December 31st, 1999 was half of my life ago. There was no war then, and no recession, so New Year’s Eve was the most important news story. CNN’s coverage was extensive. Their reporters had been deployed all over the world to cover every major celebration.
The fireworks over Sydney were first, but more was to come. Time’s longitudinal sweep would pull the future eastward until 2000 had displaced 1999 everywhere, until the new millennium had arrived for everyone on the planet.
The new millennium did not, however, arrive for me; I didn’t want it to, because I was a know-it-all smart-ass of an eleven-year-old. Since there’d never been a year zero, it seemed clear to me that the new millennium wouldn’t begin until 2001.
But my pedantry was misplaced. Our way of measuring time makes no logical sense. It is arbitrary in the extreme, from the level of millennia down to the level of seconds. The system is flawed and clunky and inconsistent, so what’s one more inconsistency?
If the rules say there never was a year zero, I say, fuck the rules. When 1999 became 2000, every single digit of the year changed. That won’t happen again for a while. It was worth celebrating. It was a big deal.
Every digit changed; a blank new decade had begun. December 31st, 1999 was the beginning of something.
What a fucking cliché. “December 31st, 1999 was the beginning of something.” No shit, it was the beginning of something. What a dumb sentence. It’s what I was thinking, though. I think in clichés sometimes.
Can I justify that? Maybe I could say that clichés are overused for a reason, that a sentiment becomes a cliché because it has a certain weight of truth, a certain resonance.
Making “resolutions” at the start of a new year is as cliché as it gets, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. People make resolutions because they understand that the new year is “the beginning of something.”
I could erase the last four paragraphs and spend time coming up with a convoluted-but-unique way of saying that December 31st, 1999 was “the beginning of something,” but why bother? Just so I can come off like a “good” “writer”? What would that prove?
Let us just say that the idea of a new year as “the beginning of something” is a universal truth, and leave it at that. Of course, the concept of “universal truths” is itself a cliché, so I can’t win, and saying I “can’t win” is a cliché too. I can’t win, and it looks like I can’t write, either.
But there’s shit I want to say here, shit that can’t be said unless I stop fretting over the imperfections of my delivery. My technique’s lacking and my style’s tired, but I’ve got to ignore that.
So I’ll keep typing. I’ll get the words onscreen; I just won’t look at them.
Over that winter break – the one in December 1999 – I read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke. I read 2010: Odyssey Two. The year 2010, then, seemed impossibly far off. I remember thinking, “In 2010, I’ll be twenty-one years old.” I wasn’t sure what kind of person I’d be. I imagined I’d be an awesome dude, very different from my eleven-year-old self.
But now it’s almost 2010, and I’m not that different from who I was when I was eleven. There have been changes, but none have been radical enough, and most haven’t been that positive.
For one thing, my grades aren’t as good now as they were when I was eleven. For another, I don’t feel as “confident,” whatever that means. There was a decade-long downward arc. Can I follow that arc now? Is that possible?
What if I compare New Year’s Eves? Would that be useful?
New Year’s Eve 2000, I wasn’t reading any Arthur C. Clarke. I wasn’t reading anything, in fact; I was just playing videogames. That winter break, I played Final Fantasy IX.
New Year’s Eve 2001, I played Final Fantasy VIII. Maybe there’s a pattern here.
New Year’s Eve 2002, my parents dragged me to a party, to one of many gatherings of Springfield’s Indian community. The host had a big projection television. Playing, endlessly, was a compilation DVD of song-and-dance sequences from various Bollywood movies.
People asked me, what medical school did I want to go to? It was a foregone conclusion that I would go to medical school. It was also a near-certainty that I’d become a radiologist, because radiologists make a lot of money. What kind of radiologist did I plan on becoming? What subspecialty?
All the money, all the economic incentive in this fucked-up society of ours, is in specializing and subspecializing and sub-subspecializing. You get into a field and specialize until you know a great deal about almost nothing. The idea is anathema to me now, and it was then, I guess, although back then I really didn’t think too much about this pretentious philosophy of life bullshit; I was mostly interested in videogames.
I was always thinking about videogames. I was doing it at that party, between fielding questions about med school. I was thinking about Legend of Dragoon.
I had bought it earlier that day – fifteen dollars at GameStop. It was a huge waste of my money, but I didn’t know that then.
I had picked the game up, had examined the back of the box, had noticed that Legend of Dragoon seemed like a good old-fashioned Japanese role-playing-game. It seemed to resemble the Final Fantasy games I’d always liked.
I bought Legend of Dragoon, took it home, and then had to go to the party. The party, being a New Year’s Eve party, didn’t end until well after midnight. When I got home, I went to bed.
The next morning, I woke up at six am. It was 2003. I “rang in” the new year (another cliché there) by putting the Legend of Dragoon disc into my PlayStation and hitting the power button.
I was expecting a game that was, if not good, at least mediocre. Legend of Dragoon was worse than mediocre, though; it was bad in a way that was shocking, almost disgusting.
I should have known from the title. Legend of Dragoon. What kind of terrible English is that? Imagine if Tolkien had written Return of King.
Legend of Dragoon is bad because it’s a bad clone of Final Fantasy VII. It gets the superficial stuff right – the pretty cut-scenes, the yellow-haired protagonist, the convoluted plot, the turn-based combat – but the game has no balls.
No daring, and no love, went into the making of Legend of Dragoon. “Making” doesn’t even seem like the appropriate word. “Calculation” would be better.
Legend of Dragoon is lazy, and it is cynical. It’s a Japanese RPG for people who like Japanese RPGs. I recognized that it was bad, but still played it for hours, because, frankly, I was a person who liked Japanese RPGs. I had nothing better to do. I played the game and hated myself for it. I played to get away.
That’s my relationship with Japanese RPGs, really. I don’t enjoy the games themselves. I just want to escape, to flee to a world where I’m some kind of goddamn hero, where I never have to do anything more difficult than press buttons and stare into thickets of dancing numbers.
In other words: over this past decade there’s been a direct relationship between the times I’ve played Japanese RPGs and the times I’ve felt the lonely and all-too-cliché angst of adolescence.
Which is to say: over this past decade, videogames fulfilled most of my emotional needs. Or rather: over this past decade, I had the kind of emotional needs that could be fulfilled with videogames.
Look at seventh grade: the school year that began in 2000 and ended in 2001. I remember my teachers, my classes, my fellow students, sure, but more than anything I remember Final Fantasy VII. By night, I’d play that game, and by day, I’d get on the bus and go to school, and then get on the bus to go back home.
Seventh grade was the only school year that I had to ride the bus, (well, okay, I also rode the bus in second grade, in 1995, but that’s really neither here nor there), and I hated it. I hated everything about it. Maybe I would have been able to handle it if I’d ridden a normal school bus, but mine was the “short bus.”
I rode the short bus because I was in the “gifted” program, and was therefore classified as “special ed.” Special ed, as in the old schoolyard joke: “Gee, you’re really special . . . special ed.”
If you were special ed, it meant that you were “gifted,” or that you had Down syndrome, or that you had ADHD, or that you had a disciplinary problem of some kind. The definition was broad.
When I got on the bus, I’d just sit there and listen to the conversations that went on around me. I remember one in particular.
“See,” the kid in front of me was saying, “I had, last night, I had my backpack, right? And I wrote on there, I wrote on there, ‘pokes smot.’ You know, because I smoke pot.”
“Oh man, dude, man,” said the kid next to him.
“Yeah, I know, right? And so my stepdad, the son of a bitch, he sees my backpack, and he’s like, ‘what’s that say?’ And I say, ‘smokes pot.’ And so he gets all pissed, you know? So like, I crossed out the ‘pokes’ part, and next to ‘smot,’ i wrote ‘hoker.’”
“Oh man, dude. Man.”
“Yeah. And so my stepdad, the dumb fuck, he sees the bag and he says, ‘what’s that say now?’ And I say, ‘hot smoker.’ Heh.”
“Heh. That is awesome, dude.”
“I know, right? I just – fuck this bus, man. It’s gonna be like an hour before I get home.”
“I know, dude, it sucks, man.”
“Yeah, and I’m starving. I wanna go to Steak ‘n Shake.”
“Oh man, dude, Steak ‘n Shake sounds awesome.”
“I want to go home and tell my mom, ‘Hey bitch! Drive me to Steak ‘n Shake!’”
“Heh. Yeah, dude. Heh.”
I’d wait for the bus to drop me off at home, and then I’d go play Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII was age twelve: the videogame. I still have the game on my shelf, and still revisit it from time to time, and it always reminds me of age twelve.
Legend of Dragoon isn’t on my shelf. I don’t own it anymore. I got rid of it in June of 2005, the summer before I went to college.
College: I guess the most significant thing that happened to me this decade. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 – those were “the college years.” 2010′s going to be another college year, too. And 2011, and 2012. Med school will end when the Mayan calendar does.
The college years: where do they fit into the narrative, into the arc of descent? I’m not sure. 2007 was the pivotal year, that much I know: 2007 is the year I keep thinking about, the year I keep obsessing over.
It’s also the year I keep writing about. Somewhere, “deep down inside” (another cliché), I feel like I can’t understand an event until I’ve written about it; writing about something solidifes something in my memory. A thing has not completely happened to me until I have written it down.
The written product doesn’t matter to me that much; most of the time, it isn’t even good. What’s important is the act of writing: it’s a process of filtering. If I’ve written a thing down, that means I’ve tried to make sense out of it. I’ve abstracted into words. I’ve tried to see how it fits into the scheme.
That’s what I keep trying to do, all the time – not fit things into a scheme, because that would imply that I know what the scheme looks like, but I keep trying to come up with a scheme where everything fits. Is this futile? Yes, probably. I keep trying anyway.
Where does December 8th, 2007 fit into the scheme? It was a Saturday, towards the end of a semester in which I’d only been taking two classes: Biochemistry and French. Biochemistry was required; French was an elective. I’d taken the class for the hell of it. All through high school, I’d done Spanish. I didn’t know a single thing about French. I wanted to learn at least a little about the language.
So while the Biochemistry final fell on Monday, December 10th, the French final came first. It was scheduled for December 8th.
The night before – December 7th – I’d been in the med school library, where I ran into my friend Hazel (not her real name). I told her about the test I had to take.
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll need it.” That’s what I say whenever anyone wishes me “good luck,” and Hazel eventually called me out on it, in January 2008, saying it was an example of my negative attitude. I agreed with her, but went on saying it.
I don’t say it anymore. Now, when people wish me “good luck” on a test, I just kind of laugh in a hollow, despairing kind of way. I’m not sure if this is an improvement.
Hazel went home to study the microbiology slides she’d just printed off. I took the elevator to the fifth floor, where I sat in a conference room and tried to focus on French. I understood the grammar, but my problem was vocabulary: I needed to dump many, many words into short-term memory.
I slowly realized this wasn’t going to happen that night. It was too cold. My fingers and toes were numb, and I kept staring out the window.
The weather was dismal. The roads were wet and slushy and flanked by strips of black, half-melted snow.
Fuck this, I thought. I drove home. The French final wasn’t until 1pm, so I figured I’d just force myself to get up early the next day and get some stuff done.
I woke up at 9am. I put my French stuff into my backpack, headed down to the garage, got into my car, and drove outside.
I should mention, at this point, that I live on a sleep incline, an incline that was shining brightly in the morning sun. The reason it was shining was in fact because it was coated with a layer of ice, something I didn’t find out until it was too late, until I was already on the road.
My car began to skid, inverting as it moved. It spun around one hundred and eighty degrees, such that it was sliding down the road backwards. I saw a line of three cars parked below me, and I realized that I was going to smash into them, and also probably die. At the very least, I’d seriously injure myself.
I held my foot down on the brake, not expecting it to do much. I closed my eyes, waited for the end. The end didn’t come. There was no impact. I opened my eyes and saw that, impossibly, my car had stopped sliding. Nine-tenths of the way down the road, the ice had turned to hardened snow, and my car’s tires were digging into it. I had pushed down on the brakes at exactly the right time.
I engaged the parking brake and stepped out of the car, still incredulous. My car was entirely undamaged. It was positioned naturally, as though I’d just happened to parallel park it there at the bottom of the road.
“Good lord!” said a voice. I looked around: behind me was a middle-aged woman standing near the entrance to her building.
“I saw the whole thing.” She shook her head. “The angels must have been watching over you.”
I managed a shaky (yet tough and manly) smile. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess so.”
“Scared me half to death.” The woman shook her head again and disappeared into her apartment.
I walked back up the hill, taking the sidewalk. On my way up I tripped, fell, smashed my face on the concrete. When I made it back to my place, I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that I was bleeding profusely out of a deep gash in my cheek.
I called Hazel while I fumbled in the cupboard for Neosporin. She didn’t pick up. Shit, I realized, it was 9am, Saturday morning. Of course she wouldn’t have been awake.
I called my friend Rock (not his real name).
“Mragh bgrhg ghrrhg,” he said. He hung up.
I called him again.
“Yeah?” His voice was bleary. “I was sleeping, man.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said, “but I’ve got kind of a situation here.” I explained the situation. “I’ve got a French final at one. You’ve got to give me a ride there.”
“God damn it. I was going to sleep in today and then play BioShock.”
“Fuck that, man,” I said. “The game probably sucks anyway.”
At length, Rock agreed to give me a lift. I met him on the main road near the hill, which had been sanded and salted, and was therefore just fine.
I took the French test, which kicked my ass, probably because I had been too busy bleeding out of a gash in my face to do any last minute cramming.
When I went to turn my test in, the professor said, “What happened to your face?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “I don’t want to get into it now.”
I called Rock.
“Yo,” I said, “the test’s over. I need a ride back and shit.”
“Uh, just a second, man. Give me, like, half an hour.” He was playing BioShock.
“Okay, fine.”
Hazel called me, while I was waiting. “Hey,” she said, “you called this morning. What’s up?” I told her what was up.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re really lucky your car didn’t get damaged.”
“I know.”
“And that you aren’t hurt! It looks like everything worked out great for you!”
“I know,” I said again. “It could have been a lot worse. It’s a pity about my face, though. It’s still bleeding. I bet there’ll be a scar. Would you still marry me if I had a really ugly scar, Hazel?”
That’s always been the running joke between us – I’m always asking Hazel to marry me. Once she said yes, maybe, she might perhaps consider it if she’s still single in fifteen years.
Rock arrived and picked me up.
“How’s BioShock?” I asked him.
“It rules,” he said. “I’m harvesting the fuck out of those Little Sisters.”
Rock dropped me off at the bottom of the hill, which was now, like the main road, sanded and salted and safe to drive on.
I walked up to my car and noted that, because it had been sleeting all day, there was now a half-centimeter thick sheen of ice over my windscreen.
I stared dumbly at this for several seconds, until a guy in a pickup rolled up.
“Need a scraper, man?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great. Thank you.”
The guy handed me the scraper, and I started attacking the ice on the windscreen.
“Man,” said the guy, “that’s a pretty bad accident you got into there.”
“I . . . what?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember I saw your car earlier, and I thought, ‘Man, that guy probably just got into that accident, said fuck it, and left.’”
I was about to ask, “What the hell are you talking about?” but then I looked down and saw it.
Someone had fucking smashed into my car – smashed into the front right wheel. The metal was dented and ripped. The rubber shit supporting the wheel was all ripped up.
“What the fuck!” I said. “What the fuck happened!”
The guy looked surprised.
“You . . . you didn’t know that was there?”
“No!” I said. “No! That was not there!”
“You . . . you mean, somebody hit your car?”
“I . . . yes!”
“Damn,” said the guy. “That’s fucked up, dude. Man.”
“I know!”
I told him about the one hundred and eighty degree slide. I told him about the angels. I told him that, earlier today, my car had been totally undamaged. I told him that I had, in fact, been very happy about that.
“Man,” the guy said. “Look for a note or something. Whoever hit it must have left a note on your car.”
I looked for a note. There was no note.
“There is no note,” I said.
“Man, that’s so fucked up. You seem really calm, though. I mean, if it were me, I’d be fuckin’ flipping out right about now.”
“I am fuckin’ flipping out, man,” I said. “I’m flipping out inside.”
The guy parked his truck and stepped out, shaking his head. As it happened, a woman nearby was scraping shit off her own windshield.
“Hey,” truck guy said to her, “did you . . . hear anything earlier today? An accident or something?”
The woman turned. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, there was definitely an accident.”
Truck guy: “What happened?”
“I saw this guy try to drive down the street a few hours ago. He slid all the way down, and he hit three cars. That was one of them, I’m positive.” She pointed at my car.
Truck guy: “What happened then?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the woman. “I went inside.” She got into her car and drove off.
“That’s a couple thousand dollars of damage, right there,” said truck guy. “It’ll be hell to fix. Anyway, look, I gotta go. Good luck.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll need it.”
I got into my car and brought it into the garage. I couldn’t drive it, really – when it moved, the fucked-up parts where it was smashed interfered with the wheel’s turning.
Back in my apartment, I kept thinking, if only I hadn’t ignored my slacker instincts. If I had just slept in until noon, like I usually do, and tried to drive to the final then, the road would have been salted. None of this would have happened.
The angels, I thought. Where the fuck did the angels go?
“You’re being retarded,” Hazel said, later that night, on the phone. “Anyway, everything should be fine. File a police report or something. Also, your insurance should take care of the car, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“So you’ll be fine. Why are you still worried?”
“I’m just, uh, kind of discombobulated and shit right now, Hazel,” I said.
When I hung up, I tried to study for Monday’s Biochemistry final. I did the same on Sunday. On Monday, I took the test, took my car to a repair shop, and then went back to Springfield, where I decided to start a new game of Final Fantasy VII. I didn’t play on my actual PlayStation; instead, I fed the game discs into my laptop and played using an emulator.
I did that for days. I played into the early hours of the morning, lying on my bed, laptop on my knees. Then I’d go to sleep and wake up in the late afternoon, or in the early evening.
Once, my cell phone rang at about 3:30pm, waking me up. I looked at the phone. It was Hazel.
“Uh . . . hello?”
“You sound like you were sleeping,” she said. “You sleep in this late?!”
“Sometimes.”
Hazel was on vacation; she was in New York.
“I might go to Times Square,” she said, “on New Year’s Eve.”
“Really?” I said. “I’ll be sure to watch TV at midnight and look for you.”
“Uh, there are gonna be millions of people there.”
“Sure,” I said, “but you can just wear a really ridiculous hat. It shouldn’t be that hard to pick you out.”
Hazel laughed. “You’re such an idiot.” She is always saying this to me.
It was true, though; I was an idiot. Why else was I playing Final Fantasy VII? Why was I wasting so many hours on the game? There were so many better things I could have been doing.
What I like, I guess, about Final Fantasy VII: unlike, say, Legend of Dragoon, it really does have balls. It’s not a polished thing. It’s disjointed as fuck; the game was made by people who weren’t sure what they were doing.
The music is harsh, off-key MIDI. The full-motion video is grainy. The character models are inconsistent. The “story” makes almost no sense. These elements come together and create something compelling in its unrefined weirdness.
To generalize widely: “true” Final Fantasy fans tend to hate part VII. Some of that hate, I’m convinced, is, paradoxically, because the game is so popular. VII is by far the most popular Final Fantasy of them all, and this makes it a little embarrassing.
Why’s that the case? I think it’s because the relationship you tend to develop with these Japanese RPGs, is personal enough that you tend to resent other people playing the same game you play. If Final Fantasy has meaning to you, you don’t want philistines playing it. Series fans avoid Final Fantasy VII because it’s been embraced by the unwashed masses.
“Unwashed masses” – there’s another cliché. Hell, Final Fantasy VII is itself a cliché. It’s a little distasteful, a little embarrassing, and I tend to play it out of sheer laziness. But it’s as popular as it is for a reason.
I finished Final Fantasy VII on December 31st, 2007 – on New Year’s Eve, at about five in the morning. I remember just lying there in bed, having watched the ending, staring at the starfield, listening to the Final Fantasy prelude. There’s that taken care of, I thought.
The next day, with nothing to do, I started looking through the games on my shelf, and grabbed my copy of Final Fantasy VIII.
I decided to start a new game, on a whim. That was how I “rang in” 2008: by playing Final Fantasy VIII.
I kept playing. I finished the game sometime in early January. It was kind of a struggle, for many reasons. VIII and VII are different in a number of ways; VIII isn’t nearly as entertaining. VIII is, in some ways, infuriating.
As I played, I’d log in to Gmail chat and talk to my friend Toups (his real name) about my frustrations.
“Dude,” he said, “you should write a review of that shit and post it on Action Button.”
“I guess I could do that,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if I was capable of it, though. It had been a while since I’d written anything about videogames. The last thing I wrote was a pretty bad Gamer’s Quarter article about, yes, Final Fantasy VII, and I don’t think anyone liked that piece much; it was too long, too rambly, too much about Final Fantasy.
If I was going to write about Final Fantasy VIII for Action Button, I would have to come up with something taut and caustic and funny, something that wouldn’t waste anyone’s time.
I tried to write, but all I could come up with was garbage. I wasn’t focused enough. The article was to be a review of Final Fantasy VIII, but I talked about Final Fantasy VII for six pages before even getting to VIII. I was talking about everything.
That’s my tendency, I think – to talk about everything, to try to link everything together. I can’t figure out what’s relevant and what isn’t. I don’t know what point I’m trying to make half the time.
Look at this thing I’m writing here. Look at how fucking long it is, how fucking flaccid. I hate this thing that I’m writing. I have to keep going, just because I want to finish the fucking thing and post it and then not have to think about it anymore.
So, okay: this past October, I found that Word document, the one containing the aborted Final Fantasy VIII review. I don’t have Word installed anymore, so I opened the document in TextEdit. I cleaned up the formatting and saved the file as an ODF.
I separated the Final Fantasy VII material from the Final Fantasy VIII material. The VII stuff seemed stronger; I rewrote it and posted it as an update here. Then I looked at the VIII stuff.
Was there still a salvageable Action Button review in there somewhere? Probably not. And now it’s been so long since I’ve played the game that I no longer understand what I was trying to say, and why I was trying to say it.
And I don’t really want to play through the damn game again to find out. VII – I could do VII again. But VIII – no, no way.
Today – New Year’s Eve 2009, a little less than two years after I wrote the original text – I reread it and tried to make some sense out of it. Somehow, I take a weird personal satisfaction out of going through this old shit and trying to figure out ways to clean it up.
These last two years were full of sick, miserable depression. Maybe I think I can reverse that, if I take this stuff and rewrite it. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do. If writing things down solidifies them, then rewriting them down must resolidify them. Maybe I think I can change the past.
Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do. This is the article. It ain’t that great:
I’ve played through Final Fantasy VIII twice. The first time was in September of 2001, and the second was in January of 2008. I hope, desperately, that I never play this game again.
Here’s the thing about VIII: it was an attempt to take what was good and popular about Final Fantasy VII and distill it. Where VII had those bitchin’ summons, VIII has them, too, and in VIII they’re a lot more impressive. Where VII had cool 3D technology, VIII has much, much cooler 3D technology.
VIII has a bunch of new game mechanics that are meant to simplify the way Final Fantasy plays. You don’t have to mess around with armor anymore. You don’t have to mess around with level grinding anymore.
The battle interface is now slick as hell – that giant blue bar that took up a third of the screen in VII is now gone. VIII doesn’t show you any information that you don’t absolutely need to see. The command window’s a discreet gray box that actually disappears when you press a particular button on your controller.
You are free to hold that button down and let the battle scenes play out like movie trailers, with a jumpy, swooping camera and a lot of flashy shit going on.
VIII has many, many full-motion video cut-scenes that cleverly segue in and out of the game, which uses them to convey feelings (and, yes, sometimes explosions too) that can’t be conveyed using the game engine.
VIII‘s gameworld is clean and beautiful and lacks some of the garish ugliness that marred sections of VII. The character designs are probably the only certifiably good ones Tetsuya Nomura has come up with in his entire career.
VIII‘s music, while still kind of synthetic and droning a la VII, at least uses better samples. In terms of composition, there’s a lot of boring stuff, yet there are some great individual tracks. For example, the game is host to the most awesomely bombastic “normal battle” theme the series has had – those midi orchestral swoops get me every time. They’re the keys to the power fantasy my twelve-year-old self dreamed about.
So the question is: if all this is true, why is it that people seem to not like VIII? I remember when the game came out – my friends all said it sucked.
“Get this,” one of them said. “They got rid of the blue boxes.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah – they’re gray now.”
“God damn,” I said. “That kills the whole Final Fantasy feel. I can’t believe that.”
(And the thing is – I was in middle school then. So I wasn’t being “ironic.”)
Because of what I’d heard about it, I didn’t even bother to play VIII until I’d played all the other games in the series. And even then, when I played VIII it was with a sinking kind of dread. What if I didn’t like it?
It probably seems, right now, as if I’m leading up to a cheesy revelation of some kind, as if I’m about to say something like, “But I actually ended up really digging the game and on reflection I think it’s the best the series has to offer.”
I’m not leading up to that.
That’s because I don’t like VIII. I don’t think it sucks, exactly – but I sure as hell don’t really like it. In 2001, when I played it for the first time, I could tell that something was wrong with the game, and I wondered what that something was.
Why did I pick it up again a few days ago? It was because I was at home, I guess. I didn’t have anything better to do. I hadn’t played a Final Fantasy game in a long time. I hadn’t played a videogame, really, in a long time.
I had allowed the real world to creep on me; I had gone to college, where I struck out with girls and failed classes and spent my weekends staring at the ceiling rather than playing videogames. I spend my vacations doing that, too.
But a few days ago, I grew tired of the ceiling. I played Final Fantasy VII, and, miraculously, actually finished it. Ecstatic over my success, I popped in Final Fantasy VIII, figuring I’d stop playing it in ten minutes. Maybe I’d just watch that fun introductory video – the one with the Latin choir and the symbolism.
That video is probably the best part of VIII – it is something you could show to anyone, even someone who doesn’t play videogames, and maybe not fear embarrassment. That video will, kind of, validate your hobby.
In some far-flung parallel universe, I made it out of puberty with the self-regard and confidence I currently lack, and without the acne I currently have.
In that universe, I have a girlfriend. (I mean, come on – if there are an infinite number of parallel universes out there like the scientists say, she’s got to exist in one of them.)
This girlfriend, who is dusky and beautiful and probably has some royal blood in her, asked me, a couple nights ago, in that parallel universe, just what the hell I was doing staying up all night with that Final Fantasy VIII shit.
And in that parallel universe where she exists, I showed her the intro video. She watched the whole thing and said, “man, that looks great,” but then Syphilis (and yes, that would be her name – I know it’s a venereal disease, but I think it’s also a gorgeous name, and if I’m going to have a fictitious girlfriend she’s damn well going to have the most gorgeous name I can give her) would maybe try to play the actual game.
After about ten minutes, she’d say, “what the fuck is this shit?” and then she’d stop playing.
There is a moment in every Final Fantasy game that I’d call the “what the fuck is this shit?” moment.
Except for Final Fantasy VIII, I guess, where that moment is actually the whole game.
I mean, I feel a little guilty saying this. A couple of months ago I chanced across some Internet asshole who made a whole fucking series of videos about how much he hated Final Fantasy VIII – how he thought it was just terrible.
He made “witty” comments as the intro movie played – as the hero, Squall Leonheart, who has absurder hair; a cooler sword, and (by game’s end) a hotter girl than Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud Strife, appeared, he said “man, what a gay-ass fag.”
This guy was kind of a retard. And it makes me want to sort of reflexively take Final Fantasy VIII’s corner and defend it from these people who just didn’t understand. It makes me want to sneer at Final Fantasy VII and say, “yeah, VIII really was an improvement.”
The thing is, of course, Final Fantasy VII really is the better game.
And yet – even though it’s deeply flawed – VIII makes sense. It is a pretty reasonable follow-up to VII.
VII was a success – a huge, shiny, brassy hit, in fact – because it was a sweeping, rip-roaring adventure. I think it mostly succeeds in this regard. It has some problems, but it worked. It created fans. I could see that.
When I was in middle school, everyone I knew, even the people who weren’t nerds, had at least heard of Final Fantasy VII. Some of these people had even played it.
It kind of pissed me off. A guy in my keyboarding class, a guy who always used to give me shit for being a loser, walked into class early one day. He was screaming, actually blue-in-the-face screaming, at another guy across the room.
“BIZARRO SEPHIROTH!” he was saying.
“BIZARRO SEPHIROTH and SAFER SEPHIROTH!”
I thought, What?
“I did too beat the game!” he was saying. “BIZARRO SEPHIROTH and SAFER SEPHIROTH! Those are the final bosses, okay? How would I know that if I hadn’t beaten the game!?”
I said to this guy, using only my mind (and he didn’t hear me), “Why? Why did you beat the game? That’s my game. Fuck you!”
Yet that was the small miracle that Final Fantasy VII achieved: it reached out of its genre ghetto. It is the only game in its series that someone who doesn’t already like to play Japanese RPGs can sit down with and end up enjoying.
It is, in my mind, one of three peaks the series has, one of three peaks that stab up out of the general Final Fantasy mishmash like arrhythmias on an EKG: one peak is IV, one is VI, and one is VII. The highest of these peaks, depending on who you ask, may or may not be VII. Even if VII‘s not the highest, though, it’s still up there: if it were a real cardiac arrhythmia, it would be the kind that can kill you.
I don’t know how many millions of people bought Final Fantasy VII, but I guess those millions of people created a hell of a problem for the developers: how would they follow that game up? How would they build something that extracted money from all those millions of people – while at the same time not pandering?
How would they make their money and still maintain some kind of integrity, some glimmer of the testicular fortitude that Final Fantasy VII had in its storytelling, and its pacing, and its speed, and its momentum?
The solution is kind of bullshit. Final Fantasy VIII, after that FMV, opens with Squall waking up in the infirmary of Balamb Garden, which is a giant, oddly beautiful building that trains military cadets.
It transpires that the opening FMV was a dramatic rendition of a training session – Squall and his rival, Seifer, were fighting. Seifer crossed a line and now Squall’s in bed with a head wound.
“You needed stitches,” the nurse tells him. “You’re okay, now, though. I’m going to call up your instructor to come get you.”
While she’s off doing that, a girl dressed in blue in another room leans over to Squall and says, “Squall – so we meet again.”
This is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about bullshit. You don’t figure out who this girl even is for another ten hours of play. By the time you figure out who she is, you’ve almost forgotten that this scene even happened.
This threw me for a loop the first time I played this game, and, you know what? It still does. It’s disconcerting, especially because it can’t just be sheer design incompetence – this game was made, after all, by the people who came up with Final Fantasy VII’s almost painfully-tight first ten hours. This has to be intentional.
“It’ll make sense later,” I told myself.
“It’ll make sense later” is something you have to keep telling yourself, if you play Final Fantasy VIII. You have to repeat it like a mantra.
The feel of the game’s different from that of VII. It’s just – it’s off, somehow. It’s slow, for one thing, and kind of plodding in its narrative. It feels like a number of set-pieces awkwardly squeezed together without much regard for coherency or logic.
The strings of set-pieces are sometimes interrupted by dungeons, almost all of which either consist of a single repeating screen or a series of puzzles involving keys and doors. This is in complete contrast to VII, which is all scripted events and three or four-screen-long interludes rife with random encounters.
The “final dungeon” in VII is basically a cave – you just run through it. You’re done in twenty minutes, not counting the time it’ll take for you to plug away at BIZARRO SEPHIROTH and SAFER SEPHIROTH.
The “final dungeon” in VIII is a fucking gothic castle floating in midair, tethered to the ground by chains; inside the castle is a maze full of puzzles and mini-bosses.
The game never tells you why it will end in that castle. It gives you, really, no explanation as to why a majority of the events in the game really are happening. Characters allude to stuff you’ve never heard of. They speak to you as if you don’t care about the details. There’s no exposition in this game – none.
. . . That’s where the review ends. I mean, I never wrote a proper ending. I don’t think I can write one, at this point. I can’t remember a damn thing about Final Fantasy VIII. Who wrote that shit? I guess it was me. I recognize it as something I wrote, but the thought processes behind it seem so alien to me now.
It could stand to be cleaned up more. Everything I’ve ever written could be cleaned up more.
It could be linked to more shit. This thing I’m writing here – it was originally supposed to be even fucking longer than it is now. There are large segments of this thing that exist in my head but that I can’t type out now. I mean, what’s the point?
I want to write down everything that’s ever happened to me. I want to find every connection I can.
Would that give me some catharsis? I don’t even know. I want to make this all make sense.
I want to analyze the past two years until they change. I want to rewrite everything, and I’m not just talking about actual pieces of writing – I’m talking about actual fucking events, man.
Here’s the rewritten version of the events of December 2007:
My car slid down the hill, but the angels saved my life.
They saved my car – nobody ever smashed into it, I never had to file a police report, and I never had to take it to the repair shop.
They saved my face – I never smashed it against the fucking sidewalk while walking back up to my apartment.
They made Hazel say to me, when I told her the story, “You’re so brave. I think I’m in love with you,” and they made me reply, “I love you too. Will you marry me?” and they made her say, “Yes.”
They made me ace the French final. They made me ace the Biochemistry final.
They stopped me from playing Final Fantasy VII, or VIII, for that matter. They fixed everything in my life, both the obvious problems and the things I didn’t even know were broken. I lived happily ever after.