Category Archives: FFVII

We Were Made For Being Happy


Today a conversation with a friend of mine prompted me to recall this song from Akira Yamaoka‘s Silent Hill 3 soundtrack, ‘Letter From The Lost Days.’ It’s a wistful track, in which a person writes a letter to her future self, wondering about what the passing of time will do with her relationship to her family, friends and her happiness in life.

The song did particularly well in the context of Silent Hill 3, which at its core is about a teen girl exploring her origins and her relationship with her father once the extent of her disassociation with those things become clear. Even though the lyrics of the song don’t literally translate to events of the game, the abstract association is very effective.

Coincidentally, I’ve been watching shows I’ve already seen before when I’m on a treadmill or elliptical at the gym (they have these internet-enabled screens there so I can Hulu or watch streaming television! The future!) I generally choose to watch things I’ve seen before — consuming new media often requires more concentration than I can allocate when I’m working out, so favorite shows are just engaging enough.

I had the bright idea a few days ago to stream the Cowboy Bebop episode ‘Speak Like A Child’, which sees rambler-gambler Faye Valentine accidentally stumble on a cassette that she recorded for herself as a little girl (before being injured in a space gate accident that left her frozen in cryogenic stasis for years and waking up with no memory, but anyway).

It’s one of the most poignant scenes in a long, highly episodic series which assembles its presiding character arcs through occasional vignettes, so it’s natural that I found myself climbing an elliptical machine trying not to get choked up about anime in front of other people at the gym. These are powerful ideas — who you used to be, who you will become, these discrete temporal editions of yourself that are deeply you, yet somehow are still strangers.

Video games have this weird power of permanence. Maybe it’s because they’re often abstract and allow us to project ourselves into them, as Kirk and I have been talking about in The FFVII Letters. But whenever we tend to think about our most favorite games, we tend to remember less about the game itself and more about where, when and who we were when we were playing them. That impact, that power of instant recollection, is more pervasive than the capsule experience of the play experience, which is generally finite.

This month at Kotaku I wrote about games’ power to influence the way we think about the world and our lives, so you can tell I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Related: this Kotaku feature I wrote last year about how much my gaming experiences have been about who I shared them with at the time. When I hear ‘Letter From The Lost Days,’ I most miss with whom I played Silent Hill 3, who beat all the too-scary parts for me.

We’re coming to the end of The FFVII Letters — just one exchange left. I wanted to begin the letter series to examine whether FFVII really was a Great Video Game, or whether my relationship to it over the years has been more about who I was as a high schooler. We’ve talked a lot about what makes the game special along our way, but the letter series and the re-play I engaged in has ultimately been a letter to my past self, from the me I am now to the me who loved FFVII as a teen. I think it’s amazing that games can form a bridge like that.

You’ve seen me recently express overwhelm at social media and a world where, when a significant global event occurs as it did this week, none of us can avoid being steeped in the noisy tide of others’ emotions and opinions (and fake Martin Luther King quotes). Maybe that’s why it’s been such a comfort to think about escapism; when headlines about PSN hackers rapidly propel us into a seductive world of future-fiction (I just wrote ‘Why We Love Hackers‘), it’s tempting to miss your past self, to want things to be simpler.

I’ve wistfully retreated into the sweet, perma-youth simplicity of Pokemon games, and I thought it might be kind of fun to watch Pokemon cartoons at the gym and I wondered about how weird that would seem, a woman my age working out to Pokemon battles. I felt kind of bad that that’s a thing I should have to worry about; I wrote ‘I Am An Adult Pokemon Fan‘ at Thought Catalog too, your consideration of which I would appreciate.

The world can be an ugly, noisy place quite often. And people talk a lot about video games as ‘power fantasies,’ testosterone-fueled grindfests geared at making us feel superhuman. But so many games can help us form meaningful retreats from the obligation to be empowered, from the scariness that, thanks to the magic of the internet, is often shouting chaotically directly into our faces.

I would hazard that while we like games that make us feel cool and powerful, we better like those that give us a place to belong — where your present self can go back and visit your past self whenever the future-self seems an unknown beast shrouded far ahead in the mists.

Minimalism And Magic

Kirk Hamilton and I have been writing all those FFVII Letters at Paste, banging on about how special and imaginative the game is. Yet as Kirk pointed out in our last letter, it contains a Meteor called “Meteor,” a Weapon called WEAPON, and stuff called Black Materia and Huge Materia (to differentiate itself from regular old Materia, of course). Creative.

But in today’s new edition in the series, I talk about how the simplistic names are abstraction at its happy work yet again — when we don’t have to think much about what things are called, it gives us more mental resources to think about what they are. Simple names make important concepts intuitive, second-nature. And then when something is named rather prettily, like the sunken Gelnika or Turks leader Tseng, it makes more of an impact on us.

When I was a kid, every game I played was painfully basic in presentation and interface. The only explanation I have for why I so loved these ancient computer games I wrote about in Thought Catalog today was that I was young, had an overactive imagination and had little else I wanted to do with my playtime — not to mention it’s not like we had many more sophisticated adventures in the 1980s, right?

I also think they impacted me so much because they were SO terse, so crude. That blob on the wall is a cabinet I’m supposed to open? How the eff would I have known that without stabbing in the dark? Why does the game tell me I’m holding a map if it is of no use to read it? I must type ENTER HOUSE and not OPEN DOOR or else the game will tell me that area is not available, and if I go WEST at this intersection I’ll be instantly killed? Cool.

That cursor blinking at me, demanding my next move, frustration a constant pall — and yet the continual possibility of sudden, lucky solution teased at the fringe of my awareness just as much as did the threat of sudden, accidental death. I’d hold my breath and get chills; they remain among my favorite gaming memories.

When young there was nothing I loved more than rich universes. I’d write about my favorite games, draw pictures and play pretend. That’s why so much of my writing lately has hinged on parsing exactly what’s changed — either about games or about me — that makes me so inattentive and easily bored.

When I play games that give me lorebooks, diary entries, character stories hidden off the beaten path, I’m surprised at how little I care. It’s not so simple as impatience for reading — I like reading, and I don’t even mind when reading in text adventures or visual novels comes at the expense of interactivity. “I’ve changed,” I shrug to myself when I have a million New Unread Notes blinking at me in this or that UI and I just scroll through them quickly because the star or dot or highlight or exclamation point that tells me I haven’t read them yet bugs me like it does in Gmail.

Yet as we observe in the FFVII Letters, some types of games can make me go way, way out of my way and to much inconvenience for even the possibility of discovering a new piece of information. Why will I do it for characters and plot threads that are so minimal, when I won’t do it for things rendered in much more depth?

Because I like minimalism, I guess. I like to do the brain-work myself, the imagining myself. And I get such a thrill from looking at the title screens of these old adventure games I can now revisit thanks to the magic of this web-based IIe emulator that I don’t even try to play them that often, because it still feels good to think of them as ghosts I never conquered, awesome machines that have forever outsmarted me. It still feels good to preserve them as half-remembered, near-legendary things.

And also because I still can’t beat most of them without a walkthrough, and you know once you open a walkthrough for one puzzle your tolerance for future ones steadily decreases, and before you know it, you’re just going through the motions, and that’s no way to honor my past. I get addicted to hints (you should have seen our phone bill, and my parents’ consternation, back when Sierra still operated that buck-a-minute hint line).

Anyway, you might have missed this 2009 Classic Moment In SVGL History when I wrote this “open letter” to Bob Blauschild, the designer of two out of five of my best-remembered — and most frustrating — adventure games, whose name sketched on the title screens always stuck with me. I did it mostly as humor, never expecting that he’d ever see it, but he did, and here’s what he wrote back to me.

Hearing from Mr. Blauschild was frankly a little dazzling, because I still maintain that lifeline to the way I felt about those old computer games and the invisible, sadistic entities that made them. Once in a while if I think about it, so is the fact that I now have periodic occasion to be in the same room as “Lord British”, whom as a kid I presumed had to be some real-life mysterious English lord, sitting on a throne made of mainframes, silently challenging the world’s peons to encounter him at Ultima. When I was tiny I thought he maybe wasn’t even real, some artificial consciousness assembled in green pixels.

I think that’s part of the Minecraft juggernaut today, actually. There’s the idea of a single figure who goes by the moniker of ‘Notch’, creating the weather in a savage and lawless, endless world that challenges its players to eke out defiance — and beauty — one hard-won step, one precious discovery at a time. Awe and death are both certain in Minecraft, and you just never know which is coming next.


[Today’s Good Song: Memory Tapes, ‘Today Is Our Life‘]

Introducing The FFVII Letters!


I really dislike the idea that in order to be knowledgeable on games, you must have played every game. There are certainly gaps in my lexicon, and I keep quiet about them because there’s nothing more I loathe than someone agape, demanding of me, “you never played [that]?! How are you a game journalist” and blah blah blah.

I never thought I’d pull that one on someone else, but when I found out my friend, talented fellow writer Kirk Hamilton, had never played Final Fantasy VII I was pretty much like dude wtf is yr prob fix this now bro (yes, that’s kind of how we talk to each other).

Fortunately, rather than tell me to step the eff off, Kirk agreed to launch into a letter series with me which he’s running over at Paste Magazine, where he is games editor. In part one, we discuss initial perceptions from his fresh perspective, and in part two, we discuss a bit about the characters and why abstraction makes the world feel real [edit: part 3 is also up] – follow official index here!)

I know it’s tempting to think of FFVII as something that’s “been done”, but it’s fascinating to see an adult gamer discover it for the first time, independent of the climate in which it was originally released, divorced from the fanboyism. I also think everyone who was an FFVII teen should endeavor to replay the game as an adult, as I’m doing — ideas on who we are now and where we came from help illuminate why a game where everyone had giant hair made a genuine emotional impact on an entire generation.

And for both of us it’s making us consider the state of RPGs in 2011, what Westernization has done, and what we might have lost in the march toward streamlined design and better graphics.

Lost Time


Jeez. The holidays come, then I get a flu, before you know it I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of weeks. Lots to catch up on, so forgive me if I just quick link-blitz you for now on a little of the stuff I’ve done here and there in the meantime:

Kotaku: New Year’s Resolutions for Gamers — How many do you think people will want to adopt?
Thought Catalog: How FourSquare Intends To Be Vs. How FourSquare Really Is — Why I think geolocation apps and “games” aren’t “social”. Now with 50% more derision.
Thought Catalog: Five Emotions Invented By The Internet — Deep angst in the digital age.

And I don’t know whether to blame holiday nostalgia for younger days or the sense of juvenile vulnerability brought on by being sick for why I’ve launched on a deep, focused revisiting of Final Fantasy VII on my PSP. And I’m not sure why I assumed a game that I and everyone else loved on such a massive scale that it’s possibly not been repeated since wouldn’t hold up, or wouldn’t be as interesting on reflection.

In a strange way, it’s more interesting as an adult, looking at the little details of the game world, traits of the experience that probably wouldn’t appear (for better or for worse) in modern designs, and try to think about why it was that the FFVII universe seized us in such a lasting way.

It hasn’t even been that long since I tried to think about this, since I was very moved by playing Crisis Core when it came out (although this is my first real play-through of FFVII in some years). I’ve just never really been satisfied by any of the writing I did around it nor by the firmness of any of the conclusions I made. Going to try to do some fun and useful stuff this time around, so stay tuned.

Yeah. Crazy busy, but what else is new?

Other good stuff: While I was sick I watched this “Princess Jellyfish” show basically in one sitting and I am impatient for more episodes now.
Today’s good song: Avi Buffalo, ‘Where’s Your Dirty Mind‘

What Does A Gamer Look Like?


If you are a Brooklynite or you know one, the perception that Manhattan is like ugh so fucking far, impossible miles comprised of inconvenient steps, is familiar to you. Although Brooklyn is as much a part of New York City as any other borough (holding my tongue against the Staten Island jab, because they’ve had enough) , when discussing Manhattan destinations, we talk about “going to the city” as if it were a cross-country road trip.

In fact, it’s just a matter of train stops. It’s not that big a deal. But when I had to go “to the city” yesterday to see the U.S. launch of Dragon Quest IX at the Nintendo World Store, I fully-loaded my iPhone with brand-new music and brought my PSP (YES! I GOT ONE, present from a lovely friend) for the train ride, and in case I had to wait in line when I got there.

Incidentally, what is the etiquette around playing a PSP at a Nintendo launch event? What if you’re using it to re-play Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII at the launch of a Square Enix game? These are the things I wonder about, friends.

As it turned out, I did not have to wait in line, but I did play a fair bit on the train — the early train sequences in Midgar, incidentally. Semi-surreal; Cloud and his AVALANCHE rebel cohort trying to evade train security so they can take the railway to their scheduled Reactor bombing, while all around me the subway interior is decorated with lectures about “if you see something, say something.” The ride was punctuated by voice-over drones about “suspicious packages.”

You read the ‘Hey Baby’ post, and how unfortunately acclimated girls from my neighborhood get to long stares, unwelcome conversation-starters like “I like your bounce, Mami,” and generally aggressive strange men. So when the guy I sit down next to on the train begins staring at me and grinning stupidly, I simply ignore it, put my headphones on, and keep playing FFVII.

He goes on staring and nodding at me the whole time, this guy in ginormous baggy pants, askew ballcap, sporting a huge diamond stud — like, not my type. By the time we arrive at the station, I take off my headphones and begin putting them away, and glance to make sure this creeper isn’t planning to follow me or something.

But he goes, “Hey, Final Fantasy VII. Old school, that’s cool!”
I was floored and embarrassed, and all I could say was something to the effect of “yeah, it’s pretty essential, right?”

And he goes, “I was surprised. You don’t really look like a gamer.”

Ha. Not for one minute would I have guessed it was my PSP he was staring at, either. Damn, did I feel dumb.

I mean, here I’ve been writing for years about “broadening audiences” and “cultural diversity” and things like that, and yet I suppose I still had in my head an idea about “what a gamer looks like” (those dudes wearing turbans and capes and Slime costumes at the DQIX event, for example).

Do you?

I once wrote this article about the innate desire “we” all have, as part of a culture that’s been historically fairly small, fairly intense and fairly marginalized, to “recognize” one another in the public, offline space. When I wrote it, it was 2007; I lived in Manhattan. I felt very much like the only gamer in the world (if you’ve seen the piece I did for Kill Screen Issue 0, you might recognize some sentiments in common).

To be quite honest, I guess it feels different now, even a few years later. I went to an internet cafe in Williamsburg to print some stuff out and they had a bunch of TW@-branded mousepads there (although, to be fair, the clerk told me I was the only person who’d ever noted the reference). Many weekends I join friends from the local Silent Barn community space in playing and promoting Babycastles, the indie arcade they’ve got going on in the basement (I recently had the privilege of playing Messhof’s Nidhogg with a bunch of my friends whose usual purview is playing music). People at my local hangouts tell me my job is cool. I know one bartender with a Triforce on his arm, and another bartender with a Buster Sword on his calf — and that’s just at one restaurant.

We are proliferating. We should adjust our expectations of strangers.

Bonus material: While we’re on really old articles of mine, one about people who got way too into Final Fantasy VII.

Double bonus: I loaded my iPhone with new music, yes — if you follow me on Twitter you’ve been picking up the mixtapes I regularly post, but if you missed it, here’s volume 2 of my ‘summertime mix’. Due to the limitations of free hosting, it’ll only be available for a limited time, so if you’re remotely curious, grab it now and give an ear to these fantastic artists.

Triple bonus ding-ding-ding: Guess what else I did at the DQIX event? I interviewed Yuji Horii. You’ll get to read that ASAP.
[Slimes on the cobbles of Rockefeller Plaza]


[Today’s Good Song: ‘I’ll Follow You‘, White Fence (via noise narcs)]