Welcome to our humble Video Game Academy, and welcome back if you’ve been here before. For our part, we sure have. We know it all too well: the familiar feeling of nerves and excitement, the prospect of introducing ourselves all over again, and the challenge of learning everyone’s name. It’s time for the obligatory back to school post once more.
Professor Kozlowski has been busy as anything, consolidating a summer of reading widely in the political, economic, and social sciences into a course which he plans to wrap up shortly, lecture-wise, with the philosophy of language which undergirds any foray into rule-making, though in real time The History of Social Thought, along with the murderer’s row of other classes he’s teaching this semester, has only just begun. Yet he somehow makes time, every week or two, to chat on the Academy discord about games; games also feature prominently in the suggested readings for his students to chose from for their short presentations at the start of every class session. Last week we talked about FFVIII, picking up in Winhill with Laguna, where his long essay on the black sheep of the franchise leaves off.
With a whole series of podcast discussions on FFVII and, some years later now, FFVIII completed at last, the inimitable Alexander Schmid, all-but-dissertation away from his doctorate, and I, your faithful Moogle-like amanuensis, have just launched into a playthrough of FFIX. The course page will be up momentarily in the Current Semester, where you might also notice several more or less unfinished discussion series still lingering. Sooner or later, we’ll get around to them! But we’ve also been reading and talking about books, working on a sort of monograph on literary modernism and the video game medium, in a segment we sometimes record under the moniker Night School.
In a moment here, I’ll finally get around to posting some writing on virtual worlds from a guest speaker and Spokane-area neighbor, Greg Bem, which he has kindly shared. We met through his helping me with a project my students were doing about AI last spring, and he shepherded an anthology of their writing through publication with his very own Carbonation Press.
For all my regular interlocutors, Ben, Alex, and Steve (who’s been on a well-deserved late-summer vacation), guests old and new like Pat and Greg, and all you readers, thanks for your time. I’m in awe that you’d find it worthwhile to visit this digital Video Game Academy, to pause and think for a spell about the possibilities of imagined worlds with us, and feel like that time is well spent upon returning your attention to the wild, inescapable world of natural sunlight and analog continuity. Long may it last!
Jess (photo credits), Ben, and I capitulated to William’s preference for the park over the museum
The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy, edited by Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, was published in 2023 as part of McFarland’s Studies in Gaming. It has the heft of an academic textbook in terms of scholarly accoutrements (footnotes, dense argumentation, etc.) but not in terms of cost or page length. The contents can be viewed on the series website or at The Video Game Library entry; I borrowed a paper copy via interlibrary loan, and would certainly recommend that before buying to anyone interested in reading this sort of text.
My guess is that, like me, the main purpose they would have for doing so, if anyone is so inclined after reading my own crabbed persiflage, would be to cite and quote from the authors so as to enter into the scholarly conversation around the game itself or some related field in which FFVII and the literature on it might serve as fodder for discussion, whether as case studies, evidence for a thesis, or counterexamples to array against another interpretation. For playing the game of academia, in short, with Final Fantasy, this volume is an entirely adequate starting point.
If none of the essays are brilliantly written or persuasive, if none looks like the definitive take on FFVII in this early phase of its influence, the book as a whole nevertheless suggests a noteworthy current of thought forming about some of FFVII‘s core themes and, by its very existence, it shows a willingness on the part of the scholarly community to engage with the game’s undeniable impact on the culture. As for what the nature of that impact and its meaning might prove to be, I’ll venture to say a close reading of the game itself, like Alex and I did a few years ago replaying it for our podcast, would come closer to giving the full picture. So give it a replay, give us a listen, and who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to respond with an epochal study truly worthy of the material. For now, in what follows, I’ll briefly sketch what I see as significant takeaways from the various essays here. As the alphabetically primary editor Cash says, quoting our spikey haired hero in the title of his Introduction, “Let’s Mosey.”
Cid is so done with this meme.
First, let’s not, though. Instead of breezing right through to the essays proper, let’s go on a little side quest to ponder the citational repertoire of this opening piece, since it sets the tone and reveals something about the editorial perspective for the book as a whole. Appropriately enough, the game has the first and last word in Cash’s introduction: “All right, everyone, let’s mosey,” he concludes, having set the temporal scene for the game’s release, highlighted some of the more objective ways in which it stands out in the franchise, and given summaries of each of the essays to follow (9). For a short introduction meant to provide context and perhaps a kind of call to action as to the significance of the work we’re about to study, as well as invite the reader into the volume with a bit of an inside joke, however, Cash’s use of this quote is telling. There is no explanation of the point at which Cloud’s iconic line appears, ie. right at the end of the game in the original localization, nor any attempt to understand the original phrase or how it is used in the Japanese version. The question of the language of the game is effectively sidestepped, here and throughout the book. All the authors would have had to say is that plenty of articles and video essays can help fill in the omission (see Caldwell and Rogers, or consult the Shinra Archaeology Dept translation spreadsheet). Cash’s references are limited to appeals to two Statistica articles about the popularity and demographics of “gamers,” a shout-out to Courcier and El Kanafi’s groundbreaking monograph, The Legend of Final Fantasy VII (though Holleman’s Reverse Design entry is ignored), and an allusion to the “hikikomori phenomenon” and “moral panic” surrounding video game play habits in Japan and the US in Addictive Behavioral Reports (1).
Having set the stage in this somewhat brusque and scattershot manner, the editors then make the decision to structure the presentation of essays according to the unfortunate “narratology/ludology” divide of “Disc 1: Narrative,” “Disc 2: Player Experience,” and “Disc 3: Legacy.” For more (than you probably ever imagined people could care) about this distinction, see the recent Historiographies of Game Studies. It’s too bad, because a disc by disc approach could have actually been incredibly fruitful for the sort of close attention to the unified effect of story, gameplay, and cultural impact in FFVII as these unfold over the course of the game.
Disc 1 leads with one of the stronger essays in the collection, “The Bringer of Light Becomes the Fallen Angel: Sephiroth, Lucifer, and Frankenstein’s Creature,” by Ceschino P. Brooks de Vita. Albeit in service to his focus on the villains, he does a better job than Cash in situating the game and what is at stake, referencing FFVI’s Kefka, Jonah Mitropoulos’s essay on the “Japanese-Shinto ‘value-orientation'” and Shusaku Endo’s Silence (14), along with Neon Genesis Evangelion to help ground the discussion (15). The remainder of the essay is a clear and straightforward comparison of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Creature with Sephiroth, concluding with an intriguing addendum on the women of FFVII as “a significant departure from the follies of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, in which the men repeatedly disregard the potential of the women in their lives to help them” (30). Arguably, the essay’s inclusion of material from Crisis Core and Advent Children expands its scope, but I would have preferred a deeper investigation of such characters as Hojo, to say nothing of Tifa and Aerith who are mostly relegated to the tail end, as they are portrayed in the original release.
The second essay, “Angelus ex Machina: Economic and Environmental Justice in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII,” by Cash, continues this equivocation about the scope of the artifact under consideration in the volume, at least making it plain from the outset that more media than the original game will be brought to bear for this particular essay. It also seeks to tie the expansion of the story’s ambitions, both within FFVII and across the “compilation” it has spawned, to the diminution of its actual effectiveness at developing the core themes Cash is most interested in. This is a subtle and sophisticated argument, and I think Cash has it almost exactly backwards. I hedge with that “almost” only because there is ample evidence that a kind of decline is at work with each new release, insofar as it makes it more difficult to see the ever-compiling FFVII in its entirety as any sort of coherent experience conveying a discernable theme, other than the proposition that fans will keep paying for more of it. In fact, far from diminishing returns, the expansion of the game beyond Midgar and the revelations of Cloud and Sephiroth’s complex relationship to one another and to the Planet they are respectively out to save and to dominate make clear that the political is always, and not only with in the framework of the game, just one manifestation of the mythic. The importance of such themes as environmentalism and class conflict are not, however, thereby diminished, but can be seen in accordance with a larger perspective. I agree with Cash that in later areas such as Corel and Gold Saucer, “providing an arguably deeper and richer interrogation of class inequality than Midgar, the moral center becomes harder and harder to pin down” (50). I certainly can acknowledge “no narrative media, no matter how developed it may be, can solve all of the problems it touches on” (51). Where he adduces these points in his conclusion as weaknesses generated by the game’s epic narrative, I would simply accept them as proofs of its literary merit, resistant to reductive readings.
Yasheng She’s essay on “The Death of Aerith: Traumatic Femininity and Japan’s Postwar Modernity” goes some way to sketching in the cultural background implicit in this reversal. She gets it: “While FFVII seems to focus on the dangers of nuclear power, the real danger lies with the wartime masculinity that allowed nuclear destruction” (61). Technological, environmental, and social justice concerns are all in play in FFVII, and all contribute to its total effect; She’s essay is mostly concerned with how history and gender inflect and inform the meaning of the game’s concrete referents to real-world wars and ideologies as they carry across in its more metaphorical and open-ended, but no less powerful, moments of individual and collective trauma and recovery. She has an unhelpful tendency, though it’s one I recognize that I’m guilty of when I set myself to write this sort of thing, too, to give only the barest shrift to citations. Of particular interest are references to Igarashi Yoshikuni on Japan’s “positioning wartime and postwar trauma as the onset of Japanese modernity,” Souvik Mukherjee’s “postcolonialism as an intervention to the studies of video games,” Soraya Murray seeking “to address ‘the popular depoliticization on video games'” (all these in successive sentences on 55), and Koichi Iwabuchi’s concepts of “hybridity” and “mukokuseki” or “no nationality” tagged onto a tantalizing description of the game’s use of “English and Japanese signages” right before the end of the paper (65-6).
“Fragile Materials: Memory and Ecology in Final Fantasy VII,” by Nickk Hertzog, along the same lines as Cash in his essay, juxtaposes themes that I’m calling, broadly, mythic and political. While I applaud his brave choice to focus on “the original FFVII” (69) I find Hertzog’s frequent use of secondary sources such as Zizek and Deleuze/Guattari to be profoundly corrosive for his argument. How does the “arborescent” view of memory put forward by the latter (71; allegedly–I haven’t read them, and if I tried to, I doubt I would understand what they’re actually saying) provide any more insight than actually looking at the scenes in the game where Cloud’s memory is represented as text, gameplay, and interior landscape? Why not abide with the Proustian view of recovering lost time, rather than jumping to the Deleuzian “sickness” (71)? Why lean on Zizek to assert that “Cloud’s journey shows that an opposition to the impacts of science is ultimately a pointless one” (80)? Hertzog does engage with Robbie Sykes’ paper on “Earth Jurisprudence” in a sustained way, but he buries what looks like a crucial distinction relating to individual agency in a final footnote (82). By the end, I’m not sure he’s accomplished anything beyond summoning up and wrestling with a handful of all-too-significant predecessors, like the ghosts of the Gii (74)–and reversing Cash’s framing, which is a good start.
The next section, “Disc 2: Player Experience” opens with a still more off-putting entry, “‘A body hast thou prepared me’: Algorithmic Suture, Gamic Memory, and (Co)-creating a Rhetorical Network of Identity-Trauma in Final Fantasy VII.” The author, Samuel Stinson, not content with this howler of a title, doubles down with the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (10:5) as an epigraph. It’s not so much the ludicrous mouthful of a subtitle as the egregious formatting on the citation of the Bible “(King James Version, Heb. 10.5)” that makes me wonder what, if anything, the editors tried to do to wrangle this piece into presentability. They evidently never asked or couldn’t convince him that it would help to actually engage with the text from Hebrews, aside from this cryptic conclusion:
Within the context of FFVII, Aeris must continually be permitted to die, instead of once and for all, because in her death there is a reminding, a remanding, for the player through each play-through, as a body has been prepared fo the enactment, and the water is ready.
Being dead, the game speaks: Why tarriest thou? (102)
Now, proposing to supply us with a rhetorical “toolkit” and drawing on a dissertation called Writing with Video Games for the purposes of publishing an article about… writing about games… to help students write with/about games–this all seems pretty circular, if well-meaning. The essay is too condescending in tone for me to give Stinson the benefit of the doubt that he might have anything substantive to say amidst all the jargon and posturing, though I appreciate his loyalty to the spelling of Aeris and the original release, his inclusion of an example from FFIV (98; though FFVIII seems like it would offer the better point of comparison for romantic insights), and his boldness in bookending his flimsy essay with KJV English.
If Stinson leaves us wondering “what hath [FFVII] to do with Christ?” the following essay, “Final FantaSi’ VII: Role-Playing the Eco-Ethics of Laudato si‘” by Gregory D. Jones, Jr. provides an answer. A very specific riposte is discernable in the concluding paragraphs to the “dead” game of the prior essay: with the final screen “an ever-unfolding starfield, where FFVII’s ‘Prelude’ plays in the background… the game plays on; it never truly ends” (120). To the believer, and to anyone open to a resolutely sunny application of Catholic encyclicals and virtue ethics to the specter of environmental catastrophe, it is no doubt a satisfying one. For more jaded readers, Jones’ trotting out of psychological research on the benefits of games may register as naive or one-sided. Regardless of one’s disposition, this central essay in the volume makes for a refreshing contrast. Again refreshingly, Jones is not stinting in his quotations from the game’s actual text, with well-chosen passages incorporated throughout.
In “‘Action combat trash’: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Control, and Combat Nostalgia,” Indira Neill Hoch puts her finger on the pulse of fan reception. Drawing on forum comments rather than interviews or other long-form analysis, she predictably finds that both positive and negative views of the remake are “predicated on the existence of a desirable, idealized past” (134). “Very little, if anything emerges in the comments regarding FFVII as a narrative… little commentary on…. themes of capitalist and corporatist systems, environmentalism, resistance, poverty, and war,” she writes, “Instead, what they hoped to protect was a fabricated, nostalgic gaming past, defined through combat mechanics, silly distractions [ie. the “frog” status ailment], and defending their own memories of the experience of playing” (ibid.). Neill Hoch has a clear, ironclad argument, based on a narrowly defined dataset and an unusually copious swathe of citations including both stalwarts of the fields of games, cultural studies, and communications (Huizinga, Aareseth, Consalvo, Wolf, Gray, Jenkins, Jameson) and specific deep dive investigations into nostalgia among gamers (Garda, Heineman, Sloan, Suominen, Wulf, Cruz, Hodson, Payne). Hers is the second essay, after Cash’s, to conclude with an apologetic footnote about how Barret’s racial representation falls “beyond the scope of the current essay.” Aside from nostalgic neckbeards (and in some cases the datasets no doubt overlap), no one is as cognizant of boundaries not-to-be-overstepped than academics writing within their chosen specialization.
Turning to the final section, “Disc 3: Legacy,” we’re again hard-pressed to see the distinction as being all that meaningful, with Craig T. Olsen’s “Very Superstitious Spoilers on the Wall: A Deep Read of Fan Reactions to Tragedy in Final Fantasy VII” picking up much where Neill Hoch left off. Olsen looks at the deaths of playable characters throughout the series and, for the sake of comparison, in Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana, as well as jumping into Remake at the conclusion to revive interest in what one should have thought a thoroughly discussed-to-death topic if ever there was one.
In “‘Because, you are… a puppet’: How Final Fantasy VII Anticipated the ‘Posthuman Turn'” Nicholas Langenberg swerves back into the sort of territory we encountered with Hertzog’s essay, engaging closely with the narrative and themes contested there. He invites us to “embrace the fluid, disjointed, rhizomatic nature of our existence… to reconcile our understanding of ourselves with the discourses that have led to the decline of humanism while also establishing an image of ourselves and others that leads to greater empowerment” (174). To which I can only reply, no thanks. By aligning Sephiroth with the “Humanist Attachment” and Cloud with the “Posthumanist Acceptance” of his conclusion (176), Langenberg seems to have defined his terms in such a way that readers are bullied into agreement, but these definitions are shaky at best. I’m open to the notion that such a “turn” has taken place, if only within the heads of the people he cites, and it certainly seems like a respectable read of the ending scenes of Midgar to suppose that the world of FFVII is literally on a path to posthumanity, but Langenberg confusingly connects this highfalutin’ term with the “inability to find comfort in grand narratives,” as if both “posthumanism” and FFVII itself were anything other than just such grand narratives. Like Hertzog, he winds up a formidable concoction of theory and stares closely into the central conflict Cash shies away from, but I can’t help but disagreeing with his inferences at practically every step.
The second to last essay, by Carlos Cruz, “Square’s Lifestream: Examining the Impact of Final Fantasy VII Characters Across the Gaming World,” goes beyond the Compilation to trace the instances of intertextual references in the form of cameo appearances by Cloud and co. in games such as Dissidia, Super Smash Bros., and of course Kingdom Hearts. This is probably the least presumptuous, if least profound, of the essays included. Essentially trivial, thinly supported by a smattering of psychological research, and nonetheless fascinating for the fan of the games, Cruz disappoints only insofar as he does not take a moment to remark on the simultaneous development of Xenogears alongside FFVII and Cloud’s strange hallucinations about this sister game.
Even the LP Archivist couldn’t be bothered to include this one
Implicit in most of these essays, and more or less explicitly stated in several, is the question Hertzog had formulated: “is continuing to focus on this game an unhealthy exercise in reliving earlier pleasures? Or does FFVII captivate because of its continued, even heightening, contemporary relevance?” (69). It’s worth asking, a fortiori, if continuing to respond to these records of that focus is anything other than nostalgia, trivial gatekeeping, and more bookish sour grapes. As a particular instance of the specter of posthumanism, it is hard to deny that given a little prompting, the currently available large language models, for all their hallucinations, could probably write papers just as interesting and insightful as the ones in The World of Final Fantasy VII, and respond to them with more grace and wisdom than I could manage here.
Which is all to say that when Kathleen Morrissey asks her version of the question–“In other words, how can one understand the timelessness of FFVII? (197)–in the course of her essay closing the book, and she arrives at the answer that we “renounce idolized heroes in favor of flawed teams when managing collective struggles” (200), we can discern a kind of circling around the same territory as many other contributors, as if they were grinding for levels or seeking a particularly rare enemy or item drop, and a recognizable theme from any number of conversations about these games. As the kids say, “It was the friends we made along the way.” And they’re not wrong. What Morrissey has to add is a wider range of video game comparisons and a more nuanced discussion of mental health as it is represented in FFVII. Their reliance on procedural rhetoric and Bogost/Galloway aside, Grimwood on “Heroic Madness” sounds like a keeper.
Awkward.
Less a “Conclusion” than a prose envoi, “Where the Rail Takes Us,” by Craig T. Olsen, briefly recapitulates the preaching-to-the-choir, protest-too-much-methinks claims about the value of games as cultural artifacts, and about the beloved characters of FFVII in particular, that anyone still reading would, it goes without saying, grudgingly concede. And we might gently point out that of the train-themed quotes that have attained meme status over the years, the editor has chosen a real humdinger. Again assuming we actually look at the line in context, we note that it comes in Cloud’s discussion of the slums underneath Midgar’s reactors, and the academic equivalent of a slum, if one is permitted to make the inference… we might call it a peripheral field. Whereas an academic book, even if just a collection of essays by passionate scholars and students, worthy of its subject would position FFVII much closer to the interdisciplinary promised land dreamt of by the new historiographers of games, and by Spariosu before them.
For my paper presentation at Manchester Game Centre’s Multiplatform 2025 on the theme of “Rituals of Play,” focusing on the role of Vincent and Chaos in FFVII, I knew I would need to draw on the work of MJ Gallagher. Besides proving itself to be a solid, informative resource, though, his Norse Myths That Inspired Final Fantasy VII is a delight to read. I’m glad I finally took the time to sit down with it, instead of just mining excerpts available online for quotes about Nibelheim and Vincent.
As an introduction to the author, out of the many podcasts and write-ups at the disposal of the curious, I recommend these from Wade Langer, aka Prof Noctis, and Moses Norton, aka Red. I’m biased, but it really seems to me that over and above any objective connections between Final Fantasy and Norse myth, what I’ve sought and been pleased to find in this book is just the sort of human connection, an interaction with kindred spirits, that talking to these two over discord has provided. I’ve had some brief communication with Gallagher, too, messaging back and forth through his facebook page, but not enough to properly introduce him myself.
I’ll note up front that his book on Norse myth has been followed by others on Greek myth in FFVII and themes of Death and Rebirth in FFXVI. It thus fits into a larger project of fanfic-writing and filling out connections between fandom and scholarship which, again, I dig. I’m in awe of Gallagher’s dedication and work rate, and appreciative of the efforts he has made to promote the study of mythology in relation to video games, generally, and to the FF series in particular. I’m supremely aware that he’s had a much bigger impact in this regard with his short self-published books than anything I’ve said so far in posts and podcasts of much longer-windedness and more presumptuous erudition.
Written with clarity and verve for the popular reader, expecting nothing from us but a familiarity with the base game, his work distills down an immense amount of material, citing his sources for the myths and games alike. It also carries a sweet foreword from John E. Bentley, “the voice of Barret Wallace.” It is encouraging and frankly goading for me to see the success Gallagher has had drawing on a single straightforward framework of comparison between FFVII and its allusions to Norse myth, out of all the possible mythological references one might pile up. He brings to bear a copious knowledge of the FF franchise, extending to the Ultimania guides and official novels, to make the most of his insights from this one starting point.
My only real critique for Gallagher as a writer, difficult to square with the great admiration I feel for him personally, so to speak, for this very same reason–is that he is too modest. As popular and respected a figure in the fan community as he evidently is, his work could do so much more in terms of scholarship and analysis than offer the “hope that by the book’s conclusion you will have found something that will enrich your experience of the franchise. Or will at least be entertained. Please enjoy…” (xviii). Taking a leaf from a writer like Alyse Knorr, in her Mario 3, he could have made more than the passing references in the preface to his own experience playing the game shaping his “understanding of capitalism and spiritualism” (xvi), perhaps addressing his father’s incomprehension, leaning on an autoethnographical approach so as to give further narrative and explanatory shape to the welter of information that follows in the book’s fifteen chapters. What does he learn about storytelling, collaboration, or themes of markets or magic, from noticing all these comparisons? We never hear more.
By the end, “entertaining (or at least informative)” as the book is (195), it stops short of giving the reader an idea of why the connections between FFVII and Norse myth (or as I would suggest, mythic language writ large) should matter, well beyond the scope of either playing video games or reading literature. As it stands, the reader is left to supply such a larger meaning to the “passion” or “obsession” that led Gallagher to undertake his project (194). Let me try, at the risk of repeating myself and coming off even more coated in sour grapes…
Both FFVII and the mythological material to which it makes such interesting references can certainly sustain the weight of a meaning bigger than themselves. Beyond providing entertainment or knowledge for their own sake, these poetic works, replete with symbolic significance that resists any simple, one-to-one deciphering of their “meanings,” have opened up vistas onto much deeper questions and experiences than how to progress to the next level or unravel a plot point. Video games and myths, separately, have the power to raise questions of ultimate significance and guide readers to explore them; taken together, they point to a great deal besides their resonances with one another. Knorr’s Mario, again, is an exemplar here; or see AS Byatt’s Ragnarok, in which she recounts and reflects upon her reading of Asgard and the Gods in the course of retelling the myths in incredibly rich, incantatory prose. In Gallagher’s book, he has got ahold of games and myths–or they have got ahold of him–in just as deep a fashion, but by doing so little beyond demonstrating the comparison, his Norse Myths That Inspired Final Fantasy VII becomes something a little less than the sum of its parts. It inspires a reader like me with emulation, to be sure, but fails to inspire in anything like the way its constituent elements do, and as they a fortiori ought to when brought into contact with one another.
In what follows, I’ll touch on a few of the more interesting parts of the one book of Gallagher’s which I’ve actually read, about a game I’ve actually played (and its spin-offs, which I haven’t). My main critique comes very early, but it colors the whole project (see above). Maybe Gallagher is playing the long game, and in other works, written or unwritten, he has the “tricks up [his] sleeve” that will answer this critique (195). Certainly, holding against him what is not in the book is not entirely fair; the lack of Knorr-level sussing out of meaning or Byatt-level reminiscence and retelling does not greatly diminish the worth of all that Gallagher does accomplish here.
I have to say I love the inclusion of William Morris and JRR Tolkien as key figures in the transmission of myth from literature and opera to video games (15-6), but I have to quibble with the lesson Gallagher draws. His contrast between “fairy-tale creature iterations” and “more mythical descriptions…noble, immortal elves or industrious dwarf artisans, for example” is not particularly on target with respect to Tolkien’s legendarium. As a whole, it mistakes the generic successors for the original sub-creator. The invidious adjective “fairy-tale” is the giveaway here; see Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories for his meditations on the deep and abiding links between Faerie (as place more than folk), fantasy (as imaginative faculty more than genre), and myth (as language and reality).
In passing, I should flag the mention of Christianity immediately preceding this at the end of the first chapter, too, as a missed opportunity to bring in “Balder the beautiful” and CS Lewis. Byatt, to be fair, is if anything even more dismissive of the influence of Christianity on the transmission and transformation of these myths, and of its influence on their transformative force, so Gallagher is once again in good company.
The next chapter turns to FF history, where Sakaguchi’s “first RPG for Square” is identified as The Death Trap (18). Here, I feel, is a rabbit hole worth delving into sometime: that both FF and Dragon Quest‘s future producers should have begun their careers with more grim, text-based adventures like this and The Portopia Serial Murder Case. It speaks to a much larger lacuna in Gallagher’s approach (and my own), however: have we sufficiently considered the cultural context in which these mythic references are being tapped, whether in post-war Japan or the contemporary West? What are the autochthonous mythic and linguistic structures underlying more exotic, albeit evocative, references to the likes of Odin and Midgar–to say nothing of the ways they are affected by historical events, economic changes, and social movements in their creators’ and consumers’ milieux? Truly, without a great deal more help with the Japanese language, to begin with, here we intrepid myth-lovers are liable to “fall into the death-trap… Please keep on adventuring!!”
Given these sorts of quibbles, big and little, I was reassured by the care with which Gallagher distinguishes between the Bahamut of RPG lineage, represented in FF following its “draconic” likeness in Dungeons and Dragons, versus the “cosmic fish of Arabian mythology” (20-1).
Along the same lines, I was astounded to hear that well before the final battle of FFVI, already in FFII there are direct refences to “Dante’s Inferno” and Milton’s “Pandemonium” (21). Gallagher is able to drill down into the previous, lesser-known games as well as pulling out the individual creative figures behind distinct storylines within FFVII, identifying the work of Nojima and Kitase on the conflict between Avalanche and Shinra “as well as Cloud’s backstory” within the script—even down to the naming of Nibelheim and Midgar (25). This extends to the departure of Sakaguchi from the company long before work on the Compilation of FFVII was complete. Though Gallagher treats the various games and media products as a kind of unit, helpfully from a lore standpoint but problematically, I would argue, if we are interested in seeing the original game on its own terms, I would have liked more clarity on tensions already developing within the leadership of the creative team as early as FFVIII, to say nothing of how this bears on closely related games such as FF Tactics and Xenogears. Again, for all his focus and admirable conciseness, the context, the creative milieu, is wanting in Gallagher’s account.
Nojima, in particular, emerges as having a “personal interest in myth and legend” (24) and later takes center stage not only as student of myth but author of the official companion novels On the Way to a Smile and The Kids are Alright (37-8). Throw these on the “further reading” list, then, along with Ultimania Omega‘s novella The Maiden Who Travels the Planet, the anime Last Order, and Nojima’s Remake-adjacent novella, Picturing the Past. Rather than raising questions of adaptation and mediation, or simple poetics, ie. how does the form of a work affects what it is able to say, Gallagher seems most concerned with these works’ “canonicity,” which to me seems a much less rich area of inquiry. Nowhere, in fact, does the poetic form of the source material for his Norse myths really get the discussion it deserves from our genial tour guide Gallagher.
Picturing the Past sounds a lot like the memory-finding structuring device used by Zelda: Breath of the Wild (or MOTHER 2/ EarthBound before that)…
What Gallagher does take great pains to discuss, though, are the contributions to the story of FFVII wrought by its bevy of prequels and spin-offs. BeforeCrisis and Crisis Core (39) give us new characters (such as Genesis) and, per their titles, crises, as well as filling in the backstory of main players from the original game, such as Zack, whose identity Cloud largely adopts along with his Buster sword. Again, the names alone cry out for comment, which, since they are not in the Norse field, Gallagher provides only sparingly; the fact that Gackt (who is apparently a big deal) voices Genesis is passed over, perhaps mercifully, in silence. Still, it might be worthwhile to acknowledge the proximate influence as well as the speculative, albeit interesting, mythological stretch.
Other names in Dirge of Cerberus referring to color symbolism with more than a whiff of alchemical mysticism–Weiss the Immaculate, Nero the Sable, etc.–are given even less commentary than the titular three-headed beast. The problem is that, like with Lucrecia and Omega, to address these would require going into wholly other realms of myth and religion–in short, we’ll have to consult Gallagher’s other books (and perhaps games in the Nier series).
Questions of artistic form and economic realities return with Gallagher’s discussion of the short film Advent Children. How does it bear on, not only FFVII, but Sakaguchi’s feature-length flop Spirits Within? Perhaps more on this is in those Ultimanias, but I was also especially curious about how Sakaguchi’s own personal life found its way into these games and their spin-offs, particularly as he is in the process of leaving the company throughout their production. Well, as we are told about Genesis and Weiss at the end of Dirge, it might be said of the biographers and video-essayists out there that “they still have much work to do” (46).
Just as Genesis, “judged by the Planet to have an important role to play in future events,” does not join the Lifestream (42), so we had better mosey… I am even less inclined to consult these games and FFVIIRemake, etc., despite the intriguing retcons Gallagher alludes to, after having read his book than before. I can’t help but come away glad he has played and thought about them so much, so that I don’t have to.
Our Universe, from National Geographic, anyone? Gotta love that Yggdrasil…
I noticed just one typo in the whole book, “Kitasi” (47). I can only assume that the report of FFVII Compilation lore is just as accurate. Besides being reminded of Our Universe and its images of the mythological and sci-fi speculations to which we are heir, another idiosyncratic response that was brought home to me was realizing for the first time just how messed up Shinra’s cover-up of the destruction of Nibelheim is, as Gallagher references Nojima’s novels about how the hegemonic power company “paid settlers” to repopulate it (55). The deaths of Tifa’s mother, and then of Cloud’s later, and of his being blamed… it all connects so powerfully with Sakaguchi’s loss of his own mother, and with games like Secret of Mana and Wild Arms, which take just such scapegoating as their heroes’ point of departure, as well as the MOTHER series, of course…
One of the only times we hear about Japanese mythology, “Shinto and Buddhist beliefs,” comes in Mt Nibel being compared to Mt Horai, with Gallagher referring us to Hearn’s Kwaidan (57). Along with the Greek connections, ie. Cerberus (61), one feels that the Japanese backdrop really warrants its own book. File along with this “the Japanese idiom ‘shinrabansho’…’all things covered by God’ (67-8).
“Yes indeed” – various Chrono Trigger baddies
Another minor quibble: so is Nanaki aka Red XIII “feline” (31) or “canine” (95)? Maybe I’m misreading, but I always thought of him as more of a dog-type, myself; just like about the “yellow fog” in Prufrock, I guess I’ll admit I was wrong! At any rate, I would love to see a book about Native American influences in FFVII while we’re at it. As I go into more detail in my paper, Dia Lacina’s critique of the music in this direction has always stuck with me. I confess I was miffed that Gallagher does not mention Nanaki’s Cosmo Memory limit break in his discussion of the point at which the party acquires “the [Odin] materia as well as the key to Vincent’s basement chamber” (89), despite going on to show some interesting connections between Nanaki and Odin (94-5).
But I love this passage in the Midgard chapter:
“Giants were considered the embodiment of chaos in nature, and the location of their lands was important in a cosmological sense, but also philosophically. As well as meaning ‘wall’ or ‘enclosure’, the Norse term ‘garðr’ was a metaphysical concept whereby everything within garðr was ‘order’ and everything outside garðr was ‘chaos’. Therefore, to the Norsemen, everything within Midgard represented civilisation, while the outlying Jötunheim represented disorder.” (63)
Along with that “civilisation with an s” spelling, redolent of Sir Kenneth Clark, I can’t help but feel the hyperlinks to John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf:
No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard. Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed and sings a lament; everything seems too large, the steadings and the fields. (c. 2460)
And Tolkien’s giants playing football, “hurling rocks at one another for a game” in The Hobbit (Ch 4). Or again Byatt, quoting from Asgard and commenting on a picture (which she includes at the end of her own book):
The legends of the giants and dragons were developed gradually, like all myths. At first natural objects were looked upon as identical with these strange beings, then the rocks and chasms became their dwelling-places, and finally they were regarded as distinct personalities and had their own kingdom of Jotunheim.
The picture gave the child an intense, uncanny pleasure. She knew, but could not have said, that it was the precise degree of formlessness in the nevertheless scrupulously depicted rocks that was so satisfactory. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended… This way of looking was where the gods and giants came from.
The stone giants made her want to write.
They filled the world with alarming energy and power. (10)
Personally, I would have liked more of this philosophical, metaphysical discussion from Gallagher. In the course of which, there should have been room for some consideration of the “Promised Land” motif, which we first hear about early in the game. It could certainly fit better in a discussion that included more about Abrahamic religions and Greek myths, as comments later in the book on Eden and the Hesperides indicate (152-3). Allowing for the focus on Norse myth, though, some reflections on the peculiar playfulness of scenes like the revels of the warriors in Valhalla and the slaying of Balder, besides more Christian-inflected ones like the apocryphal rejuvenation of the world after Ragnarok, could well fit an adaptation of FFVII‘s “Promised Land”.
The parallels Gallagher draws between Midgar and Gold Saucer are well taken (we might add Junon into the mix), as is the delightful and surprising link between Cait Sith in his capacity as fortune-teller and Odin as knower of hidden knowledge (80). The Odin summon, of course, has its parallels again with a range of mythological figures besides its Norse namesake: Raiden, Gilgamesh, and perhaps even the elusive Genji, besides the in-game associations with Shinra Manor, but also Cosmo Canyon by way of the Cosmo Memory limit break (88).
In the discussion of runes, Gallagher gets wonderfully into the weeds, noting not only the importance of the Rune Blade’s double materia growth mechanic, but also the detail on Tifa’s gloves in the Remake (99).
Looking closely… at the runes… just like people used to talk about reading Playboy for the articles
What does it mean for Heimdall to be the watchman, guardian of the rainbow bridge, and giver of runes to men, and yet for Odin to have blinded himself in one eye receiving the runes originally hanging on a tree, wounded with a spear (98)?
LOVELESS, which features as a stage play in the original game, becomes a poem in the spinoffs and remakes (101). Its all-caps mention defers discussion of the poetry for several chapters, but does lead into more about the materia mechanics. Again, it seems to me that a discussion of poetic form would have fit perfectly here.
As the next chapter explains, Vincent’s berserkr-inspired limit breaks are some of the most intriguing links in Gallagher’s study–but also, he’s sort of a cowboy. What’s up with that? And as ever, the question seems open as to whether the causal direction implied by “inspiration” is actually present, or if its impression is more the effect of keen associative reading on our part to discern shared lineaments of story, regardless of authorial intent. Whatever the case may be, some of Gallagher’s strongest arguments come in the symbolism of wolf and serpent, as we are prompted to reflect on the “enemy within” Cloud (127), much as in Byatt’s retelling she dwells frequently on what she calls “the wolf in the mind.”
For deep lore sticking within the bounds of the original game, the distinction between “sentience” and “instinct” with respect to Jenova’s purposes and Sephiroth’s control should provide further reflection (139), down to the controversy over spoken lines attributable to either agent (146). Once more we skirt an analysis of the power of poetic language with reference to the Skaldskaparmal, in which Loki is both tempter and rescuer. What of the tensions inherent in the different poetic sources; in what sense can we even speak of a singular “Loki” figure, or indeed of “Norsemen” as a class (159)?
To my mind, Gallagher’s discussion of the “triple deity” is particularly loose (164), and when in the next breath he moves lightly back to the theme of the goddess figure Minerva as the “conscious will of planet” (165) I get especially confused as to why he insisted on attempting to separate out the different mythological sources into separate books when these games so gleefully mash them up together. Still, it is delightful to see the parallels between Thor’s cross-dressing and Cloud’s in the Wall Market segment (166). Fascinating to hear that in the Remake Cloud is guaranteed to be chosen (167); one would have imagined (in naive Hamlet on the Holodeck syle) that the newer game would rather have moved in the direction of greater freedom of choice and player agency bearing on the outcome, but instead in this case, at least, it does the opposite.
As we come to the end of the book, elves (via Tolkien) as well as angels and demons (influences by way of Christianity) rub shoulders with Odin’s ravens, named for Thought and Memory, and the “fatalistic society” of the Vikings (170) gives rise to unanswered questions about the “Whispers” of planetary destiny introduced in the Remake (174). While Gallagher’s geological conception of Icelandic volcanoes as a source for the “primordial fire” of Muspell is not wholly convincing (184; cf. Tolkien’s critique of Max Muller and the theories he represents), his association of the Proud Clod with Surt is virtuosic. The connection of SOLDIER Unit 13 with Ragnarok (190) is a fitting mic drop.
To be sure, the book is enjoyable and informative, as its author hoped it would be; but we could say more. Like the introduction of Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger would have it, bringing the mythmaker’s early work on the Finnish Kalevala to a wider audience in her edition of Kullervo, it should also be recognized as “worthwhile and valuable.” As Tolkien himself rhapsodizes at the point where his essay “On ‘The Kalevala'” breaks off, we should strive to find in Gallagher’s appreciative study not only the linkages between Norse myth and FFVII:
But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man’s universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala…
–and, I would argue, in the contribution to poetry, art, and mythology that is Final Fantasy.
The phrase he can’t remember at first is mono no aware; the artist I’m spacing on, Yoshitaka Amano.
Our abstract proposals:
How Worlds Collide: The Parallax of Psychology and Cosmology in Final Fantasy VIII, or The Interplay of the Mythic and Psychological
Final Fantasy VIII was a genre defining JRPG from the late 20th century which itself followed a groundbreaking installment and innovative masterpiece, FFVII, and was followed by a widely plauded meditation on the ubiquity of death in FFIX. These three JRPG’s constituted the “Playstation One Era” of Square’s iterative Final Fantasy JRPG’s, and are often described by scholars and gamers alike, as part of “the golden age” of the JRPG genre of video games. What made these games, and in particular FFVIII, worthy of a rank also ascribed to 16th century Spanish drama, 1st century Imperial Rome, and even an indefinite mytho-historical time in Don Quixote, Dante’s Inferno, and Hesiod’s Works and Days? In this essay, the heavy and sometimes confused interplay of mythological themes in Square’s Final Fantasy VIII will serve as a map for exploring the development of the protagonist’s consciousness, sense of his self, and understanding of the depth of the world surrounding him in both space and time. In exploring this thread, the paper will examine the ways in which the protagonist’s expanding sense of himself reflects his expanding understanding of the cosmos he inhabits, and that an essential aspect of works from any “golden age” is that they serve to effect similar transformations in those who listen to, read, or play them.
Mansion, Safe, Coffin: Ritual Game Space and Hidden Chaos in Final Fantasy VII
How are secrets in video games, such as side quests, unique items, and hidden characters, potentially generative of powerful real world connections and revelations? Early in course of their playthrough of Final Fantasy VII (Square 1997), players can obtain an item which has no apparent use: the Peacemaker, a handgun that none of the characters currently in the party are able to equip. Hidden in plain sight in one of the treasure chests in Kalm, the first village outside the game’s opening sequence, the grayed out item in the inventory points obliquely through its lack of immediate functionality towards an optional side quest later in the story, while its name hearkens directly to real-world historical and theological references. There follows an important flashback during which the main character, Cloud, and the game’s iconic antagonist, Sephiroth, join forces to investigate reports of a malfunctioning reactor near Cloud’s hometown of Nibelheim. Climbing into the mountains and slaying dragons by the way, they discover evidence of human experimentation that causes Sephiroth to question the source of his own uncanny powers and the circumstances of his birth. Hours of gameplay and many twists and turns of the plot later, upon reaching Nibelheim in the present of the story, players have the option of exploring the Shinra Mansion, where the creators of this monstrous technology secreted their basement laboratory. By following the obscure hints written on a note near the entrance–or more likely, looking up the combination online–they can open a safe containing the Odin summon magic along with the key to a room in the basement, where the hidden gunslinger Vincent can finally be awoken from his rest in a coffin to join the party. Eventually, extending to sequels and paratexts outside the confines of the base game, his backstory reveals the presence of primordial Chaos within the worldbuilding of FFVII. I argue that the trail of secrets conducing to the discovery of Vincent and Chaos illustrates the ways in which gameplay breaks the “magic circle,” only to invite players to reinscribe it beyond the scope of the game so as to call up the sources and interpretations of allusions to history and myth in their own lives.
Ben essentially gave his talk on Project Moon weeks ago. Though his proposal wasn’t deemed occult enough for the occasion by the organizers, I hope he’ll end up writing the paper anyway, perhaps in the course of future posts on Limbus Company. His abstract:
Many multiplayer games (like Fortnite, World of Warcraft, or “gacha” games) incorporate mechanics that reward daily, weekly, or event-related participation to drive up microtransaction sales, encourage habitual play, and enable social communities to form in their game spaces. Limbus Company, the third game by Korean developer Project Moon, makes the odd choice to incorporate many of these mechanics, despite the fact that Limbus Company hosts virtually no multiplayer interactions, and is, instead, a single-player-focused game telling an ongoing story over several years. Furthermore, this story is, in fact, a re-telling of some of world literature’s greatest classics: Don Quixote, Faust, Ulysses, and Yi Sang are all among the characters in the game, and their stories are re-told in each of the game’s chapters, though each of these re-tellings is relocated to the game world Project Moon has built over their career. Many players across the world, inspired by the game, have gone on to read and learn these great works directly, in order to understand and appreciate the thematic adaptations made by Project Moon in this ongoing story. Intentionally or unintentionally, Project Moon has created a game that invites players to ritually re-tell these great stories through play and community, and to engage with a globally-minded cultural identity.
Playing fast and loose as usual with the connections, often tenuous but ever-present, between games and literature, this time let’s nevertheless open with a fairly straightforward question: Why are the Genji Gloves a recurring peak item in the Final Fantasy series?
And a little reading and searching provides at least three possible literary references.
In Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West, Aidan Moher delivers on the promise of an idea or idle dream many of us have shared but all too few have realized: recounting the stories of the games we love and weaving those stories together into the tale of a genre, a medium, and an industry over the course of a book.
Reviews abound, as the book has been out for a couple of years–mostly positive, from what I can tell, and for all my sour grapes I can’t disagree: the book itself is even out there in audio, so I highly recommend checking it out. While the definitive book on JRPGs, if there is such a thing, remains to be written–and while the writing of such an ideal book, even if quixotic, seems well worth the effort–having this bird of Moher’s in hand makes for encouragement, inspiration, and provocation.
As the book goes on, tracing the development of the genre chronologically, I personally grew less and less interested, even as (or perhaps because) the games under discussion were more new to me. Having set up the basic structure of the history of JRPGs as a kind of dialogue or dialectic between the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series, Moher slips into reportage rather than analysis for the bulk of the text. Still, there are a number of insights and simple points of fact that make the text perfectly adequate for what it is setting out to do. Appealing to a broad audience, Moher gives enough context for the general reader, as well as peppering his chapters with insights for those who are more familiar with the basic outline. Along with the many iterations and generations of the core series DQ and FF, he does fit in a range of lesser-known games and series into the narrative.
While convincingly making the case for the coherence of his subject, Moher also includes just enough of his own subjective experience to hint at the importance of this history for the individual. Plenty of background information is given for anyone in the audience who hasn’t lived through it, and those of us who would have liked to write such a book are spared the effort of a certain amount of historical research, while the work of introspection and deeper analysis remains. Given the scope of his work, Moher necessarily touches lightly on any given game. At times, even beloved and important games appear only in the form of inset thumbnail sketches, or in a stray reference. Just as the history of JRPGs is ongoing, so he acknowledges that his own research is only offering one viewpoint among many–including his own future writing, podcasting, and so on.
For another look at JRPGs, on the recommendation of sometime interlocutor and friend of the site Dylan Holmes–whose book A Mind Forever Forever Voyaging does touch on the genre as well–pay a visit to the Digital Antiquarian, where JPGs are placed within the much larger framework of CRPGs as a whole.
For more on those two other proverbial birds, and without too much beating around the bush, I heard that a certain gamelogician is working on a book on RPGs, which I’ve been looking forward to. Or was it a oiseau that told me? If you happen to read French, consider the approach taken by Jordan Mauger. En quête de J-RPG: L’aventure d’un genre has yet to be translated into English. The title might be translated In Search of J-RPG, as The Video Game Library has it, but it also puns on enquête, a word whose range of meanings includes “investigation, survey, inquiry” as well as the root meaning of “quest”. Like so many of us, Mauger is simultaneously making the case for the importance of his subject while also treating it as important and worthy of detailed analysis. My own French is far from adequate to understanding all the nuance of his argument and his numerous puns and plays on words, but insofar as I could read it, I definitely enjoyed and would recommend this book, as well.
In short–and again, I apologize for the brevity and slovenliness of these posts lately–anyone out there writing about games like these, like this, take heart! It can be done, and it is. And it can always be done better.
It’s 1997, and Squaresoft just released a game that many have called the greatest video game of all time.
Oh Boy! It’s Final Fantasy VII!
I’m not here to defend or dispute that claim. In fact, I’m not here to talk about Final Fantasy VII at all (or at least beyond using it to contextualize our discussion). I think there’s plenty of folks talking about FFVII already—including the team developing a series of contemporary games that are part-remake, part-commentary on the original text of Square’s masterpiece.
Suddenly here we are. Beyonce’s album dropped a week ago. It’s already the first Saturday in April.
At 10:55 and again at 4:15 Central Time, we’ll be talking video games as part of TexMoot, one of Signum University’s regional gatherings. This year’s theme is Storytelling Through Play: Games and Immersive Narratives. Many thanks to the organizers!
Here’s what I hope to talk about.
First, the morning’s discussion panel on Teaching Video Games.
In recent years, video games have become the subject of critical thought and inquiry, giving rise to engaging works of scholarship and amateur discourse, as well as featuring prominently in other artistic media such as novels, films, and music. My own contribution to this discourse has taken the form of online courses for kids and adult learners, in-person electives in public schools, and long-form podcasts, essays, and interviews. I’ve read and listened to a fair amount of the literature on games, but I know I am still only scratching the surface. Inviting participants to share their own experiences studying and teaching about video games in academic settings, ranging from higher ed to K-12 schools, we’ll discuss the value and meaning of video games as a topic of research bridging STEM fields and the humanities.
A prospectus for an unwritten chapter on the topic.
Slides to look at from SPACE. (Spoilers for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.)
Video games play a significant role in transmitting images of heroism in contemporary culture. This talk concerns allusions to King Arthur in the Final Fantasy video game series, read in the light of mythic narratives present in the role-playing game genre. I focus on representative Arthuriana in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VII, which I take to be illustrative of the tension between crystalizing and splintering tendencies at work in the series. I draw comparisons between two major examples, the Excalibur weapon and Knights of the Round summon magic. For a tentative framework of theory, I make reference to Tolkien’s imagery of light as refracted by Verlyn Flieger’s analysis in Splintered Light.
Video Game Academy 