Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “The Flawed Mandala”

“One should learn even from one’s enemies.”

-Ovid, Metamorphoses

Having poured out a libation to Biggs and Wedge and Jessie, we pick up where we stopped last time, right in front of the Shinra HQ building, presented with the option whether we want to bust in the main entrance or sneak up the stairs. Whichever choice we make, we’ll get to hear substantially the same conversation, our heroes either huffing and puffing in the stairwell or humming along in the elevator. 

Barret

So there are times when even you fight for other people. I am impressed.

Cloud

Who cares if you’re impressed…?

Barret

Y’know, I ain’t so good at sayin’ this, but… Sorry… for lotsa things.

In the course of the corporate dungeon crawl we’ll see several of the upper floors, including a library full of some very interesting books, a model city, and a trail of blood leading to the President murdered at his desk. All the evidence points to Sephiroth having returned. It’s too late for Shinra, but if we can settle accounts with him, perhaps the planet will be saved. Accompanying this new focus for the story, the gameplay ramps up with a series of boss fights and a motorcycle chase, and then we finally make it out of Midgar.  

Along the way, our party may well get wiped out if we aren’t careful, which brings us to one other key function of those save points: like a climber’s pitons anchored in the rock, we fall only as far the previous save. Still, redoing what you’ve just done can be infuriating. How humiliating, to lose in this children’s game! What a waste of time, with all the important things there are to do… From a certain standpoint, that’s the price for the good values instilled by these games: foresight, patience, and grit; paying attention to prepping party members before boss fights, developing the rudiments of strategy based on the enemies’ strengths and weaknesses. Or just remember you can totally cheat by using grenades on everything. Whatever keeps you from smashing a controller and wasting more time.  

The emotional connection we make to the narrative, then, is not just nostalgia and enthusiasm, but is also comprised of frustration or devastation, that moment where we are thrust into freefall. I don’t know if you really get that in other media, but it certainly forms part of the irresistible allure of games. If I want to move forward in a book, I read it. It can’t stop me, even if I don’t understand what I’m reading–I may read all the more quickly for that. It doesn’t feel like losing.

In FFVII, skill and attention is rewarded with concrete progress. It’s part of what makes a video game compelling by its very form, regardless of the content. 

Anyhow, as a kid I always took the stairs, so this time I rushed in for a change. Dispatching some weak soldiers, your party terrorizes all the people in the foyer, who run from you like a herd of sheep. The company shop is still operating despite the chaos, though the shopkeeper won’t let you open the treasure chest in the back, hearkening back to the old days of RPG weapons shops with their loot behind the counter. There’s a young couple so entranced by an advertisement on TV for Shinra automobiles that they only flee when you come close to look. In my case, the game froze at this point, as if Cloud were mesmerized by the flashy graphics and flowing specs. Again, you don’t usually have a book that just suddenly glitches out on you.

While I lost only about ten minutes of gameplay, it’s just a little reminder of how reliant we are on the hardware and software working properly. Without them, no amount of skill or care will let us progress in the story, impeding any fun experience or the leisure to expatiate upon it. 

With that said, the player is normally in the godlike position of standing outside of time, freely dipping into or out of the laws of the game. But then when our parent would come in and say we need to go outside, or now when adult responsibilities of our own arise, we can’t play our video game anymore, and all of a sudden the time we’ve put into it becomes real. The all-powerful ego developed in isolation is suddenly challenged, and crumbles. There’s no reloading from a previous save to get that time back.

In a couple of interesting ways, the Shinra building plays with that god’s-eye viewpoint, both in the Midgar model room and in the ventilation shaft connecting, of all things, the toilet and the boardroom, delightfully establishing a kind of parity between the two. In the President’s final business meeting, you see how petty the movers and shakers of Midgar society really are. Palmer, Scarlet, Heidegger–each of them is out for their own little niche, just as each section of the library is demarcated from the others. They have their power over some little circumscribed area of life and are out to maximize that at all costs, whereas your vision as the player–seeing it through Cloud and the others’ perspective–is elevated, literally and figuratively. We see it all play out thanks to this little breakdown of infrastructure, the toilet ventilation shaft built so as to lead straight to the meeting room–or vice versa. The same goes for how we run into the head of security working out in the gym, treated to the broad irony of his boasts of how seriously he takes his job while our party is right there, running amok. There’s a lot more funny stuff in Final Fantasy VII than I realized as a kid. 

The image of Midgar with its component parts invites more than ever that comparison to a mandala that we have alluded to from the start. Piecing it together, completing that image, we are brought back in turn to the self embodying it, incomplete just as the model is. This points up the problem with focusing on one aspect of reality rather than the sort of net whole; rather than developing that in us which would permit a fuller perspective, that logos whereby we see how things work together and our place within it, we see how prone we are to partiality. Shinra’s project has tended towards developing and rewarding an absolutist perspective, disconnecting its denizens from the goals of the whole; it has lost sight of the goal of maintaining the planet on which it depends for life. We can become so blind to that which is most important to us, that which we rely upon in order to live, that we can actively work towards its destruction. We might even pretend like the small world in which we develop skill and competency–the game, the city–is the only world, out of neglect or fear of the unknown space around us. 

In Shinra’s case, the flaw seems to be hubris. In Hojo, the scientist we meet on one of the upper floors, we have another take on this: he seems to represent the intellect derailed from morality. So confident in the sufficiency of his knowledge, he claims you won’t kill him because he’s the only one who can operate the delicate machinery–and then Barrett just starts shooting. 

Also near to the heart of the mandala here, we come upon Jenova in her little chamber reminiscent of Akira. For all that Shinra’s master plan to get Neo-Midgar up and running in the Promised Land depends upon this powerful being, they seem to have calculated without considering the ultimate living destructive force whose mother she is. They were still under the impression that Sephiroth had died, whereas if they’d consulted their instruction booklets, they would have seen he is MIA. Like Odysseus, it’s unclear what his fate has been after the war with Wutai; like the suitors from The Odyssey, Shinra assumes that he’s gone, only to be destroyed in dramatic fashion on his return. 

Within the game, we’ll want to compare that image of the impaled President to the Midgar serpent once we get there. Cloud and Tifa will divulge more when we get to Kalm, but for now our information about Sephiroth is limited to rumors. 

At this point Rufus, Shinra’s son and heir, sweeps into the plot, his arrival almost as unexpected as Sephiroth’s. He makes another alter ego for Cloud as well, and indeed their one-on-one combat foreshadows the highly symbolic final battle of the game. Sephiroth’s presence is still a matter of gossip, though Palmer claims to have seen him, almost in a negative version of post-Resurrection Gospel narratives. Again, we’ll see how FFVII alludes to and perhaps inverts a lot of Christian imagery among its countless mythological borrowings.

Plainly, Midgar has the form of a mandala but it does not actually have the content or the spiritual quality of one. Traditionally a magic circle with a figure in the center such as a Bodhisattva, in Midgar instead we have the ring of reactors around the slain Shinra. Traditionally, between the center and circumference we have order, structure, and protection from outside elements oftentimes shown as demons or serpents; but if Midgar is a mandala, it is one where the monsters and beasts are within it. It does not protect those within from the outside, because in our entire time within the lower city we see absolute disorder, rot, and decay, and the violence only escalates the closer we get to the seat of power. 

Part of this distorted mandala aspect consists in a kind of vertical bifurcation, for another way to characterize Midgar is by the demiurgic quality built into it. We have the Mayor partway up the tower, who, we find out, doesn’t really do anything. He’s subsumed within the corporate structure; though nominally the political leader of the city, he literally works there for the President of the power company. That’s what we might call the demiurgic quality of the Mayor, as false god placed to rule over the city. Behind him you have the real, non-governmental ruler, Shinra, who believes that he has structured the world such that he is safe, on a path towards unstinting progress, and free to continue Midgar”s domination of the world without consequences–AVALANCHE, Sephiroth, and the Planet’s own defenses notwithstanding. 

The principle at the center of Midgar, then, as we might have guessed by looking at its circumference all along, is power, which is doomed. It’s a Tower of Babel whose builders speak to different interests and aims. Mayor Domino describes himself as a librarian essentially, cooking the books for his corporate overlords. It seems right that Shinra loses perspective partly because he’s able to see that there’s a false leader below him, but he mistakenly takes himself then as the real deal. Domino, being below, can see that the real thing is definitely not Shinra and this house of cards that he’s got going. 

Jenova in name and aspect just skirts being sacrilegious, but brings in all manner of religious and metaphysical speculations. What are we to make of this biological weapon, this freak of nature which is also potentially the god? Do we have access to its wisdom? Is it going to destroy us? Or is it something that we can have power over? Jenova will later be described as coming from the sky–like Meteor, or the atomic bomb. Just as the player has this god’s-eye perspective, she once must have, too, but now lacks a head. 

The true source of power, greater and above the demiurgic middle manager Mayor or the false god Shinra, however, remains to be reckoned with. So, too, its would-be Sophia, its gnostic wisdom which operates as an intermediary between the transcendent reality and its creation. From this standpoint, Shinra may be the ruler of the physical world, but Sephiroth represents a wisdom outclassing any he possesses, whether in the Mayor’s library or Hojo’s lab. His sonship to Jenova–transparently a stand-in for Jehovah–positions Sephiroth as a distorted Christ-figure. Jenova herself, however, is a dismembered amalgam of sky-god and Great Mother, requiring a head or a set of eyes in order to act in the world. Corrupt idols are at the heart of this mandala. We will observe that they, in turn, are still not the ultimate powers at play in this world. 

Sephiroth has a very essential idea of who he is as predetermined and necessary to carry out at the risk of destroying the entire world on the other side are roles that can be taken. While there are definitely predispositions for magic users or brawlers, the materia system confers the ability to change in order to suit the roles of the party. The game is already saying something about this essential individual as embodied in Sephiroth, and then ourselves the player the hero and the heroes who can fit other roles. Individual as isolated and as part of a greater whole. Shinra building and obviously we’re going to eventually circle back around later to the broken mandala of Midgar.

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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