I first wrote this piece in 2021, for a different context. I couldn’t assume any knowledge of video games on the part of the reader, and I felt compelled to assume a rhetorical position of expertise, one I’m hoping not to inhabit in general, as I’m not an expert—especially not a video game expert—and, in general, I don’t much care for their rhetoric. That said, I think it serves as a pretty good introduction to some of the kind of thinking I’m hoping to do here. It’s also a bit longer than I expect most of my letters will be. (Heads-up that the letter contains various spoilers for Final Fantasy VI and VII—although if you have found your way to this newsletter, intend to play FFVII, and have gotten this far in your life without learning The Big Spoiler, you’re some kind of plot-ignorance virtuoso, and I’m sincerely impressed.)
Searching for Friends
I
Halfway through the video game Final Fantasy VI, you1 fail to prevent the apocalypse. By this point in the story, you’ve spent dozens of hours moving through the game’s world – visiting towns, talking with people, trawling dungeons and caves, fighting battles, riding and, eventually, flying across great swathes of varied terrain – in an effort to help the faction called the Returners stop the ruling Gestahlian Empire from acquiring the capacity to use the magic that destroyed the world centuries earlier. But your enemy, a rogue Gestahlian commander named Kefka, succeeds: he unearths the petrified gods and harnesses their power to supersede the Emperor and destroy the surface of the world. Your laboriously assembled party of adventurers is scattered to the winds.
A year passes. Celes, a former Empire general turned Returner collaborator, wakes up from a coma on the shore of a deserted island. She has no memory of anything that happened after Kefka destroyed the world and no reason to believe that anybody she knows is alive. She is the only member of your party left: she is the only one whose movements and decisions you can control, the only person who fights when your party enters combat. She is the only means you have of interacting with the world.
If you look around the island, you find a small house. Inside is a man named Cid, a former Empire research scientist. Talking with him begins a “cutscene” – a dramatic scene in which the characters speak and act of their own accord. Through the cutscene’s dialogue, you find out that Cid has been taking care of you for the past year. When you come upon him now, he is bed-ridden, dying of an undisclosed illness.
After the scene in which you learn of Cid’s condition, you are given back control of Celes. You have been charged with catching fish for Cid to eat. You have never been given the option to catch fish before; it requires a mode of interaction with the game’s world that has not yet been demanded of you. A timer begins to tick down. Cid begins at 120 points of health, losing one point each second. If you catch and give him fish, his health increases by a set amount, depending on how difficult the fish was to catch. If he drops below 30 points of health, he dies. Cid’s dialogue changes depending on the number of points of health he has.
These numbers, however – the timer and the health points – are all invisible to the player. This is the most crucial formal feature of this sequence. The numbers were only discovered by players experimenting independently, taking the game apart and looking at the source code. The experience of actually playing this sequence, on the other hand, is obscure and opaque. You are given instructions that do not correspond to the kinds of activity you are used to performing and you must quickly figure out how to execute them. In an important sense, you have no idea what is going on.
The first time I played this part, I panicked. In control of Celes, I wandered out to the shore and looked at it for a while. Eventually, I figured out how to catch a fish. I brought it back to him. He told me that his worst nightmare was to think of me alone on this wretched island. I wandered out and caught another one. When I came back, he was dead.
If you let Cid die, you lose control of Celes again. I watched as she wept at Cid’s bedside, then walked out to the edge of a cliff – a cliff I’d explored earlier, while in control of her. She stood at the edge for a while, looking out. Then she jumped.
It doesn’t work. Celes wakes up on the shore again. There is a seagull next to her. She sees that someone had bandaged an injury on the seagull’s leg with a bandanna. She recognizes the bandanna: it belonged to another member of your party, a man named Locke, with whom she had a complex and unrealized romantic entanglement. She realizes that Locke may be alive.
Back at Cid’s house, she finds a note he left. It reveals that, before his illness, he built a raft for her and left it in the basement. You watch as she carries it to the shore and leaves the island on the raft to go look for the other members of your party – for her friends.
II
Final Fantasy VI, released in 1994, is often cited as the greatest Japanese role-playing video game ever made. It was developed by a company called Squaresoft for a game console called the Super Famicom, whose North American equivalent was called the Super Nintendo. The entire game fit on a cartridge with two megabytes of storage, the equivalent of fifty seconds of modern MP3 audio. It takes about forty to sixty hours to complete.
By and large, the gameplay is simple. The player controls a party of adventurers, pre-written characters who enter and exit your party as the plot demands. There are fourteen total possible party members; you control up to four at a time. One acts as your avatar as you move through the world. You steer this character to a particular place and talk to someone. Story stuff happens. Then you walk somewhere else. Before you get there, you might have to fight some enemies, including powerful and narratively significant bosses. You get stronger. Then you get to the next place you’re going.
Given its structural simplicity, it surprised me how much this game – and the genre as a whole – affected me. Before last year, I had not played video games for many years; nonetheless, Japanese role-playing games (and Final Fantasy VI in particular) were responsible for the most stirring and profound aesthetic experiences that I had in 2021. I’ve since thought a lot about why this might have been the case. Two of many possible answers: 1) Final Fantasy VI places immense structural and thematic emphasis on the importance of relationships, and 2) its technical limitations open up a remarkable imaginative space.
It's for these reasons that I opened with the first properly post-apocalyptic chapter of the game. It’s an episode about the importance of friendship: if not for Cid’s care for Celes, the world’s tyrant would have gone unchallenged; the same outcome would have resulted had Celes succeeded in killing herself rather than happening on a reason to recommit to the world of others.
And the episode was only effective because of the game’s mechanical limitations. If the game had switched to an entirely different mode, or if the cutscenes had not taken place on the same stage I’d just explored, or if the game had been clearer about what it needed from me, the sequence would not have been nearly as effective – and all of these, to a greater or lesser degree, are functions of the game’s technical limits. I believe these principles apply to the rest of the game, as well.
III
The foundational social unit of the Japanese role-playing game is the party: a small band of adventurers on a particular quest. Stories centered on parties such as these are probably as old as stories themselves, but it is worth pausing to discuss the specific lineage Final Fantasy VI draws on.
The developers of Final Fantasy were inspired by western role-playing games from the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Wizardry.2 For the most part, these games did not catch on in Japan, both because they were designed for expensive American computers and because they are (at least to a sensibility nursed on their descendants) laughably opaque. (The last time I tried to play a role-playing game from this era, I spent a full five minutes attempting to interact with a wooden box.) These western games and their immediate antecedents are, at their core, single-player adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons – itself a high-fantasy adaptation of early 20th-century wargames3, an adaptation intended to steer the genre away from historical re-enactment and facilitate increased player agency. Many ubiquitous features of modern video games, including quantitative health meters which reduce when characters or enemies are attacked, item acquisition, and “leveling up,” are direct descendants of game mechanics originating in Dungeons & Dragons4. In tabletop games such as D&D, players collaborate to explore unmapped territory, defeat enemies, and complete quests; this collaboration is sustained across multiple sessions. Characters within parties frequently have specific and complementary skillsets: the parties are greater than the sum of their parts. These mechanical features, as well as a sense for the narrative possibilities which can emerge from them, undergird the games to come.
Japanese developers like Squaresoft focused and sharpened the western RPG form, paring it down to its basic elements in order to render their games playable on accessible, affordable home consoles. Beyond this, game designers blended the rich traditions of anime and manga with western fantasy conventions, creating a distinctive, colorful, visually appealing art style (especially compared with their drab western counterparts) and opening the form up as a storytelling medium.
It took a while for the form’s narrative potential to come to fruition. Many consider Final Fantasy IV, released in 1991, the first genuinely story-focused JRPG. FFIV integrated game mechanics and storytelling to an unprecedented degree, weaving narrative development and player actions in a way that was distinct both from choice-focused western RPGs and earlier JRPGs, in which gameplay and narrative barely touched. FFIV’s lead designer, Takashi Tokita, was trained as a theater actor, and theater, far more than film, is a useful framework for understanding the narrative limitations and possibilities of games from this era. They are, in an important sense, staged. As you can see in the screenshot of Celes at Cid’s bedside, the spatial perspective is sharply limited. The story is mostly conveyed by way of static backdrops and written dialogue. And like theater, the focus is on the characters: what happens between them; what they do together. They are ensemble pieces.
One of the most famous subplots of Final Fantasy VI involves Cyan, a character whose entire family was killed when archvillain Kefka poisoned the water supply of the castle in which he lived. In the first section of the game, Cyan briefly glimpses the ghosts of his wife and child, but they escape before he can reach them. After the world has been plunged into ruin, you can go back to his doomed castle. (In the “World of Ruin,” you can do basically anything at basically any time. It is wonderfully, forbiddingly open.) The castle is empty. I walked through the whole thing, and there is nothing in any room: no items to collect, no people to talk to. Few, if any, buildings in the game are this spare. It’s haunting and upsetting.
There are, however, some beds you can sleep in. Sleeping plays an important role in the game: it’s how you restore your health and heal ailments you might have acquired in combat. Usually, your party sleeps in inns, but there are beds in other places – especially, as you have seen by this point in the game, inside of castles. When you press the “A” button to interact with the bed, a familiar dialogue box asks if you would like to go to sleep.
If you say yes and Cyan is not in your party, you go to sleep and wake up normally. If you say yes and he is, you and your party awake in a strange, dreamlike version of the castle.
What follows plays out like a conventional dungeon. You explore, collecting treasure and killing various monsters. The final boss of the dungeon is a monstrous ghost created by the tormented souls of those lost in that first war, the previous time the world was destroyed. Destroying him allows the spirits of Cyan’s wife and child to move on from spiritual limbo. It’s a very moving scene.
The thing that really sticks with me, though, is not anything explicit – nothing Cyan or his family says or does. Throughout the game, your party has borne witness to Cyan’s agonizing grief. They’ve just finished accompanying him through his private nightmare, dispatching that which needed dispatched, protecting one another. After the final boss, they silently behold the scene with his lost family. They watch and listen as his loved ones let him go. (In the screenshot, Cyan is the one at the center of the frame; the other three members of the party are downstage.) But when the party wakes up from the dream and get out of bed, nobody comments on what they’ve seen. It was a private experience; it doesn’t come up again. But they were there. Cyan knew they were there, and they knew they were there. And so were you.
About two-thirds of the way through a typical Final Fantasy game, the player receives access to an “airship.” Typically a kind of blimp, the airship allows you to navigate the map more quickly than on foot. The airship can move over obstacles, including bodies of water; it allows you to avoid the frustrating randomized combat encounters characteristic of early JRPGs.
Unlocking the airship always makes me emotional: besides marking the ending’s approach, there’s something poignant about the way it makes the world smaller, draws the places you’ve been nearer. Final Fantasy VI has two distinct acts: before the end of the world, and after. Both feature their own “airship moment.” The first act takes about twenty hours to play through; appropriately, you receive the airship thirteen or so hours in. In the second, you receive it much faster, because your task – finding the rest of your party and defeating Kefka – is reliant on it.
In both cases, the airship has its own unique musical theme, one which plays while you fly around in it. Before the apocalypse, in the “World of Balance,” the airship theme is named after the ship itself, the Blackjack. Afterwards, in the “World of Ruin,” the theme is called “Searching for Friends.”
The first airship theme, “The Airship Blackjack,” is all prog-rock drums and soaring synthesizers. It’s fine. It does its job. “Searching for Friends,” on the other hand, captures a mood I have not quite found anywhere else. The percussion is unobtrusive: an understated hi-hat cymbal and something like a shaker keep steady time low in the mix. The synthesized strings ebb and flow, pivoting deftly from mournful melancholy to something more optimistic, phrases and periods suddenly resolving into major chords. The flute melody is lovely.
What really moves me, though, is that the whole thing is just heartbreakingly gentle. It has a kind of quiet determination, a warm and insistent momentum. The fretless bass weaves a steady, playful countermelody, as though it is urging the other instruments on; it’s joined on the chorus by a sound like a guitar softly driving home a one-note rhythmic figure. As “Searching for Friends” plays, you see below you the world you’d explored: whose inhabitants you’d spoken with, whose towns you’d mapped, whose monsters you’d fought. Now those towns are in ruins, their inhabitants terrified of the vengeful and arbitrary demiurge your party allowed Kefka to become. Officially, the post-apocalyptic world is called the “World of Ruin” – you can’t go back to the way it was before. But there is always something to be done. “Searching for Friends” figures and soundtracks a cooperative and caring social dynamic, a mood or energy that can sustain the pursuit of repairing the world. Like the rest of the game’s soundtrack, it loops seamlessly: you don’t notice when it restarts. It gives you as much time as you need.
IV
The lead character designer for Final Fantasy VI was a former anime artist named Yoshitaka Amano. His character designs are elaborate, beautiful, and hilariously impractical. Character models (“sprites”) in the game itself are, on average, 32 x 48 pixels. The sprites in FFVI are masterpieces of economy, expressive far in excess of what the technology should have been capable of; but for context, a modern 1080p television has about 1300 times as many pixels to work with as the FFVI sprite artists did. The palette was limited. The traditional solution Japanese developers settled on was to render the sprites blocky, cute, exaggerated.
It’s a good solution. Amano’s art fulfills none of these criteria. His characters are impossibly slender, their bodies traced in long, light lines. Their garments are regal, all brilliant colors and dense folds; their skin, left unshaded, is as pale as the air around them. If not for the weight of their clothes, it looks like the wind would blow them away. (The adjacent drawing is of Celes, the character kneeling by Cid’s bed in Section I.)
Amano is also responsible for the game’s remarkable box art. The picture depicts Terra, one of the game’s heroes, looking out at the main keep of the Gestahlian Empire. Because Terra’s father was a member of the race of the hunted and imprisoned magic-bearers called Espers, she has natural access to the power the Empire wants – the power which Kefka uses to destroy the world. The game begins with her under Empire mind control; its first mission mounts her escape.
It's a disorienting image. The perspective seems to warp a bit, as though the keep is wrapped around her. The sky is perfectly blank. We cannot see the ground. It is hard at first to perceive the machine she’s riding because it’s so of a piece with the skyline below, all dark steel and jagged edges. But there’s something almost animal about it. It looks like its mouth is open, its body tensed to strike.
Terra herself is in the top-left corner. Her small, pale body is draped in jarringly brilliant red, drawn against the empty sky. She is physically divorced from the earth for which she is named, surrounded by the accoutrements of murderous technology. Her mount was constructed by the Empire and fueled by the same magic she embodies in her person. You cannot see her legs because they are in the machine: she has merged with the empire that wants her dead. She can see everything from her vantage, but her eyes are closed. It’s hard to see how she will descend from her perch.
But in the middle distance we can see the other patch of color, the pale pink of Setzer’s airship. The airship, as in the game, changes the picture entirely. She is not the only one seeing what she sees. We can’t know how many people are on the airship, but we know she’s not alone.
I spend so much time describing what I see in Amano’s art not just because I like it, although I do, but because it is integral to my experience of Final Fantasy VI. His elaborate, delicate sensibility expands the distance between the game as I can see it on the screen and the world the game is representing. I see the tiny sprites (which I love in their own right), but I have a sense of the deeper, wilder vision undergirding the visible plane. It’s an interesting place to be, an interesting place to spend time in.
This is one of the ways the theater comparison is useful. Final Fantasy VI is, in my estimation, one of the most gorgeous video games ever made, but it’s not realistic in the way many contemporary video games are. Like theater, experiencing the game requires a particular kind of suspended disbelief. You know there is a gap between what you are seeing and what is happening, and it is up to your imagination to close it. The soundtrack, with its elaborate arrangements and low-fidelity imitations of orchestral instruments, does something similar: it is both beautiful in its own right and gestures toward the purer version of itself, unbounded by the creative constraints that made it possible. But the purer, imagined version of the game does not, as one might expect, render the real game worse: it enhances it, drawing us, by means of the fake, closer to the real – or at least the possible – in the way that all good art does. We live in a world; whatever comes after it is, definitionally, different from our existences as we experience them. What is important is the gap between the fictional world and our own: what it tells us about ourselves and the possibilities available to us; what realities this distance unlocks.
V
I played Final Fantasy VI for the first time during the spring of 2021. I was living at my parents’ house in rural North Carolina. I’d spent almost all of 2020 there, too. For a few months near the end, during my first semester of school, I lived with some friends in Providence, RI. But that semester had gone very poorly; my mental health had all but collapsed, so I’d taken a medical leave. And when I’d realized I’d ran out of unemployment money, I found no compelling reason to scramble to pay rent. So I moved back home.
This is not an exceptional story. I am lucky: the pandemic was not a personal apocalypse. I was not an essential worker, not a worker at all. My father kept his job. (My mother quit hers, but she’d wanted to, anyway.) My family had plenty of money. Nobody in my immediate family got COVID during this period and they are all now fully vaccinated.
But if it wasn’t the end of the world for me, it didn’t really feel like the middle of it, either. Things seemed to stop. Time became thick, disorienting, opaque. I woke up anywhere between 6 AM and 2 PM. I was incapable of performing any of the activities which mattered to me or of making progress on any of my long-term pursuits. I was unable to actualize my values in any real or meaningful way. I did not grow up there; I have one friend in the area, and her house is a fifty-minute drive from where my parents live. I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to see. I couldn’t read or write or see my friends. I couldn’t get outside of myself.
Thwarted and inert, I played, on a friend’s recommendation, a couple of recently-released Japanese role-playing games on my family’s Nintendo Switch. As I worked my way through them, I started to perceive the contours of an art form fundamentally different from any I’d encountered before. I felt like I was reading an illustrated book, with a soundtrack, in between miniature chess matches – except the experience was somehow integral: of a single piece.
Before then, I’d tried to play the video games people had recommended to me, but they were “prestigious” big-budget American action games – a kind of video game which I find, on balance, morally bankrupt and aesthetically repugnant. (Or, as is equally likely, I’m not good at them, they scare me, etc.) For example: on my fifteen-year-old sister’s recommendation, I gave renowned hyper-realistic American post-apocalyptic zombie game The Last of Us a try; I made it about an hour in before I began to feel the banal brutality of its vision hijacking my brain like the game’s world-ending plague fungus. (I didn’t say this to my sister, even if she routinely entered my bedroom in order to roast me for my “silly anime games.” I am above that sort of thing.)
I guess I don’t like when art is simply trying to be life. For the most part, life is all the life I need – maybe too much. I like when art provides some friction, when the form forces you to generate an individual account of the relationship between what you are beholding and the world in which you live.
So because I had literally nothing else going on in my entire life, I embarked in earnest on the project of attempting to accumulate encyclopedic knowledge of the Japanese role-playing game. I played Final Fantasy I, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, XII, and XIV; Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden, and Persona 5 Royal; Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together; Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne, IV, V, Devil Survivor, and Strange Journey; Phantasy Star I and IV: The End of the Millennium; Xenogears and Xenoblade Chronicles; Chrono Trigger; Romancing SaGa II; Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Awakening, and Three Houses; Tales of Vesperia; Dark Souls and Bloodborne; Dragon Quest I, V, and XI; Earthbound; Metroid: Zero Mission; The World Ends With You and Neo: The World Ends With You; Ys I, II, VIII, and The Oath at Felghana; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past; Nier: Automata; Castlevania I, IV, Bloodlines, Symphony of the Night, Dawn of Sorrow, Aria of Sorrow, and Portrait of Ruin; Super Mario RPG; The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC, SC, and 3rd; The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero; and, my personal favorite, The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure.
While I did not complete all of these games, I completed many of them, and I played at least a few hours of the rest. I pirated almost all of them from the internet and put them on one of two used, outdated handheld game consoles I’d purchased with leftover stimulus money and “hacked.” During this time, I was often reminded of the Twilight Zone episode where the world ends and the man who just wants to read books gets excited because he’ll have a lot of time to read in his big bombproof vault, but then bends over and breaks his glasses; except I wanted to play JRPGs, and I don’t wear glasses, so I just sat there and played them. For too many months in a row, I rolled out of bed, took the several psychiatric medications I’d been prescribed, fixed myself some coffee, sat back down on my bed, and played a video game until I had to do something else. (I often did not have to do anything else.)
Why did I become so fixated on this form I’d never before cared about? The dullest reason is the foundational one – they were something I actually had the intellectual and emotional capacity to engage with. But beyond that, the games required strategic thinking, which I hadn’t realized I enjoyed. The music was great, and I care a lot about music. I am very invested in science fiction and fantasy literature, and it was interesting perceiving the ways game designers played with those conventions. I enjoyed getting a grasp on the way the form developed over time – attempting to track how Final Fantasy I became Final Fantasy VI, which became Final Fantasy XII. I learned a lot of interesting facts – or facts I, at least, find interesting.
The biggest factor, though, was that the games were shockingly emotionally affecting. At the time, I was lonely, and while these game characters did not feel like my friends, they reminded me of my friends. More than this, they provided an aesthetic vehicle that allowed me to think through what friendship is, and why it’s important.
To take a particularly intense example: even though I knew it was coming, I was crushed by Final Fantasy VII’s infamous plot twist, in which Aerith Gainsborough, protagonist Cloud’s love interest and the last known descendant of the life-giving Ancients, is murdered by antagonist Sephiroth. A good friend of mine – perhaps the most brilliant and wonderful person I have ever had the privilege of knowing – overdosed and died in February 2020, right before lockdowns began; Final Fantasy VII was the only work of art I’d encountered to that point that felt as though it lent anything like form to the blunt, brutal pointlessness of that event. The game is crudely animated and it’s not a particularly well-written scene on the level of the language itself, at least not in the (infamously poor) English translation. It is cruel and silly and obvious; it is clunky and poorly translated and disproportionately intense. But so is life.
This is where I believe my point about imaginative distance comes in. There are many emotionally compelling new games. But there is something in the space afforded by these older games – their clunkiness, their experimentalism – that really moves me. It encourages a kind of generosity of imagination, a higher-than-usual suspension of disbelief. You play video games with your hands: the characters’ bodies respond directly to your own. You look around and find things and talk to people. It is intimate and strange, spatial and somatic. Good games feel like worlds, and especially during the pandemic I experienced a gap between the world I desired to live in and the world I actually did.
This is, of course, an extreme understatement. I love the world, but it’s unfathomably fucked. It’s all I think about, and I still can’t believe it. The imaginative faculties help me love what is real by showing me the world within the world, the possibility undergirding and immanent to reality – what I care about; what I can do.
The world of Final Fantasy VI ends. It will never be fully redeemed. The damage is deeper than you can grasp. It is often difficult to know what to do next. (I mean this literally. I often had to consult an online guide.) It is occasionally slow and frequently frustrating. It is easily “breakable” – if you know what you are doing and prepare correctly, you can kill final boss Kefka in one turn. It is a strange and damaged world. And while the quest of the “World of Balance” is ambitious, glamorous, far-ranging and wild, the mission at the beginning of the “World of Ruin” is desperately basic: you must find the people you love and take them with you to fix a problem you caused.
But the game is so lovingly rendered, generous and ambitious and surprising and wonderful. It’s the product of people who cared about the worlds they were making – cared far more than they needed to – and wanted, more than anything else, to invite you in. It’s a gift. All art, to some extent, is escapist, but the best returns you to the world more alive than you’d been before. I had a friend who was excited to hear I was playing Final Fantasy VI; after the credits rolled, I called and told him all about it.
I do not have space to fully articulate the way player identification with the game’s characters functions – the reason people oscillate between speaking of the experience of the game in a first-person perspective (“I killed the boss”) versus when we speak of it in the third-person (“Celes wakes up from a coma”). It flickers and phases; it is both formal and subjective. As a substitute for adequate elaboration, I have attempted throughout to be as authentic to my own shifting experience of identification as possible.
This paragraph is indebted to Jon Peterson’s excellent book Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games.
Interestingly, this period’s canonical wargame ruleset was written by H.G. Wells.
For those interested in the ways early role-playing video games adapted the quantitative mechanical structure of tabletop games, a GameFAQs.com contributor going by “Ryan8bit” mapped out every quantity and probability used in the massively influential 1986 JRPG Dragon Quest (https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/switch/272748-dragon-quest/faqs/61640). Dragon Quest’s mathematical elegance marks a clear link between the dice-based, pencil-and-paper calculations of tabletop games and the gnarlier, computer-dependent number-crunching of games to come.