Patreon Letter: 21st February 2020

Hey folks,

Jackson here with a Pateron letter! It's been a while, as it often has, but the time off has been somewhat restorative for my body and soul. Not as much as I'd like, but that's how it is in this world. I spent much of my time off having severe mental illness, as I believe is the millennial tradition. Truly we are all harried and broken and doing our best. 

Which brings me neatly to: Final Fantasy 7. I did a big replay in preparation for the remake coming up. This isn't going to be a comprehensive writeup or anything, just some short thoughts because well, we're about to record a Voip Life focused on the game in a few ours (if that interests you it'll be on the $10 tier!), and when the remake drops I plan to do a podcast about it, also I'm sure I'll write letters as I go as it will no doubt consume my life. The point is, I am not lacking in opportunities to drop hot hot takes about Final Fantasy 7.

With that said here is the short version: dude FF7 rules. I feel like, given my prediliction for tearing down the things I love in the interests of criticism, and given the intense wrong foot forward of everything that has been shown from the Remake thus far, I may have the reputation of "a hater," when the truth is that I fucking love Final Fantasy. I love it so much. I think the games are thematically expansive and ambitious, the characters are almost always great, and the sense of cinematic propulsion and scale in the set pieces absolutely jaw dropping. In the late 90s, Square had all the money in the world and while they certainly did not know how to use it, they made some remarkable games with it.

I'm not going to go into spoilers because like I say, my cup overfloweth with opportunities to go on about FF7 in the next few months, but also because if you haven't played it then I must plead with you to do so. The remake hovers in the sky ominously above the discourse like a meteor, casting its shadow on basically every discussion about the original at this point in time, and possibly for like a decade depending on how long square takes to make the rest of it. And I think it's a shame when the original is out there, it's on everything at this point, and it's still excellent. If you have not played the original Final Fantasy 7 and you are thinking about diving into the remake please just try the original. You can only play it for the first time once. 

I think the most striking thing about revisiting FF7 - which is not a unique quality, though definitely heightened thanks to the sheer budget and scale of the square PS1 FF games - is how the line between cutscene and gameplay is practically non existent. It is something that has almost totally disappeared in modern games because of the sheer amount of labour and bodies needed to throw onto the gears to develop the level of verisimilitude level to pull this off. 

Now obviously FF has cutscenes, but the bulk of its storytelling is dialogue boxes, expressive environments and the manipulation of its models with stock animations. Which was until polygons basically the main way that games did storytelling with sprites and backgrounds. FF7 carrying this philosophy directly into 3D even more than 8 or 9 makes for a near singular experience in just how much it lives in expressive abstraction yet also detail and fidelity. The sense of placing the player as an actor in these pantomime scenes is, I feel, the defining quality of the storytelling of these games, and it can only exist because of the global language for play being the same at all times. Go to the right place, and press X. The only time you do anything else is in a discrete battle scene, with an entirely different language.

Anyway much ink has been spilled on this idea already, and how the loss of towns in XIII breaks the game down into either combat or cutscene erases this third element binding the whole experience together (I enjoy XIII, and this is still just a true fact). This is not a new observation, but it did really stick out to me on this replay just how sad it was that this game that was made in 1997 and gave a lot of people "holy shit games can do this" vibes, was giving me "holy shit games can do this vibes" when it is 2020 and i've already played it before. 

It's an interesting paradox, and has left me doing much soul searching about what I want from games in the wake of this replay. The pursuit of scale and fidelity are what has basically destroyed this philosophy as a way of making games. And yet, FF7 itself is an expression of the pursuit of scale and fidelity from its era, its budget dwarfing all its competitors, its sense of wonder being achieved by an unrivalled mass of money, bodies and time. Similarly, FF7 is a game about the beauty of human connection and ingenuity, and also how that same quality is, inevitably, going to destroy the fucking earth. And now we come to the remake, midgar ships on two blu rays and the metaphor is complete so perfectly it sounds like parody.

I don't really have a conclusion to this. Two wolves fight inside of us all. I think this is a very sad place for Square Enix to have ended up, and I'll be riding this right into the dirt with them. I love Final Fantasy, I miss Final Fantasy, all things are true.

See you soon with another letter!

Jackson