Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (3 page)

“Cloud . . . You Just Want Friends. Isn’t That Right?” The Player as Party

The process of identification is more complex when there are multiple playable characters. This leads to a greater number of signifiers and a larger number of ways to interpret those signifiers. A distinction needs to be made here between party-based RPGs and strategy-based RPGs that may involve whole armies of characters. The games in the main
Final Fantasy
franchise usually have small parties of playable characters who work together to achieve a common goal. There is also a distinction between party-based games, where players take on the roles of those characters, and strategy-based games, where players become generals within the game controlling those characters.
⁵
Often players identify less with one specific character the more characters they have to control. Games that attempt to blend the party-based and the strategy-based include the
Suikoden
and the
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
series, but in these games the majority of playable characters tend to have extremely limited preset characteristics, whereas a smaller group of playable characters are more fully fleshed out.

Final Fantasy VII
is a party-based RPG. Cloud may be the main character, but the eight other playable characters provide further opportunities for player identification and signifier interpretation. Those who identify with Tifa from the outset may find themselves caring more about her relationship with Cloud, AVALANCHE, the Seventh Heaven bar, and Sector 7 than players who identify more strongly with Cid or Red XIII. This is because Tifa’s love of these things forms a part of her character—they are some of her signifiers. Just as alternating perspectives in a novel can provide the reader with new vantage points from which to interpret a text, having multiple playable characters allows multiple ways of interpreting the game text. This is because part of what makes each character unique is the varied signifiers he or she contains.

Some players may, as I did, opt for maintaining a strong central party to the exclusion of the other characters. I became invested in Vincent and Lucrecia’s story and in the happenings at Cosmo Canyon because I kept Vincent and Red XIII in my active party for most of the game. As such, I spent a great deal of time customizing their (and Cloud’s) equipment and materia, while doing nothing with the other characters. This meant that I spent more time interpreting the preset signifiers contained within these characters and assigning them customizable signifiers of my own (Red XIII was a Magic-User and Summoner, Vincent a Healer and Command User, while Cloud was a Melee Attacker) to the exclusion of the others. This limited my experience of the characters I didn’t play with to their preset actions within the plot, and as such my investment in and subsequent identification with them were lessened. The level of interaction and identification with a character will affect how, and the extent to which, players interpret that character’s signifiers, which will have a significant effect on how players produce the game’s text.

Aerith’s death has a dramatic impact on both the preset Aerith and the customized player Aerith. Unlike Cloud’s identity crisis, it doesn’t force a reevaluation of the game text, but it removes one of the lenses through which players interpret it by eliminating one of the signifier bundles through which players produce the text. Gamers not invested in the game world or its characters may turn off the game at this point. The payoff in an RPG results largely from the players’ ability to turn a weak starting character into a juggernaut. For gamers, this can be expressed as a simple formula: time (playtime) + effort (customization) = payoff (a more powerful character). This formula informs the gamer’s interpretation of signifiers. When that payoff is taken away from the gamer, it results in a lot of wasted time and effort. Such is the case with Aerith’s death, where the player’s customization is nullified.

The extent to which Aerith’s death upset players is evident in the numerous rumors that circulated over the Internet about the possibility of resurrecting her, as well as instructions for finding the glitch to see her ghost in Midgar.
FFVII
’s game developers were relying on players to be so invested in the game world that Aerith’s death would not stop them from completing the game. This required the players to identify with characters other than Aerith, allowing them to continue interacting and interpreting the game text through alternate bundles of signifiers. It was therefore essential for the game developers to allow multiple points of entry into their game environment. These multiple entry points make
FFVII
a writerly text.

“Zack . . . SOLDIER First Class. Same as Cloud”: The Player as Zack

Grand adventures usually start with the disruption of the natural order.
⁶
Prequels allow us to go back and experience what the world was like before the hero is called to arms. They are often tragic because they usually involve characters we know are dead in the contemporary setting of the original story, and we also know while consuming a prequel that something bad is about to happen that will spur the action in subsequent narratives. This tragic overshadowing influences the way players interpret the signifiers within a text and influences the type of text they will produce through those signifiers.

More experienced gamers may be able to correct me on this point, but to my knowledge
Crisis Core
is the first game where players know that the playable character has to die in order for them to complete the narrative. This means the game cannot be beaten. By drawing the narrative to a close, it can be completed, but no matter how well you customize Zack or how much time and effort you put in, you cannot defeat the final continuously spawning army of Shinra infantrymen that will be the cause of his death. Believe me, I tried. Knowing that it was futile, I still tried to fight for Benjamin-Zack’s life.

So, why play the game? Although there are parts of the game that can be beaten, and monsters that can be vanquished, the ultimate payoff for playing
Crisis Core
is not in beating the game but in experiencing the world of Gaia through Zack’s eyes and interpreting the text through
his
collection of signifiers (as opposed to Cloud’s). Players already know what happened during the Nibelheim incident because they have seen it in flashbacks in
FFVII
, but in
Crisis Core
they get an insight into who Zack was and what caused Sephiroth’s madness. This forces yet another reevaluation of the game text onto the player. Signs like SOLDIER or Sephiroth or the Turks take on new meanings, based on a player’s interpretation of signifiers within
Crisis Core.
Even Cloud can be reinterpreted through our identification with Zack as we learn just how much Zack invested in him and how he shaped Cloud’s bundle of signifiers. This makes mastering the original
FFVII
all the more satisfying because we now know that
we
have lived up to Zack’s expectations. It is the ultimate expression of Barthes’s writerly text—one that the consumer wants to expand by reevaluating the core narrative via another entry point.

“A New Life . . . Children Are Blessed with Spirit Energy and Are Brought into the World”:
Advent Children
as Cathartic Dénouement

Advent Children
is the first instance in the
FFVII
universe where players become entirely passive in a gameplay sense. I do not wish to enter the debate as to whether film audiences are passive or active, but viewers of
Advent Children
are passive in a gameplay sense—they cannot customize anything within the film.
Advent Children
provides yet another access point into the
FFVII
game world, but, unlike others, it makes no demands on the player’s interpretation of the game text. It relies on viewers with preformed opinions about the world from their time as players. As a film, it doesn’t have to construct its own imaginary world. Unlike the financially disastrous
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(2001), which sought and never found a mainstream filmgoing audience,
Advent Children
is clearly targeted at fans of
FFVII
who have already come to identify with its main characters and who have already interpreted the signifiers within the text.

These interpretations may be proved false in the film, however, making it the least writerly text of the
FFVII
franchise.
Advent Children
moves away from Barthes’s ideal, with its multiple signifiers open for interpretation, back to a more traditional text where the writer limits the signifiers and the consumer does not produce the text. The preset characters in
Advent Children
will probably be nothing like the characters a player has customized. Benjamin-Cloud loved his materia and never would have left them behind in the church to be stolen by the bad guys; Benjamin-Red XIII loved using the Knights of the Round summon, which the
Advent Children
Red XIII never does. This doesn’t mean that a less writerly text cannot contribute to the larger writerly text of
FFVII.
Although
Advent Children
’s Cloud was different from Benjamin-Cloud, he still acted and spoke in the same way as the preset
FFVII
Cloud, so I was able to identify with him in the film. Cloud’s set signifiers remained unaltered. It was only his customizable signifiers that were missing. Lacking these customizable signifiers meant that my interpretation of Cloud was more restricted, but
Advent Children
still provides another entry point into the
FFVII
universe.

“I Couldn’t Stop Her. That Was My Sin”: Exploring Vincent in
Dirge of Cerberus

While acting as yet another access point into the world of
FFVII
, the mechanics of
Dirge of Cerberus
and the demands it placed on the players are as different from those of the original game as are the mechanics of the film and the demands it placed on its viewers. This game relies more heavily on reflex and gaming skill (the ability to push buttons in the correct order and with the right timing) than it does on developing a party and using it strategically. The first requires immediate responses, whereas the second requires more strategic thought, particularly if players adjust
FFVII
’s Active Time Battle system to give themselves more time to think and respond. These demands on the players’ skill in
Dirge of Cerberus
influence the way players will interpret the signifiers within the game and allow players to produce a different kind of text from that produced through the original
FFVII.

Not only does
Dirge of Cerberus
provide an opportunity for players to identify to a greater degree with a supporting playable character from the original game (Vincent), it also allows them to learn more about him and
his
view of the game world. We learn, for example, what Yuffie and Vincent were doing while the rest of the
FFVII
crew were watching Meteor fall on Midgar (as optional playable characters, they were left out of the ending cinematic of
FFVII
).
Dirge of Cerberus
aids in the pluralizing of the
FFVII
text by offering another access point and by moving beyond the scope of the original narrative. It multiplies the number of signifiers contained within the Vincent character, while providing new ways of interpreting those signifiers to produce the text.

“This Is the End?”

All texts contain signifiers, but in a writerly text those signifiers are multiplied to such an extent that the consumer of the text is forced to produce his or her own text through an interpretation of those signifiers.
Final Fantasy VII
is a prime example of a writerly text where the playable characters’ preset signifiers are multiplied by the psychological depth of the characters and the players’ identification with them. The ability to customize the characters in
FFVII
not only multiplies the number of signifiers they contain exponentially, but also requires players to interpret them based on how they are producing the text. Different texts will be produced by each person who plays the game, based on how the player identifies with the
FFVII
characters, and also how he or she interprets the signifiers within the various titles in the series. Thus,
FFVII
fulfills the ideal of Barthes’s writerly text in a way that printed literature cannot.

NOTES

1
Roland Barthes,
S/Z
, translated by Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp. 4-6.

2
Ibid., p. 5.

3
See James Paul Gee,
Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul
(Australia: Common Ground, 2005).

4
Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, eds.,
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2004), pp. 121-123.

5
Gee,
Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul
, pp. 71-72.

6
See Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(London: Fontana, 1993).

2

KEFKA, NIETZSCHE, FOUCAULT: MADNESS AND NIHILISM IN
FINAL FANTASY VI

Kylie Prymus

What are your values? They are peace, freedom, prosperity, wealth, and so on and so forth. So that any man who should, for instance, openly and knowingly act contrary to the whole of that list would, in your opinion, and in mine too, for that matter, be an obscurantist or a plain madman, wouldn’t he?

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

A Kefkaesque Beginning

“Kefka.” Mere mention of the name conjures up the faint sound of synthesized laughter to the ears of those who have played
Final Fantasy VI
. The name, of course, is also an allusion to Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a philosophical writer well known for his twisted and unsettling perspectives on the world.

One of the most infamous villains of the
Final Fantasy
multiverse, Kefka Palazzo is also one of the most philosophically dense characters in video gaming lore. Despite his court jester attire and comic demeanor, Kefka is quite deliberate in enacting his goal of world destruction. He finds no meaning in the universe and sees the eradication of all forms of existence as his only reason for being. But is Kefka truly mad? Or are we simply unequipped to label a man with such wide-ranging homicidal tendencies any other way?

Kefka: The Man behind the Laugh

We first meet Kefka and the midi tones of his infamous laugh at the gates of Figaro Castle, where he has come in search of a strange woman named Terra. Unbeknownst to us at the time, Terra, a half-human, half-Esper hybrid, is one of the few people alive capable of controlling magic innately. Kefka is under orders from Emperor Gestahl to acquire her for the good of the Empire; whether they intend to use her for research or exploit her as a war machine is unclear. Even at this initial stage in the game, Kefka’s sanity is questioned by the game’s main protagonist, Locke. Later that evening, when Kefka attempts to burn the castle to the ground as a result of King Edgar’s evasiveness, we witness his penchant for mass homicide.

What we are not told until much later in the story is that Kefka’s behavior is the result of experiments done on him years earlier in an attempt to infuse humans with magical ability. Magic had all but disappeared from the world a millennium ago, when the three gods of magic ended a violent and bloody conflict with one another by willingly turning themselves to stone. The magical soldiers they had created, Espers, retreated to a separate part of the world and were gradually forgotten by humankind. Technology replaced magic as both tools of convenience and weapons of war until Emperor Gestahl began research into Magitek, a way to combine ancient magic with modern machinery. The only way to create Magitek or for humans to wield magic is through the acquisition of Magicite—the rare remains of deceased Espers. In an effort to end the Empire’s dependence on rare artifacts for magical power, attempts were made to infuse human beings with Magicite. An adolescent Kefka was the first test subject, and it granted him the ability to wield some magical power, but it also effected a gradual change in his behavior, behavior that it is easy to characterize as insane and that we see for the first time at Figaro Castle.

We catch up with Kefka again later during the siege of Doma Castle. By this point even his own soldiers are wary of him, and after the general in charge is called away, Kefka takes matters into his own hands. Here the full extent of his murderous impulse becomes clear as he orders the entire castle’s water supply poisoned, resulting in the death of nearly everyone inside, including some of the Empire’s own troops who had been captured and imprisoned. “Nothing can beat the music of hundreds of voices screaming in unison!” Kefka yells in glee. It appears there is little left for us to do other than write him off as a deranged and archetypal criminal antagonist—the homicidal maniac.

Foucault: A Method to His Madness

There is no question that Kefka is homicidal, but is he truly mad? Enter Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a French philosopher who bore a striking resemblance to Uncle Fester. Underneath the turtleneck and the shiny pate, however, lay a man deeply concerned with the historical forces that have shaped modern-day structures of power. His first major work,
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
, published in 1961, charts the history of the concept “
insane
” and how the label is applied to less desirable members of society as a way of controlling them. Although not initially a term of moral disapprobation, it has come to suggest a willful failure of not only the logical but the moral faculties, from the inability to be productive in society to the downright desire to engage in reprehensible acts.

Labels are powerful things. Forget the common mantra that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Labels create social hierarchies and can invoke affirmation or condemnation, depending on their use. It is little wonder, for example, that Locke prefers to be called a treasure hunter, rather than a thief. Labeling people as “mad,” according to Foucault, filled a space at the end of the Middle Ages once occupied by lepers. Leprosy was thought to be a disease not only of the body but also of the soul, as many believed it a curse from God for moral depravity. The construction of leper colonies gave the rest of society a sense of safety and superiority—no matter how downtrodden your lot, at least you weren’t a leper! But constant quarantining led to the virtual disappearance of leprosy in Europe. A new group of outcasts was needed to give the general public peace of mind. The unfortunate targets of this restructuring were the insane. To isolate the “mad,” fifteenth-century artists rendered them as cargo on a Ship of Fools, sailing just outside the city’s borders with no direction and no greater purpose.

Prior to this change, during the Middle Ages, the common characteristics of madness were often thought to be signs of a veiled wisdom. Foucault noted that this older image of madness still persisted in literature after the Middle Ages—think of Don Quixote or Hamlet’s grave diggers. Even the Heroes of our tale are no strangers to madness in their midst. Both the eccentric old magician Strago and the quirky but wise Moogles are examples of an older, more positive notion of madness. Even more telling for our purposes is Foucault’s conviction that the transformation from insanity as veiled wisdom to madness as cultural fear begins with Christian views of the apocalypse. Biblical allusions to the human inability to comprehend the reason of God are taken to imply that those who come too close to such understanding will be driven insane. By the seventeenth century, madmen were feared because it was supposed that they were driven crazy by stumbling upon hidden secrets of the universe and the coming apocalypse.

If we take this symbolism and understanding of madness to heart, then the process of infusing Kefka with Magicite may have given him a revelation of “dark secrets and visions of the apocalypse”—knowledge that no human could comprehend. In the world of
Final Fantasy VI
, magic was controlled by three gods who removed themselves from the world, spawning an era of peace and tranquility that lasted a thousand years. With the rediscovery of magic, this peace is threatened. The fear of what would happen if the gods of magic should return gives rise to the notion of madness in the game, in much the same way that fear of the Christian apocalypse created the label of madness at the end of the Middle Ages. Kefka is quickly labeled mad because those around him fear the knowledge he may possess.

The Age of (Un)Reason

In the eighteenth century, the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment was heralded as the solution to all of humanity’s problems. Foucault contended that nothing was more of a threat to humanity at this time than those who refused to employ reason—madness became the very antithesis of reason. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) even went so far as to provide us with purely rational justifications for morality. So, naturally, those whose capacities for reason were flawed came to be viewed as morally corrupt. Foucault marked this period as the “Great Confinement,” or the birth of the insane asylum. The insane were locked away for the betterment of society, treated little differently than criminals even if they had committed no criminal acts. From this point onward, madness and depravity are inextricably linked. The marriage of these two concepts creates a set of familiar archetypes: the criminally insane, the violently deranged, and the homicidal maniac.

Players are quite comfortable giving Kefka such labels. Few of the protagonists attempt to reason with him, and certainly none desire to understand him. Any attempt he makes to persuade us of his position is ignored and invalidated. His arguments are routinely dismissed with a common logical fallacy, an ad hominem, or “appeal to the person.” This fallacy involves referencing some aspect of a person’s character as defective or undesirable, rather than criticizing the logic of the person’s argument. A common use of this fallacy is to say, “You’re crazy,” implying that nothing of what you argue could be logically valid. Good reason, however, stands on its own; “twice two makes four” is a sound statement whether I am perfectly rational or certifiably insane. During the Great Confinement, however, there was no attempt to understand those who were locked up, just as we have no desire to understand Kefka. The insane were simply locked away and forgotten, “just” punishment for their perceived moral transgressions.

We are definitely justified in locking up Kefka—he is most definitely homicidal—but what evidence do we have that he is insane? There is a method to his madness, as Polonius would say of Hamlet. The poisoning of Doma was the most efficient and effective way of ending the siege swiftly and with a minimal loss of Imperial life. What is unreasonable about that? In fact, before the story ends Kefka amasses divine power and finds that there is no ultimate meaning behind the world’s existence. He thus sets out to destroy it. If there is no purpose, no reason, then why should the world exist at all? This fundamental logic is the basis for the philosophical movement of existentialism, which we shall turn to shortly when we discuss the work of Nietzsche. Existentialism arose as a response to the Age of Enlightenment, proposing that logic cannot provide meaning to the world, so we must seek it elsewhere. If Kefka suffers from anything, perhaps it is not too little reason but too much. When he achieves the height of all rational power available to both humans and the gods, he suddenly finds no justification for life at all.

God Is Dead! Long Live Kefka!

The main theme of
Madness and Civilization
permeates all of Foucault’s work: society has a desire for control and that which it cannot control, it seeks to dismiss. The very concept of madness has become a tool of dismissal and control. As we saw, labeling Kefka as mad is really just an attempt to ignore what may be a valid point of view. Now let’s take a more serious look at how he acquired that view and what it entails.

After the massacre at Doma, we find Kefka at the Imperial Magitek research lab trying to coax magical power out of live Espers the Empire has captured. Learning that Magicite is actually the remains of dead Espers, he proceeds to kill them all, an act that disgusts his adoptive father, Cid, a perennial
Final Fantasy
favorite and the inventor of Magitek. Through a complex scheme of manipulation, Kefka convinces Emperor Gestahl and our Heroes to find and open the sealed door to the land of the Espers, whereupon he makes his final grab for power, killing the Emperor and draining all magical power from the petrified gods of magic. This results in a cataclysm that shatters the world and makes Kefka a god himself. In true arch-villain fashion, he builds a mighty tower within which he rules over all, doling out punishment at will and destroying entire towns that refuse allegiance to him. By all rights Kefka has achieved his goal—ultimate power and ultimate knowledge—and will be content to rule over all life for eternity.

When our varied band of protagonists finally manages to organize a resistance and scale Kefka’s tower to confront him face-to-face, they find he has undergone an interesting metamorphosis. No longer garbed in jester robes or keen on snappy one-liners, he has instead taken on a winged, angelic form and his attitude is one of detached stoicism. The power and knowledge of the gods have changed him such that, to our horror, he no longer desires simply to rule over all but would rather destroy everything, creating a paradoxical “monument to non-existence.” By way of explanation, Kefka says that there is no meaning to the world, no reason that justifies its existence, so he will destroy it entirely. While ascending the tower for the final confrontation, our Heroes attempt to “argue” against Kefka and explain to him what gives their own lives meaning. Cyan lives to carry the memory of his family; Shadow has come to value friendship; Edgar wants to create a kingdom where people are free. These explanations fall on deaf ears, however, for Kefka is no longer subject to logic or reason. To be clear, though, he has not become unreasonable or illogical. Instead, Kefka’s goals have become
a
rational—not contrary to reason but outside the domain of reason entirely.