Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
To recap: Final Fantasy VII doesn’t start with you looking at Cloud. It starts with you looking at the stars, which turn out to be whatever Aeris is looking at, and then at Aeris’ gaze. That cinematic touch will be worth bearing in mind, foreshadowing what we will learn about this cosmos later. Meteor and Jenova and the Ancients and what this game is interested in showing us about them–it all begins as this little glimpse of beauty and light down an alleyway, and this girl who has caught sight of it, who can linger there only briefly. Her footfalls clicking in the silence are the only sound, and then we’re back in the sudden rush of cars and noise and movement. There is this beautiful thing that’s being encroached upon by darkness and tumult on all sides, but that fact doesn’t detract from it, but makes it tenacious of life. The light in the darkness turns out to be what powers even the oppressive regime of Shinra, their reactors drawing upon this power that they don’t understand, in order to prop up a vision of life they can never realize.
We find out soon that those in the slums beneath can’t even see the light of the sun. It’s not just that they’re impoverished in economic terms, but that they lack access to the same perspective as those above. The irony is that even those exalted ones are blind in their own way to the natural phenomena of sun and stars and the infinitude of existence that they represent. Nobody chooses be in the slums, we’re told. How, then, did Cloud and the others end up there? And what does choosing to get out of the slums look like? Obviously AVALANCHE is trying to effect change with their eco-terrorism, but they’re also making mistakes, killing innocent people. They’re in kind of hell where the shades of people walking around, not fully human, not fully dead, serve as a massive labor pool for Shinra. In control of the media, Shinra puts out a very limited kind of story about their own values and about AVALANCHE’s motives. Still, swayed by that propaganda, people come to this city from other places, drawn to it by opportunities for gain. Cloud goes to join SOLDIER pursuing a misguided ideal of his hero Sephiroth. Tifa has come, too, for reasons we don’t fully understand yet, to find him. As for Barret, we learn about his story later, his motivations for organizing this movement. But we never really see the background of the Shinra bosses and what they’re all about. We will get a glimpse of it through a peephole at Don Corneo’s, and then through the figure of Cait Sith, but the dominant conflict with Shinra is ideological, not personal. It’s a strawman for capitalism, easy to detest, but still unclear how to determine what the alternative might be as long as we’re inside it.
Such is this Midgar you find yourself in, rather than beginning in Cloud’s hometown, as would be the case in most RPGs. That hometown’s called Nibelheim, another Germanic name drawn from Norse myth, where it refers to the misty underworld. Either way, rather than beginning in sort of a comforting, safe place that is estuary-like, one you must leave in order to face the dangers of the world, you’re in an oppressive, prison-like place from the start. You’ll need to break out of Midgar, just as you’ll need to develop the identities of your characters, returning to the places they originally come from in the course of gaining a fuller perspective to see the world as it is, rather than just the dystopian city which is our initial world.
Of the characters we’ve met so far, Barret stands out immediately as having the clearest purpose. He’s physically striking, with his dark skin, his bulk, his beard; where Cloud has the archetypal sword, Barret has a Gatling gun that has been grafted to his arm. This admixture of sci-fi gun and fantasy sword does more than add the variety of long-range weapons to your melee combat. It tells us something about the characters, too. Barret sets the tone for everything in the beginning, leading the infiltration of the reactor. There’s this funny competition between him and Cloud. He cares so much, while Cloud tries to care so little; he goes in guns blazing, while Cloud is a little more distant, actually. We see that Barret’s got his soft side, too. He has a kid back at the home base, Marlene. The civilizing effect of love for this child is mixed with the passionate protectiveness she has engendered in him. Quick to swear and quick to fight, now he’s fighting on the side of good as he sees it. He has a very simplistic way of going about achieving his goal–by blowing things up–so whether he’s doing good or not is a real question. That antipathy between Cloud and Barret, the mercenary relativist and the true believer, will be recapitulated in various ways throughout the game.
So in the midst of the garish mechanization everywhere, mitigated only by a glimpse of Aeris, or the barbaric splendor of Cloud’s preposterous sword, we see in Barret this composite figure of humanity with the destructive potential of the industry around him. He’s a union of opposites; he has in part become what he hates most. At least part of him is made similar to the reactors and their guardians, and yet he can use it to fight against them. He appears, from this perspective, a more fully rounded character than Cloud, because he’s taken these oppositions into himself. He pushes back against the sick society around him, holding himself in the tension between wielding a destructive weapon and becoming a person in the second half of his life who is something more than his violent profession, living for the next generation. He’s also part of a community, even if it’s just the misfits of AVALANCHE, whereas Cloud is a wandering spirit who goes where the money is, without any history except that which Tifa knows. Cloud’s hovering above the earth, if we want to use that imagery. He’s not connected, while Barret has Biggs and Wedge (names lifted from Star Wars or FFVI) and Jessie; they live alongside each other in this very cozy hideout underneath the jukebox. In the juxtaposition of Cloud with Barret, the game poses the question, how do you change the world: pay up to destroy the prevailing order, or use the money for Marlene’s schoolin’?
About an hour into the game comes the first chance to make any real choices about what to do next, the first glimmer of freedom to explore. You’re done talking with Barret and Tifa for the moment, having watched the scene about the promise (which we’ll still need to consider), and now you’re wandering around interacting with the local NPCs. You can walk into their houses, while the slums’ groovy music plays, and there’s small treasures there; despite the gloominess weighing down the people, there’s still a faint hope within them, too. The train conductor, for instance, talks about the joy and the sorrow of life. A mom near your hideout says she was so annoyed by her son when he was here, but now she misses him when he’s gone. All these sort of nuggets of wisdom which, when you’re first going through the game as a kid, you’re liable to read right over or skip entirely, are essential bits and pieces of real human experience. A train conductor distilling down the shape of his life for many years into the pithy sentiment, life is full of joy and sadness, is really quite profound, especially when you consider the train imagery throughout the game. Or the idea that the people around you right now you may take for granted because you can’t imagine not having them around, but the moment they’re gone, you miss them for the rest of your life–what about Cloud’s mother, or Tifa’s?
Walking around, talking to everybody and getting all those little hints of what’s taking place alongside the main story, and thematically embedded within it, you’ll find other things that are more immediately practical. The little training room with its All Materia plays with making Cloud the expert on everything, the people there asking him questions on your behalf. That’s the game’s way of letting you learn without too overt a tutorial, through watching the little kids discover Limit Breaks and using magic on each other. There’s a light tone to it, but then when you look at it later, knowing what happens as the story moves on–what’s in store for the slums, and for Cloud in the final boss battle of all–then the Beginner’s Hall takes on a fair bit of pathos. That combination of joy and sorrow again, humor and seriousness, is the mark of sophistication masked as simplicity. We get the nuances of these people’s lives, making the best of a bad situation, while AVALANCHE tries to make the situation itself better, but potentially makes it worse–everybody is dealing with these consequences emotionally and nobody seems to know what to do to improve things. There may be no analytic answer to that, but the hold this game has on our imaginations suggests there is a mythic one. What an epic like FFVII does is to weave the elements of comedy and tragedy into a greater whole.
To historicize in a way that hopefully won’t distort things too much, what is involved in making this game and playing it also entails the encounter, not just between possible lives and modes of storytelling, but between cultures, as the Japanese creative team and western audiences find their way in a world that is very different from what either knows, being an amalgam of both. Allusions to Norse mythology, like Midgar and Nibelheim, within the dystopian-anime aesthetic, suggests the beginnings of a sort of worldwide culture, a world-encircling mythology that is going to break through in this game. Could that be why FFVII struck so many people so deeply, because it opens up a world mythology, or reveals some underlying structure of mythology which is true universally?
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What that’s going to look like exactly remains to be seen, but the game presents a collage taking bits and pieces from each culture: some Norse mythology here, some spiky yellow hair there; to its fantasy and sci-fi generic stock adding in chunky contemporary political and environmental questions. In the city itself, there’s a combination of archetypal symbols, masculine in that the Shinra building reaches up into the heavens, feminine in that it’s girdled by a circle. If it seems like I’m circling around the point, or that I’m being circumspect here, I’m hoping that the discourse is nevertheless appropriate to the complexity of the topic. What this game seems to be trying to do is nothing less than to figure out the world, to tell the story of the world in which we all now live. It’s something which none of us have figured out (thank goodness), which is why we continue to return to this game years later. If not to replay it (or its remakes), then just to think about it.
Maybe you have the soundtrack on in the background as you do so. There’s a metaphor in every track for what I’m getting at. Uematsu’s music is by no means entirely western, but he does use a lot of western-style instruments and orchestration, certain canons of hearing music which are classically worked out, but which in themselves are built on things which are much deeper and untranslatable. Across all cultures there’s music, rhythm and melody and all that. You can just hear that music play and it sort of takes you back, connects the past with what lies in the future, in ways we can only try to articulate. Until next time, happy listening!
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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