Final Fantasy VII Remake

or, political violence as salvation; or, a snapshot of April 2021

It’s April, 2021. The pandemic enters its seeming tenth year and my Johnson and Johnson vaccine — which got recalled today, the day after I received it — courses through my veins, muddying my ability to focus and drenching me in feverish sweat. I look out at my Minneapolis street, flurries of snow falling over grass greener than I’d expect beneath an endless grey sky. A few days ago, a cop — head of her city’s police union, no less — was recklessly unable to differentiate between her gun and her taser and murdered a young man named Daunte Wright while he tried to not get arrested. Last summer, George Floyd was murdered by a different cop while he had the audacity to try to breathe. It happened here, where I live, within walking distance of my front door. My neighbors and I watched our neighborhood set on fire while the internet told us how to feel and castigated us when it deemed we were feeling incorrectly about what was happening directly to us.

Tonight the city will rage and mourn for Daunte Wright — boarded up windows, riot cops, National Guard on my street — while we anxiously await the end of the Chauvin trial over the murder of George Floyd.

A few weeks ago, I was Cloud Strife, indifferently blowing up energy plants in a seemingly futile attempt to slow down ecological disaster in a city with a steel sky — and I know that a decade or two from now, I will be haunted, forever, by Aerith saying, with wistful sorrow, she will miss looking up at a steel sky as she leaves Midgar behind, which is a profoundly bleak yet gloriously true statement about the human condition.

In a different life, a decade gone, in Budapest, I listened to a Hungarian woman tell me how her mother misses the Soviet Union and I asked her how could that be and she told me, a stranger, about how her mother grew up in a world defined by a totalitarian regime that delivered world class art and culture directly into her living room and kept the population housed and fed. That same woman showed me the bulletholes still in the walls from WWII and the subversive symbolism slipped into monuments to an autocrat. She told me about students marching their demands for change to Parliament and being murdered by State Police, how that sparked a national uprising, how the Soviet military rushed in and violently crushed the citizens fighting for self-determination.

Almost exactly four years ago, Indigenous people began the #NODAPL protest at Standing Rock, where they would be harassed and attacked for months by state employees violently clashing with peaceful protesters on behalf of an energy behemoth. As I write this, Indigenous people are facing off, again, against state violence sponsored by energy behemoths in Thief River Falls, desperate to stop Enbridge Line 3 from being illegally built through their land and poisoning the water for millions of people.

Earlier this year, Andreas Malm published a book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

A few weeks ago, I was Barrett Wallace waging an endless war against ecologically cataclysmic corporatism where essential infrastructure was the only target. A man — whose body revealed a history of violence — possessed with fury over unfettered extraction sucking the planet dry, erasing a future for his daughter, Marlene. I was Tifa Lockhart, conflicted over how destroying an energy plant would leave many of the most oppressed in Midgar without power, how the infiltration of the Shinra plant would lead them to violence against the workers there, some of whom lived alongside them in the slums beneath the steel sky.

A few months ago, the arctic froze later than any time in recorded history. Then my child turned two and began having opinions.

A year ago, while holding that same child, I had to turn off David Attenborough’s Our Planet, absolutely shattered with the knowledge that my child would grow up in a dying world.

Twenty years ago, I was a child with my own opinions who, like many children filled with hope and cartoons and Tolkien mythology, wanted to save the world. Not the world I lived in, but the world invented by the sloshing mess of ingested narratives that filled my tiny body, gave texture to my tiny life, and dominated my already sleepless nights. It was that version of me who watched a man with an absurdly large sword ride a motorcycle through a world of metal. Between the ending theme of Dragonball Z and the opening theme to Gundam Wing, I was awestruck, caught in this impossibly awesome Toonami commercial for something I could not have conceived existed. I remember a sensation rising in me — I imagine it’s how caterpillars feel before they form their cocoon — pushing me to be so much more than I could possibly be, begging the impossibly large world to fit inside my stupidly small head, desperate for my hormonally deranged body to become a weapon to ignite a cause, the way Zechs Merquise raged violently against the idealistic militarism of the Alliance so his sister, Relena Peacecraft, could create a pacifistic sanctuary in a world dominated by piloted weaponized giant robots, the way this sworded man would set the world on fire to save it.

A few years older, I was finally able to play Final Fantasy VII (FFVII). I remember falling in love with Aerith, but especially with Sephiroth and his tragic determination to annihilate the god who cursed him, to become god, because I remembered being nine years old, crying alone through the night over my own inability to believe in god, despite a childhood spent in churches, with parents who routinely housed priests from around the world, and I remember more than almost anything in my life how I begged a god I knew I couldn’t believe in to damn me to hell as long as it promised to save my family. I remember nights staring unsleepingly at the moon wishing the world and my life were different. Wishing I could be who I wished I could be.

FFVII, like all Japanese Roleplaying Games, was a game about a small collection of people changing the shape of the world. I’ll admit, after years of hype and growing expectation, I was disappointed in the game, even as I recognized that it was great. And I love the Final Fantasy series. I love it so much that I dream about it, that if I were the type of person to get tattoos I’d have Kefka’s big dumb face covering my entire back the way I have Vivi’s life tattooed inside my heart, the way I dream in Yoshitaka Amano, the way I hear in Nobuo Uemetsu. But FFVII never hit me the way VIII or IX or even X hit me.

The World Trade Towers fell while I watched them on TV in my classroom before I even knew those towers had a name, and when I went home that afternoon, because soccer was canceled, I thought about men with big swords saving the world. It was the same year my friend told me, laughing, with a viciously blackeye, like it was a joke, that her dad beat the shit out of her, and I stared at her in terror because, even while she pretended it didn’t matter, I knew she was a kid like me, wishing to be the person she wished to be, but absolutely brutalized by a world we imperfectly understood, a world we didn’t know how to navigate because it had been here so many horrific years longer than us. Later that year, my best friend returned from a year across an ocean because her parents thought it would be good for her, but when I saw her for the first time, she was different. She was aged, somehow, even though she was younger than me. Even twenty years later, she’s never told me what happened to her there, but I can’t help but think it continues to define the destructive behavior I’ve so long associated with her.

A few years later, I watched, debilitated, while someone called my friend the N-word, which resulted in swinging fists and different kinds of blackeyes.

We inherited a traumatized earth. We’re descended from traumatized people.

All of history is trauma.

All of life is learning to live anyway. No, not anyway: despite. Living despite the intolerable inherited pain of thousands of years of calamitous violence.

The Final Fantasy VII Remake (FFVIIR) is a game about friendship, zealotry, political violence, and shattering history’s chains of trauma. It is a great game. It is beautiful to look at and an absolute delight, for me, to play. It reminded me of everything I’ve always loved about Final Fantasy, even while it forged its own path, deconstructing and raging against the original FFVII, exploding that world we thought we understood way back in 1997, when we were just kids, playing games to broaden the world even though our parents told us it was a trivial escape from reality, playing games to feel transcendent emotions of imaginary people living imaginary lives in imaginary worlds that felt as solid and real as my own unhappy life.

More than the nostalgia so thick it clings to your skin like gelatin, the game is obsessed. Obsessed with its world, with its themes, with its character. FFVIIR, as Tim Rogers put it, is more FFVII than FFVII. This comes directly from FFVIIR’s obsession with FFVII. And while you may ache with nostalgia as you play, it’s the differences, here, that matter, that make the game great, especially if, like me, you’ve been falling in love with Japanese Roleplaying Games your whole life.

What struck me most and early on was how the character writing was so much better than any videogame I can remember playing. So much better, certainly, than any other Final Fantasy game. Cloud is moody and morose but softening due to the obvious affection his friends and new comrades have for him. Even the way his in-combat dialogue changes from nonchalance and indifference to complimentary is a uniquely great innovation that I’ve only ever seen in God of War. And then there are the rest of them. Jessie, Tifa, and Aerith all bring humor and delight to me as they drag Cloud through narrative detours. They’re all distinctly themselves, distinct from one another, and written well enough that they remind you of people you have known, maybe ones you even loved. And then there’s Wedge, who I love deeply. Our soft, kind boy, desperate for affection and so open with his heart.

But it’s Barrett that drags at me. His determination and the sacrifice he’s willing to make for his belief. He is a zealot. Terrifying and captivating. He would murder thousands if it meant saving humanity, making a future for his daughter. He’d march through hell, through valleys of dead bodies piled high — bodies he threw there — if it created a future world, if it meant stopping ecological collapse and catastrophe.

I do not believe in violence. I am an adamant pacifist.

And yet.

And yet I find Barrett’s utter devotion to his belief commendable. Any means necessary to save the planet, to save humanity. No bridge is too far. No line uncrossable. Barrett is terrifyingly vivid. Terrifyingly real.

Because, to put it bluntly, this fight he’s fighting in a fictional world against a fictional corporation is the same fight we’re fighting in our world against very real corporations subsidized by governments all over the world, held sacred by militaries and police all over the world. FFVIIR, in this way, is not escapism, but a mirror, even if it’s simplified and the actual physical violence is somewhat abstracted. FFVIIR makes the terrifying and bold case that political violence is an act of salvation.

It’s something I firmly stand against. An idea I find repellent.

And yet.

And yet what are the ethics of building a pipeline to transport crude oil across a continent? Where is the morality in refusing to blow up that pipeline?

When we see the police beat protesters, use chemical weapons, commit murder against citizens decrying the state’s abuse of power, their monopoly on violence, what is the morality in condemning a riot?

Minneapolis, May 2020

When I watched my neighborhood burn down, it didn’t feel like justice. It wasn’t justice. Not for George Floyd and not for the immigrants and people of color who owned those businesses, who worked there, who watched their livelihoods, their dreams be burnt down by strangers to our community. In many ways, it was violence against the vulnerable people who these protesters were advocating for.

And yet.

And yet the nation raged. The unrest spreading from city to city, turning national and international conversations towards racial inequality and state violence against citizens.

When I walked through the slums of Midgard, I was reminded of my own neighborhood, walking through the husks of burnt-out buildings. I took pictures. Hundreds of them. I remember what it felt like walking through a brutalized landscape in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. The landscape told a story, here, of violence. Of police firing rubber bullets and teargas (a war crime) into crowds of protesters. Broken glass and graffiti everywhere. Smoke still rising from the rubble of a restaurant I’d celebrated more than a few anniversary dinners.

Midgard tells its own history of violence in the landscape of the slums. Metal piping buried beneath the dirt, sometimes twisting free and rising high into the light before collapsing once more beneath your feet. We see the earth beneath our feet as forgotten, discarded, ruined and twisted by industry, by metal, and then we look up to a metal sky.

The characters we meet beneath that steel sky feel real. Realer than any characters I remember encountering in a videogame. They speak about their lives, their fears, their hopes, and, more than all that, they find meaning and joy in life. Their lives are defined by the metal disk above them, the ruinous wasteland all around them, the desperate people who make up their community, and the blessed few who live up above that steel sky in a Midgard that looks like a scene from Blade Runner, rather than the one below, looking like a Mad Max nightmare.

One could play FFVIIR and ignore the obvious themes of disaster capitalism, of extractive exploitation of the earth, of political violence as path to salvation, of ecoterrorism as the requirement for a habitable future. You could, instead, focus purely on how it reflects and distorts the original, how it asks us obliquely to consider the multiverse, how it demands we reconcile our memory of a game with its radical reimagining, how that very question asks us to ask about the nature of memory itself, because we can never replay FFVII because we can never be who we were when first we played it.

We can never go back. Only remember. Only reinvent the past as a story to tell ourselves about ourselves.

After my blackeyed friend told me her dad beat the shit out of her, I could never return to a life where that possibility was, once again, unfathomable. I could never unhear my friend being called a racial slur, could never unsee the devastating year my friend spent abroad, could never believe again in a god I begged to be real.

We can never go back to FFVII. FFVIIR demands we not even try.

When FFVII was released, nearly half of the C02 currently in the atmosphere was not there. In the intervening years, instead of working to combat climate catastrophe, we’ve accelerated relentlessly towards cataclysm.

It’s only now, as a very different person than the one who played FFVII, playing a very different version of that story in FFVIIR, that I think I understand why FFVII mattered to so many people in 1997. Why it continues to be one of the most influential games ever made.

In a world on fire, in cities seething with racialized state violence, I understand Barrett’s zealotry, Tifa’s turmoil over what she believes must be done and the people who will suffer most because of it, and Aerith’s belief that the world can be reborn. And in between, I find myself staring at myself the same way I stared at Cloud. A person who cared about nothing who found himself caring desperately about so much.

The relief I felt, today, a week since writing the beginning of this essay, celebrating with all of Minneapolis, hearing the jury convict Derek Chauvin on all three counts felt like stepping into another world. It’s not justice. Not yet. It doesn’t change anything that has happened, but it gives me hope, for the first time in a long time, that a better world might be possible. One cop going to prison won’t end police brutality or wash away the decades of brutality, but it may be a sign that the country is ready to walk towards a brighter future.

It only took my neighborhood burning down and a nationwide protest movement.

And yet. The world is still burning and the pandemic is still raging under apartheid patent profits dictated by one of the wealthiest men who has ever lived, one who wrote a book about the need to combat climate change, not through collective political action, but through technocratic innovation.

And I see Aerith, again, already nostalgic for the steel sky that she finally leaves behind.

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