My god, it’s full of stars…
-Dave Bowman, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Let’s talk about the very beginning of the game, first impressions through the first boss and up to where we meet Tifa back at the bar.
On beginning a new game, there’s the introductory cutscene, taking us from what looks at first like stars, or snow–is it going down, or is it going up?–then like a little spring of energy illuminating Aeris’ face in the alley, and zooming out from there to encompass the entire metropolis, before homing in again on the train carrying the main character, Cloud, who will be her counterpart. He and his sword juxtaposed against that towering building at the center of the city provide Final Fantasy VII with its cover art, but then inside the case, underneath the first disc–and it’s worth noting this is one of the first games featuring multiple discs for the PlayStation, which adds to the epic gravitas of it all–we have the image of Aeris similarly posed with the airship in the background.
Behind the third disc, to peek ahead, is yet another figure, androgynous, wreathed in fire, and on the back of the case, just sketched in, a hint of the animal nature which inherits the planet at the end of the final cutscene.
The iconography here invites some pretty clear, if reductive, comparisons.
Depending on your theoretical, theological, or aesthetic framework, you might see Aeris as an Anima sort of figure, a woman who is the ultimate woman in some way, an aspect of the Great Mother, just as Cloud with his humongous sword suggests a phallic fantasy. We’ll revisit the details of this imagery, but in its structure, we have a kind of triptych or even a fourfold of nested counterparts here, reminiscent of the medieval altarpiece as much as the byōbu, the Japanese painted screen. And yet its overt purpose, like any cover art, is really to sell copies, to entice the player and set his or her imagination aflame.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch
From the very beginning of the game, then, whether we take FFVII as the physical object or the experience of playing it, we see three major things.
Problematically, the first is that what you think you see is not necessarily what is actually there: what’s down and what’s up, or what’s large and what’s small; Cloud as mercenary ex-SOLDIER, someone who really doesn’t care, and this poor flower girl–is that a euphemism for her being a prostitute? If that is implied, there’s an interesting connection to Mary Magdalene, another Great Mother figure. There’s also the tension there between beauty, the freshness of nature, against the ugliness of technology, the sordidness of industrial life. FFVII stands with the great moderns in literature–Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, or Dostoevsky’s Sonya in Crime and Punishment–in this context.
This leads into the second point: this Midgar that we see (its name the name of Middle-earth from the Norse mythology) is ugly, but it also is a symbol of the Self, ripe for perfection: the circle of Plato’s Timaeus, or the mandalas of Buddhism.
Taken together, then, this brings out our third point: in Aeris and her city we see the interplay between technology and nature in the same way that we’re going to see an interplay between science and fantasy throughout the game, the form of the game working out its content in a new genre and medium of expression entirely.
Sonya in the Room of Dying Marmeladov, Dementy Shmarinov
For a particularly unsettling and, I confess, not entirely clear-cut instance of the same complex of tensions, consider that communication between Cloud and the red light which happens just before the first boss, when he and Barret are placing the bomb at the heart of the reactor. That manifests in words, rather than images, that we’re being warned against something, rather than enticed into it. That makes me wonder about what we spoke about with respect to the prelude, the fascination the game holds over us, about our being imprinted with it as opposed to more rationally working out our own destiny in dialogue with those attributes of an Other which so impresses us.
That black-robed person in the fire, or that person Tifa remembers talking to in the flashback when they were young… The red light which speaks to Cloud here is the first hint of the question whether that sort of imprinting is something that’s actually happening in this text, in this game. When Cloud and Tifa are talking after they meet together back at their hideout, a bar in the slums of Midgar, he says in her (or their?) memory that he wants to be like the great Sephiroth, he wants to join SOLDIER.
We have to ask, what is this interplay between you and what your dream is, and your pursuit of that dream? How does it affect you if you do not manage to realize it?
The ethereal red light intervenes on reaching the core of the Mako reactor. This voice, this text dialog box shows up warning Cloud, or perhaps it’s the game designers warning the player, this isn’t an ordinary reactor (read: approaching scorpion monster). If it is a voice only heard by Cloud, it seems as if something in his unconscious occurs to him, but maybe he can’t understand it. It doesn’t prevent him from making the mistake–if it is a mistake–of trying to blow up the Mako reactor, but it does seem like it’s a prefiguration of there being sort of a splinter in his mind, something that might expand. It’s already getting to Cloud, last name Strife, that there is this fracturing of the psyche, both within himself and within the perverted cosmos of Midgar.
You might think of the ensuing boss battle, or any tough fight which might take some foreshadowing, be it from a mysterious dialog box or from a fellow party member or NPC–think of it like a zone of proximal development, a task slightly beyond one’s initial abilities, leading to both struggle and growth. So that dialog box, or say Sephiroth in general as a figure of the Self theoretically completed with the Shadow, seems to be a representation of that zone of proximal development, that which pushes you into the next situation that you’re not yet prepared for but which, if you engage with it, perhaps you can succeed in encountering.
Right before the first boss, the first big challenge, Cloud experiences this flash of painful, confusing insight–that strikes me as exactly how you would feel right before you go on stage for the first time to sing, or before the first time you go up to hit for a baseball game: that nervousness that’s just the sort of a shock that can be prohibitive, or stimulating.
To take a less fraught example: right before the boss, on a narrow catwalk of the sort you’ll get used to finding in these situations, you also pick up your first Materia. It’s the Restore Materia.
You don’t know what that is when you start playing your first new game, and you’re not even allowed to do anything with it yet because there’s a whole tutorial about it first, which happens back in the slums. Though we learn later more of what goes on with Mako and Materia, for now it’s just one more magical thing that the player knows nothing about. There’s much more going on than we really understand as we’re starting to play, and it seems we’re supposed to get the sense that Cloud knows more than he’s letting on.
He’s got this experience as a SOLDIER (it’s never clear whether that’s an acronym or just capitalized for some reason) and now he’s with AVALANCHE (ditto), who are trying to take down the Mako reactors and save the planet. He tries to put on this persona that he’s above it all–a Japanese motif long predating the anime cliché, noted by Huizinga in his foundational game studies opus, Homo Ludens–but that’s a little undermined by how weak Cloud actually starts out being, how little Materia and equipment and experience points he has, and then by this red flash warning, this liminal thing between logos, the word, reason, and more sensory impressions, light and sound and feeling.
Is it some buried component of his personality, or his perception of his ideal self, speaking to him here? Is it the Materia, that crystallization of the spiritual force of the planet speaking through him? In all, it points towards an enigma which it will take most of the game for us to restore to some sort of clarity.
With all that said, the boss fight itself is kind of underwhelming.
The stronger the counterattack the thing uses, if you do mess up and trigger it, shooting lasers out of its tail, the quicker it gives you a Limit Break to counterattack in turn. The Limit Break is something we can talk about another time, but how does Materia–and I think this leads us back to the Aeris scene with the Mako spring in the intro–function symbolically like the warning: this is not what it seems? We run into a boss where we have to learn how to invest in some degree of patience in order to correctly fight him, then we learn something new about ourselves, the fact that we have a Limit Break and can use that as well as this Materia we find. That’s all strong evidence that from these first moments, the game is a representation of how to act in a situation where known territory has dissipated, where you are now relying on unknown tools, learning what they are in the course of using them, and learning where you are in the course of exploring.
The game starts in medias res, with the sense that you’re a rebel, even a terrorist.
You don’t really know what you’re doing. It’s only after you’ve destroyed the reactor’s guardians and, under the pressure of the timer, made your escape, only as that focus, single-minded like the tracks of the trains you leap down from at first, then onto the back of another making your getaway, begins to fade–only then do you find out innocent people have died due to your actions.
This mirrors the way some of the enemy encounters here break with the random encounters: you can see the enemy before you fight, faceless soldiers built more or less like Cloud, blocking your way, and you can try to avoid them. This mirrors, too, the way we’re only able to see certain things with the game’s camera. It’s not something you can move around; the camera is fixed. It follows you to an extent, but it doesn’t obey you, it seldom shows you a first-person view. So the stylized fighting system, the stylized view of everything, tend to schematize your relationship to Cloud and to the world, leaving a certain distance, a degree of unreliability and moral ambiguity.
Caveat emptor.
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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