Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “Prelude”

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story… by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

-C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

What I propose to do here, in the following series of essays, is to tell the story of Final Fantasy VII in such a way as to unfold something true about the roots the game has in other great works–myth and literature and art–while also getting at the nature of storytelling in our time, in this age of video games it’s helped to define. 

We each bring to the discussion our own experience with Square’s 1997 smash hit, a host of associations that accompany us like the prelude music playing in the background. After all, what have you been up to the past twenty years? College, travel, jobs, relationships… and now and then returning to FFVII, hoping to get dunked into some Mako and remember who you are, and who you wanted to become. Though without knowing who you are before diving into the Mako, perhaps it becomes even harder to figure out.

There’s just so much to analyze and to look at in any game beyond the text of the story alone, even leaving aside the personal freight of memory. In this particular case, for one, there’s the name, Final Fantasy VII. Sort of a contradiction in terms–it’s not final, because there’s a number after it, and plenty of sequels after that; and it’s almost more like a science-fiction game than a fantasy. From the title, then, we stand before a paradox and a promise. Distinctions between them are blended in ways we’ll want to explore. 

In terms of gameplay, there are endless other things to think about: the style of role-playing game, the leveling up features, the menus that you have to access, keeping track of counters like hit points; you fight enemies in a very specific way, and bosses who require additional strategy; you have sprites as well as CGI… Where do you start?

The ins and outs of the technology are not my expertise. Other people can go into a lot of detail and explain some of the mechanics and development aspects of the game. With the release of the remake, those design elements more than ever will come in for renewed attention as points of comparison. What I try to do with the game is to read it, almost like a book. There are still way too many things that happen in FFVII to go into all of them, but there are points at which the game highlights certain things which it thinks are important. In most cases, but not all, these will correspond with those memories and associations we have playing the game, the things that we must have thought were important, and the things they pointed us towards: science and art, philosophy and politics, love and the loveless and all manner of transcendence. Bridging those, drawing the connections between them, will be our aim. 

The most daunting part of all will be how to account for the visual, musical, ludic aspects of the game.

How do you analyze those in words?

They’re different categorically. And it’s more than a movie because of the player’s interaction with it, and the freedom of movement through the world. As you start to interpret the game, at once the interplay between these subjective and objective aspects confronts you. On the one hand, there is the game that everybody has the shared experience playing, sort of like you have a shared experience reading a text; on the other, there’s always that subjective experience because you are the one making the choices (even though they’re fairly prescribed). You find yourself switching between those two modes, the playing mode inhabiting a character being borne along by the story, but also the objective mode, where you’re trying to see what it is that is happening, to derive some information, to distill some knowledge from it. 

So how to be both a player and a commentator at the same time–this is one of the most interesting things that playing games, even more than reading books, does. It teaches you, if not a method, call it an attitude or perspective, where you see the distance between those two things. And you start to notice, well, if I see that distance, then other people have seen it, too, and they’ve probably thought about this a lot. Then you start to enter into the conversation on that more reflective level. The game is this great challenge because it really prioritizes the playing, the subjective flow of being in the moment of it. That’s what’s fun about playing: you lose yourself. And that’s hard to talk about in a way that doesn’t sound so banal or just wan and slippery, but it’s definitely essential. 

That is the power of the narrative of Final Fantasy VII…

…and of narrative itself: it can suck you in, and you can go down the rabbit hole. Almost like watching a playthrough, or having watched a friend play this game back in the day, there is this third or hybrid aspect of being able to view yourself being pulled in during the game, becoming capable of actually striking that balance between the myth and its matter. As much as we take on Cloud, the ex-SOLDIER suffused with it, we are also Aeris, pensively beholding the glow of Mako in the gloom. 

Wesley Schantz (the Bookwarm Mage) coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA. FFVII Myth & Materia comes out of his podcast series with Alexander Schmid and Vincent Reese.

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