Knights Of The Round
For Gameological’s contribution to 1994 Week, John Teti wrote about why he finds the death (or rescue) of Shadow in Final Fantasy VI more effective than the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, the latter being a moment which has become something of a cultural touchstone. There’s been a loud Final Fantasy VII backlash taking place over the last few years, but a couple of commenters stepped up to defend it this time around. Here’s RedBlueGreen:
Final Fantasy VII is a hard one to be objective about because it came out at such a landmark transitional time in the industry. For me personally, and I’m sure for a lot of people, it was not only my first exposure to Final Fantasy, but the first time a video game truly felt so huge and immersive. Hell, it was probably the very first narrative I ever cared about that wasn’t a Disney movie. I was only 9 when I played it.
As with everything that becomes so huge, it’s gotten popular to kind of shit all over FF7, especially in when comparing it to FF6. But I’d argue that there’s still so much to love about it. As Kyle O’Reilly said, it’s dripping with personality. Take the Midgar slums; everything slots together to make that place come to life: the design, the music, the abject somberness of it all. It’s way more atmospheric than any PlayStation game from 1997 has any right to be. And the whole game keeps that quality up. As an adult, the plot doesn’t really hold up. It’s convoluted faux-spiritual drivel for the most part. But the world is almost palpable: The Gold Saucer, Cosmo Canyon, Corel, The City Of The Ancients, the Junon Parade, Costa Del Sol—it’s a really wonderful game.
Many commenters pointed out that the death of Cid in Final Fantasy VI, which is also something that is under your control to a degree, was just as, if not more, heartbreaking than that of Shadow. Lucky for them, Anthony John Agnello wrote an essay that’s in part about the death of Cid during our Special Topics In Gameology series about emptiness in games. Talking about what makes Final Fantasy VI great, Pgoodso echoed a lot of Anthony’s sentiments:
The whole game is about moving on from tragedy—especially in the original sense of the word, where your misery is born out of your own mistakes, whether you know it or not. Dealing with the past to move on toward the future, grim as that future may be, and whether or not you can make the best out of the tattered remains of your life decides who you are as a person. Shadow can die because you didn’t wait, and that changes Relm’s fate in the World Of Ruin. Cid can die because the fish Celes catches aren’t good enough, which brings Celes to attempt suicide. Locke’s entire motivation is trying to run from or face the guilt of being gone when Rachel “died,” and every other character aside from Relm, Mog, Gogo, and Umaro (i.e. the cute ones) has a similar problem dealing with their past and who they are (even Gogo might have a past stuck in tragedy depending on which theory you subscribe to about his/her origins). That you can not only choose whether or not to retrieve your party members, but also whether or not to deal with their pasts and their new post-apocalyptic lives gives you a real sense of agency in this game that many others in the series do not.
Redial
Calum Marsh wrote a For Our Consideration essay about the way Hotline Miami plays with flimsy calls-to-action in retro games to make a point about video game violence. NakedSnake also had some kind things to say about Hotline:
Everything about the game—the “story,” the music, the aesthetics—merges perfectly to highlight the sweaty suspicion that the whole game (and by extension, most games) exists only as a vehicle for murder. Stranger still, the game manages to make that point by drawing you into a psychopathic point of view. This is a game where you feel savage satisfaction from killing scores of people in time with the beat of the music. Any second of the game in which you are not bursting through doors and cutting and shooting your way through bad guys feels strangely hollow. When you shut the game off, though, you feel dirty. It acts as a critique of video game violence by demonstrating how easily video games can peel away the veneer of civilization and let your lizard brain take over.
And BuddhaBox had this to add:
My favorite part of each level is actually at the end. The throbbing techno music is totally silenced, replaced with a horrible, unearthly droning as you’re made to walk over the masses of shot, bludgeoned, and pool-cued nameless goons. It feels like the game is really rubbing your nose in it. “Oh wow, what a big man! You beat the level and killed all of these people for some reason. Congratulations!”