Creativity
What A Game Can Do: Final Fantasy 7
Growing up, I was always a big reader. You could also insert nerd, dork and dweeb following that sentence, and it would sit just as well. While I enjoyed watching shows on TV or even Empire Strikes Back on VHS – which was my favorite movie until Jurassic Park came out – I never got quite the same satisfaction as I did reading a fun adventure on paper. There was something about holding the story in my grubby hands, interacting with it by turning pages, seeing the words as they formed whatever pictures I dictated and really having time to connect with characters. Sure, movies had people that I loved, but spending several weeks with a character in my brain was infinitely more satisfying than just a few hours on a screen.
But I never knew a video game could do the same thing until Final Fantasy 7.
It was the summer of 1998, and my brother and I were tired of playing nothing but Goldeneye (as great as it was) on the Nintendo 64. For those of you that remember, the N64 had an excellent first year or so, and then started to hit a sophomore slump. One day, out of boredom or heat stroke or both, we decided on a whim to go purchase a Sony Playstation. While we didn’t really have any money to buy any games right away (ah, weren’t those the days), we were fortunate enough to have one of Kerry’s friends lend us a copy of a game we never heard of: Final Fantasy 7. Really, when we asked him about it, the only thing he told us was that it had magic and cool graphics. Sold.
From the opening sequence I knew I had never played a game like this before. Any nostalgic FF7 fan knows that familiar shot of the stars, the panning and sweeping camera, the shots of Aeris and the tinkling of those crystal-like musical notes. It’s one of my favorite openings of any game ever, and it swings around to reveal Midgar, that bastion of steam and magepunk industry, pumping Mako from the earth.
Over the next few hours, I was riveted by the tale of AVALANCHE, the terrorist group out to stop Shinra, Inc. from destroying the planet one kilowatt at a time. I loved the somber tone of the slums and the lower plate, the way we saw the trains swirling around the struts that held the upper echelons of the city in place. It was science fiction and magic colliding together like two football players, and hit some special part of my brain that didn’t even know it wanted that.
Looking back at it, I know that Final Fantasy 7 isn’t the best story I’ve ever seen, or even the best video game story I’ve ever seen. It’s far from both of those actually. It wasn’t even about the music or the characters (which are actually kind of flat in some instances, most notably Cloud) or even the nonsensical plot that to my young brain seemed out of this world and perfectly convoluted in a way that I liked. The important thing about Final Fantasy 7 is when I played it.
I’ve never been shy about the fact that nostalgia can easily ruin many new things for me, or build up older things indestructibly. This is one of those games. I played it at just the right point of my life for it to have an impact on me the way it did. Hearing just a few notes of its much-praised music immediately makes me die to play through it again. I’ve beaten it more times than I can recall, and a couple of my playthroughs measured at 90+ hours. It’s a world I absolutely fell in love with like no other before it, and in some ways since. Sure, there had been other magepunk and steampunk worlds created. But I hadn’t seen them. Heck, I didn’t even know such a thing was possible. I had no idea that we could see science fiction, magic and swordplay in a cyclone that lasts for 40 plus hours.
To be honest, I had no clue a game could last that long. True story: we didn’t even have a memory card. Having never played a formal RPG before, we just assumed we would be able to beat it in one long sitting. We got to the end of Midgar and assumed we were about halfway through the game, and our friend told us we were mistaken.
What Final Fantasy 7 did that nothing had done to that point was show me the importance of wonder and story. Like I said, there are other, better stories out there. But to me, it was the first game that scratched that itch in a meaningful way. I loved reading books, but games that meant something were like books that I played. There’s an important distinction there, and it changed the way I looked at video games, and even story. For the first time in my life, I remembered having a vested interest in an ongoing saga, and I got to live it out myself. This was a tale of angels and monsters, love and airships, ancient civilizations and stones that powered society to its own doom.
To this day, I still remember that important example about what a game can do, because there are a lot of people that think otherwise. If I’m being honest, this beloved Squaresoft game is one of the first things that made me want to tell big sprawling stories, because I saw firsthand the effect they could have on people. As I said, this is silly to think about now, considering I’ve seen so many finer and more suitable examples of things that have gone above and beyond this – but for me it was the first, and the one that all others are measured against in terms of its impact.
Have any of you ever had this kind of experience with a story before? What ways have games or other media surprised you?
Discussion
7 comments for “What A Game Can Do: Final Fantasy 7”
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You hit the nail on the head right there. FFVII continues to be one of my favourite games. Sure when it came out i was too young to play anything but the gold saucer games, but when my brother actually LET me play the damn game, I was drawn in instantly. It was the only thing i’d play for hours and hours. I still do occasionally take the game for a spin, there’s nothing better than a game of FFVII when you’ve got time to kill, and just want to whip out that old PS1 or PSP controller. If they ever do a remake I just hope they don’t screw it up by making it more “modern” and “realistic” and just make it a revamped version of the classic, retaining the spirit, style, writing and characters that made the game so good. Like, if they remove so much as even the world map, or even change the battle system it will be a mere shadow of the game it once was.
The storyline of Chrono Cross still amazes me to this day. It’s hard for me to explain it, but all I can really say is that there will be no other game that will impact me as much as Chrono Cross did. I must have had more then a hundred playthroughs. Also, the music has got to be one of Yasunori Mitsuda’s masterpieces.
[...] written at length today about FFVII on my blog, but I thought the question would be pertinent here as well. What games changed the way you viewed [...]
I didn’t know you were introduced to RPGs through FFVII. I was too! And yeah, there’s a nostalgia there that’s as potent as moonshine.
I’d be interested in reading a more in-depth critique of the game, since you mentioned in a couple of places that you recognize its failings now. I wonder if ours match up ^_^
Haven’t had such a cool experience with a game yet, but I love Deus Ex’s story, and Arcanum’s world. I also like Planescape: Torment’s world, but I hopelessly lost :p. The only experience like this has happened twice to me, in the realms of music and books. My taste in music was completely changed when I first heard Tool’s “Schism”. I used to only listen to music in the same way a mainstream American does (surface value, beat, etc.), but Tool turned that upside down. When I listen to music, I always ask myself, “What’s this song about?” If there’s an answer to the question, and the answer doesn’t involve partying or intercourse, it’s a good song. With books, the revolution started with the movie, A Scanner Darkly. I loved the movie, and wanted to see how close it was to the original book. I borrowed it from the library, and started to read it. I immediately stopped caring about how close it was to the movie, because the book was just so damned good and engrossing. After I finished that, I immediately got hooked on Philip K. Dick, and I’m trying to read every book of his that I can get my hands on.
It’s funny how said that FFVII wasn’t the best of stories and nor was it the best of gameplay, but regardless it plucked at your heart strings like an angelic harpist. When ever I hear any of FFVII’s musical score outside of the game I am instantly reminded of the bond I had with the game, it’s story and most importantly my bond with it’s characters and their journey’s. There have been few games that have the ability to stop me in my tracks by just hearing a simple ballad from it’s playlist. Only one game has come close to that, and it’s Kingdom Hearts. When ever I hear “dearly beloved” I am instantly reminded of all the elements that drew me into the story, and solidified my emotional connection to sora’s journey.
I’m not old enough to say I really like FF7. By the time I played it, it had little impact on me, it was almost like reading something like Catcher in the Rye for an English class.
Half-Life 2, however, was the first game that really made me love games for their story-telling ability. It wasn’t entirely the story that made HL2 so important to me, however, it was how I felt *immersed* in the story. It was the music, and fluid gameplay, and the free choice in solving its puzzles, I felt constantly in control, as if I was living Gordon Freeman’s story.