cashew | Entries tagged with game: ffvii

So, I've been a little out of the loop on SquareEnix's many projects due to the disappointment of FF7:Remake. I only learned today that there is yet more of the FF7 Complication coming down the pipeline and it's...ugh. Just ugh.

Ignoring the bit about how weapons are going to be locked behind a gacha system or the newly released Battle Royale game of The First Soldier, I'm more ~~concerned~~ ambivalent about the potential of more young-Sephiroth backstory and a re-writing of critical themes from the original game.

The thing is, despite every nerdy gamer's insistence that FF7 was an overrated game, FF7 was a very seminal piece of work in JRPGs, and possibly video games as a whole. Not only did FF7 open multiple technological doors on what can be done in a video game, it also challenged what kind of narratives can be told through the RPG genre.

Although lazy game critics/theorists/meta-commentators like to pretend that FF7 was about a power fantasy, the game was actually a disempowering experience. Here are just some prominent examples:

Aerith dies. While this is not the first time that a party member has died in the Final Fantasy franchise, this is the first time a plot critical party member has died. Having a party member die and the memory of that member haunt the player to the end of the game is something that games before FF7 have never tried before. Not only are you, the player, able to wrestle back control of Cloud right before her death — thus misleading you into thinking that your choices mattered — you are then forced to watch helplessly when Sephiroth drops out of nowhere and stab Aerith through her chest. And there's nothing you can do, no choice you can make, no secret ending you can unlock that can undo any of that. (Until FF7:Remake, the fraud.) Death is brutal, sudden, and completely meaningless (because Aerith already finished summoning Holy, so Sephiroth didn't get what he wanted either).
Your party does not save the world. Sure, you kill Sephiroth (for the second time), but he has still successfully summoned Meteor and nothing your party did was able to spare the planet from the catastrophe. It was Aerith who managed to summon Holy right before her death that allowed the planet to survive. Your party's efforts amounts to exactly nothing: You didn't defeat ShinRa, you didn't prevent Meteor, and you failed to stop Sephiroth.
The villain is the capitalistic system that everyone is trapped in and you are helpless to change it. Be it Yuffie's anger at her father for allowing Wutai to turn into a tourist trap or Barret's anger at ShinRa Company for destroying his coal mining town's livelihood or Cloud's anger at Sephiroth for burning down his hometown, no one was able to fix the problem. The game offers you exactly zero solutions to the social problems you've encountered in your journey. Townspeople continue to struggle between choosing easy access to energy and the increasing wealth gap between the rich and the poor.
The game often allows you to control Cloud while he is incapable of influencing the events around him. You literally are in control of Cloud when he hands the black materia over the Sephiroth, twice. Your choice of who else gets to hold onto the black materia also makes zero impact. The game is filled to the brim with deliberately meaningless choices to enforce helplessness. Because in the face of systemic oppression, individual action does nothing. (And yet, gamers continue to complain that their choices aren't meaningful, missing the point that this is a deliberate design decision.)
People and the land are exploited and your party cannot ease their suffering. Literally nothing you do ultimately made any difference. Oh sure, you'll get a small victory here or there, like defending Fort Condor from ShinRa's invading forces, but the story repeatedly emphasizes that the energy consumption by the world's population is destroying the planet and it took literal catastrophic events (the planet awakening the Weapons) to make ShinRa take notice that maybe what they're doing has dire consequences for civilization and their own survival. Again, your party's eco-terrorism didn't do anything to change ShinRa's mind and instead made them double down on their previous business decisions.
Every character struggles with the guilt of helplessness. Tifa can't do anything to help her friend. Barret lives with serious depression and survivor's guilt. RedXIII has abandonment issues. Yuffie struggles against an imperial power's cultural exploitation. Aerith lives in perpetual loneliness as the last of her kind (not to mention being in love with a dead person). Cid regrets his lost youth and failed career. Cait Sith (aka Reeves) harbors crushing ethical dilemma of working for a company that's evil but is also the only employer in the land. Vincent literally gave up and locked himself in a coffin waiting for a death that won't come. And the protagonist Cloud is a bundle of mental issues spanning PTSD, survivor's guilt, amnesia, imposter syndrome, crippling introversion, and suicidal ideation.

In short, FF7 was a story about disempowerment and suffering through that disempowerment. One of the reasons I think a lot of the later games failed to really click (with Crisis Core being the only real sequel/prequel that worked) was because the theme of disempowerment was never revisited. Only Crisis Core successfully addressed the same theme through Zack's doomed plot. Being forced to play as Zack and fail and fail and fail to save anyone through basically the entire game (Angeal, Sephiroth, Genesis - in that order) brings back the feeling of helplessness despite your character growing stronger and stronger. When you pit the individual against the system, the system always wins.

And seeing how FF7:Remake decided to go with the theme "only we can decide our destiny", it makes me unenthusiastic to see how the definitive Ever Crisis is going to write the story. I'm beginning to think that the people at SE have completely forgotten what the original FF7 was all about.

Also, can we just spare a moment to marvel at how FF7's theme of corporate greed and late stage capitalism exploiting the planet's resources has led to the planet literally trying to kill off humankind remains a relevant theme in 2021 despite the game being released in 1997? Two and a half decades later and the story of FF7 has only become more topical.