Is it weird to find a video game
touching?
Everyone has their special song, a
piece of art, a poem or story, that they find especially touching or
moving to them. Nowaways it's common to have a movie or maybe even a
television show that just touches the heartstrings like that. But
with video games, there's something different. It's less common, I
think. Sure, there'll be the occasional person that talks about how
much Portal affected them, or maybe even some story-based
game. Gone Home or To
the Moon are the games de jure
of this category.
For
me, it's Final Fantasy X.
This isn't a “are
games art?” discussion. I've never really felt that I have anything
to add to the discussion. It is such a subjective debate over a
medium that is completely subjective to begin with.
Final
Fantasy X probably influenced my
cultural affinities since I very first played it when it was first
released for the Playstation 2. When my young eyes first witnessed
the sight of Tidus climbing the cliffs in front of Zanarkand, laying
his eyes with us over an ancient, dead, and completely alien city,
with the haunting piano music behind, I knew that I had come upon
something truly amazing. Playing through the game for the very first
time, I enjoyed the characters, the heroic and ultimately-tragic
story, and the exciting spells I could cast and skills I could
perform. But what stunned me most of all were the incredible sights,
vistas, and landscapes around the game itself. Nearly everywhere you
went in the game, you would find massive ruins and crumbling towers
and buildings: relics of the world that had long since passed.
This fascinated me
to no end. A major theme of the story is the gradual discovery of
Tidus' hometown. You begin the game in Zanarkand, immediately before
it's destruction, but with enough time to explore a little while and
familiarize yourself with what it looked like. When you finally
return, journeying across the continent of Spira, there is nothing
but ruins, and no inhabitants, save monsters, for presumably miles
around. It's apocalyptic. You revisit places that you started your
journey at, Tidus' old home and a bridge he traveled to a voiceover
about him and his father. Finally, you arrive to Zanarkand's sports
arena, where the city's total destruction first began. When you make
your return, you discover that it has become a temple dedicated to
the whole destructive cycle that plagues Spira, in an utterly grim
irony.
Something about
this sparked an apocalyptic interest in me. This isn't exactly
uncommon among our culture. Movies, books, and art for the past
century have explored this concept in grim detail. Initially sparked
by the horrors of the first World War, the interest in apocalypse
only intensified over the course of the twentieth century, as nuclear
weapons technology developed and total annihilation seemed to become
closer and closer. Nowadays, the threat seems perhaps less real, but
we continue to explore it, though we are perhaps more interested in
the cause rather than the aftereffects (see: Zombie movies or the new
Planet of the Apes series, for instance).
And this is
something I often take into the outside world as well. Honestly, when
I'm walking around Seattle or some other city, I simply cannot help
but to picture it in some sort of ruin, just to see what it would be
like. It triggers the explorer in me; I would love the opportunity to
be able to tour all the abandoned buildings, to see what was inside
places I ordinarily wouldn't be able to go to and see what people
there were like and how they lived. Urban exploration might be one of
my biggest passions that is often impossible to do. Not to mention
the beauty of seeing nature reclaim places that man has left behind.
Seeing vines or grass creep out of brick and stone walls, trees
growing in places surrounded by sidewalks, or moss retaking a musty
well or shaft is fascinating.
I do the same when
I read about real life mass disasters in history. For instance, after
the first wave of bubonic plague struck the Byzantine Empire in the
sixth century, Constantinople lost around 40% of it's population,
while nearly a third of all people in the entire Eastern
Mediterranean died. They are terrible and tragic figures, indeed.
Picture entire quarters and districts of Europe's biggest and
greatest city left behind, it's people dead or gone. A truly
apocalyptic scene, one that must have been terrifying to behold. What
would that have even been like to see? There is simply no way for
almost anyone alive today to be able to contextualize that mentally
in this age.
It was this sort
of haunting message I took away from Final Fantasy X. It is a
grim one, pessimistic, tragic. They're sensations people don't like
thinking about, but sometimes it can be rather fascinating, at least
to me.
At the end of the
game, after the cause of the great destruction has been defeated, the
people of Spira gather together with the game's heroes and talk about
their future together, starting out in a new life free of terror and
fear of death. Despite the apocalypse, they still have hope with
them, that they can rebuild and move on, and hopefully, prevent what
happened from coming again. It's an uplifting message. Even should
the worst happen, I think we'll be okay.
