Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “Just Skinned Knees”

Just an interlude for this time, before we go on. Remember:

……You all right?

……Can you hear me?

Cloud

……Yeah……

Back then…… You could get by with just skinned knees……

Cloud

……What do you mean by ‘back then’?

What about now? Can you get up?

Cloud

……What do you mean by ‘that time’? ……What about now?

……Don’t worry about me. You just worry about yourself now.

Cloud

……I’ll give it a try.

                                                                   –according to the FFVII script at yinza.com

I was wondering about that language.

Would it be fair to take it not only as a voice talking to Cloud but a voice talking to us, now and in the future, whenever we’re playing FFVII again, so as to recall to us the state in which we first played the game?

As kids playing the game for the first time, there’s not much at stake. There’s none of these second thoughts. We lived in a simpler world, just as Cloud once lived in a simpler world–or so it seems in hindsight. Returning to the game now, not only are we seeing it with new eyes, but we are seeing the person that we once were, and the person that we’ve grown into since.

The game itself offers the fixed point from which to see the emotions and the choices in the person that we wanted to be when we were young compared to the one that we have become. Whether FFVII wants us explicitly entertaining that notion, to let it serve as connective tissue drawing together past and present in relationship, we can’t help hearing those words land with additional force now. In the same way as Cloud resolving to give it a try, we introject ourselves with these characters in their process of differentiation. 

Watching Cloud get at this idea, aren’t we consciously doing what the first time through we did unconsciously? It’s a parallel question to that within the game, about Cloud consciously constructing himself as the hero, or embodying the emergence of a heroism that he himself does not intend. In the eruption of memories we get later, I would say signs point to this being a potentially unconscious activity.

So what? In the role-playing aspect of this game, juxtaposed against the time between replays, there is a way of dramatizing the difference between conscious and unconscious activity. It’s brilliant how this stuff bubbles up. It seems fair, if a little preposterous on the face of it, to ascribe intention on that to the game designers, to see them building FFVII to be capable of communicating with the player’s older self ten, twenty, an indefinite number of years later.

Replaying the game at a sufficiently long interval after playing it for the first time, however, emerges as integral to the overall thrust of the story. Who Cloud is, his identity and his relationships, is at the heart of FFVII. It is about choices and dialogue with others, but also about self-talk, self-construction, and the way in which latent potential is pulled out by experience. This all mirrors us playing the game. It’s at least worth posing these questions about intentions on the part of Cloud, the player, and the creators, if only to better see how the game works them out.

One core purpose of video games, then, or of any story worth retelling, might be to act as a corrective to one’s actual path in life. As children we play games imagining we want to be the hero; as adults, we get to see how wayward we’ve become. If we’re still young enough, perhaps we can still get back on our way, just as Dante’s pilgrim is portrayed doing in his Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

–Mandelbaum trans.

Plainly the commedia is not reducible to this one aspect any more than FFVII is dedicated to self-help, but part of what this game supplies is that same function, to tell us where we are along our own journeys in life, where we have fallen short, and how far we have to go; what we have sacrificed, what we’ve missed out on, and what we’ve achieved, getting towards what we wish to become. 

Is it too large of a question or inappropriate to ask, as we might ask of art or education, what the game is for?

Like creative and educational endeavors, play seems to be a shared experience with ramifying possibilities that more closely or more distantly come to consciousness for the player. In the Final Fantasy series, we can squint and see the finality of the characters (generally) not coming back for a reprise, the message there being: you are the person you are just one time; but the fantasy of it is that you get to pause and look as if from outside, talk about it, and replay it.

Allowing us to play and replay as Cloud and the rest, the games guide us through holding up ideals to shoot for, signposts we can ignore at our peril. Their story becomes our guide, much as when Dante follows Virgil and then Beatrice as guides through his fantastic story. Taking narratives as representations of reality, it makes sense to put ourselves as characters within them. After all, we need some way to orient ourselves within psychological and social reality–and for Dante, in the cosmos as a transcendent whole. For all our skinned knees, we don’t just live in physical reality. 

If part of what we are looking for when we play games for a second time or read stories for a second time is to orient ourselves in relation to our own path in life, then part of how we judge a narrative to be good or bad is according to what degree it enables us to do that.

Final Fantasy VII actually seems to prompt us to make this demand of it. In drawing us back to the way of understanding ourselves, it functions as one of those epic narratives, as a reflection through which we can see ultimate questions being explored. Whether we choose to read it or play it as such is another question, one we would hope to see settled with FFVII taking its (subordinate) place alongside the likes of Dante, Virgil, and Statius in the course of time. Surely the most important art is not just in museums, and the most important learning does not take place in schools. 

What about the specifics of this canvas, this text, this game? How does FFVII seem to reflect us back to ourselves?

We land in a world that is fractured not only in terms of the society, the dystopian city with sectors in which people live cut off from one another, but our main character Cloud’s own memory and psyche are fractured. To play this game through and save the world, then, involves restoring this fractured city and self alike. The player finds in doing so the insight which might get brought up through everyday activities, too, that we push away rather than reintegrating: that you, too, are a fractured individual, living in a society riddled with fissures.

And yet you feel the pull of some story, some guide, to find a way to restore the world–not only by yourself, but as part of a community. Cloud, as well as everyone else, will begin to restore this fractured whole in fellowship with other people. As I write this, it is as a personal example of doing just that. During this playthrough of the game I reconnected with old friends, and writing about it I hope to connect with new ones. Even this conversation is a part of it.

When a lot of us first played through the game, we totally identified with Cloud’s arrogance, not with his brokenness. Here was this SOLDIER, aloof in a way that seemed impressive, even though we knew nothing about what SOLDIER was, nor about Cloud himself.

Encapsulated there is an excellent representation of how we think we know ourselves whole when we know just the smallest, most superficial piece. Cloud had a giant sword, so he was obviously much stronger than the others; I was blind to the fact that Cloud was essentially just the same as they were, and that with the Materia system, party members were basically interchangeable. I was blinded by his pride, or potentially by my own, overcome with a pride of unreflecting identification with the hero-like patriotism or rather jingoism which had no other outlet.

With growing up comes realizing what I’ve actually accomplished myself and what I owe to others who’ve helped me, and how vastly the latter outweighs the former. On the one hand, I do still identify with plenty of things I played no part in achieving, but I think I’m beginning to parse that out from what’s really my own, in a way that we will see Cloud explicitly do when he has his psychotic break. When we talk about what Mako, Jenova cells, and Meteor, in particular, might mean, we’ll look at how they simulate an empowering but corrupting form of integration, eroding your free will and leading you towards a goal that is not your own. 

Casting back over these first few essays, what are some other landmarks for framing our understanding of FFVII and how that understanding has changed and should change?

There’s the historical aspect, reflecting the fraught experience of the Japanese nation and its relationship to the West. There’s what we might call the environmental context, though that doesn’t quite capture it. Even as a kid I had the sense that there was something interesting about the Final Fantasy series’ obsession with elemental powers, from the crystals in earlier games and elemental magic, to the Materia that is the crystallization of Mako energy here.

What it means to save the world in these games is always also about understanding the kind of energy which gives rise to light, order, and life itself. That idea of your connection to the energy of the Earth might seem a little new-agey, but as a fan of EarthBound, I was all about it. When these ideas are new to you as a kid, they’re quite powerful, especially considering that my neighbors and friends, people that I looked up to, all enjoyed these kinds of games, and that’s how I got into them in the first place. 

But it wasn’t just saving the world. As a kid, the relationships with Tifa and Aeris and Barrett were more immediate, too. I definitely identified more with Cloud then and was more invested in how I reacted to the other characters.

The way that Cloud and Tifa talked on the water tower in their hometown and swung their legs over the edge–that’s another great image to me of what it’s like to be a child. Everything is bigger than it should be, like you haven’t grown into it quite yet.

In the subsequent flashbacks with Tifa and her father, too, there’s something very archetypal and fairy-tale about that incitement to adventure. Then Aeris and her flower garden in the slums, and jumping over the rooftops with her–all those images had a poetic, romantic effect on me as a kid.

In a way, my induction into a love of art and literature was neither from looking at art nor reading books, but was from playing these games. They were very formative at the time, such that now looking back I try to judge them from the standpoint of a little bit more critical distance, it takes an effort, but at the same time it’s the natural thing now to make that effort. I learned by playing FFVII to see the distance between real experience and the game. 

The goal now becomes about learning to play these games with other people in the most enlightening, illuminating fashion. How do you get people interested in doing that? How do you get people interested in learning?–that’s my main question. I haven’t amounted to much so far as a teacher, but still I think it’s the right question for someone aspiring to teach to be asking. And that’s something the game seems to open up: a way to get people interested in learning and thinking about the experience that otherwise would go unexamined.

What’s paramount, what makes it a game, is the fun experience of playing it… and yet over time, for me anyway, more and more of what’s fun about FFVII or any of these classic RPGs is inquiring into its meaning. Playing, whether past or present, is still what provides the impetus necessary to use your attention to focus on the elements that create that layered experience. It’s almost as if you need the game to hit you like Meteor, and then the impact that it has on you is what draws your attention back to the question, to try to understand what just happened. It’s not just the world that gets hit by Meteor but us–and healed, too, by Holy. 

This game has had a real impact any way you look at it.

What Final Fantasy VII does better than any game I’ve ever played is to show how the chaos in the world is reflected in the psyche of those in the world. Where exactly that chaos comes from is a very interesting question, of course.

Meteor comes from outside the world only because someone on the world calls it forth… Is it the chaos in the mind of one person that’s reflected in all the events in this world, or is it vice versa? Is it fallen human nature, or an illness to be treated along with gradual amelioration of the social context? Is nature such that psyche and matter interact with each other, or is one of these just an epiphenomenon or misconstrual of the other?

Dante’s perspective suggests that going to the bottom of things, literally, is the only way out of the labyrinth. We’ll plunge into Wall Market and the sewers beneath Don Corneo’s next time, before beginning the long re-ascent.

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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