Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 2

Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 2

The following contains spoilers for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, specifically for Chapter 12. You should be done Chapter 12 and firmly into Chapter 13 if you don't want to be spoiled on anything.

I hate spoilers, and I will always try to protect readers/viewers/audience where possible.




As a game developer, we often talk about content guides. Personally, I've worked a lot more in the space of games for kids, educational games, and games with an emphasis on development. However, as a gamer, I almost exclusively play M rated, adult games. The idea of 'games' for 'adults' isn't new, and by and large, they fall into one of two categories.

They are games that showcase off excessive violence or gore, or games that have sexuality or nudity. Sometimes games have both. Often they have both. Games that feature either or both, are almost always rated M, or the 'forbidden' rating of AO (adults only). Horror games, things with tentacles, people exploding into bits and pieces, these are the domain of 'adult' games.

So what does this matter for Final Fantasy 7R?

The game is rated Teen. But it actually has one moment that I think is incredibly adult, and incredibly nuanced. It isn't a moment of gore, and it isn't a sexual moment.

Instead, it's a very philosophical moment that asks the player to subsume a very complicated, sobering viewpoint.

Let's backtrack.

One of the main alterations they've made for the remake over the original game was to spend time fully fleshing out the world. Midgar, and its citizens were really very quick brushstrokes in the original. You had a basic understanding of the pseudo-cyberpunk retro-futurism that the society existed in, without a real personal touch. In the Remake, this is blown wide open with a much deeper look at both setting, and character.

Nowhere is this more evident than the player character's interactions with the other members of Avalanche. Avalanche is the extremist eco-terrorist cell with whom you have already accepted a mercenary contract before the game begins (I say you as we are primarily in control of Cloud as the protagonist.). Also to say they aren't terrorists is reductive denialism, and I'm uninterested in that.

Your exposure to Avalanche is through Barrett, who starts as more of a caricature Mr. T than a full character, and his lieutenants, Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. I would like to state again, for clarity, that they, and you by proxy, are terrorists. This is an important concept to understand. You are yes striking out against an 'evil' corporation, which may be moralistic in whatever perspective you choose to apply, but the first mission is literally to sabotage the cyberpunk fantasy equivalent of a nuclear reactor. Jessie is the explosives expert, and makes a bomb for you to plant to crack the reactor and shut it down.

As an audience, we are treated to a scene that must seem bewildering at the time. The bomb, which our characters of course can't see as they've already beaten feet, is not effective enough at what it is meant to do. So our villains instead turn their own weapons on the reactor, causing a catastrophic failure that harms and kills thousands of people around the reactor.

Jessie spends the next 10 hours agonizing over that destruction. She blames herself, she even pulls you into an involved quest (that is entirely new in the Remake) about building a better and less destructive bomb for the next mission. During this time, we get to know our fellow cell members in detail, we learn their names, we learn their past, their history, their likes, Wedge's pet cat, Biggs' anxiety.

In the original game, we know all three of them die. Although they don't exactly die onscreen, the game is relatively unambiguous about their fate. (An inside joke in most Final Fantasy games is that Biggs and Wedge always die). But the Remake spends literal hours with them, we get to know them so closely. As players, the design is skirting a fascinating line where it is asking us to wonder, perhaps even subconsciously, "Will they die?"

There is something incredible to dissect here. Again, as with my first meditation, there's a memory contradiction happening. We are aware that in the original, they die. Will they die in this story? Will they die in this revision. There are enough DIFFERENCES that it begins to be called into question. If they just die, why spend 10 hours WITH them? There are so few IPs to be able to really deep dive these moments on, the alteration of our memories and what they mean.

I want to share a small exercise here. Which I got another friend to participate in. She'd never played the original game, and is largely uninterested in video games. So I got her to watch the original sequence, and then the new 'remake' sequence.

The original FF7 scene. Skip to 4 minutes in. You really only need to watch like 30 seconds or so.

And the remake scene.

There's a LOT to unpack here. Obviously, the graphics are far better (as you would expect from 20+ years of technological innovation), the scoring, the character work, there is voice acting. The backgrounds have detail, this is an actual SCENE now.

But more than that. There's a deeply adult thing happening here. We the audience are aware that Jessie is not to blame for Reactor 1 exploding. But Cloud, and Jessie are not. She dies, believing it is karmic retribution for her sins. She honestly dies believing she deserves to die. And neither of her friends are able or capable of comforting her about that. Tifa cries, and Cloud, bless his social nievete can only exclaim "You owe me a pizza!" as though their love of her is as important as anchoring offering her absolution from her life. This is Grecian tragedy basically at its finest, exhibited in a video game.

I'm not to proud to say that I had to put down the controller at this point and walk around the apartment a bit, I had to think. It was agonizing, it made me angry, it made me sad. I expected this moment, in the way that we know Romeo and Juliet both die at the end of the play, but the knowledge of it, and the tease that they 'might' live, does nothing to detract from the viscerality of feeling the death here.

It's a masterwork, this game. And has given me a lot to think about.