Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis (cont'd)
an ongoing cormac mccarthy–esque summary of a complicated video game plot, and a critique of how it is being retold
Where we last left off in Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis – a sort of anthology retelling of 20-year-old video game and its various prequels and spinoffs – we have three not-quite interwoven stories. A mercenary joins a childhood friend’s ecoterrorist organization on a mission that goes wrong and meets a flower seller. A soldier from the military organization the mercenary will leave in the future trains and goes on a black ops mission that goes wrong and he meets a hero. Three more soliders from even earlier in the miltary organization’s history go on a mission that goes wrong as they crash land on a strange island and meet a boy. The stories are not exactly informing the reader why they are all part of one larger story. It continues to do so dubiously, hinting at an almost lovable thing.
At this point, the player is given freedom to play through more of either the first or third story. In the first story – the familiar beloved story – the mercenary learns the flower seller he has happened upon is a surprisingly important person to the utilities company/government body he is doing freelance work fighting. The flower seller hires the mercenary as her bodyguard, teasingly offering she will pay him one date. She knows he will, under no circumstance, not not help her. She is having fun with him.
The flower seller finds him charming. She shares her self-awareness that it might just be because he reminds her of her ex. (The veteran player who has played at least one of the original games knows the ex is the solider from story two. They also know the mercenary used to work with the soldier, but – because of complicated reasons which will not explained for a long time to come – does not remember him and thinks he is him, to some degree. They also know something neither the memory-addled mercenary nor the flower seller know yet: the soldier is long dead.)
They cross paths again with the childhood friend on an undercover investigation. The childhood friend and the flower seller briefly size up whether theirs will be a friendly rivalry for the interests of the mercenary and determine he is not either of their top priorities. The mercenary is so embarrassed to the core of his self he does not even understand what is happening.
They learn terrible information. The utilities company/government body is going to destroy an entire sector of the city and blame the ecoterrorist organization for PR. This happens. The utilities company/government body also captures the flower seller. The team decides the first step in fighting back is saving the flower seller because they have caught wind of some strange larger picture: the utilities company/government body believes the flower seller holds genetic secrets (somehow) to (a possibly existant or nonexistant) land of a vast wealth of untapped natural resources. All of this, essentially, is for Q4 earnings.
The flower seller is rescued. The head of the utilities company/government body is mysteriously assassinated by a third party. The mercenary immediately knows whose work this is: the hero. This is odd because the hero is believed to be dead. The player has thus far only met the hero where we last left the soldier. If the player has also been playing (or will next play) the third story about the three more soliders on the island, the player will soon meet the hero in his youth on his first mission.
The third story also started with a scene in which one of the three more soldiers is fighting an older, more present-day iteration of the hero. Is this a flashforward in a part of a story that spans the youth, career, and mysterious “isn’t he supposed to be dead?” period of the hero’s life? Is this a dream sequence, for some reason this as yet nonsupernaturally flavored one of three more soldiers is somehow privy to? This is unclear and remains unimportant, story-wise. Criticism-wise, however: what?
The third story sees the three more soliders befriend the boy on the island. The boy reveals he knows they are on a mission to go to the main island where they will slaughter and colonize his people. He oddly prioritizes helping them leave, myseriously insisting what’s most important is they leave the smaller island he has been stationed to occupy alone as soon as possible. Whatever the big picture is here, the three soldiers begrudgingly admit it is above their pay grade. So soon is their main mission: as soon as they find the spot they were sent to find, the hero is dropped in to commandeer the mission.
The hero is famous, but his achievements are manufactured. He confides this is his first real mission. He is the first of a new generaion of soldiers: genetically modified and physically superpowered. The three soldiers do not like this glimpse of the future. Yet they warm up to his naivete. He is brash but shy. Capable but emotionally awkward. Their problems are the problems of normal people: family illnesses, medical debt. His problem is he is a manufactured public figure created to shoulder a nation’s morale who has never himself known real human connection and has been processing all that with the mind of a teenager.
The veteran player has never known the hero to be either of these things. The veteran player may wonder what this exactly adds to the hero’s story, for the veteran already knows the hero’s true role in this story: he will be the villain.
This is a lot to keep track of. The mercenary’s story stops – for now (until future updates) – with the son of the utilities company/government body assuming control and declaring his intent to find the hero and the land he believes will lead to untold profits. The mercenary fails to finish him off and the son escapes. The mercenary and the others decide their war against the utilities company/government body has become bigger: the best thing they can do now in honor of the lives they’ve failed so far is to find the hero before the utilities company/government body does. The soldier’s story has remained stopped (until future updates) where it was: the hero has stepped in because something is going very badly with the military organization. The other three soldiers’ story continues: they be colonizing. Which brings us to: an issue.
I don’t think the issue here is that the wider anthology of this source material is inherently a bad candidate for this sort of episodic storytelling. I think the issue is more so the same thing I pointed out last time: whoever is making the decisions for where to restructure the shifts from one story to another isn’t doing so very coherently or compellingly. Thus far, this suggests the hero (the antagonist) is the main character of all this, since this is the only person who links all these stories together. That’s not exactly a bad idea, especially considering the issues behind the alternatives. The twist in the mercenary’s story comes so late that I don’t know when they could possibly introduce him in the soldier’s story that won’t totally rob it of its impact… but I fear that’s exactly what’s going to happen, based on how they might have to pace this and how little care they’ve demonstrated in the matter so far.
The issue here is that reframing all of this around the story of the antagonist is: why? What is this story trying to say now? The events that incite the hero’s heel turn are fully, sufficiently explained in the original 20-year-old game, and they don’t have anything to do with him feeling lonely when he was younger. We learn relatively early in Final Fantasy VII (so I maintain this is not a spoiler) that what causes him to go on his rampage is an existential crisis of learning that, while he knew he was a genetically engineered soldier, he learns to his horror that what’s been kept from him is that he’s not even fully human. He’s not merely genetically modified; he’s part alien, and also there are aliens. My point here is: something wilder than that needs to happen to justify any other time we spend with him, especially as something that is supposed to explain his motivations. And what’s not particularly wild is him on his first mission for a colonial utilities company’s private military doing genocide pausing to suggest that the real problem here is that he just doesn’t feel that connected to other people. One of the last scenes we get in the currently published game is him being hugged by his new – his first – comrades, surrounded by the bodies of children he’s just killed because he just needs to let his feelings out, buddy.
This is bonkers, but not the right kind of bonkers that really makes spending this time with this character feel important to our understanding of him. The story of how he got his genocide driver’s license just is not the most interesting thing that has ever happened to him, and we already know that. Most teenagers on the path to adulthood learn it is ok to not feel ok. This doesn’t make the hero unique. Doing so while surrounded by people he has just murdered on a genocidal campaign that he repeatedly expresses no interest in contemplating the morality of technically does make it more unique, but in a what the fuck? kind of way. Our picture of this story’s new main character now is that of an awkward gifted child soldier who cares not for why he kills, who will eventually become a company man to the point he seems to be the only soldier who is not deserting the company, who will eventually maybe die and even his maybe death will not stop him from exacting revenge on the president of the company.
We don’t have to like a main character; fiction is not inherently a morality fable where we follow people demonstrating how to live decent moral lives. There’s a lot of bad crit nowadays that largely boils down to fictional character does something bad, therefore the art itself is bad. But thus far the focus on our main character is that of a child doing war crimes simply because he is good at them, and it is a tall ask to say the point of all of these stories that came out over the last two decades is to feel kinda bad for the antagonist because he is baby.
Ever Crisis thus far is, narratively, struggling with the baby princess leia phenomenon: in which new media is justified merely by having a younger version of recognizable IP rather than having a new story to say about a familiar character. In lieu of tapping into the magic of what the original story said, it is now just vibes tapping into the magic of seeing a character again. Even if Ever Crisis finds a way to make these three stories feel like one greater-than-its-parts story, I’m not confident that won’t overcomplicate an already effective story already told 20 years ago. Aalthough I never played Crisis Core – the soldier’s game – and part of why I’m interested in playing this goddamn game in the first place – so maybe overcomplication has already been canonized.
Standard plugs zone:
over at our music playlist blog trash garbage, we’ve got our requisite definitive taylor swift playlist and we are not taking questions at this time. we’ve also recently run a noisy work music playlist that’s sometimes spooky, sometimes screamy RIYL genres with “post-” in the name, upsetting art, three metal songs in a row that all have the same riff, brief reprieves, you watched half of Chainsaw Man, a second wind on an uninteresting afternoon
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