The neverending Final Fantasy

I chatted with a former student recently; he chatted with his former instructor recently; our conversation moved to email and has loosely orbited the FF series. I'll begin with the FF content from my most recent response, with the previous email in italics as I go:

> Final Fantasy VII has the best plotline of any video game ever made --

Except for Final Fantasy VI.

I feel more familiar with the installments in the FF series than with
almost any other text -- but each one is self-consciously massive, and
also takes part in a massive tradition (see below), and so resists
inclusion in a course syllabus that doesn't focus on FF almost entirely.

That being said, Chrono Trigger, another extremely well-plotted RPG by
Square, was almost included on my list (and still may be) -- it's got many
of the benefits of an FF installment, but it's shorter and more
self-contained.

> and it comes straight from ancient mythology. You
> could read a fan fiction/novel adaptation of Final Fantasy VII...

Literary analysis of fanfic is EXACTLY where literary study needs to be
going right now (but it can't do so effectively until a capitalistic
system stops governing literary "quality" -- seriously). I tried to dig
into it in chapter two of my senior thesis back when, but it ain't easy.

> alongside my personal favorite, The Hero With a Thousand Faces by
> Joseph Campbell, and discuss the hero archetypes in the game. I know
> Red XIII comes straight out of Native American (eh, culturally
> appropriated Native American) mythology, and Vincent is "the shadow"
> straight out of Carl Jung.

I'll see your Jung and raise you Freud (um, Sephiroth?)... but this is to
say nothing of the (tenuous but fun) connections between FFVII and Hamlet:
a brooding, melancholic, discarded blond son is paralyzed by his own
inability to know himself, suffers from serious (serious) mommy issues, is
betrayed by a friend who acts as a spy, and loves but loses a pure
virginal sweetheart who is constantly surrounded by flowers until her body
sinks down into the deep... yeah.

> -And finally, you could take anything by Emile Durkheim, or How the
> Other Half Lives, and apply it to Final Fantasy VII in Shinra's
> post-industrialized world. Hey, you could even relate it to modern
> Calcutta!

FF games invite such comparisons. Conspicuously. Part of this is the
growth of RPG's from the pastiche of multicultural mythological references
in D&D culture...

But in FF's case, starting with FFVI, the references congeal around what
Western culture considers *legit* -- and I think there's kind of a pattern
to it.

FFVI: opera. Events in an opera house form the pivot of the plot, but
themes and plot points from the opera-within-a-game continually bleed out
into the rest of the game. The storyline itself is especially *tragic*
(romantic leaps from cliffs, for one).

FFVII: sci-fi/futurism. While not "legit" in as traditional a sense as
opera, the foray into dystopian narrative (Midgar) and especially *filmic*
moments (Cloud's and Aeris's "date" at the casino) which are built on
camera angles and dialogue, not to mention particularly cyberpunk
plotlines (Cloud's cross-dressing his way into the mafia; Shinra and Cait
Sith and the Turks), jacks into the whole world of Philip K. Dick, William
Gibson, Neil Stephenson, the Wachowski Bros, etc etc. These are beginning
to be recognized as legit by the academy, but are already big guns in
Hollywood.

FFVIII: romantic film. Complete with a cast of *only* good-looking,
early-20-year-old actors, an Armaggedon-style space scene, a prom, love
letters, a rivalry to win Rinoa's heart (and to get her to wear your
necklace), a B-story about "how I met your mother in a hotel bar", etc
etc. And most importantly -- a pop song that plays at just the right
moment.

FFIX: the most interesting of these -- it refers to FF itself. Each game
thus far has had, at its core, some "legit" genre as a governing source of
references -- FFIX self-consciously uses *previous FF games* as its genre
-- and in doing so, asserts FF's place among the "legit" forms.

After that, FFX's makers actually go on record as conscious of their own
legitimizing power -- they use specifically eastern/Asian genres to help
canonize these in fantasy.