At long last it is time to talk about yet another Final Fantasy VII–related game, Dirge of Cerberus, a game everyone loves and definitely interested in reading about now that Rebirth is out. I’m also going to do so while also talking about Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio, because I hate writing something that could possibly even appear to be have a glimmer of an audience.
2006’s Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII is a wild curiosity. The first-ish sequel-ish to one of the most successful video games ever, starring one of the missable, most minor major characters from the original game, mostly featuring other missable or least liked main characters, in a genre different from the original game, and it all takes place after the open-ended finale of the original game where it was boldly left unclear if anyone survived or not (this game’s mere existence saying: yes).
A brief, shocking renewed interest in the game happened in my circles on the internet when critic ThorHighHeels surprise dropped their top 100 personal favorite video games in a tweet on a whim, and it was a wild list where they explained their criteria was not “good” but just important to them and stuck with them. Between that and the then-imminent release of Rebirth, a bunch of people set out to play this weird game.
The game is fun enough. That’s not what I’m interested in writing about. What I’m interested in writing about is the first half of a poorly written and plotted story with an unclear case for itself. I am who I am. Which, if anything at all, “I am who I am” is sort of the theme of this game? It’s a weird and inexplicable one.
The plot’s a mess. The antagonist is a hat on a hat version of the original game’s antagonists (the secret research arm of a utility company/quasi-government’s… secret research arm… but the more secret one no one knew about before. Despite the hundreds of people required to work for it. Yeah.) The protagonist and his fellow B-tier friends’ motivation here is they’re involved in rebuilding efforts after the events of the original game, which would be kind of neat if it weren’t that they’re not really getting fleshed out more. Kind of the only compelling subplot are two brand new characters who are estranged sisters who’ve gone on wildly different life paths which are too difficult to summarize here (because I honestly don’t even understand them), offering the one time in the game where someone’s inexplicable motivations can at least point at something universally inexplicable, like, well, yeah, of course she’ll do anything for her and of course she wants to kill her – they’re family.
People talk about their feelings a lot without really saying much about their feelings. 2006 was a big time for having feelings. Pop-punk had gone emo, Shadow the Hedgehog was born, and Vincent Valentine the sort-of vampire from Final Fantasy VII got his own game to brood about his sins, his past lost unrequited love, and being condemned to being a monster. Vincent is endlessly broody in this and it doesn’t actually bring us any closer to what his deal is. The whole game is like the ad libbed fandub of Shadow the Hedgehog saying just “Maria”, his self-pitying raison d'être, as he looks away from an explosion in outer space.
Around the same time, I also read Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio (2023), a magical realism novel in which a couple’s son dies, the wife cuts out his lung in hope that she can grow a creature out of it, thus giving birth to the creature they name Monstrilio who starts out as a fully feral but doting little creature who they eventually pass as human. The novel uses the other characters’ relationships with Monstrilio to reflect the different ways everyone has processed – or not – their grief over the dead child, including Monstrilio himself, who sort of has the child’s memories, but is not the child, and deals with the pressure to take his place in some way while still being encouraged to be his own person so long as he does so in a human-passing way.
What was interesting about reading Monstrilio and then picking up Dirge of Cerberus is how, over the past two decades, our stories about monsters within have shifted. While Vincent only gets to brood and dream of martyrdom, Monstrilio never feels shame for what he is. Vincent bemoans his monstrosity, but Monstrilio bemoans his humanity. I can’t help but feel this reflects a cultural shift in how people are allowed to be true to themselves and to be flawed. When you fuck up in Dirge of Cerberus, one of Vincent’s dying fail-state moans is “Now I can finally rest”, pure A+ brooding. When Monstrilio slips up and kills again to satisfy his hunger, the humans in his life scramble to cover it up while Monstrilio makes a point to narrate he does not feel guilt.
It occurs to me now that, with 2024’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, part 2 of 3 of a remake going full meta on revisiting itself with decades of cultrual change and self-reflection, we’ll get to see Vincent get another shot at it in 2024. I wonder if he gets to accept himself this time around.
Speaking of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I am still slowly playing this extremely long game. While I love luxuriating in it, its length and the pressure of knowing that the odds of coming across spoilers on the internet have somewhat compelled me to basically spend every moment of free time I have over the past month playing it. And I am not far at all.
I just got on the boat leaving Junon, so spoilers for up to that part, because I guess I’m just going to keep screaming into the void about everything that happens in this game.
Tifa and Cloud’s conversation in Junon has so much romantic tension I had to scream. Jane Austen–ass levels of longing and staring here. Pride and Prejudice for gamers. I love it.
And I love that Tifa and Aerith have an actual relationship with each other, are real friends, and know the other has a thing for Cloud. Aerith suggesting they talk about boys and then they immediately get interrupted, my god, this game gets why this love triangle is so good.
Fucking Glenn is here??? The absolute gall of this game. The meeting must have been like:
"Ok, team. Any already existing characters we can cram in here naturally?"
"Here's what I'm thinking. The most boring characters from Ever Crisis."
"From the Baby Sephiroth story that isn't even complete yet?"
"That's the one. We're thinking Glenn."
"Ah, the boneheaded Shinra military leader who isn't good at being a leader. What do you have in mind?"
"In the time since the unfinished story where anyone knows him from, he's defected to Wutai."
"Tantalizing."
"He was murdered."
"What."
"By Rufus."
"We're gonna use a preexisting character who has a whole thing going on and be like by the way he was unceremoniously murdered by another game’s antagonist but he's fine now?"
"He is wearing the Sephiroth clone black robes and is walking around barefoot and speaks like he's read a book for the first time in his life since we last saw him."
"And Glenn is the most natural choice for this?"I like that they had to come up with a more story-integrated way for Yuffie to enter the story this time around now that she’s not a missable character, and what they came up with was the chest compressions joke. And that Barrett goes full “kids these days” on her instantly. I am old enough where I’m like wow is Barrett the most relatable character?
I have been racking my brain trying to understand why they went so hard on Chadley. Best I got at the moment is, ok, this game is the meta version of FF7. What if Chadley... is us
Also, I have not read as much analysis of the game as I would like to have, by lieu of not actually wanting to find out how it ends in that way. But I have found a few things I was able to read. Reid McCarter, in “Let the Dead Snake Lie: The Diminished Drama of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth” for Remap, wrote about a significant drawback of the meta bombast of Rebirth and what simpler effective story beats get lost in all this being clever.
This approach makes Rebirth, like Remake before it, a clever game—and far more fascinating than a largely faithful remake would’ve been. At the same time, though, its focus on defying expectations moves its priorities from impactful storytelling to forming a dialog with its audience’s memory. The result is something that operates more on the level of the brain than the heart, which is sometimes gratifying but ultimately works to dull what emotional power the original game holds.
Final Fantasy VII is, at its core, a story about a crisis of identity. Cloud spends much of the game presenting himself as a strong, powerful, stoic soldier. What we learn, via the twists of a plot involving clones and amnesia, is that he has been unsuccessfully pretending to be Zack, a dead friend who achieved the kind of masculine, martial prowess Cloud desires for himself. In the end, forced to confront his delusions, he makes peace with his fractured psyche by fighting for the good of the world and for others against Sephiroth, his former hero, whose own sense of alienation led him to become a self-obsessed, violent monster.
Because the truth of Cloud's background is revealed, bit by bit, through surprising plot reveals and Fight Club-style revelations about unreliable narration, the player is wrong-footed and confused about the nature of Final Fantasy VII's reality up until its final scenes. The issue with introducing metatextual doubt to a story of this kind is that it puts a hat on a hat, coupling a character’s unreliable understanding of reality with the plot doing the same. The confusion multiplies. The point is diluted.
I also had a conversation with my book club recently about fandom being a weird and offputting overlap of identity and capitalism. Gita Jackson wrote for Aftermath about an older, pre-internet version of someone building their identity around being a fan of the game ruining Jackson’s own ability to enjoy the game:
I don’t remember if I’m still at camp or not when he calls me to suddenly end things. I know it must have happened after the yearly anime convention that summer. On the phone call, he explains that while he was in his Cloud Strife cosplay, he met an Aerith cosplayer handing out flowers. They recreated the scene where Cloud and Aerith meet in the game, and then hung out all weekend. After three days of seeing her at the convention, he’s decided that he wants to date her. She lives out of state, but she agreed to date long distance.
In his explanation, he compares me to Tifa, Cloud’s childhood friend who is also in love with him. Being drawn into his bizarre fantasy like this, as a romantic rival in a drama where he is the main character, disgusts me.
…
Fandom is very fun, but it is also a nightmare. When I was still deep in the culture of livejournal, an observer of culture rather than a maker of it, people sometimes talked about the mental illness soup that often precedes an extreme investment into specific pieces of media. … There is a point where the thing you like supplants your common sense, or at least your sense of scale and proportionality. If you’re basically in love with Aerith and spend as much time as possible surrounding yourself with iconography from Final Fantasy VII, dating someone who can also act out the game with you might seem totally rational. But that’s not really a relationship with another person—that’s just your fandom for Final Fantasy VII projected outward at a woman.
Nothing to plug today, but basically all of the screencaps I used for Dirge of Cerberus came from this very helpful author on Let’s Play Archive.