Day 21: Best Story
There's a lot of stuff that, from what I've been told, would be a contender for this category that I haven't played. The first one that comes to mind is the highly-praised, but once notoriously hard to find Xenogears. It's on Playstation Network now, so maybe I can change that in the future, but for now I've gotta work with what I've played. A couple of games I've already talked about are strong contenders. The Metal Gear Solid series has really pushed the envelope more than any other in terms of what sort of story a game can tell. Chrono Trigger, as my friend at He Been Weatherbeaten went with, had an ambitious story that had you traveling throughout past, present, and future. Final Fantasy VI had maybe the best cast of characters put together in a game, all of whom had their own subplots that developed over the game. But I'm going to go with a game that I've already blogged about here before a couple of years ago when I was replaying it again:
Final Fantasy VII
(spoilers)
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
I know FF VII gets an eye-roll from some people who aren't that crazy about the massive shadow it casts over other games that are about as good but which for one reason or another didn't have the massive mainstream success that FF VII did. It's true that it's not a perfect game, and I'm not going to argue that it is, but to me it's story is the most memorable out of any game I've played. Like a lot of games, it ultimately boils down to your basic "good defeats evil" story, but it's "good defeats evil" done especially well. It had a great setting, some memorable characters--even if somewhere a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, memorable villains, and Square used the newfound power of the Playstation and it's ability to play full-motion video to weave a fantastic story together.
Final Fantasy VII's intro is still one of the coolest sequences put together, in any medium, really. It foreshadows the story, with Aries appearing in a field of stars, it sets up the massive size of the truly impressive dieselpunk (seems like that's the term that fits best) creation that is Midgar, and gets you pumped up for starting the game proper, which begins as soon as you step off the train. Even with the break-neck opening, though, a big part of the genius of FF7's story is that it's true scale is hidden from you for the whole first act of the game. While you're in Midgar, it seems like the basic premise of the game is that the main antagonists are the head honchos at Shina Corp., and the goal of the game is to ecoterrorist your way around the city until you force a final confrontation, take out President Shinra, and liberate the city from the corporatocracy. If the game was merely that, it would still be pretty awesome, because as I said, Midgar is a pretty awesome creation, and it actually would've been cool to see even more of the city than what you did over the course of the game.
Maybe five or so hours in, though, (depending on how fast you're going, of course) the game completely pulls the rug out from under you when President Shinra dies, but not by your hand. You then set out from Midgar and get ready to explore the rest of the world, and Cloud tells you in flashback about Sephiroth and you realize, if you managed to avoid spoilers by the time you'd played the game, that the first act of the game was a bit of sleight-of-hand and that the stakes are way higher than just the fate of the city. If you were someone who had played Final Fantasy games before FF VII, you likely figured the world map was going to show up sooner or later, but I could easily see someone who wasn't familiar with the series and its conventions being rather taken aback by the game completely opening up the way it does. What's cool, though, is that when you replay the game from the beginning again, you can catch little hints pop up here and there, like the guy in slums with the number tattoo who's mysteriously sick.
As I said in my best villain post, Sephiroth's backstory is kind of muddled a bit, and you really have to watch all of the optional cut-scenes concerning Jenova and Professor Hojo and Profressor Gast's experiments to really get the complete picture. Sephiroth nevertheless has a plethora of iconic moments, first and foremost being the scene where he razes Nibelheim to the ground and you watch him walking away through the flames. The game does a great job building up the legend of him before you really directly confront him. You don't run into him during the Shinra headquarters sequence, but you find his giant masamune run clean through the Shinra President's body. Later, as you're tracking across the marsh, you see the giant cobra that murders you if you run into it (if you're not over-leveled, that is) impaled on a giant pole. By the time he kills operatically descends, seemingly from the heavens, to kill Aries, (hey, I said spoilers, and seriously, you knew that at this point, didn't you?) he's already obtained a God-like omnipresence over the game long before he literally becomes God-like at it's conclusion.
The game's supporting cast, while perhaps not as diverse and as colorful as FF6's, is great in its own right, and each character is utilized well as a piece in the larger picture of the puzzle. Barrett has been criticized, not unjustly, as basically being a Mr. T clone and perhaps not the most progressive portrayal of a character who happens to be a large black man in history, but in between his "You better watch yo' spikey headed ass!" comments he shows real humanity, and another layer is added to his character when you reach Corel and play through the subplot with Dyne. Aries is great as the girl whose existence seems oxymoronic, an eternally sunny-eyed optimist who grows flowers all day in the middle of a giant, run-down cesspool. Cid is kind of a comic-relief character for a while ("Sit down and drink your goddamned tea!"), but has a genuinely emotional moment at the climax of his part of the story, when you complete his lifelong dream and launch the Shinra rocket into space and he presses his face right up against the porthole to take in the fullest possible view of the stars. Yuffie will piss you right the hell off when she steals your materia but is funny as hell.
A lot of people are irked by Cloud starting Square's emotionally-detached loner protagonist phase that increased ten-fold with Squall in VIII, and yeah, maybe there's one to many "Cloud: ......." dialogue boxes in the game, but I think his descent into madness over the first half of the game is done really well. It's a great tease when you first see him go into one of his fits trying to plant a bomb in the Mako reactor and you see the ominous text from a nameless voice: "This is more than just a reactor." And the scene at the start of disc 2, when Cloud has completely succumbed to the idea that he's not human but rather a failed Sephiroth clone ("I wasn't chasing Sephiroth, I was being summoned by Sephiroth!") is a great and unexpected twist. The game had already killed off a playable character at the end of disc 1, which at the time really feels like it's going to be the low-point before the heroes start building up some momentum again towards the climax. But with that scene, where Cloud is seemingly lost for good, combined with the next scene where Tifa wakes up aboard the Highwind, and Barrett opens the shudders to reveal the big-ass ball of fire slowly falling to earth is a tremendously effective "how are they gonna get out of this one?" moments. The scene later in disc 2 where Tifa is roaming around in Cloud's head is maybe a little cheesy, but you can't help but smile during the big reveal in Cloud's real memory of Nibelheim when the Main Theme music builds up and Cloud comes rushing in to save Tifa. The game ends as you expect it would, with Sephiroth being defeated, although before Advent Children was made and set two years later (which I thought was decidedly "meh"), it had the added wrinkle of the last scene where Red XIII is taking his children to go see the ruins of Midgar and it's not really immediately clear that humans were actually deemed worthy to survive when Holy came to cleanse Meteor.
Put together, Final Fantasy VII's story is a great ride. It combines the high adventure of the old medieval FF games with a cool, dystopian future setting that was foreign to the series at the time. It used the new technology of the Playstation to make the story more up close and more personal than it had been and used full-motion video to make it bigger and more operatic. Plus, it had a cat yelling into a megaphone riding a giant moogle.
Serendipitously, Roger Ebert tweeted a link to someone's blog post, written as a open letter to him, while I was writing this one, and he mentions Final Fantasy VII.
Next: Day 22 -- A game sequel which disappointed you
And it's gonna be from this series...
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