The Patreon Letter - 31st Dec, 2020

Every month I tell myself 'Em get the letter out mid-month, save yourself the consternation' and every month here we are on the last day sitting down to write. At least I'm off work from my day job today, it's not like I'm cramming or anything. It's just funny how resistant I am to ever making my podcast job easier on myself. 

I started playing Final Fantasy XV this week, which is the only mainline single-player FF I've never played before. I put it off for years, I have had a much-documented hard time with games the last few years, the windows version seems kind of fucked, I was busy replaying most of the FFs for the podcast, there are tons of reasons. But 15 was the first thing I downloaded on Xbox because it's the one version of this game that just runs well, and now it's finally time to clear a massive item from my backlog. 

This letter isn't about FF15, because I'm only five hours in and have mostly been fishing and doing hunts. Instead I wanted to talk about the emotions kicked up by the game's opening screen (shown above), that dedicates this game to all the fans and first-timers. I can't speak for first timers, but the fan part has been picking at my brain ever since I first booted the game, and that's the thing I wanted to feel out today.

I got into Final Fantasy in junior high, which would have been early 1998. I was really into Earthbound and Pokemon and all my friends were talking about how if I liked those I HAD to play Final Fantasy VII! My younger brother had a PS1 but I had basically not used it until I borrowed a friend's copy of FF7 and played through it that year. Twice. With like full 100% clear files. I had all the time in the world as a teen. By then FF8 was being previewed in magazines and I was so hype to play a new FF. I played all the anthologies and origins releases as they dropped (yes even those busted ass versions). I played 7 8 9 multiple times. I was hooked.

It was really easy to be a FF fan in the late 90s. They made the nicest looking games, they were hugely popular, and there was a lot of historical back material that you could go back and play relatively easily on one platform. FF2 and 5 had never even made it to America before! It felt like not only were we being showered in incredible games, but that the tap would never stop flowing with new experiences. Just when I got close to finishing my backlog, a new game would drop. And if I ever ran out, I could always try that weird FFT thing people talked up. 

Some say I am still saying this.

The PS2 happened to all of us. I say this culturally, because I didn't actually get a PS2 until 2006 because I was flat broke. But it still happened, and with it the great schism of RPGs as everything got voice acting and suddenly half the old guard nerds realized they had been tricked into playing anime and ran as far away as they could into the arms of Master Chief and Darth Revan and eventually Todd Howard. Kingdom Hearts bears special mention here because the hangers on who were okay with anime so long as it was Serious and Adult like Sephiroth FF7 had to reckon with him getting his ass beat by Donald Duck and the clown shoes boy. I'm not saying FFX wasn't popular, but it did mark a turning point and generational gap. Someone right now is complaining about Tidus or Wakka.

Also FF: The Spirits Within happened. Which was bad for Square but honestly anyone who claims it affected the FF fandom is over-exaggerating. Most people just laughed it off and/or forgot it existed until Life is Strange brought up all our old memories of Dr Aki Ross and her afterlife investigations. 

But all of this started chipping away at the Final Fantasy brand, especially as the spin-off games started coming out. Compilation of FF, crystal chronicles, Tactics Advance and A2, Square (soon to be Square-Enix) was off to the races turning their series into a super franchise, and it became really apparent in the early 00s (even before accounting for life-consuming games like FFXI) that you either were going to devote your entire gaming awareness to Final Fantasy, or you weren't. Most people didn't. I certainly didn't, even as I was playing X and X-2 on my roommate's PS2 in college at this point. 

And that's good and normal! Every company wants to be the only thing you care about, from WWE to Disney, but it's just not natural to command people's interest and resources like that. It isn't even sustainable, as you watch the creative wheels fall off these enterprises. Even if I still like Final Fantasy a lot, the 00s FF is not the 90s FF in terms of interest and ambition. The FF of the teens is an even more cross-brand disaster, as mobile games and MMOs take up all the attention as main line entries languish under longer and more disasterous development trying to live up to the impossible hype they themselves created by doing all of this!

All of this is to say that I feel really weird when a Final Fantasy game claims it's for the fans, because that means like six different things and all of them are fraught. That the game was relatively disliked and got cancelled a year after it came out just makes it all the more indicative of Square-Enix as a very confusing and poorly managed game developer over the last ... well, the number of years really says a lot about which type of fan you are, doesn't it? I'd say ever since they announced 9 10 and 11 all at once. That was PRETTY stupid, imo. But also FFX is probably the best Final Fantasy, so you know, even fucking up Final Fantasy can be incredible.

It's just very strange to come back to this game and remember when all I did was listen to FF soundtracks and replay FF5 and 8 over and over again. I still sometimes just get in a hole and listen to the Black Mages over and over. I did that while writing this. But Final Fantasy can never be a thing I experience in total again in the way I was happy to know Final Fantasy back in the day, and thus my fandom often feels taken away from me by Square-Enix. Do I still love those SNES and PS1 games fiercely? Yes. But I was willing to be all in on playing FF when that meant a new game every two years, not when that meant two MMOs and gacha and spin-offs and whatever else is happening with FF these days. 

It's good to remember that fandom is not a thing that is fully your own, that you exist in negotiation with whoever or whatever holds onto the thing you care about, which has its own agenda and probably doesn't know you exist/only sees you as a wealth extraction vector. But also when FFXV opens with that dedication, and lets me drive around listening to Shuffle and Boogie, I feel like it sees me and recognizes that once upon a time I daydreamed about Balaam Garden like it was a place I could grow up and go to the same way a generation after me did for Hogwarts. 

I have this very fraught relationship with FF because I've been playing and thinking about these games for over twenty years now, and while I recognize the hell of a corporation like Square-Enix I still want to believe that I can fall in love with a world and story and characters like I did with AVALANCHE or SeeD or Yuna's Pilgrimage crew. It's often an overwhelming distaste for what the thing I cared about became without my permission (FF7R is probably a good game, but it makes me feel genuinely ill sometimes), but it also means I can put on The Coin Song and get moved in a way few things can do for me so reliably. 

I have no good conclusion, other than it's strange to navigate this space where I feel so pulled in so many directions. I'm reminded of this tweet (and its improved translation remake) from our good friend Jackson:

I will update you with FFXV thoughts if I have more to say, but here's to fandom, may we never forget that the only division that matters is us against the company that sells us these worlds at such a high cost. 

Wishing for an anti-capitalist 2021,

Em