FFVII Myth & Materia: “The Fall of the Pillar”
9 min read
One needs a vision of the promised land in order to have the strength to move.
War and Peace
As we mosey around the Train Graveyard, trying out our new Steal Materia against random enemies who liven up the moody depot with its derelict cars waiting to be recoupled, a little discussion of battle strategy might be worth bringing up. Final Fantasy VII transmits all the familiar conventions of turn-based combat to the then-next-gen system, but it offers a few ways to mix it up, too. Grenades and other one-time use items can deal flashy damage, but somehow they never make it into my repertoire at all. I always just put Cover Materia on Cloud to ensure he gets plenty of Limit Breaks, and leave him in the front row to attack. I’ll give the others Fire and All Materia so they can end battles quickly, and keep Restore equipped but generally try to use it outside of combat so as not to waste turns.
At such an early stage of the game, there frankly isn’t a lot of strategy, but that only highlights how fun it is to try to make the most of what we do have at this point. Much of that fun, fantastic element comes through in the restorative items providing our stealables and findables here, Potions and Ethers and Phoenix Downs. It might never have occurred to us to question them, so we probably didn’t think about what those words meant: Ether, redolent of old medical practice and theoretical physics; Down, not as in KO’d, but as in the feathers of the mythical bird which is reborn, as we’ll see later at Fort Condor. A couple of new status effects, introduced along with the Limit Break mechanics, Sad and Fury, and their corresponding recovery/inducement items, Tranquilizers and Hypers, riff on the very modern incidence of depression and ADHD, especially in young people, with their accompanying prescriptions. (Or, in Don Corneo’s case, the Hyper might be an aphrodisiac.)
A good strategy to maximize efficiency as we’re playing through is to bump up the battle and text speed settings. Not to say we want to rush through even a relatively minor linking segment of the game like this, impatient to get to the good stuff. After all, what could be better than this? We’re partnered up with Tifa and Aeris, and most of AVALANCHE are still alive for a little longer. Becoming too goal-directed, we might forget the super-ordinate goal of exploring, appreciating those relationships which reveal depths to our characters’ personalities that we hadn’t accessed, that perhaps weren’t manifest in the world before we sought them out.
Our party, ourselves, but also the NPCs have more to them than we might expect. What happens in the collapse of the plate is deeply troubling to the people in the surrounding slums. Destabilized emotionally, they practically all change their previous text to talk about it. From atomized individuals, they begin to give the impression of a community, expressing themselves in the same way, about the same subject. A lost unity can be reforged, oddly enough, when things collapse that we never expected to lose, whether they be physical ceilings or intangible fallings-apart of laws or customs. We’re stunned into acknowledging them, like these NPCs.
We’ll see more of this sky-falling mentality later, but it’s foreshadowed in a couple other interesting ways already. Cloud’s fall into the church should leap to mind. A subtler one is in Don Corneo’s bedroom, where the Chinese character for Heaven, Tian or T’ien, adorns his sheets. The bedroom is his heaven and yet the trapdoor to the sewers at the same time. Heaven as the Promised Land is also the subject of the disturbing quasi-messianic sex fantasy Cloud can spy on through the keyhole of one of the Honey Bee rooms. It seems to involve President Shinra himself, or someone role-playing him, being acclaimed as the savior of society amid lightning flashes and religious chanting. Fortunately, we can’t see anything very clearly in this case, though it tracks with some of the language that starts to come through more distinctly, more pieces of the story falling into place as we go along.
In the shootout on the pillar support, Tseng and the Turks, who we might recognize from Aeris’ flashbacks, introduce the Promised Land into the storyline proper, this place of supreme happiness spoken of by the Ancients. Shinra as pseudo-political, corporate God–such seems to be the connotation of the name in Japanese–clearly goes in for the smiting of foes and divine wrath, very Old Testament, and conveys the tragic likeness between fanatical terrorists and oppressive rulers which echoes throughout the ancient and modern history of the Middle East. That other symbol from Don Corneo’s office, the twin dragons on his rug, intertwining with each other like DNA, suggest a kind of infinity to the spiral of violence, and also a mirror symbol: the enemy confronting us feels the same pain we do. Whatever Shinra has done in the past, whatever AVALANCHE has done to provoke them, no one thought they would let the plate fall. It leaves the populace shocked and traumatized.
Barrett’s ideology is basically vindicated: Shinra has attacked the planet and the source of life; they seek ultimate power in the vision of the Promised Land; now they show themselves willing to sacrifice their own subjects in that pursuit: so by any means necessary he’s going to stop that from happening. His way of going about it, however, is shown to be deeply flawed by this dramatic set-back. Destructive frontal assaults of the kind which have led to this terrible reprisal will have to be superseded by the process of the development of character, just as the battleground of Midgar and the foe Shinra will ultimately be left behind. We see the beginnings of this in Barrett’s consternation at having left Marlene alone, when he is confronted by Elmyra; his deeper motivations, and his adopted daughter’s background, only emerge later.
Our first glimpse of the true scale of the game, akin to this theme of the Promised Land, comes in going out past the church to the big field on the outskirts of Midgar. We can see the possibility of a green world outside the city and even a bit of blue sky out at the very edge of the screen. Along with the zoomed out, panoramic view, we get this subdued hint of the overworld musical theme there, muted because we’re still within the fence. Only after completing this industrial prison-like area, which takes a pretty long time, will we get the sort of Final Fantasy overworld experience we might have been expecting. One of our first destinations will be a Chocobo farm, in fact, as if to reward our perseverance. And only much later will we find a way back into Midgar.
It’s an image of childhood, or adolescence, where we can see something of the future, yet are not yet capable of attaining to it. FFVII thus varies the typical RPG hometown motif, though it’s still true we have to leave in order to complete the quest, to grow out of the boundaries of our childish perspective and see ourselves as a speck on the map of the world.
With Aeris being kidnapped and taken off in the helicopter, captured by the Turks after all these years, for Cloud, especially, but for Barrett and Tifa, too, the motivation for going up against Shinra radically shifts. From fighting back because they are sucking the lifeblood of the Planet, we now have to rescue Aeris. The familiar save-the-princess archetype smooths over some of the complexities of the plot thus far. Shinra seizes that terrorist mantle with their attack, and the moral high ground is recovered by our rag-tag band.
We develop a connection to a person, a friend, rather than just a disembodied idea of resistance or freedom. By giving us a distinct character to get to know, FFVII, more so than in Mario or Zelda games, develops the figure of Aeris into something like the Anima or Eros, the principle of coherence and connection itself as the goal, personified. The person we’re trying to save brings together our other characters to trust in each other. The game also taps into our incentive-reward system, keeps us shelling out quarters or springing for sequels, because despite the group’s differences they’re in pursuit of the same goal, like how at the end of a battle they all have their specific pose to celebrate.
Love, in short, draws Cloud into life with others.
I interpret it as a spiritual bond rather than a romantic one, primarily, developing between the party members. The end of disc one, but also the conversations on entering Shinra HQ, will show more of that dynamic.
As Aeris’ bodyguard and Tifa’s promise-keeper, Cloud is increasingly brought out of his pose of apathy, and the battle on the pillar creates another level of connection through the deaths of the NPCs on the AVALANCHE team. Their sacrifice foreshadows that greater one Aeris will make, and it means the surviving members of Avalanche have to rededicate themselves to a task that is no longer about the environmental crisis alone, but for the lives of their friends.
Undeveloped as these characters are, partly reflecting Cloud’s perception of them, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie also seem to provide recognizable foils to our party members. In the light of their pathetic deaths, previous interactions, like a stray remark about how many people died to get the codes for the first mission, take on greater pathos. Biggs is kind of like a poor man’s Cloud, trying to be tough. Wedge, too, talks about how someday he’s going to be famous, and that’s exactly what we see young Cloud talking to Tifa about in their flashback. Jessie’s putting the moves on Cloud, but she also seems to be frazzled or distracted whenever he talks to her, so she can’t be watching him too closely.
If Wedge is still dreaming up until his life is cut short, is there some comment there on the limited amount of time we actually have to pursue a dream and realize it, before we become who we will be? We can contrast his fall with the fall that Cloud has a bit earlier. Aeris is there for him, too, but it’s too late for Wedge. Cloud clearly gets the best of the comparison, and yet he’s far from accomplishing the goals he’s set for himself. And Aeris is not long for this world, either.
The new dyad of Marlene and Elmyra, adopted daughter of Barrett and adoptive mother of Aeris, point up again how everybody in this game seems to be playing a role. We are invited to think about heroism at many points, but also the more general problem of individual personality as a role determined by the constellations of others around us, supporting us in ways we may not even realize. Depending on our worldview, we might deal with this idea of the essential nature of individuality, asking whether the self has being or not–whether we are playable characters or not, if you like–and come up with completely different answers. Revisiting classic JRPGs from childhood provides a fascinating framework for addressing the existing traditions of thought on this question, putting the East and West into communication to tell a new story together.
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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