SPOILERS FOR: Final Fantasy Series
There is an issue which has had me pondering almost since the FF4 SNES days. It
became particularly strong with the release of FF7 and has been hanging in the
air in any room full of RPG fans ever since. That issue is Final Fantasy fans
with conservative attitudes.
Given, the RPG genre's roots in swords and dragons, save the princess and all
that lent themselves well to being fairly apolitical, but now that games have
thankfully been able to move into more complex storylines due to improved
technology, we have been seeing games which more closely reflect modern social
and political issues. Perhaps the best example of this, and certainly the most
mainstream popular, is the Final Fantasy series.
Throughout many of the Final Fantasy games, we see several major themes which,
whether or not they are directly integral to the storyline, strike gamers which
pay more than a little attention. One is capitalism and what happens when greed
and power go out of control. This was the more "innocent" good vs. evil variety
back in FF1 (US version), but by FF4 the theme of power-hungry world entities
seeking ultimate power at the expense of entire races and the life of the planet
itself emerged. This theme grew much stronger in FF7. Not only that, but the
traditional and easily recognizeable images of the bureaucrat or businessman,
such as Kefka (before we knew he was an insane mutant) and FF7's Rufus, ram home
this theme by carelessly endangering the world in their pursuit of power and
fame or wealth, and do a very good job of making a solution of the ongoing
problems in the world harder for the protagonists. In addition, in nearly every
FF game we see big divisions between rich and poor; generally the worlds tend to
consist seemingly of 80-90% subsistence level agricultural or simple towns
supporting sometimes only 1 or 2 major cities with extremely high technology and
conveniences. This is again particularly true of FF7 with Midgar.
Surely, everyone loves to bash on the super-greedy guy at the top, even in real
life, so it's not so surprising that this would appear in a video game. But
closely linked to capitalism emerges another theme: technology vs. nature and
the value of environmentalism. In many of the Final Fantasy games, some type of
natural disaster becomes imminent because of the reckless use of technology or
the abuse of the planet by its inhabitants. It is then up to the protagonists
to set things right by restoring the balance. A variety of "earth-first
friendlies" appear in the games to help out the heroes and point them in the
right direction; the sages in Mysidia, the clerics of Toroia, the dwarves, and
the Lunarians in FF4; the Returners and many others in FF6; Avalanche, Cosmo
Canyon and many of the small towns in FF7. All of these places offer advice to
the heroes for how to help stop evil and save the planet, and they all use power
or the earth in appropriate ways.
To some degree these themes can be chaulked up to Japan's special history. Even
the Godzilla movies are an example of this theme recurring in Japanese media
since the second world war, when the use of atomic weapons awoke the Japanese,
and the world, to the horrific destructive power of modern technology and the
unknown dangers the world would face in the future as a result. Godzilla in the
earliest movies was simply a terrible monster created freakishly because of
radiation from atomic testing, but later became a sometimes-ally of humans
against even worse threats as humans learned to show more respect for nature
(within the story world of the movies, at least.)
The other day, when I happened to be browsing the internet for the track
listings of the Final Fantasy Piano Collections CD, I ran into a fan review of
the CD with a track-by-track review. His review of the Cosmo Canyon track read
something like, "I didn't care much for this song in the game, because it played
in Cosmo Canyon which was mostly a bunch of really annoying hippies." This
shocked me quite a bit. Given, I've been off having a life and doing other
things, so recently digging back into some Final Fantasy info on the net jolted
my memory about this kind of attitude you encounter in some FF fans. I wondered
immediately, "How can someone who views environmentalism as "annoying hippyism"
possibly be a fan of a decade of FF games more or less devoted to that very
theme?" A friend pointed out that a lot of FF fans are gamers first; they play
the mechanics of the game and enjoy the graphics and action battle sequences,
but pay only a small amount of attention to the actual storyline. This
explanation satisfied me somewhat, although I'm still really shocked that
someone who'd chaulk up one of the major themes of the game as "annoying
hippyism" could possibly finish FF7, having to hear all of this information
about the lifestream and how to use it to save the world, and all this other
"greenpeace crap."
This confusion on my part becomes even stronger when I see that Rufus is,
somehow, a very popular FF character among many fans. Let's see.. a man who
flat out admitted in the game dialogue that his only goal was profit and power,
and dismissed the well-being of humanity as essentially something they can be
paid off about. Then, because he's completely ignorant (and perhaps just
doesn't care) about the origins of the crises facing the world, such as Weapon
and Sephiroth, he makes matters worse by INCREASING the rate at which his empire
sucks mako energy out of the planet (the very thing that started the entire
chain of events) in order to pull off projects like the giant materia launch
against meteor and the powering of the various ray cannons designed to fight
Weapon. In essence, he makes the problem worse and does everything in his power
to prevent the heroes from progressing towards their goals, even though they're
essentially the same as his.
Putting together Rufus's popularity with the eye-rolling by some FF fans about
the "hippyism" (which I've heard more than once), the only conclusion I can draw
is that we've got some conservative FF fans out there who admire businessmen
who'd threaten the planet to make a profit and think that problems like the
ozone layer, global warming, or the dumping of chemicals into rivers and oceans
which make seafood supplies toxic in many areas to be a bunch of left-wing
propaganda, to be dismissed and ignored. Admittedly, the Final Fantasy games
are terrific GAMES in their own right, with or without their storylines. The
graphics, sound, music, and battle setups tend to be top-notch, or at least were
at the time each individual game was released. But I'm still rather mystified
as to how people so averse to what I consider to be major themes through the FF
series can sit through hundreds of hours of FF gameplay and dialogue. They must
feel like they're having needles pushed into their eyes everytime they have to
read a lengthy bit of text about someone endangering the world or hurting the
planet. I simply don't know how they do it.
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