Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Final Fantasy VII Retrospective 'The Midgar Arc'

This is the first installment of my retrospective on Final Fantasy VII. FFVII had a very major impact on my gaming experience growing up. The concept of story and games was novel to me at the time (I was 11, sue me) and from that point on I was hooked. With the release of the game on to iOS, I felt I needed to give this game another go. This retrospective will cover things I noticed, and may not be entirely linear in its approach. This will NOT be a walkthrough, but a commentary on the game, my memories, and my hopes for the recently announced Remake and other projects. I will also, of course, discuss how this relates to us in roleplaying.

This entry will contain roughly the beginning portion of the game set in Midgar. Warning: This will contain spoilers of FFVII. If you have not played the game and don't want to know the score, please don't continue.

The game begins with everything running. Literally. You hope off of a train as the protagonist (Cloud Strife) in this dirty city surrounded by what look like industrial stacks. Your first action is to take out guards, and then advance onto one of the stacks which are actually high powered Reactors sucking natural energy into a refined energy called 'Mako'. This is killing the planet, and you're going to do something about it.

So, cool, you're here to save the world. You're doing awesome. You're....planting a bomb at the very heart of the reactor....uhm...guys....guys...? This one could go hard and to the--

Well, crap.

Going through the game, I was shocked at the notion that I was playing the part of an eco-terrorist whose first mission was essentially a bombing run on a nuclear reactor. If you look at that video, during the Reactor going full on Praxis, several explosions to the left of it occur. Those were houses. People were sleeping.

Congrats. Twenty minutes into the game and you've killed countless people in their sleep. Well fucking done.

The concept that, yes, you're a terrorist is brought up, but its done in a very broad sense. Cloud's a generally ambivalent about the whole thing, which makes it easier for the Players to make up their own mind. Barrett and his AVALANCHE squad of doofuses are too comical to be taken seriously as a group. But we're also viewing it from Cloud's POV, he could just be viewing them as being doofuses. People around them certainly take them (and Barret 'definitely not based on Mr. T' Wallace) like a serious threat.

Again, this doesn't get looked at too in depth because the game is constantly moving and constantly setting up little pieces that are going to go off eventually. Tifa and Cloud's past together and their connection. Cloud's mysterious flashbacks/memory voices that pop in at weird times. Mentions of the great warrior, Sephiroth. The sheer callous evil that is the Shinra Corporation. And then, all of this starts to go off when Cloud falls through a Church roof and meets a flower merchant.

The plot of the game, the real plot of the game, begins when you meet Aerith (I know the US translation insists on Aeris. I'm using the universally accepted version). She is a mysterious woman who looks and has the skills of a flowery and squishy Mage, but is actually a bold tomboy. Her involvement is ultimately what makes this a simple story of freedom fighters against a Capitalistic Regime into something on a much grander scale.

During this current run on the game, I realized how fast they were going by everything. Details about the world, some of the people and characters. They were playing fast and loose. You were given just enough information to get the gist, then we'd move on to the next piece. The only time it felt like I was in what would be a now traditional RPG was during the whole Wall Market affair where I was doing errands and chores for the entire Market in a bid to sneak into some place with the most success. Other than that, the story was entirely linear.

The entire story in Midgar could have been an entire game right there. From the assault on the Reactor to the  the rescue up the entire 70 floors of Shinra Headquarters in the heart of Midgar, that's set up-second act-denouement right there. The game could have been over, Cloud could resolve the sticky little triangle he suffered between Aerith and Tifa (or the girls could leave him alone, either way). But no. It's only until you reach what would be the end of the story that you're introduced to the real  problem.


This Bitch Right Here
It's not until the creature known as 'Jenova' appears that the narrative changes. When things go pair shaped at Shinra HQ and Jenova bursts out of her/its cage, Cloud stops the show and announces that Shinra, the evil empire they and we've been dealing with for the past few hours, aren't the major threat to the planet. Keep in mind that Cloud up until now has only been doing things on a personal basis, even including saving others because they mean something to him. Cloud goes from ambivalent about the fate of the world to pointing us at the threat really fast, and with good reason we'll find out soon enough.

Now, going through the game, the dialogue and writing of the game's text has not held up well in the past two decades. Because of a lot of graphic limitations, we have to be told how bad things are instead of being shown how bad things are. But even then, we've no real context to go on. How bad is it on the outside, is there even an outside left? There's mention of a war that had gone on a few years before, but that's it. All we know is Midgar at this point.

We've no context as to where Midgar is compared to the rest of the world metaphorically speaking. We are shown more in the few minutes of the Remake announcement that cements that Midgar's environment is slowly degrading than the first act did. That's one of the reasons this game deserves a remake. So much detail was clearly put into the setting of Midgar that a full blown game could have been done by expanding the first three hours of material, but so much of the time was spent tell us about it. In a modern game, we can get the nuances of the setting and the character for granted, whereas before even though we were seeing the scenario it was so stylistically and graphically coarse that we had to fill in the gaps still.

The Midgar Arc serves the purpose of getting the player acquainted with the main characters, the antagonists, and kick starting the major problem in the setting. Because once you leave the walls of Midgar, it is an entirely different world out there.

- Later,

C