It is funny to look back at Final Fantasy 7, and wonder how this game managed to gain so much popularity. It seemed to be such a cultural event. I still remember going over to a classmate`s house just to see how far into the “Shinra Mansion” he got and how to unlock one of the secret characters. For the most part, I imagine the big reason it gained so much traction is mostly do to its, at the time, amazing graphics, and the many television advertisements. But at the same time, I wonder if a lot of the lasting appeal of Final Fantasy VII is just the hugeness of it. It spanned 3 discs with over 60 hours of potential game play. The amount of things to do, people to see, and secrets to uncover was perfect for those school ground discussions. Where to find things, who to use, what tools to equip, it was a phenomenon that took my middle school by storm.
Which is also the first time I realised some of the biggest problems about discussing games with people. For one, trying to have a discussion without spoiling the story for the other person, and then trying to relate and compare your experience with someone who might of played it completely different than you. FFVII seemed to be built on the idea that a person who starts the game should have a complete different idea of the story and characters by the end of the game. While that is normal for any sort of story with character arcs, FFVII seemed to relish in completely turning the table on the player. The magical cat who can tell fortunes? Its actually a robot controlled by a triple turncoat. Main character who is supposed to be a cool, bad-ass mercenary? Nope, not really. My favorite character switch up is how they flipped the “nice, naive girl who is a white mage and lives in a church” and the “tough tomboy childhood friend who you never got with because she was ‘one of the guys’” cliche by making the white mage very forward and a bit of a brown noser and then making the tomboy childhood friend who fights with her fists much more quiet and demure (which doesn`t make a ton of sense seeing that if a person can go toe to toe with huge behemoths, they probably have enough self-confidence to speak up that maybe her love interest might be an insane puppet that is doing the main bad guy`s bidding against his will, but I digress). So anyone beginning the game will either try and avoid talking to people who beat the game or just deal with the fact that they are just going to spoil the story for themselves.
Well, it has been over 10 years, so anyone spoiled by the game by now, at least you have the comfort knowing that FFVII allows a whole lot of choice for such a linear adventure. Depending on what characters you bring with you on your quest to save the world, the context for the events are almost completely different and can give such a different interpretation of the story. For example, when I played the game, I wanted to get the two secret characters in the game and have them on my team (it helped that the secret ninja girl was the only girl around my age I could have on my team and I totally thought she was the bee`s knees, and the other was a secret vampire, and I could not say no to a secret vampire). As it turns out, the makers of the game did not really plan for many people to actually pick those people on their team, so most of the big events in the story don`t really involve them too much. In fact, the ending doesn`t even include them. It honestly gave me a weird context of aloofness to the game. Whenever something tragic or important happened to one of the characters, because I never spent any time with those characters, I just didn`t care as much. Later when I played the game a second time with characters more central to the story, I just felt more involved. Maybe it was just because in the end, people feel something for characters they have invested time into, whether or not the characters are actually really sympathetic in themselves.
But that is one of those things that make video games the medium they are. Unless you invest yourself in the story in the characters, you may not even be able to progress, not to mention actually caring sincerely about them. FFVII is also a world that does a good job of providing a plethora of activities that rewards players investments, and that I think is a good reason why such characters as Cloud and the gang have managed to still be iconic ten plus years later. People have invested so much of themselves into the game that they want those characters and that world again. Fans all over the world have asked for more FFVII but for a while there was nothing.
Though, it is actually not hard to see why. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer of the game, has been quoted as saying that when he made the game, he was in a dark place due to his mother dying. A lot of the game`s themes, about dealing with death, dealing with yourself, and the nature of the planet probably influenced by his own struggle with the grief of dealing with his mom`s death, so not wanting to necessarily leap to the opportunity to reiterate on the game is understandable. It probably wasn`t until he made the Spirits Within movie, almost bankrupted Squaresoft, and was bought out by a rival company Enix and Mr. Sakaguchi was, for all intents and purposes, ousted from the company before FFVII was revisited again.
The “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII” (also known as the marketing blitz that Square-Enix attempted to exploit the popularity of the FFVII) includes 4 products, Advent Children (a feature length movie), Before Crisis (a cell phone game), Crisis Core (the PSP that I`ll talk about eventually), and Dirge of Cerebrus (a 3rd person shooter). The problem with most of the “compilation” is that it completely missed out on the point of FFVII. The compilation wasn`t about dealing with death, or the conservation of the planet, or how memory can define you (aka what the subtext of FFVII was), the compilation became mostly about focusing on the characters that people fell in love with. While character studies are not necessarily a bad thing, this wasn’t so much “character studies” as much as they were character exploitation. The problem I felt that plagued most of the compilation is that Square-Enix felt like they were focusing on much more trying to fulfill what the fans wanted the games to be instead of being something worthwhile on their own merits. Having at least checked out the entire compilation there is one of the titles that actually manages to break out of its chains of marketing and becomes something I think is actually worth playing on its own. Crisis Core takes one of the most interesting aspects of FFVII, the role of how memory can define you, and gives it a new spin.
But first, an explanation of the role of memory in FFVII. In FFVII, the player is lead to believe that Cloud, the main character, was an part of an elite private military force SOLDIER owned by the Shinra Coporation. When the game starts, he claims that he has quit and now is a mercenary for hire. As it turns out, not only was never part of SOLDIER, but he could not even qualify and therefore became just a lowly infantry man. Then, partly due to experiments preformed on him when he was captured, and partly due to his own trauma, he took on the life of his elite Soldier friend Zack. This is not revealed until late in the game, so while it is not really covered about what type of person Zack was, one could extrapolate Zack`s personality through Cloud`s fake memories. Cloud`s story and character development takes on the theme of how memory and the narrative people create can make a person, even if that narrative is actually completely false.
And what better way to continue making a commentary on memory than to make a prequel? Crisis Core (for the PSP) is the prequel to FFVII that allows the player to take control of Zack. So instead of relying on Cloud`s memory and self deception to try and figure out who exactly this Zack character was, the player is shown exactly what the deal with Zack was. The game takes this as an opportunity to “flip the script” in a way, and instead of the main character being a brooding young man, unsure of who he really is (ie Cloud), Zack is rather cheerful and social. While the flip on character types may seem like maybe a bit of a obvious choice, it allows Zack to interact with series mainstays such as Sephiroth (the main villian, also I am rather surprised I managed to write so much about FFVII without mentioning him) and the Turks and get different sides of their personalities. While that is not really a great driving force for people not familiar with FFVII it does add to what made FFVII fun in the first place: it was an adventure. Crisis Core was really the first (and only really) game in this continuum that was about trying to show different sides of things instead of just showing the one side that fans fell in love with.
If Square Enix has any real leftovers from all their years of publishing, it is the fact that they love polish, and Crisis Core is dripping in it. The only real problem is despite the rather good voice acting and localization, boy is it melodramatic. There is humor here and there (Zack sure is a wacky guy) but for the most part the story beats involve fake Shakespeare-esque quotes taken from a fake play, asking out loud what it means to be a hero, and enough angel feathers to stuff a whole warehouse full of stuffed pillows. For me, that is also part of the nostalgia. I am not sure why, but I enjoy melodrama. Maybe its because my right brained, left-handed self is just wired that way, but it adds a certain amount of transparency and vulnerability that just doesn’t happen in real life. It also serves as a helpful tool to giving voice to characters that were previously voiceless, both literally and figuratively. It made the motivations of all the characters, old and new, have a weight that just wasn’t there in the original game. Sephiroth’s change from a heroic soldier, to a cold blooded killer makes much more sense in the context that Crisis Core provides. It takes advantage the memories the player has about FFVII, and instead of having Cloud having to change his assumptions about the past, the player is forced to change their perception of the world that they have invested themselves in. That, in the end, makes it a valuable experience playing after and before FFVII (though I would not recommend playing either of these without the other, they either way they lead rather well into each other, though playing from Crisis core to FFVII may be a little hard do to the graphic and localization downgrade). Crisis Core does what FFVII fans wanted for years, which is just another game that compliments their experiences and expands on them.
Say what you will about Final Fantasy 7, it has been praised to high heaven and sent to low hell by various critics and people around the world, but it still does hold up in a weird way. Maybe it is because a whole lot of the game is about memory (who could forget a game about memory?) or because maybe for kids like me it was the first time something that really spoke to them about saving the earth and dealing with death in a way we could understand. Either way, it is hard to just scoff at all the time and work it took to create the world of FFVII. It probably has had more missteps than hits at this point, but in the end, it provided me hours of entertainment and something I could invest myself into, and that is all I really ask from my entertainment. Good job Final Fantasy VII, even if they never do that remake that fans have been clamoring for, it was a fun ride on that Golden Saucer coaster.
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