Final Fantasy 7, Capitalism, and Nostalgia Culture

I’ve never liked JRPGs. Having only ever beaten Final Fantasy IV (incredible) and Lost Odyssey (mediocre), my opinion of the genre is fairly low. For me, the hallmarks of JRPGs are convoluted, hackneyed plots, excessive random encounters, overwrought emotions, and cumbersome, oftentimes intentionally obtuse gameplay. 

But I also chase clout, so when everyone is talking about a game, I have to buy it. Enter Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the first of a (three part?) remake of the lauded Final Fantasy 7, and spoilers to follow.

I beat FF7R in about three sittings. It covers the first five hours of Final Fantasy 7, stretching them out to about 30 hours in total. It’s both fantastic, fun, and also unexpectedly brave. There’s a lot to say about how the genre of JRPG seems to have evolved into something playable and easy to navigate while retaining its depth (At some recommendations, I picked up Persona 5 and FFXV right afterwards), but the structure of the game is its strongest suit, and also its most controversial.

FF7R presents a familiar world with familiar story beats, and then bucks them in favor of something new. Introducing dimension breaking story beats that upend the idea of remake in the title and leave the end of the story wide open, with a fourth wall breaking reveal and survival of characters who, in any other version of Final Fantasy 7, are dead. FF7R ends exactly where FF7 ended at the same point in time, but with a player awareness that from here on out, anything is possible, and the game’s story is now totally unpredictable. Someone on reddit pointed out that the word “remake” in the title slyly refers the villain’s plan to remake the timeline, not necessarily the fact that the game is a remake. It’s a reboot disguised as a remake, and chameleon of a game that trades on player goodwill in exchange for developing something new.

Naturally, people are upset. 

Nostalgia is a weird thing. It’s arguably a blight on our culture and cultural moment, one that trades in evocations of a feeling for when we weren’t in such a precarious moment economically and environmentally. It’s the worst side of escapism; a thin, cynical ploy to get your money in exchange for remembrance. You’re not paying to see the Marvel movies because they’re necessarily great, you’re paying to see them because Captain America wielding Thor’s hammer is something you wanted to see as a kid, and to see it realized on screen is a validator of a small childhood dream that was once very large in your imagination. For everyone else, those who never got into comics as a kid, they’re slick, fairly mindless vehicles for action and set pieces and the facsimile of an occasionally deep idea. 

For those who never got into comics, though, there’s always something else. Star Wars, Riverdale, Sabrina, even ill thought out remakes of Baywatch and 90210 and CHIPS (?!). 

Updating the old with modern sensibilities and aesthetics is the primary driver of capitalist media production. Anything else is either an indie project, a vanity project, or a prestige project. To see something that is wholly original made with the apparatus of money, power and technology that nostalgia pieces are is grounds for often undeserved or overstated kudos (In my opinion, a majority of Christopher Nolan’s non-Batman cinema falls into this camp). Because they are original and too big to fail, they feel fresh, and therefore, must be good. 

But when nostalgia culture is repackaged into something structurally subversive, something that deliberately bucks its own material, is when the world starts ending. Take the backlash for Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, a film that attempts to subvert and reclaim the essence of Star Wars with a hearty fuck you to the idea of fanservice and predictability, and has been violently derided by the diehards and oldheads that obsess over the franchise.

The Last Jedi is a polarizing film, one that I like and that many people of a similar bent to me do not. I would argue that those who deride The Last Jedi as a product of the Joss Whedonification of culture (a la, the extraordinary cultural criticism podcast Struggle Session) have a valid claim to stake their criticism on. The fans, however, do not. The question of fan ownership is a moot one. Films and video games, perhaps more than any other medium because of their immense cost, are the product of artists and executives in a specifically unequal measure. They sit at the intersection of art and commerce. The blockbusters are almost always guaranteed to make money, and when they don’t, it’s headline news in news that covers that sort of thing. 

Fans, with a capital F, do not have ownership of the material they love, even though so many of them are certain they do. For one to be consumed so deeply with nostalgia, with the emotional memory of a product, that a deviation from it is anathema to quality is an insane worldview. It is a stunning marker of disassociation from the world today, and from the cruel future we seem to be hurtling towards. It’s akin to an engineered mental illness, an unintentional side effect of capitalism’s necessary reliance on nostalgia culture. 

None of us are free from this (I’m always disappointed when I think about the promise and failure of FMA: Brotherhood, for example), but it’s the Fans that exhibit a vitriolic anger to the creators, who obsess on message boards and send death threats to the creatives, that are the most telling of what it means. The fans can be a violent, obsessive force, ones that have directed their anger towards those that attempt to intersect their desire for the past with the cruel reality of their present. The Fans have both capacity and emotional anger without the awareness to direct it toward the apparatuses that have created the world they live in, and therefore are a force to be feared for the people who create the products that offend them. The Rise of Skywalker was an endless array of fanservice, and received poorly by both fans and casual filmgoers alike, but not to the same degree as The Last Jedi, even though it is objectively a much worse film.

Which makes the subversive tendency of FF7R so much more interesting and laudable.

I’ve played maybe two to three hours of the original Final Fantasy 7. But I know the story as well as anyone who’s played it a hundred times. It is a flashpoint in videogame history that is so inescapable that everyone knows the big twists, that everyone know the rough plots and what happens in it. It has created for itself a remarkable cultural memory, one that is familiar to those with even just the most passing knowledge of video games. In short, any attempt at remaking it as it is with modern mechanics and a fresh coat of paint is a predictable notion.

Any attempt at remaking it as it is would be a hollow, cynical enterprise, meant to please people who want (but will never truly have) the feeling of it to repeat the feeling of being a young person playing the original FF7 for the first time. It would be a particular capitulation to the idea that remakes must function as remakes, that the hundreds of millions invested in an enormous piece of art must serve to only and safely update a familiar, predictable story to remain familiar and predictable but with better graphics.

I’ll give it to director Tetsuya Nomura and his team for not doing that. Nomura has made some awful creative decisions in the past, the monolithic and incomprehensible story of the Kingdom Hearts franchise chief among them, but his diversion from the Final Fantasy VII story is a smart, stripped back exploration of the ideas he loves to trade in. It’s just metatextual enough to understand the commentary, but that commentary itself is restrained enough to let the game’s largely compelling story remain at the forefront. 

FF7R has spectral ghosts (Whispers of Fate) that appear throughout whenever the game attempts to deviate from the original’s story. In the first five minutes, protagonist Cloud meets love interest Aerith, and their conversation goes a little longer than it did in the original. Enter the whispers, who surround Cloud and Aerith and force her to leave, so that the game may continue along the lines they, the Whispers, have determined it must. The lines of the original Final Fantasy. It would be an inconsequential moment of the core story to extend, but the Whispers have determined that it is not what should happen, therefore it cannot happen.  Any meaningful or prominent deviation from what is fated, what is meant to be, and what already exists must be stopped and corrected with extreme prejudice.

In short, the whispers are a stand in for the oldheads, the die-hard fans, the people who want an exact copy of the game they played 22 years ago. The game’s penultimate boss battle is fighting an amorphous, millions strong monster created from these Whispers, ultimately making the player participate in a total rebuke of what they said they wanted this whole time. For many people who pick up the game, it’s a sequence that is literally asking them to participate in the destruction of their narrow, toxic wants. It’s never an explicit fourth wall break, but it certainly gets the point across.

The reaction online is troubling, to say the least. From the obvious disappointment that it isn’t a legitimate remake, to the ten thousand word screeds decrying Nomura and Square Enix, to the folks who’ve talked about how they’re unable to eat because of their depression around the game not being what they want. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find assertions that the game has politics (read: left wing social justice oriented themes) forced into it now, rather than it being the natural extension over 40 hours, of the politics inherent in the 5 hours of 1998 video game it's based on.

I would argue most of these people miss the point. I would also argue that these kinds of lashbacks are perhaps one of the most understated articulations of life, consumerism, and culture under capitalism. 

It’s true the game has politics. Class politics, environmental political (Which are rad, by the way), gender politics, and a greater critique of capitalism than most media musters these days. Yes, capitalist realism, but also yes at not creating an empty shell of a game that contains the same surface level vapidity that many games of the original’s era were limited to containing, both because video games had not matured as a storytelling medium, and because the technology wasn’t there to explore an idea as deeply as a modern video game is capable of.

It’s also true that while this isn’t the game old fans wanted, it contains much of what they did want. It’s also not immune from the culture of nostalgia it rebukes. It’s not a remake, but it is a sequel. It contains the same sequences that many of its older fans loved. There’s a repeated statement online about many playing the game with a smile on their face until the last two or three hours, when the totality of its themes come to light.

Seen holistically, FF7R has much of the fanservice that’s craved. The next games in the franchise will as well. The game does not indict the faithful player, but challenges their obsession with reclamation of feeling, of nostalgia. It’s painting of Whispers as a destructive, oftentimes murderous force is spot on, but their nature, of ghostly, dementor-like apparatuses, hammers home that the method in which we inhabit our cultural memory is with the nature of angry ghosts. We might get what we want, but it’s hollow, and a little emptier, and a little more cynical. 

I think history will be kinder to FF7R than the current response, as it will be for the Last Jedi, and for Metal Gear Solid 2, and for any franchise that deliberately challenged the expectations of what fans thought it should be versus and instead focused on what it could become.

Certain characters within FF7R know the future this time around too. They’re challenging what is inevitable, or simply going along for the ride. There’s a question of inevitability within all of it. Will FF7R2 and FF7R3 show that you can’t change the inevitable march toward the same ending, the same story beats, no matter how hard you try? Will a new generation of people play this, and in twenty two years, they might get a new remake that upends things and upsets them, again? Capitalism’s drive to recombine, repackage, and update nostalgia is limitless. Maybe a CEO will look at fan reactions to this game and say, we’re forcing this thing back on the track the fans want. I hope not. I hope those conversations happen though, among the forces of finance and art that most media is caught in between, and I hope that the next game may explore that inherent conflict, at the intersection of time, money, craft, and commerce. 

It’s probably wishful thinking, but at the very least, I’m on board to see this saga come to an end, whatever that end looks like. It’s given me more to chew on than the entire MCU. Than all of The Last Jedi. Than almost every single reboot I’ve seen since we began this insipid phase of culture.  

Is this kind of analysis meaningful? I think it is. In our moment of crisis, we must look at the way we’ve been trained to look backward, to fall into familiar, repeating cycles of boom and bust, of the way capitalism has taught us that reproduction under new circumstances of labour is inevitable. It might now be as important as organizing, as theory, but culture is one of the dominant forces that engineers how we conform to our world, or see beyond it.

Maybe it’s not worth lauding a blockbuster video game from a multi billion dollar franchise, but I mean, then you gotta start asking, what’s laudable about any art made under capitalism? And if the answer is “nothing,” you’re an edgelord who will never have your revolution. That’s a fact. 

Home for the FF7 faithful will always be there in a Playstation 1 disc, in an emulator, in any number of original FF7 ports to dozens of platforms. Ultimately, FF7R simply says, at the end, that you can go home again, but home will be blocky, and on a CD-Rom drive, and look like a bygone era, and it will never have that fresh coat of paint and the new appliances you wanted.

And if you ever feel like it, Tetsuya Nomura has built something new, on top of the old. Something interesting, something daring, something controversial, and something worth examining. Some of the artifacts are the same. The people inhabiting it certainly are. But it’s not what you remember, and it’s not what you expect, and you can give it a chance, if you’re tired of old haunts.