The Final Fantasy VII Letters, Part 6
You've Got To Keep Your Promise
From: Kirk Hamilton
To: Leigh Alexander
Subject: Re: You’ve Got To Keep Your Promise
Leigh,
This game really likes to stick it to the player, doesn’t it? First there’s that whole Aeris thing, then Cloud loses his marbles and goes all Universal Soldier on us. On top of that, a leviathan named Weapon (really? Weapon?) is unleashed just as a meteor called Meteor (really? Meteor?) bears down… By the time I finally obtained an airship, a pall hung over the entire game. Who wants to chase down sidequests to the sound of that ominous, keening world-map music?
Though I will say that dear lord, was that one triumphant way to introduce a new vehicle. That legendary slap-fight atop Sister Ray had me jumping out of my chair; I punched the square button like nobody’s business and sent that horrible Scarlet to the ground before leaping off of the Ray and onto the Highwind. The soaring, driving music kicked into gear and well… there are fist-pumps, and there are fist-pumps. That was some good shit, right there.
Long have I been a fan of the RPG world-map; long ago, I even wrote a whole thing about that magical instant “When The World Changes.” There is no single moment in gaming that I dig more than when the world first opens up, the seemingly infinite possibilities that stretch before me at the start of a grand adventure. That first opening of the galaxy map in Mass Effect, or that now-famous moment of blinding light in Fallout 3, when my character’s eyes adjust to the light and take in the vast stretch of the Capitol Wastes.FFVII’s “world-map moment” felt quite different from those ones, I thought. I had been enjoying Midgar well enough, and had just gotten my head around its geography when I was cast into what at the time felt like a massive, featureless wilderness. It felt hostile and cavernous, and not particularly exciting or eye-widening. Just a huge field loaded with random encounters, and somewhere nearby, the village of Kalm. I certainly count myself among those who bid random encounters good riddance. I have come to appreciate how they function as a sort of representative shorthand, stand-ins for the hazards of travel in a dangerous world. But they set my teeth on edge, and I find gaming’s recent move away from them to be most welcome.
But then, perhaps that is my soft, new-gamer brain talking. Even now, it wasn’t long before I figured out how to navigate the world, and how to maximize FFVII’s fairly brutal save system and relax into the rhythm of its encounters. I have always been able to adapt to these things. Over the past few years I have played through the brutally hard and stringently save-pointed Far Cry 2 multiple times on the Xbox 360, and I have loved every minute of it. I’ve loved it so much, in fact, that after returning to the game on my new PC I was surprised at how jarring I found the quicksave option to be. I felt like I was cheating myself of a richer experience! As with Far Cry 2’s lack of 360 quicksaving, much of FFVII seems difficult and unapproachable. And as with Far Cry 2, I often wonder how much of that was by design.
You suggest that we are given no reason to explore the outskirts of modern-day open-world games, but there I must disagree. After all, a good number of current games hide their most delightfully daft bits in their furthest reaches. For example, I’ll never forget the time in Fallout 3 when I discovered the sexy sleepwear. I followed some scattered diary entries and clues to a lockbox in the corner of a subway antechamber. After entering the code that I had somehow managed to unearth, I opened the safe to find… an article of clothing called “sexy sleepwear.” It was a leopard-print bit of cloth with no armor value and little monetary worth. Laughing ruefully, I put it in my pack, and in short order I was accosted by a scavenger in the tunnel. “Where is the sexy sleepwear!?” he cried. I am not making this up.
It wound up being this entire saga, like, one guy had stolen it from another guy, then hired someone to kill him… I don’t remember the particulars. My point is, there are most definitely some great surprises at the fringes of many of today’s open-world games. If anything, those are the places where the writers and designers are still allowed to get weird!
But one thing that Fallout 3 doesn’t have is the steady drip of mastery that FFVII does. Many games give us a pleasurable sense of player-skill progression, mastery of their worlds and of their mechanical systems. But mastery is its own sort of discovery, and as with any type of authored reveal, pacing is everything. I felt like Fallout 3 was compelling as I first hobbled around the wastes, barely scraping through fights and living off of what sad, irradiated scraps I could scavenge. But too quickly, I transformed into an armed-to-the-teeth badass, sprinting across the map while mowing down every hapless foe in my way.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
