, and the areas that we're interacting with are familiar aspects of the story. So not only is there little to do, what is there we've seen before. Yet this is the most important and fascinating parts of the game. Final Fantasy VII starts off with the basic idea of a hero, slowly builds him up, then breaks him almost completely. The restructuring of Cloud's psyche can be thought of as the proof-positive that we can only explore this story via interactivity. Acting as Tifa, the player helps to reassemble the correct memories and motivations of Cloud, restringing the puppet. Not only do we as the players have that chance, but we're doing it via a person that Cloud has long cared about--the girl he crushed on at home (a true memory, perhaps the truest one he has), the one to whom he uttered an important promise--so that the process is anything but mechanical. FFVII spends the better part of an hour letting the player into the internal workings of the character. That's what Shakespeare was doing with Hamlet, and though I'm not putting FFVII in the same stratum as Shakespeare, the effectiveness of both pieces of art comes from this deep desire we have of understanding who and what we are. Cloud is faced with the ultimate existential crisis: He is not who he thinks he is, and he has--for a long time--no way of being able to differentiate between subsumed, real memories, and traumatized, implanted memories. Despite this worry of not knowing who he is, Cloud decides that there are memories that are true, that existence in the face of the unknown is a journey and valuable in and of itself, and that the world is worth preserving. This is why Cloud's comments to Sephiroth at the end of Advent Children are so important. He's telling Sephiroth--the emblem of all that had been taken away from him--that there's nothing that doesn't matter. Cloud faces existentialism and denies it, pushing away nihilistic proposals, seeking continued existence in the Lifestream (where Aerith and Zack continue to watch over him) and a worthwhile existence with his friends. Like I said, Cloud is a complicated guy. In order to prepare myself for the video game Winterim that's coming up this January, I've been playing a lot of video games. In the same way I would be reading a lot of books for the Lord of the Rings Winterim or watching a lot of documentaries for the dinosaur Winterim, I am cramming in as much context and experience points (lol) as I can in order to give the students something worthwhile. For the most part, that means that I'm playing a lot of new games--Batman VR, The Last Guardian, and Child of Light have been gracing my PlayStation 4 for the last week or two--but I'm also revisiting some of the greats of the past. I have both Portal and Portal 2 as my next stop, as well as Final Fantasy VII. I've played FFVII since it came out in 1997. With twenty years' time passing, there are some aspects of the game that have not aged well. The LEGO-esque form of the characters (except, confusingly, in battles and some--not all--the cutscenes) is distracting and hard to enjoy. I think I tolerated them back in '97, but now that gaming has come so far, it's less cool. The battle system is still superbly balanced and enjoyable, but the process of playing the game isn't as good as it was in the old days. (Who holds down a button in order to run? Seriously.) Those minor parts aside, one of the things that had a surprising impact on me was while I was playing the section where (spoilers…I guess? I mean, the game is two decades old, plus the moment is fairly fresh in the game--only three hours or so into it, maybe) the Sector 7 plate is dropped onto the village below. The entire thing is set up to frame the group my character, Cloud, is working with. AVALANCHE is essentially a grassroots environmental terrorist organization that is pushing against the oligarchical control of the Shinra Company. The Shinra is a monolithic business--energy business, as a matter of fact, done by extracting mako energy from the Planet and turning it into electricity and the magic of the world, materia--that is also a monopoly. The de facto president of the entire city-state (as it were) of Midgar is also the president of the company. There's a lot to unpack there, including the ideas of what kinds of rights a company has when there isn't a state to rein it back, as well as the ethics of having a company creating its own super-soldier army and using those troops to wage war with a country on the other side of the Planet. (There's a not-so-subtle stand in for corporate imperialism coming into an island nation filled with Buddhist-stand ins and ninjas, but that's worth looking at on its own terms.) The Shinra is also so committed to its energy-extraction policies that it is literally killing the Planet, draining it of the Life Stream in order to line its own pockets with gil. Add on top of that the desire by the president to get to the Promised Land--a world of bliss and painless existence--via human (and sentient animal) experimentation, and you have a top-to-bottom "bad guy" as the primary antagonist of the story. There is more to Final Fantasy VII (a lot more), and it gets weirder (like the talking cat/marshmallow puppet guy), but that should be enough context for the next part. See, I've played this game three or four times (which, considering its 40+ hour run time, is no small feat), yet I've never had a strong emotional reaction to any of the things that have happened. But as I was watching the plate drop down on the citizens of Sector 7, an action that could only be authorized by the President of the Shinra Company, I realized how brutal a move this was. In the past, I was more worried about making sure that I got off the plate in time to keep the game going--one of the strange tendencies of video game logic and priorities. This time, however, I took in the way the game designers told the story. Yeah, there's a dramatic escape on a magical-Tarzan-vine-like wire, but this time I noticed the people running away, looking up in surprise. There's one shot, in particular, of an empty room that has a view of the toppling plate. In the foreground, a news anchor is silently reporting the news. Then he looks up to his right, recoils, and the image goes to static as the explosions worsen. The plate drops onto however many thousands of people, with the camera zooming out until we see the president, standing at his window, looking over at the destruction. The unmitigated heartlessness of it shocked me. Part of it is because I'm in a more sensitive mindset right now (finals always do that to me). Part of it is because I'm more aware of the real tragedies that always swirl around ruthless greed, which is embodied in the corpulent President of the Shinra Company. There are likely other pathways that carved this response, but I found myself deeply empathizing with Barret, the one-armed man who was also the leader of the now-discredited and -disbanded AVALANCHE. As he stares at the ruble that was his home, he screams and fires his weapon uselessly at the tons of debris. Inside it, he believes, is the ruined body of his only daughter, Marlene. Though he'll soon learn that she's still alive, his grief felt tangible to me in a way that I had never felt before. Then he shouts at the uncaring pile of destruction, "What was it all for?" What is it all for? Not the game--there are lots of reasons over in that direction--but the bigger question that this blocky character asks from the depths of his digital despair. What is the purpose of suffering? How do we make meaning from tragedies and senseless violence? What do we do in the face of the disgusting violence of unbridled capitalism? How do we justify actions that take us away from what we truly love (in the case of Barret, his quest to save the Planet for Marlene--which means, if he wants to accomplish his goal, he has to abandon Marlene)? My own growth of a person since I last played this game--and, being more attuned to the story that it's trying to tell--has made it so that I have new ways of contextualizing the problems that I've long had when looking at war and violence in entertainment. The wars of video games are fictional, fantasy--even when based on the real life inspiration, no matter what Battlefield and Call of Duty would have you think--but sometimes I worry that we feel that real wars are just as fictional, just as fantastical. I don't have a solution to this; I know only that this is something that I need to address again and again until I can understand it. And, since the topic is war, I know I will never really comprehend what it is or why it keeps happening. |
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