Like many of Murakami’s writing, Dabchick is absurd. Things don’t make sense, the backgrounds of characters aren’t discussed, major details of the story are left unexplained. In many cases, this may leave the reader with the feeling that they can fill in the blanks. Something about Murakami’s writing, however, encourages the reader (or me, at least) to leave the blanks as blanks. Don’t imagine how the narrator is dressed besides that he’s wearing tennis shoes. Don’t guess at what would happen if he turned left instead of right. But even less than that. There’s no imperative “don’t.” Murakami’s writing is hazy, as are his worlds, and they much less resist filling in the blanks than they do simply sit there as a haze over the narrative.

A pure style

Now, bear with me a moment, because this might seem like I’m taking my own left turn. Puns, though, are the purest form of humor. You may like them or dislike them, but whatever the case, they are jokes that rely on nothing more than funny connections. Those connections could be word-play, or meaning-play, or they could just be simple absurdities. Did you hear the one about the magic tractor? It went down the lane and turning into a field. A dad-joke, maybe, but also hilarious.

There’s a certain amount haziness to this joke about the tractors. The humor of it rests on the face that “turns” and “turns into” sound similar but are completely different. But when you try to imagine what it looks like for a truck to turn into a field, to actually become a field, what picture comes up in your head? It may be different for different people, but the whole idea of a pun isn’t that you imagine it. It’s that you laugh at the connection.

Puns aren’t about politics, they don’t play on social or gender relations, they’re not satire, nor do they have any deeper meaning. They are simply funny, which is what I mean when I say that they are “pure” humor. In the same way, Murakami’s story Dabchick is a funny story. It’s just funny and just absurd, which is one of the reasons that it works.

Isn’t it about something? Anything?

In a way, there’s not all that much in Murakami’s story for there to be a story. What is this job the narrator is going to take up? Where in the world is he? Why are the directions wrong? Why does the doorman have to take a bath after lunch? Why wasn’t the narrator given the password? What actually is the password? For the world of the story, these things (the job, the location, the password) are all very important, but we don’t know what they are. The whole plot actually works to undermine the most important parts of itself, so that all we’re left with is a man walking down a corridor, a conversation, and a bird.

Nor do these parts really fit together. Everything seems to go wrong. The directions don’t work. The narrator doesn’t know the password. The doorman gives more hints than he should have. The bird is thinking about death. Nothing works out. We as the readers are told nothing. And yet the story still have a start, a climax, and a conclusion. It’s still a really funny story (if a bit weird). It still works as a story, but there’s just so little content.

And then there’s the meaning. Is there a meaning? I don’t think so. Like puns, the story is there for the joy of it. There is one, single part that suggests a world outside of itself, and that’s when the doorman suggests that it’s tough to get a good job. The story was published in 1981, so unless I’m missing something about the Japanese job market in the early 80s, this is just a throwaway comment. The story contains itself, even though it’s unfinished.

Absurd things are absurd

All this is part of what makes Dabchick so fun. Murakami is known for his absurdism. He’s known for coming up story that don’t make any sense. One of the joys of reading him is to be left in the dark about things. After you read a few of his stories, you know that you’re not going to be filled in on everything that is going on or has gone on. But somehow the stories make sense. Somehow they’re still stories and they work as stories. And the blanks become part of the joy.

It’s not just about the joy, though. I think I need stories that don’t have a wider connection with, well, anything. If you’ve been reading this substack for a bit, you may be surprised at this. I thrive on finding deeper meaning and connections. I started writing on substack to get to the bottom (if there is a bottom) of what I’ve been feeling towards Japanese literature generally and Japanese fantasy specifically ever since I was a kid. Most of what I do for my day job is help people find meaning in their lives. But sometimes a story has to be just a story, and Murakami is great for that.

I spent a bit of time in academia studying literature, and for a while all we did was dissect the text. What does this story mean? What’s really going on here? Why use this word instead of another word? Often, this was fun, but most of the time the answers had to be something cultural or political. And I really mean that: they had to be cultural or political. If a story wasn’t about culture or it didn’t have a political comment to make, then either it wasn’t a successful story or you weren’t digging deep enough. That’s a lot of culture that goes into making a story, and when people write, they always do so from a specific and very cultural point of view. Studying these things helped me, and when I explained them to others they helped my students, understand a story more fully.

But what about wonder? What about joy? Not everything has to be about a specific point of culture. Political readings don’t need to be constantly jammed down a story’s throat. Sometimes my students knew more than I did about a story, even though I had a fancy degree from an overly expensive graduate program. I remember having a conversation with a woman, just after I graduated from my masters’ program in English literature, who talked so beautifully about how a story we both read together was about redemption. Redemption. That’s not a word you use in academia. But how much of life is about redemption? A lot more than taxation and the intricacies of voter registration.

We all need fantasy. We don’t just need to take a break from the world we live in. We don’t just need a vacation. We need to step outside of everything we know to be real and see something else, because the world is not encompassed by what our culture tells us to be true. There’s a whole lot out there, and fantasy helps us see some of it, imagine some of it, and (most importantly) to be receptive for new and amazing things coming your way.

So when you hear a pun, don’t groan. Remember that your soul is growing. The same with Murakami. He helps us understand just how much there is to the universe.

In a game filled with all sorts of creepy characters, Auguste made me feel the most uncomfortable. There are many kinds of antagonists in RPGs: evil deities, arrogant kings; bloodthirsty savages, and the like. Most of these don’t live with these kinds of maniacs breathing down our necks, and so in a way we can feel distant from their evil. There is something particularly awful, however, when an antagonist comes a bit too close to home. Jeckt in Final Fantasy X (2001) is a great antagonist partly because most of us have known bad dads or bad father figures. He’s close to home, and that’s what makes Tidus’ quest so personal (and also so effective). That said, at the end of the day Jeckt isn’t all that bad of a person, though he remains a jerk.

Auguste, however, is a bad person, and he gets way, way to close for comfort. There’s something seriously wrong with him internally and spiritually, as there is with all of the other antagonists. One of the interesting parts of the antagonists in Octopath Traveler 0 is finding out just how twisted and snapped these people are - and, of course, so much the better that we get to bring them down. Auguste is, however, particular. He isn’t a warlord like Tytos or a obsessed with money like Herminia. He is an actor and a playwright whose muse is not some beautiful woman or idyllic memory of the past but acts of tragedy that he himself creates. If he needs to write a murder, he has someone murder someone else - or he does it himself. If he is writing a play about betrayal, he sets someone up to be betrayed, or again he does this himself. During the game’s plot, he goes so far as to poison both himself and his son, then gives his lover and the boy’s mother only enough antidote to cure one of them. Who will she choose. It is this kind of real-life tragedy that gives Auguste his inspiration to create plays that are startlingly close to those scenes that he creates and then witnesses.

On the one hand, Auguste’s story is the most contrived of any chapter in the game. It’s a rare person who has to choose between curing their lover or their son. The classic “train problem,” in which a person has choose between the life of the person most dear to them or ten complete strangers, is an incredibly unrealistic situation. Most of the time, compromise is possible, and it’s surprising how often both parties can be happy. There is also the possibility of real self-sacrifice to save others. The train problem, as well as the decision that Auguste forces on Francesca, is completely unrealistic, but it does show us how twisted Auguste is in fixing the situation so that there really is only one solution.

The interest in Auguste’s story, though, comes from seeing a man who can only find artistic inspiration in the real possibility that he, or his son, will die. I don’t believe for a second that Auguste has any concern whatsoever for his son, but dying in this experiment of evil aesthetics would probably be too simple and secretive an end for Auguste to feel comfortable with. The man bets his life, and it is here in this moment that he can write such magnificent plays.

This space that the writers of the game have created, in which art is found in imitation of humanity, reminds me something of the theories of Zeami, a scholar of Noh theatre from the 14th and 15th century. Let’s take a few minutes and think about how Zeami depicts a perfect actor.

Imitation and the container of the universe

Now, before we begin, I have to note that I don’t know of any statement or interview in which the creators of Octopath Traveler 0 said they drew on, or even read, anything that a medieval playwright wrote. I don’t know if anyone in modern Japanese theatre, let alone anyone but medieval scholars, even thinks about Zeami. I have only played the game and read a description of what Zeami thought (in a magnificent book called Literary and Art Theories in Japan by Makoto Ueda). My guess is that people in Japan know as much about Zeami as most people know about Shakespeare - they may have read his plays in high school but haven’t thought of him since. Whatever the case, something in what Zeami writes about with Noh drama sounds very similar to how Auguste finds his inspiration.

First, if you’ve never seen Noh theatre before, go on YouTube and search “Noh theatre example” or something like that. Take some time and watch a whole scene. Don’t go thinking that you’ll understand anything of what’s going on, but just go for the experience of seeing it.

Noh is Zeami’s thing. He was trained in it by his father, and he gave his own skills to his students. And he wrote about how to think about it, how to act in it, what it means and how it makes meaning, and why it’s so important to watch a Noh play with an open and learned mind. I don’t know enough about Noh to teach you how to watch a play, but I can explain some of what Zeami thought about this type of theatre.

For Zeami, imitation is everything. If a person is playing a samurai, they had to become a samurai. If they were playing a woman (all Noh actors were men), they had to become women, even to the point in which they feel as if they had been born a woman. The actor was to become identical with the thing or person he was playing, so that he himself became nothing and the role became everything. He needed to reach into a thing or a role and understand its “true intent” and to make that true intent his own.

This may seem like the Western model of acting, or certain types of acting, but in fact it goes counter to much Western philosophy and specifically the philosophy of art. In his Republic, Plato famously banishes art from his perfect society, because it is imitative. He imagines sacred and pure ideals of everything - trees, people, chairs, dogs, frying pans - and each individual instance of a thing (John the man, Rover the dog, that cherry tree across the street) are only themselves in as much as they take part in those sacred ideals. The ideals, not us, are what is real. One of Plato’s students, Augustine, complicated this philosophy, and later writers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas continued to modify it (especially in Christian contexts), but until the Renaissance was in full swing and materialistic science gained ascendency in Western culture, the individual object was not as good as the original and eternal, be that the perfect chair or tree or God himself. Even during and after the so-called Enlightenment, the arts and literature were deemed less important a pursuit of the sciences, especially if that piece of art was in any way fantastic. <rant> One of the reasons that fantasy and science-fiction is still seen as lesser writing and art than, say, realistic fiction or drama, is that it doesn’t represent anything real. It’s only for the imagination to play in, which is kids’ stuff. Adults like serious, gritty, realistic art, not dragons, elves, and outer space whales </rant>

Imitation is pretty suspicious in the West (look at the picture above this paragraph; the French means “This is not a pipe.” Of course it’s not, it’s a picture. But the point of the piece is to prove that art isn’t real. Thanks Magritte), but for Zeami, imitation is so incredibly important that you should actually lose who you are as a person in your imitation. When an actor is able to obtain such identification with a role, they can find its inward reality and spirit, which looks to the hidden beauty of reality. To paraphrase Ueda, yūgen is the type of beauty that Zeami encourages his actors to reach. The word is difficult to define, so Ueda splits it up into two parts: yū meaning deep, dim, or difficult to see, and gen originally describing the “dark, profound, tranquil color of the universe” (60). What in the world could that be. My daughters’ crayons box has a color “outer space,” but I don’t think that’s what Zeami is getting at. No, he’s describing a “profound, mysterious truth of the universe” (61). Later, Ueda describes this beauty as austere, “deep, tranquil, and awesome” (64).

That’s a rabbit hole I want to continue going down, but most descriptions of yūgen are found in untranslated tomes on Japanese aesthetics, and I’m still learning the language. And we’re talking about video games. Zeami has, though, two more things to say in our context here. First, the cosmic truth of humanity, for Zeami, always points towards our sad destiny. Yūgen is a beauty of universal sorrow. Cherry blossoms are beautiful in the spring, but they are gone so quickly - just like the lives of we lost humans, Zeami would say. Japanese literature if rife with images of the beautiful ending too soon. To quote Ueda again, “Noble court ladies are gracefully beautiful in themselves, but they would be even more lovely when they suffer under some strange power beyond their control, under some mysterious force hidden in the universe…Yūgen is the beauty of seeing such an ideal person go through an intense suffering as a result of being human” (61).

Now, if you feel like this is kinda morbid, then I’m with you. But ideals of beauty are grim in many cultures. Think of Frodo in Lord of the Rings: he may destroy the ring, but he is so broken from his quest that he can’t really stay in the Shire anymore. Or think of Avengers: Infinity War. I really didn’t like seeing so many characters wisp away into nothingness, and even though I knew in the back of my mind that the creators would save everyone (this is Hollywood, after all), it was both a horrifying thing to watch and something that geared me up for the sequel. We also have our own morbid senses of beauty. In a way, they help us understand death and especially our own death, and they point to a reality beyond this world where such pain and suffering are no more (for both Western and Eastern art).

Second, there are some roles that one cannot imitate, such as the role of a demon. As Zeami writes, and Ueda quotes, “By its very nature, imitating a demon involves great difficulty, for the more faithfully the actor imitates the demon, the less entertaining his performance will be. The ‘true intent’ of the demon lies in its horrifying quality” (59). As a Westerner, I would say that this is because a demon is “evil,” but I don’t want to project my idea of what a demon is onto a man living in Japan in the 14th and 15th centuries. Whatever the inner nature of a demon is, in part they are essentially horrifying creatures, and they therefore cannot entertain.

If you’ve ever watched Japanese cinema, you may wonder at this. I’m a scaredy-cat, and I can’t watch Japanese, horror because I know that I would never be able to sleep again. I have heard that it is creepy, weird, and unnerving, and for that it is also entertaining. This is one reason why we cannot insist that every playwright, director, or game creator knows and follows Zeami, only that he is present in the great ocean of tradition in Japan. For Zeami, though, you can’t horrify your audience, and if you’re an actor you definitely don’t want to identify with something horrifying. That wouldn’t be yūgen.

How to horrify your audience

I’m with Zeami, but I’m a chicken. Auguste, I think, is quite a bit like Zeami, but a twisted one. Auguste is all about imitation. He wants to be in the world which is steeped in sorrow and longing and hatred, and in being a force of tragedy in the world he believes that he can come to the pinicle of what it means to be a human being. Above, I mentioned that he might feel a sense of horror to think of himself dying in an experiment of tragedy, because he, a great man, must die in a truly magnificent and terrifying way. That’s the way the guy wants to go out, because that’s what makes him a great man.

Auguste, though, is written by a modern Japanese writer for a modern Japanese audience, and for that writer and that audience (and for us in the West) horror is entertaining, and so Auguste follows suit. He literally becomes a demon to live out his ideas of art, even to become his own muse. All that is demonic, and all that Zeami stresses cannot be truly imitated, is what Auguste embodies. The evil that he writes, he then becomes, so that he can write more and, in his mind and in his world, become that much a better playwright and a better man.

And we take part in this. As icky as it may sound, we are Auguste’s audience just as we are the audience of Octopath Traveler 0. We are entertained by his evil, even though we cheer when he dies. In a game about people who are mythically evil, evil beyond the normal bounds of what it means to be human, Auguste fits right in. He becomes a universal, almost a Platonic ideal of what it means to betray and kill. Each time I met a new antagonist, I wondered how much more evil they could be - and the creators always pushed the idea of evil just a little bit more. These people weren’t really human anymore (no, not even the one who joins the good guys towards the end). They have become Something Else, something utterly dark, basically evil, a force of nature and super nature that seeks not just to destroy but enjoys the evil and the destruction that they create. They become demons, and that is part of what makes playing Octopath Traveler 0 so very unnerving.

I remember feeling this way when watching the movie Contact in the theaters. Towards the end of the film, the main character, Ellie Arroway, is boarding a space ship, and I had absolutely no idea what would happen. Would she make contact with the aliens? Would it all be a hoax? Would the movie just stop then and there? The filmmakers had set the story so well that I was at the edge of my seat. I had the feeling that I was on the verge of something desperately important but I couldn’t see past that moment. It’s one of the reasons that I still love Contact so much (though, of course, the book by the awesome Carl Sagan is a lot better!).

This can happen in Japanese literature, film, manga and anime, and video games. Like any other culture, Japanese art can hack a little close to the genre bone or it can surprise us. In a way, Japanese art is more traditional than Western art, partially because it didn’t go through a period of art criticism called early-20th century modernism. Here, we find artists like Ezra Pound saying things like, “Make it new.” If art doesn’t do something new and surprising, then it isn’t interesting in the West. Think about Star Wars Episode VII; there are a lot of problems with the movie, but one frequent complaint is that it recycles too much from Episode IV, A New Hope. Star Wars follows mythic structures, and recycling older material is what myths and legends do. Complaining that Star Wars has old mentor figures, plucky heroes who don’t know their lineage, and mystical encounters with strange, small, wrinkled creatures is like complaining that there are too many spaceships and lightsabers in a space opera like Star Wars. But this is exactly what Star Wars fans complained Episode VII did, because we in the West want things to be new.

Again, Japan didn’t go through this “make it new” period. Japanese culture struggles with with the dual influences of the past and the present, or traditional Japanese versus Western influences, but these influences are in tension with one another instead of one (the modern, in the West) winning out against the other (the past). Japanese media can be a lot like classical music and opera in the West, where musicians try to perform set pieces with their trained skill. It doesn’t matter that many people have sung Don Giovanni before; it’s the performance of the music, hitting all the notes, and giving it life again that’s important. Japanese media works the same way, so that where we in the West see a series of stereotypical tropes that seem like repeats of what has come before, many Japanese will see artists trying to achieve virtuoso performances of traditional material. In other words, “new” isn’t the only way to judge the success of something in Japanese culture.

Wandering through the wilderness

All this said, the Japanese aren’t all trying to repeat their traditions ad nauseam. Like Contact, Japanese literature and art can surprise us and lead us into an artistic, pathless wilderness where we only have the artist as our guide. I get this sense of being lost with only the artist as my guide especially when reading Murakami Haruki. His plots are wild, sometimes even too wild, but there’s always a sense that there is some meaning, somewhere, perhaps just out of reach, perhaps forever outside of our reach. One of the reasons Murakami is so fun to read is that you rarely know where you’re going or even where you are. You can meet anyone, you might meet no one, the path you’re on may peter out and turn into a figurative thicket of thorns, or the whole thing might come together and make sense in the world of the story (if not in our world outside the story). In his children’s stories (yes, Murakami wrote children’s stories) about Watanabe Noboru, the reader is thrown into the a confusing setting where a man, who seems to have no reason to be in the narrator’s house, is asking an old pencil sharpener or a kotatsu that is actually (or maybe not?) a time machine. We never learn whether Watanabe Noboru is the only person who collects old pencil sharpeners or if the kotatsu is actually a time machine, but the joy in the stories isn’t figuring them out but in following the narrator as he plays along and sees where this strange story goes. The narrator’s humility before the strange and mysterious allows us to be humble as readers as we walk into the unknown, giving us a place to stand as we are surrounded by the surreal and, in this case, the hilarious.

Other Japanese authors do this. Kawakami Hiromi’s worlds are a bit closer to reality than Murakami’s, though one needs to follow her into some very strange, and often very dangerous places, without a map or knowledge of where you’re going (or if you’ll ever get back). Her novel Manazuru is a fantastic (in both senses) journey into a woman’s inner world of grief and longing, and that grief and that longing become real in a way that threatens not only her relationship with her daughter but, it seems, her “self.” I put self in quotes here, because it’s not fully clear what is really at stake. Is it her sense of who she is? Is it her sanity? Could she be lost in the worlds she wanders in, never to return to the “real” world? Or is the world where she journeys somehow more “real” than the one in which we all inhabit? One of the fun things about reading Kawakami is being okay with going where she leads, even if it’s uncomfortable or eerie. Again, having humility is the important part of reading Kawakami.

Morimi Tomihiko is also good at this, and although his stories end up being very similar to one another, they’re also pretty funny, and that humor goes a long way. When I was reading Tower of the Sun, I didn’t know that the tower was actually a real thing in Osaka, and so the descriptions of this wild monstrosity seemed to fit in with all the other weird things going on in the story. When I learned that the tower actually exists, I literally laughed out loud. It seemed to fit the world of the story, which is wacky and strange, more than it fit in our world.

What is Japanese about this kind of Japanese fantasy?

Fantasy literature has an interesting tension. On the one hand, fantasy aims to describe worlds beyond our own. We go to fantasy to leave our waking world in the hopes of taking a break from that world, to exercise our own imaginations, or to look more deeply into reality than an otherwise realistic story can bring us. This is the difference between “truth” and “reality”; no, unicorns don’t exist, nor do Tolkienian elves, and I don’t personally believe in little grey aliens that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, but reading about these creatures, even though they are not “real” helps me understand some things that are important and essential to our world. Whether unicorns are magical creatures that shoot rainbows or docile creatures that can only be lured in by maidens in mystical forests or they’re monstrous creatures that attack knights in heavy armor, we learn about the human penchant for violence, our desire for purity of spirit, and what it means to be human when we read about them. Tolkienian elves, similarly, are more natural than humans. They are are tied deeply to the fate of the world, and so their grief and longing for safety and power are somewhat “thicker” than ours, who (in Tolkien’s world) are destined for something beyond the confines of the world. In fantasy, we learn about ourselves, who we are, what we are, how we work, and the “truth” of what it means to be human.

On the other hand, fantasy is a genre with reader expectations. Murakami is hard to categorize because he doesn’t write stories about alternate intelligent species like elves and dwarves, his writing style is more conversational than the high, Tolkienian style that mimics myths, legends, and Biblical literature, and the lore in his stories is much more hidden than in other fantasy, where the discovery of lore is part of the joy of reading. Writing to reader expectations is one of the ways to make a book popular, and one of the reasons that Murakami isn’t more popular in the West is that he doesn’t care about reader expectations. He does his own thing. So do Kawakami and Morimi. Again, that’s part of what makes them fun, but they’re outliers because of it.

What, however, is Japanese in all this? How are Murakami, Kawakami, and Morimi Japanese in a way that a Westerner writing against the expectations of the reader aren’t? I think it’s a question of wisdom. Western authors need to make things new and thrive on confusion, where Japanese fantasy authors may be confusing and unsettling to read, but there is a sense of wisdom and truth to their stories that we discern vaguely and need to think about, deeply, in order to achieve. What wisdom is there in Murakami? For me, it’s awe and humility before the unknown. Also, I’m a Christian, so the spiritual world is “safe” because it’s ultimately controlled by a loving deity. Murakami and Kawakami’s worlds aren’t safe in the same way. People can get lost in them. And being lost doesn’t “destroy” or “damn” the soul as it might for a Christian or Western author; the space beyond reality is one in which someone can wander for a long time, perhaps even for eternity, and the grief in thinking about that teaches me something about the preciousness of life, society, and community. There is something to learn, however, in skating so close to these worlds of endless wandering, and that wisdom is something that can only be gained when threatened with the possibility of being forever lost. Again, for a Christian, this would be like there being a place not just between Heaven and Hell but beyond that dichotomy (this is one of the reasons why reading medieval literature is so fun; that dichotomy doesn’t always exist).

What is this wisdom? It’s hard to discern, and one of the reasons I started this substack is to think about and wonder about what that wisdom is. All I can say is that, again, it makes me a more humble person to consider worlds beyond ours and eternity that is not necessarily all good or all bad. Breaking dichotomies is one of the gifts of Japanese literature and culture as a whole, and it’s certainly one of the joys of reading Japanese fantasy.

Ending a story is difficult, even in video games. It may seem, at first, like video game endings should be easy: fight the final boss, make some comments about what the world will be like without living under a constant threat, and show a few scenes of the characters continuing on with their lives. Add that the final dungeon breaks apart for some reason and everyone needs to rush to escape, and you’ve got a good ending. Most games follow this formula, and they tell the formula decently well, but most RPGs run into a particular problem when it comes to sacrifice. What happens when a character must sacrifice themselves for the party or even the fate of the whole world? How do you handle the grief players will feel in losing someone they’ve grown to love and rely on, but also at the same time, how do you make that sacrifice meaningful without the player rejecting that sacrifice?

Rage-quitting Sephiroth

The quintessential RPG sacrifice is certainly Aeris in Final Fantasy VII (1997), though it happens relatively early in the game rather than at the end. Character death wasn’t new for the Final Fantasy series; ever since the second game (1988), no party member was safe. Early entries felt like Hamlet, with NPCs’ bodies littering the stage. Most of them are meaningful, and the developers did great work on such limited hardware to make these deaths hit home. These early stories of sacrifice, moreover, set expectations for RPGs ever after and are some of the reasons that RPGs take their stories and their worlds so seriously. Stakes are high, drama is high, and the stories that come from such expectations tend to be high in quality.

Now, I may have felt sad about the death of a white mage or one of the Cids in early Final Fantasy games, but nothing prepared me for Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy VII. I played the game when it came out, when I was fifteen, so perhaps my young, sensitive heart that was beginning to fall in love with female characters in games may have been the reason that her death hit me so hard, but I think I can say that her death was a pinnacle moment in gaming for those who played it in the 90s. I was stunned. Immediately after Sephiroth stabs her through the stomach, there’s a battle with Jenova, and while I tried to continue playing, instead I threw down the controller and went downstairs. When I came back, my party had been defeated. Instead of restarting my save and playing through the scene again, I started the whole game again from scratch. Maybe I just needed to see Aeris alive again, or maybe I couldn’t bring myself to play through the scene so soon, but I needed time to process. Her death was such a blow.

Enough reminiscing, though; what was it that made Aeris’ death so powerful for so many gamers? First, it was a surprise. It’s one thing to lose a beloved NPC or a martial artist or bard, but it’s another thing to lose a potential love interest and main heroine. Final Fantasy VII never really chooses a love interest for Cloud. Both Aeris and Tifa are obviously interested in him, and even though Aeris still has a heart for the mysterious Zack, she’s written so well that players fall for her. She’s innocent but also a bit spicy; she’s down-to-earth while Tifa is cool and (we think) collected; she’s the healer, and there’s something about white mages that pull on our heart-strings. Our heroes are out fighting, but we always know that our healers are behind us, caring for us and allowing us to move forward. They’re a foundation, a touchstone, a stable place that allows the other characters and the player to move forward in freedom. Take that stability away and there’s no center of gravity anymore. Anything could be lost, and, really, everything is already lost.

Nor does Aeris completely disappear. She isn’t on screen anymore, surely, but the fight against Sephiroth becomes more personal. In the back of our minds, we continue to remember that this is the guy who killed Aeris, and the possibility that we’ll forgive him becomes less and less. Then, as the meteor is falling on the planet, and the lifestream seems to be weakening and is unable to present catastrophe, Aeris’ holy spell shows up again. Her sacrifice suddenly makes sense: from the midst of the lifestream she has been able to cast a spell that saves the planet when nothing else, even our heroes, could. All of the things we loved her for become the ways she heals the planet, and in a way that heals us as well. Our grief and anger are suddenly turned into joy as we realize that our love of this character wasn’t for nothing. Everything is made whole, and we are well again.

J.R.R. Tolkien called this quality of stories, and especially fairy-stories, Eucatastrophe. In one of his letters, he writes, “I was there led to the view that [eucatastrophe] produces [joy at the turn of a Happy Ending] because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.” The sudden reversal of tragedy breaks us from the deterministic world and allows us to glimpse what Tolkien thought was Truth: namely, and to quote Julian of Norwich, that all manner of things will be well. Stories only end when all is healed; otherwise, they are still in the process of being told. Aeris’ death was not the end of the story. The salvation of the world is the true end and the complete reason for her death in the first place. This sudden joy is what makes Final Fantasy VII so beautiful and successful of a game.

Overcoming Sin and playing Blitzball

I liked blitzball, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Final Fantasy X is similarly about sacrifice. Yuna’s whole journey is to go to the legendary Zanarkand and sacrifice herself for a mere ten-years reprieve from Sin’s attacks on the world. All of her companions, with the exception of Tidus, know her journey’s destination and reason from the beginning. Have they come to terms with her choice to sacrifice herself? That’s part of the story and is one of the reasons the characters and the game itself are so interesting and compelling.

At first, the plot seems to be expounding on a particular theme: an end of all sacrifices. Tidus and Rikku strain their brains to find a way to defeat Sin without sacrificing their friend, and when the party learns the truth about these sacrifices, they all join together to end the cycle. In the end, Yuna is saved, but sacrifices still continue - or, at least, one more sacrifice has to be made: Tidus. In place of Yuna, Tidus sacrifices himself as the dreamers awake. The final scene of Yuna trying to hold Tidus is heart-rending, and the nice high-five that Tidus gives to his dad doesn’t take away from the tragedy.

What makes this sacrifice compelling? Partially, we see that Tidus has grown from a childish sports star who can’t get over hating his dad into someone who knows what it means to do something for someone else. Tidus is able to understand the great sacrifice that his father made, and while he doesn’t follow him into the same sacrifice, his development into a real hero leads him into a greater sacrifice: for the continued, not temporary, safety of the entire world. He openly embraces his love for Yuna, but he knows that there is something more important than his own happiness, and that’s the happiness of everyone else. He accepts this with open arms and even with a sense of joy. He remains a great character for his force of humble will.

Then…comes the sequel. Not only is Yuna changed completely from her demure and thoughtful character into a dynamic person, suggesting that introverted characters can’t be happy unless they’re turned into extraverts, Tidus’ sacrifice is undone. This is cheap. It undoes the reality of Tidus’ sacrifice for a tidy, happy ending. There is no eucatastrophe here. It’s just a reversal that doesn’t add much to, nor challege, the characters. Nor does it challenge the player. It only acts as wish fulfillment for those who wanted to see Tidus and Yuna get together at the end of the first game. That’s not good writing, and it’s one of the reasons that many fans reject the whole story of the sequel.

Crossroads

The thing is, sacrifices serve a purpose. At first blush, sacrifices seem unnecessary: with such powerful characters, can’t something be done? Is it all that bad that Yuna finds a way to meet Tidus again? If she can find a way, in-universe, to return him to the waking world, then why not do it? The problem isn’t that they’re unnecessary (sometimes they are), but that they’re unrealistic. When we’re young, we feel powerful and capable of anything, but as we grow older, we realize that we have to make choices in life. That may be between going to one college over another, or studying one subject or another, but it may also be between continuing to travel and starting a family, work and life with our significant others or kids, or living in a place we really like versus living close to family. We must make sacrifices, and our hope is that we turn away from things that wouldn’t, in the end, make us happy and towards things that will, but sometimes we have to choose between two really great things, both of which could make us very, very happy.

Life can go in all sorts of directions, but life isn’t as long as we want it to be, nor are we as powerful as a level 99 Cloud Strife with a full assortment of materia. In the end, even a level 99 Cloud Strife must deal with the fact that, in order to save the world, his beloved friend had to die. Joining him in his journey grants us some wisdom in the limits of life and our own powerlessness - but also our ability to keep on living, to trust and to love, and insight into what we carry on through those sacrifices.

When games, or any stories for that matter, shy away from that wisdom, they cheapen the experience of tragedy and sacrifice. I’m not saying that good things can’t happen. If Yuna can find a way to Tidus again, or (I just finished playing it, so it’s on my mind) if Capell can miraculously come back from the dead in Infinite Undiscovery, that’s great. Sacrifice is not the only way to solve problems, and, like I wrote above, all stories end in the good, but the ending of a story doesn’t erase the grief (and growth) experienced on the way. Aya doesn’t seem to overcome anything in herself in waiting for Capell’s return, and Yuna changes into someone completely different from herself lessens the impact of the sacrifice and takes away some of its meaning, both for the characters themselves and for us. Too quick a resolution, without that growth, weakens a story and an experience.

So why start with Final Fantasy VI? He’s into retro gaming and Japanese culture, like I mentioned, and he also wants to begin at the beginning, or at least as close to it as he can get (he studies early medieval history and literature, if this helps at all). I’ve been thinking about how to get into video games ever since he started, and whether it’s best to start at the “beginning” with Dragon Quest, with the high points like Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger (1995), or with something modern with thicker storytelling, worlds, and characters. I’ve also been wondering how to appreciate older or retro games not as representations of the past or stepping stones to modern gaming, but on their own merits. In other words, what were these games doing, or trying to do against hardware limitations? How were they telling stories? What are their own virtues, not as games taken off the shelf of a museum that represent a certain age, but just simply as storytelling worlds and creative efforts?

As a technical note, what I’m suggested is a synchronic view of games as opposed to a diachronic one. These are originally linguistic terms that represent the study of a word in its own particular context (synchronic) versus the study of a word across time. For example, you could talk about the word “cool” in 2026, how it means “fashionable” for some age-groups, and how it is used in conversation. This is a synchronic look at the word. A diachronic look would note that this usage comes from African American groups in the 1930s and developed in the ‘40s, probably in discussions of jazz, then came into popular usage among other groups later in the century, notably in the 80s and 90s. Synchronic, diachronic. (By the way, you can find this information about words on etymonline.com (click here for the link).

Revolutionizing a genre

Alright, so what is a synchronic look at the first three, or NES, Final Fantasy games? What is their character, what kinds of stories were they telling, what kinds of games are they? Rather simply, Final Fantasy (1987) followed the release of Dragon Quest, which had been created to make the otherwise confusing and technical RPG (or “simulation”) games more widely accessible to more than hardcore fans. What we call RPGs (but were called many things in the early to mid-eighties) tended to open-world or dungeon-crawling adventures that left the player to discover everything. This sounds pretty fun, but early RPGs also had poor balance or required players to do specific things without much guidance. They could be frustrating, with a lot of game over screens (if they had these), but hardcore gamers loved them. There was a sense of accomplishment in solving the puzzle of a game, and sharing information through magazine and before the internet connected people together as if they were on the journey together. Think of speed runners for Super Mario Bros. (1985) or the first two Mega Man games (1987 and 1988), and consider how much trial-and-error must have gone into figuring out glitches and timing and you’ll see some of the fun in these early games.

Horii Yuji and Sakaguchi Horunobu (for Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy respectively) wanted to make these kinds of games more accessible so that non-hardcore gamers could enjoy exploring worlds, fighting monsters, and gaining levels. The two founding games in these series seem pretty opaque to us nowadays with our little flashing notifications on area maps to tell us where to go next, but in the mid-eighties, these games were much, much more friendly. It’s fun to note, too, that both Horii and Sakaguchi were successful. They not only made RPGs accessible, but popular. Their shared goal was realized, to our joy today.

Both Horii and Sakaguchi had other goals, though, and this was to create imaginary worlds and tell certain kinds of stories with a certain amount of player interaction. What kind of worlds were these, and what were the stories? How were they constructed, how were they built, and what sort of stories are being told - in view of player interaction? To answer these questions, I could look to what Horii and Sakaguchi said about these games, but here I want to look at the Final Fantasy games themselves (I’m limiting myself to Final Fantasy because otherwise there would be too much to say, and because the answer for Dragon Quest is actually pretty different).

A fragile world

The worlds of most Final Fantasy games are built around crystals, and this storytelling element began in the first game. Four Warriors of Light set forth to bring their darkened, powerless crystals to light again. The world is sustained by the power of the crystals, which are directly connected to the physical integrity of the world itself. Without the power of the crystals, there are floods, earthquakes, and the winds die down. In later games, like the pseudo-spin-off Bravely Default (2012), this means that these physical elements literally cannot be accessed, such as ships being unable to sail on water without the power of the crystal. In games like Final Fantasy VII and XVI, a desolation comes to the land that is connected to what powers or infuses these crystals or their source, but the important thing to consider for the first and third Final Fantasy is that the health of the world is tied to four crystals. Their destruction is the means by which evil overtakes the world. In other words, the things that sustains the very world is visible and may be interacted with directly (and therefore destroyed).

This is not how our world works. There is no power plant that makes the world go round. Things like gravity or the laws of physics may be the underlying means by which the universe works, but they cannot be touched or destroyed (probably, at least). In some religious cultures, such as Christianity, a head deity may sustain the world, but that deity is not immediately accessible to physical touch, and even those Christian denominations (like Roman Catholicism or Anglicanism) which see the Eucharist as being divine matter, there is no way to affect God through the bread and wine. The laws of physics and the laws of God are immutable.

The worlds of Final Fantasy, in other words, are rather fragile. The crystals can be broken, and the literal health of the world can be ruined. No need for global warming or mountain-top removal, and these things only ruin this particular planet, not the whole of the universe and the laws by which is functions. Human beings can reach into reality, take hold of crystals, and break them. One doesn’t even need to be that powerful. They only need to be okay with a) hurting people and b) unbalancing the world. Both are mere human desires in our world but are sources of destruction in Final Fantasy. One’s will can either save the world or destroy it.

This is the case in Final Fantasy II, too, though without crystals. Here, the Emperor is able to recreate the workings of the world after he has died. There is a hell, and possibly someone is in control of it, and, importantly, the Emperor is able to gain control of this part of the afterlife. This isn’t common in many modern religions, but in classical mythology, Zeus/Jupiter is able to overthrow his father, Cronos/Saturn). Zeus is, however, already a divine being. I’m not aware of a mythology or religion where a human mortal is able to lead a supernatural dimension. Final Fantasy, and subsequently many RPGs, are worlds where the supernatural are, if not immediately, at least readily accessible.

I don’t think, here, that “supernatural” is the right word. In modern parlance, “supernatural” refers not only to a different dimension but to a “higher” one as well. In the West, a supernatural world is one where an otherwise material world finds its meaning and where the dead and, if there is one, the creating deity live. A supernatural world is one where supernatural creatures reside, and while in 2010s and 2020s, our supernatural beings tend to be rather down-to-earth (we like a democratic multiverse, after all), in most cultures the otherworld is usually dangerous but always powerful. It is no place for mere mortals.

And yet the Emperor takes it over. Firion and his companions defeat him and his guards, though he is powerful enough (or charismatic enough) to command the forces of hell. One wonders how long peace will last and how often existence needs to be saved if the workings or leadership of worlds is so open to humanity, which is so fallible and open to evil inclinations.

This is a fascinating world mythically and theologically, and it’s one that shouldn’t be just assumed as “normal.” A lot is at stake in this world, not just the enslavement of all free creatures (as in Middle Earth) or the oppression of a political or economic empire (as in Star Wars), but the literal destruction of the world. At this point in the development of gaming, the destruction of the world is a matter of course; but not all worlds in all games can be destroyed down to their constituent parts. This weakness of the world says something about these game worlds. It suggests a world that is living under constant threat, where the future is in no way secure, and if nothing is done, the world may end. Personally, I’m worried about the world my daughters will grow up to inherit, not whether there would be a world at all. In NES Final Fantasy games, this would be a constant worry.

Ending thoughts

Does a player need to think about the world mythically and theologically to enjoy an NES Final Fantasy game? Of course not. These are games, after all, and a player can ignore the world building and think only about leveling up their characters. Nor do we have to have a conscious understanding of the fragility of the world, because a lot comes through the dialogue and music that communicates this threat. I certainly didn’t think about these aspects of the world when I played them as a kid. I think, though, that considering the created world can help us appreciate the game more fully. We can see why the Warriors of Light are waited for with such anticipation, and why their coming is met with such great joy.

We can also imagine the journey of our PCs within a “thicker” world. NES games didn’t have much room for worldbuilding and dialogue. A lot needed to be assumed by the player. Many RPG fans will hold conversations among the PCs about what is going on as they journey across the world. The canvas of our imagination, however, is not blank. The games add a lot to that canvas for us to interact with, and with a “thicker” understanding of what is at stake, we can understand better the importance of these quests and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of what it means to have courage.

I realized while writing this article that I had far more than enough to say about all this, and so instead of typing up everything I had in mind, I’ll end here and write more in the upcoming week (or weeks? Who knows).

We soon learn that this isn’t just any old poor aunt, nor is it the narrator’s poor aunt. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a physical thing at all. It is, quite literally, the phrase ‘poor aunt’ stuck to his back; “those very words, without meaning, without form.” If the narrator had to give a label to it, he’d “‘call it a ‘conceptual sign’ or something like that.’” Other people see this “conceptual sign” as different things, not just a poor aunt. One person sees it as his dog that died a few months back; another sees an old elementary school teacher who had been burned in the air raids of World War II. Whatever is seen, though, this conceptual sign has taken on an existence all its own, independent of the narrator’s will. It’s like a memory, especially a memory of something you wish you could forget. It continues to exist and live and thrive on its own.

There’s a lot more to this short story, but at this point you might be wondering, “What in the world is this story about?” There isn’t much of a plot, and describing this “oor aunt” conceptual existence is basically the point of the story. If you’ve read much Murakami before, you’re probably nodding your head and saying, “Yeah, that sounds like Murakami to me.” Again, you don’t dissect Murakami. You go along for the ride and let him play with concepts and ideas and, most of all, his imagination.

Now, I’m not sure how influential Murakami is in Japanese literature (he’s certainly popular, both in Japan and outside Japan), but Murakami has said that he wasn’t much influenced by Japanese literature. He claims a number of Western authors as his teachers, though I really do think there’s something to say about his writing being attempts to turn jazz into narrative form. That said, I think there is something very Japanese about something like having a conceptual sign on your back. It is a way of seeing a post-modern idea in a non-modern way. It is at once post-modern, Platonic, linguistic, and “enchanted” at the same time. And this collection of descriptors is something that Japanese authors and creators are very good at imagining.

I used the word “enchanted” above and put it in quotes, because I wanted to draw attention to it as a technical term in scholarship of the imagination. An enchanted world is one where the world around us is not just natural but is supernatural and hypernatural as well. Medieval European cultures were enchanted in that they saw the world populated by creatures such as elves and faeries, but also that it spoke of and revealed the character of the Christian God to those who studied it. A disenchanted worldview is one which sees the world as merely sense data and as a source of information about the material workings of plants, animals, and soil. A materialistic, scientific worldview is disenchanted, because it doesn’t concern itself with what we think about, feel about, or imagine the world to be like; it only wants to see how things function and to study these functions as the only facts about nature.

An enchanted worldview does not see the functions of a thing as the sum total of its meaning. C.S. Lewis says it this way in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: upon meeting a star, the character Eustace says “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” The star replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” You don’t have to think of stars as much more than giant balls of burning gas, but an enchanted worldview says that giant balls of burning gas speak of a greater reality and deeper meaning than just a bunch of particles up in space. When we think of other people as more than just bags of flesh and bones, but as human souls with a thriving life force and consciousness, courage and doubt, hope and loss, joy and sorrow, and not just a bunch of neurons firing in the brain, we are seeing humans in an enchanted way.

Murakami’s worlds are enchanted, but not in a Western way. Western enchantment is highly influenced by the Christian story, myth, and imagination, whereas Murakami’s enchantment is rather Zen Buddhist. The greater meaning for someone in the West need not be Christian, of course, just as Murakami isn’t writing Buddhist dogma, but when people in the West imagine a greater world beyond the physical, we are generally imagining something “more” than the natural world. Something supernatural. We also imagine that this supernatural world is full of life. There is more stuff: more beings, more energy, more ability (in the form of magic), and greater landscapes to explore. For Murakami, the world beyond the physical is often thinner, not more robust. People fade away and disappear, meaning is lost, poor aunts become conceptual realities, whatever those are, and those conceptual realities have a life of their own, but they also leave on their own without communicating directly. The narrator in “A Poor Aunt’s Story” gains wisdom, but it is dark and mysterious wisdom that can only be expressed with feelings and images and experiences. This is what makes Murakami so fun to read, what makes him so elusive, but it’s also what makes him so very Japanese.

As a note, though, I’ll be discussing Cyan’s entire story here. If you haven’t, and you want to save some of the surprises, then maybe save this article for a later date. There are also light spoilers for the other games in the Final Fantasy series.

How Final Fantasy builds themes

What does it mean to make a game series? Back in the late 90s, after Final Fantasy VII was released, Western gamers were looking for more stories from that world. Square, however, had moved on, and continued its tradition of creating new worlds for each of its Final Fantasy games. I think that part of the distaste many Western gamers have for Final Fantasy VIII is that it wasn’t Final Fantasy VII-2. Western gamers wanted to dig more deeply into the stories of Cloud, Tifa, Shinra, Sephiroth, and the history of the world, not move on to something completely new.

Square has continued this design philosophy with most of its Final Fantasy games, only releasing direct sequels a handful of times (nor have these turned out to be great games, either). This is a conscious design choice. Square could easily have done what Xenosaga and Xenoblade creator Monolithsoft did and create a story over three different games, or what Konami did with the Suikoden series, creating multiple games in the same game world and sharing certain characters and locations. Square, instead, chose to create new worlds, though not necessarily from scratch. If you lifted up the hood of the Final Fantasy genre, you would see that the engine wasn’t fit together by a game world or characters or a developing battle system but by themes.

Think about the theme of the wasteland, a term I’m borrowing from Western myth and legend but that is helpful here. A wasteland is a part of the world that has been drained of its natural or spiritual energy, usually through some single act of anger, hatred, sin, or malice. Trees lose their leaves and their bark becomes dry and cracked. Grass withers. Rivers and lakes dry up. Only rock and the hard soil remains. And again, importantly, this is not just a natural disaster but a spiritual one as well.

The second half of Final Fantasy VI and all of Final Fantasy VII feature such wastelands, and they have come about through the direct action (Kefka) or as an unintended consequence (Shinra) of certain characters. Final Fantasy VIII has its own wasteland: the Moon, where monsters and a powerful sorcerer are kept prisoner. What does it mean to use a wasteland as a prison?

A wasteland can be more than a desecrated land. In Final Fantasy X, the world of Spira has a joyful, blue, watery tone, but the people are living in fear of Sin. This is a sort of spiritual or emotional wasteland (think of the scene where Yuna dances at the funeral). In Final Fantasy XIII, Pulse is a wasteland of safety, though it is shown to be simply a fully natural world, mostly untouched by humanity (and therefore a wasteland of civilization, not of nature). Finally, Final Fantasy XVI returns to the idea of a physical and natural wasteland, pinning the fault on Ultima, the game’s antagonists.

Images of wasteland come up time and again, but Square doesn’t just give the same wasteland over and again; the developers build on this theme by asking various questions. In FFVI, a megalomaniac destroys the world, but what will happen to Terra when things are made right again? FFVII asks the question of how we heal the wasteland when we are using nature to support the very way we live, and the last scene of the game suggests that civilization may not actually survive this loss of resource. FFX wonders what needs to be sacrificed in order to revive the land, and FFXIII surprises us by suggesting that what we in our comfortable lives think of as a wasteland could very well be the natural state of the world (and which can go on living without our intervention). Each game takes the wasteland and looks at the topic differently, and in discussing one, new lights can be shown on others. Putting them in the same “Final Fantasy” box forces them to converse with one another, so that Terra and Aeris and Yuna and Lightning can all comment on the wasteland in their own way and be set to talking to one another.

This is how Final Fantasy games talk to one another and to their players.

The dark blade

This sort of conversation is happening with Cyan in Final Fantasy VI; or, rather, Cyan is in the middle of this kind of conversation. Each character in VI is a representation of a job class: Mog is a dancer, Locke is a thief, Sabin is a monk. Cyan is the party’s samurai. His character is bound by honor and loyalty, both to his king and to his family. He uses special weapons that no one else in the game can use, and his special ability focuses on patience leading to stronger attacks. The samurai class is from the fifth game, which focuses on stunning or stopping enemies, doing hefty damage, and throwing gil for even more damage. Cyan continues the tradition of being a physical-based character who can deal decent damage and whose ability (Sword Tech or Bushido) can, in one form, stop opponents.

Of interest here, however, is Cyan’s weapon: the katana. While samurai used them in FFV, they are assigned to Dark Knights in FFIII. There isn’t much lore when it comes to character classes in FFIII, but one NPC in Falgabard, a town of dark knights, says the following:

There’s nothing in the game that requires a character to actually overcome fear in order to be a dark knight, but the lore is a possible explanation for why the class has a lower defense stat than other physical-based class. Whatever the case, these dark blades (the katana) is a possible link between the dark knight class and the representation of the samurai class, Cyan. Does the series build on this idea of defeating one’s own fears as a dark knight or a samurai.

Of course, there is Cecil from Final Fantasy IV, the quintessential dark knight. Cecil overcomes his sense of guilt and suffering on Mt. Ordeals, facing his shadow in battle and becoming a Paladin. This scene is one of the key moments of the game, and it sets Cecil, and his quest, in a completely new direction. His quest against Golbez couldn’t be completely with his sin and guilt weighing so heavily on him, nor could he get closer to Rose, who obviously has feelings for him. So much is holding him back. When he becomes a Paladin, he faces himself and can find redemption.

In general, once this transformation is complete, the game moves on. Cecil doesn’t harp on his transformation for too long, and after the initial surprise he receives from some characters, he continues forward unwaveringly. But that’s Cecil. He needs to lead his companions into battle and confront other realities, particularly those concerning his family and the deaths (and supposed deaths) of some of those close to him.

Cyan, however, is not Cecil. Cyan is constantly mired in his past. The tragedy of the death of his king, wife, and child haunt him (sometimes literally) all throughout the game. He sees his wife and child depart on the phantom train for whatever afterlife exists in the world of FFVI. He stands on the platform as the train pulls away and the game makes the player wait and watch him looking down sadly. Is he crying? Is he making sense of anything? Is he merely bearing the weight of his loss? For a character with such a noble personality, Cyan certain experiences and feels a lot during the first half of the game.

In the second half, Cyan seems to overcome his grief in writing letters to Lola, and while he finally admits to her that he was the one, not her boyfriend, writing the letters, there is a sense that he would continue writing them if he could. He is doing what is right, not necessarily what he wants.

This may seem like a fair end to Cyan’s grief, but his story continues in his dreams. Here he confronts various scenes from his past, from the Phantom Train to riding Magitek armor, and eventually is set upon by Wrexsoul, who only appears in battle when one of the party members dies. When he finally wakes up, Cyan is able to put the past behind him or at least integrate his sense of loss and grief with his desire to continue moving forward with his companions. It’s no surprise that, here, he finds the esper Alexander, the representation of holy strength, in Doma’s throne room.

In all this, Cyan continues to face his fears, just as the dark knight is supposed to have done in FFIII. The difference between Cyan and Cecil, though, is that Cyan is continuously facing his fear. Cecil overcomes his fear, but Cyan’s fears and griefs haunt him continually throughout the game. Cecil faces his shadow on Mt. Ordeals, while Cyan lives with his shadow. I personally think this makes Cyan a much more compelling character than Cecil, but whatever the case, both characters represent the dark knight’s character to overcome what afflicts them.

The splitting of fear

There’s a bit more here that Square is doing with katana and dark knights. In the same town in FFIII as before, an NPC says the following.

This is one of the game’s gimmicks, something that the early Final Fantasy games are known for. In FFIII, certain bosses can only be beaten by using certain classes: you really need a scholar to defeat Hein and four dragoon to defeat Garuda. Two of the game’s dungeons, the Cave of the Ancients and the Cave of Shadows, have enemies that multiply when hit with any weapon except the katana or dark blade. Thus, make a party with at least two dark knights and head in. Otherwise, you can’t complete the dungeon.

This theme continues in FFIV with Cecil, who is literally cloven in two as the dark knight and the paladin. Cecil faces a mirror that shows his true self, both as a shadow and as his inner sense of justice, and only by wielding the holy blade can the two be made one.

Cyan is a bit more interesting. We see Cyan’s whole life destroyed just a short time after we meet him: his king and family are poisoned. On the train platform in the Phantom Forest, he is split from his family. In the World of Ruin, he writes to Lola as her boyfriend, even though he isn’t. Cyan’s final journey is in a dream world that is both like and unlike the worlds through which we’ve traveled with him. FFVI sets up multiple doubles for Cyan again and again, never truly reconciling them but each of them another step towards healing. If dark blades stop enemies from splitting in FFIII, and a dark knight becomes his true reflection as a paladin in FFIV, then Cyan in FFVI shows that balancing two opposites - grief and a stiff upper lip, loyalty and failure, dream and reality, truth and lies - leads to the healing of grief. Cyan is a character who continues to seek balance in opposites. And in doing so, he finds peace.

Does the conversation continue?

Final Fantasy as a series of course continues after its sixth entry. Auron in Final Fantasy X is the next samurai, and he certainly has a dual reality in the game world. Clive in Final Fantasy XVI goes through similar grief as Cyan in the loss of his brother, and he eventually overcomes that grief through accepting that the hooded man is in fact himself and by joining with Joshua to become an Ifrit-Phoenix hybrid. Final Fantasy continues to tell the story of the splitting and rejoining of noble and stalwart characters who are a tad bit old fashioned compared to those around them. So as the series changes, Final Fantasy continues to spin new stories on themes established twenty to thirty years ago, and the stories continue to inspire us and to heal us as well.

A friend once told me that the most important part of a story is what happens after it ends. I’m not too sure about that, but it’s an interesting idea. What happens to Sam after Frodo sails off over the horizon in Lord of the Rings? Do Cloud and Tifa ever get together as a couple after the end of Final Fantasy VII? Or in the case of Expedition 33, what happens to the character whose ending you choose? Do they ever come to happiness? Or are they destined for sorrow? These are all questions that the narrative of the game asks us in their closing minutes. We may have our own head canon as to what happens, or the game creators themselves may give some hints about what happens after a game ends, but the games themselves are over. We have to deal with what we get.

This can be a lot of fun when you’re really invested in the characters and world, because the game seems to continue to grow in our imaginations. What happens, though, when we don’t get enough closure to really decide what happens next? What happens when we get mixed signals?

Think about the ending of Final Fantasy XVI and the question of whether or not Clive is alive at the end. He is washed ashore on some nondescript beach, and we see that his hand has turned to stone. He then faints - or dies. We then see Jill as a new life is coming into the world, then as she sees the red star Metia fade. She rushes outside, afraid for Clive and Joshua, but then she smiles as the sun begins to rise. After the credits, we get a scene of two boys (one with black and one with blond hair), and on a table in their house is a book written by Joshua Rosfield. What happened?

Gamers seem to be split on the question of how all this fits together. If you play all the sidequests, there is a suggestion that Clive will live on to write his memoirs - but it’s Joshua’s name, not his, on the cover of the book. Clive may have died on the shore after having survived the fall from origin, but he kinda seems fine, and only his hand is turned to stone, not his whole body. Jill certainly hopes that Clive will survive, but there’s a short note in the back of Logos, the lore book, where Clive tells her that he’s pretty sure he won’t return. Also, what’s the connection between Metia, magic, the Phoenix, and Ifrit? So many questions!

The creators of Final Fantasy XVI clearly don’t want to give us an answer. Instead, it seems they wanted the players to come up with ideas on their own. You can make the case for Clive being alive or dead or Joshua being alive or dead. But in terms of the game world, which is it? A person can only be alive or dead, not both.

Schrodinger’s Box and the End of the World

In quantum physics, however, an unobserved object can exist in two mutually exclusive states at once. A cat inside of a box can be either alive or it can be dead, and so, the theory goes, it is both alive and dead at the same time. This is a thought experience, of course, as it really doesn’t matter what the observer thinks or observes concerning a cat in a box. The theory only makes sense on the quantum level, as we humans do not create or destroy things like cats or trees or stars, because we look at them or don’t. Reality is separate from our human observation.

I’m not aware of anyone doing so, but a Zen Buddhist may suggest that the cat in Schrodinger’s box may be neither alive nor dead. It’s an inversion, and it may make as much sense as a cat being both alive and dead at the same time, but the inversion points to a difference between Western and Eastern (or at least Japanese) thinking. In secular, Western thought, matter cannot be destroyed or created; it can only be changed. Our culture developed in a Christian worldview, where the universe was created and where it has stable being. Scientific, rational thinking doesn’t allow for two mutually exclusive things to happen at the same time, which is one of the reasons that Schrodinger’s Cat is such a widely referenced and interesting concept for us. New ideas from theoretical physics may delight us and strike us as fascinating, but very few people believe, and no one really acts as if they believe, that the world disappears when we stop observing it. The world exists.

But what about Japanese thinking? At least in Zen Buddhism, nothingness is as much a possibility (or perhaps more so a possibility) than existence. We in the West can’t really imagine a true absence; even space is filled with light and radiation. Zen Buddhism doesn’t just believe in nothingness, but practitioners try to attain that null state. Those who practice meditation in the West try to quiet their inner voices and connect with their true self. The Christian meditative tradition (which existed before being influenced by Buddhism in the 19th and 20th centuries) aims to empty the self, but only so that the self may be filled with God’s will. There is no desire for a completely, utterly, vastly empty, void self. For Zen Buddhist practitioners, there kinda is.

We can see this desire for nothingness in Murakami Haruki’s work, especially his Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (a new translation has recently been published that included substantial differences and additions that is called The End of the World and the Hardboiled Wonderland. They’re basically the same story, though). Here, the unnamed protagonist is caught between two worlds: one is the world where we live, though this version of Japan is filled with strange creatures, mafia goons, methods to unconsciously memorize large amounts of data, and the usual Murakami jazz and whiskey. The other world is a dim, medieval-ish world within a wall where the protagonist pulls golden dreams out of unicorn skulls. It’s an awesome, wonderful, strange, and enlightening book that many fans of Japanese games would love, but it also has an ending that may be disconcerting for Westerners. At the end, the protagonist cannot reintegrate his dream self with his real-world self, and so the dream self finds a deep, empty, bottomless hole and throws himself into it. What happens afterwards? It seems that in the real world, the protagonist dies, but the act doesn’t seem like one of suicide. It seems like he’s entering into something more real than either modern-day Tokyo or the dream village. He enters into nothingness, but that nothingness isn’t just a place without anything in it (just by being a place, it can’t be a void).

I don’t know what happens to him, but this nothingness appears in other books by Murakami, especially After Dark. Then there are other books, like Kafka and the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, and Hardboiled’s companion novel The City and its Uncertain Walls. Like in Final Fantasy XVI, things just don’t seem to fit together, and Murakami doesn’t give us enough information to figure out just what happened to the protagonist in Hardboiled Wonderland or Sumire in Sputnik Sweetheart. We are left with the sense, not that people are both alive and dead, but that they are neither alive, nor are they dead. They are in a space between, or a space apart, or in a place that is not “space” at all. They have gone into a “nothingness” which is no place.

So what is it?

It’s really hard to know what to do with any of this, which is one of the reasons why Murakami is considered such a good writer. He provides closure within non-closure, or we his readers get the sense that some thing, some circle, has been completed, but it isn’t the circle that we’ve been following or that we might want to be completed. Partially, it’s something inside of us that is completed, because we have walked with the protagonist right to the very edge of human meaning and experience; anything beyond this is beyond human capability.

Now, this is a very interesting thing to consider in terms of gaming. We as players have a specific goal, and we want to complete it. An antagonist may come out of nowhere (like in Tales of Vesperia), or we may not be sure who the real antagonist is (like in Expedition 33, though I’m pretty sure I know who it is), but at the end of the day, no game (even games named things like Everquest) lasts forever. There is a platinum trophy for completing all the tasks. There are credits and additional content and sequels and more games in a series, but at the end of the day, these things come to an end. But what happens when we come to the edge of something, realize that we can’t go any further, but know that the story continues?

In a way, this is where we come to at the end of a story. We may have some idea of what is to come, like the ending of Final Fantasy IV or Grandia. We can always guess at which characters get together, which ones part ways, and who lives or dies. But then there are games like Valkyrie Profile, which end with the battle of the gods where all time ends (or does it?), or Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, where nothing or the whole universe may still exist (but who really knows?). How about the end of Xenosaga III? Does anything exist? To look at anime for a moment, what about Neon Genesis Evangelion? Shinji and Asuka are still alive at the end of the original movie End of Evangelion, but what is the world that they are alive in?

These endings aren’t just open-ended. They lead to a world beyond what we can know. They walk us right to the edge and tell us to look out and see what we can see, but they don’t represent that, because the world beyond human knowledge is unrepresentationable. It is literally beyond us.

And that’s a good thing to ponder, I think. It’s good to find the limits of the human mind and spirit and to take a peak at what may lie beyond. The imagination allows us to do that, which is as much to say that the imagination may be one of the most powerful human capacities we possess - if we possess it and are not guided by its own whims.

RPGs are a mixture of friendship and loneliness, a party full of heroes who will be with you through thick and thin, and moments of utter loss where characters are left alone to deal with stark reality. These themes are in many games, of course, and in games from many different cultures, but they take a prominent place in Japanese games. Why? That’s a big question and one that I will begin to tackle here.

In this article, I’ll discuss my own perception of Japanese community and individuality. I am not, however, Japanese. I’m a white guy, born in New Jersey, who spent two and a half years living and teaching near Kyoto. I’ve studied Japanese culture, but my observations are from an outsider’s perspective (what folklorists call an “etic” approach, as opposed to an “emic,” or insider’s, perspective). I observed Japanese culture in Hirakata City between Osaka and Kyoto, then again in a middle school in Adogawa, Shiga Prefecture, a small town on the north banks of Lake Biwa, north east from Kyoto. My perspective, therefore, may be particular to me. I hope it’s not, but if you’ve had a different perspective or experience, feel free to comment in the comments section below.

Community begins at school

It doesn’t, really, but many Japanese people learn how to be part of a community in middle school. Students spend the majority of their day in classes during school and in clubs after school. Many of my middle school students didn’t go home until dinner time, and that was every day. Students learned how to respect their elders (both teachers and older classmates), how and when to use the different registers of the Japanese language, and what it means to work together, especially with people they don’t like.

It’s more than just bowing to the teacher and doing group work, though. Middle school (and high school, to a different degree) is lodged deep in the Japanese imagination. Compulsory education ends in middle school. Students forge deep relationships with their peers. Anime and manga is rife with stories of first loves, best friendships, promises to live life in with shared dreams, and adults looking back on school as the most poignant time of their lives.

The only thing is: all of this ends. Even in the small town where I taught, students went to a variety of different high schools, if they went to high school at all. The relationships forged in middle school and high school do not last into adulthood, at least in terms of how school is imagined in pop culture. It’s not that these relationships are seen as immature or simple; in many ways, it seems that they look towards the heart of what it means to work together, to rely on one another, to achieve something that is held as sacred and idealized in Japanese culture. That’s how it seems from looking at pop culture, anyway.

I saw that this pop culture ideal was indeed true in good ways and bad ways. I saw my students bawl their eyes out at middle school graduation, though I don’t remember seeing any tears when graduating from eighth grade in the U.S. (I don’t remember having a graduation or diploma at all, actually). Students would come back in the years after their graduation to see their middle school teachers, and they seemed from an outsider perspective to be beautiful and heartfelt reunions. When I myself left to return to the U.S. for graduate school, I got some letters from my students that begged me not to forget them.

Now, both of my parents were teachers, and they often tell stories of students returning and telling them how important their classes were. Japan was different, though. It was more like the students were returning home. In fact, I think that school can often be more “home” than the place where they go to sleep and eat breakfast and dinner. I remember hearing a story once that, when a student got in trouble for stealing something, the police called the kid’s teacher before they got in touch with the parents. Why? Calling the parents would bring shame on the family, but it was also the teacher’s responsibility to teach the student civics, and it was more the teacher’s “fault” for not living up to this responsibility than it was the parents’.

I also have a rather negative and sorrowful example. There were two brothers in my school who had, from what I was told obliquely, a last name that identified their family as untouchables. I couldn’t get much information about it (my fellow teachers didn’t want to talk about it), but it seemed that, in the past, their family had something to do with handling the dead or using dead animals for ritual purposes. I don’t know. All I know is that they were bullied because of this last name.

The older brother was just fine. He was chill and seemed to let things slide off his back. He wasn’t too interested in English, but we talked every now and again, and he seemed to seek me out in his own, cool way. The younger brother, however, was different. When he entered middle school, he was young and bright-eyed. As the school year went on, though, he became quieter and more withdrawn. When I asked why, I was told that he was being bullied for his name. This broke my heart, and I tried to talk to his older brother about it, but I was shut down pretty quickly.

Kids are bullied for all sorts of reasons. If it’s not a name, then it’s the way they look, or the things they like, or the clothes they wear. Middle school is particularly difficult because kids that age are going through puberty, and their emotions and hormones and relationships are all out of wack. My mother taught eighth grade English, and she always says that her students needed an equal amount of deep care and strict structure in order to help them grow. Getting bullied isn’t a Japanese problem.

What is a Japanese problem, and especially for middle schoolers, is suicide. I often hear people talk about suicide in terms of high school entrance exams, but it also comes from bullying. During one of the culture festivals (bunkasai), the students put on a play about a girl who attempted suicide. My Japanese wasn’t (and still isn’t) all that good, but the problem wasn’t entrance exams. It was bullying. I was really happy to see my students take the initiative and deal with the problem of suicide in a creative and visible way, but it also broke my heart that suicide is such a problem among early teens in Japan that they needed to make a play about it for people to feel safe. Kudos to them, but what a grief.

Problems arise when we idealize any period of time, be it a historical period or a cultural one. People in the U.S. idealize college, and many people feel that they can never live up to the fun they had in college. Many people idealize their children’s youth, be it as a baby, toddler, or whatever, and are rather grim about them growing up. I can’t tell you how many people who beg me not to “blink, because the good times with your kids are gone in a second. It all moves too fast.” Maybe it does, but we should also cherish the times we have with our kids as pre-teens, teenagers, and adults as well.

Japan, however, has a period of intense cultural education and interpersonal development in middle and high school. These periods set the standard for what people expect life to be like and the ideal of how life should be like. And these themes make their way into games, which deal with them creatively just as my students dealt with suicide creatively in their play. Creativity is sometimes the best way to sort through problems, fears, joys, and our developing sense of self and community, because creativity deals with the whole person, not just the rational or conscious self. And it is the whole self that is challenged by the questions of who we are and how we relate to others.

Being part of the group vs. being useful

It’s often joked that Japanese media (games, manga, and anime) are about how the power of friendship saves the day. Some games are pretty on-the-nose about this theme, with characters talking to the camera about how important everyone is to them. Even a game like Final Fantasy XVI, which is about a lonely, grumbly man and his dog, finds strength through his relationships to win the day. As I discussed above, this theme comes from the importance of, and the continued importance of, relationships developed in middle and high school to the Japanese imagination. These media, however, are not just replaying the themes from Japanese childhood, however, but are seeking to explain, explore, and teach the wisdom found in tight groups working towards a single goal.

There are a number of JRPGs where the tight-knit group of PCs are separated from one another (Dragon Quest XI and Final Fantasy VI come immediately to mind, though there are many others). The player doesn’t know if these characters are dead, lost, injured, or in some other way changed, and while the main protagonist in these games can continue forward and defeat the end boss on their own, there is a magnetism that urges the player to search out and find the protagonist’s friends again. This is particularly the case in Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, where the player does not need to rescue all the missing PCs in order to finish the game. But, except for curiosity sake, why wouldn’t we seek out and find all who are lost?

Many JRPGs lean heavily on forming a core group. Or, to put it differently, many are thematically about gathering like-minded people together for a single task (usually saving the world). This is done different than in the West. Usually, at least in the Western games that I’ve played, parties are formed a la table top RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons: namely, on party balance. We need a tank, DPS, a healer, and maybe a mage to round out the party. These characters are often player-generated and don’t always have a personality of their own, but the discussion among gamers (again, from my perspective) in developing a party isn’t how fun a character is to play, or how odd their abilities, but how well they fit into a single party. Customization in WRPGs is about balanced stats and abilities, not balanced personalities. At least in the U.S., this expectation is built into how we work in groups: everyone has to do their fair share based on their abilities. Jobs are divvied up to individual participants, all of whom work together in their own sphere to get the job done. This plays out in how players view video game parties, too. I remember playing Lord of the Rings Online (2007~) and getting chewed out for “not doing my job” as a healer, even though I had told everyone in the group that I was still learning the ropes of the role. And no, I’m not still bitter about that after all this time…

There are some Japanese games that work this way (I’m thinking of Dragon Quest III (1988, US 1992)), but for the most part, it doesn’t matter in these games that some characters are better than others. In Final Fantasy VI, there are a total of three blue mages that learn or use spells from monsters (Gau, Strago, and Relm). Strago is probably the best among them, because he’s more reliable in casting specific spells than Gau, who the player loses control of, or Relm, whose ability can miss. In Final Fantasy X, Kimahri is only good if you do the work to make him good. Chu chu in Xenogears is, well, a big, pink rabbit thing that gets crucified along with the mechs (this still doesn’t make sense to me; why crucify a mech if the pilot inside is just sitting there in their chair?). The point isn’t that these characters are necessarily good, but that they’re part of the group. Suikoden games have 108 characters, and not all of them are great, but they are still part of the group. That’s what’s important: that everyone belongs, not that everyone is useful.

Why this difference between Western and Japanese games? Part of it is that Japan is a community-based culture whereas productivity is important in the West, which spent hundreds of years industrializing, even if it made people unhappy or caused them to lose their jobs. One of the reason the bubble burst in Japan in the 90s was because banks lent money to people who had historical relationships with the bank leaders, not because their ideas were very good. All over Japan you can find half-made ferris wheels that were never finished, because the “if you build it, they will come” mentality that money lending was partially based on didn’t pan out. Capitalism doesn’t work for traditional cultures, because traditional cultures are about relationships, not making money. Japan reflects this in the PCs in their games with characters who are low powered and maybe lame, but being lame doesn’t mean you’re not part of the group.

A friend in every port

There are few games that follow a single character throughout multiple adventures like the Ys games do. Adol Christin, the red-haired wanderer, meets a great variety of people on his many quests but only keeps one, really, as a close companion: his wall-crushing friend Dogi. Sometimes Adol is joined by characters he meets in his adventures, but besides Dogi, he doesn’t stay in touch with with most of them. At first, this kind of broke my heart: Adol spent such important time with these people, and then he just drops them? But these relationships are not less important because Adol doesn’t keep up a hefty letter-writing practice, nor is it a sign of Adol’s lack of importance to people that they don’t follow him on his adventures. Like graduation from middle and high school, Adol must leave his friends to continue on his journey, just as they must leave him to continue their lives - and there lies the poignancy.

I once had the rather sorrowful experience of being told that I was a friend of convenience. I’ve been abroad in programs like JET in Japan, and I’ve spent time in three graduate degree programs (two in literature, one in theology/ministry), and each of these programs had clear starts and ends. We met one another, studied together, and then left each others’ lives. For me, growing up on JRPGs where everyone stayed friends to the bitter end, this left me pretty lonely. I hadn’t learned the other lesson of these games, namely that there is importance in spending time with people, even if, or especially if, those relationships don’t continue.

In Japan, this concept is called ichi go ichi e. The phrase translates to “one time in a lifetime” and sees deep meaning in the chance meeting of two people (or a person and an event, a sight of nature, etc.). Something has brought those two people together, be it fate or chance, and that meeting is precious because it is unplanned and unrepeatable. What we might see as a friend of convenience the Japanese would see as a place of inexpressible beauty. And why? Because life is fleeting. Things fall apart. The cherry and plum blossoms are only around for a short time. You blink and it’s gone. And unlike Tolkien’s elves in Middle Earth, the Japanese don’t grasp at these moments and hold on to them in a vice-like grip but cherish the wisdom that they bring. And what is that wisdom? Let me try to explain, though my explanation is as a white guy from New Jersey, not as a Japanese person, so keep that in mind.

The world is so big. Unimaginably big. Think of how many people there are in the world. Think of how many nooks and crannies there are in a typical neighborhood, let alone a city, let alone a country. There are places of amazing meaning and joy even in our backyards, but we could miss them. I met my wife in college, but I might have gone to another college and never met her. I could have stayed in Japan another year and not gone to graduate school, but then I wouldn’t have met my best friend. But more than that, I wouldn’t have met that one guy who I met once at a bar in Athens, Georgia when my life seemed to be falling apart. He was drunk and thought I was just some kid, but after talking, he saw something familiar and good in the way we spoke to each other. He punched me lightly in the arm and said, “You’re alright.” I have no idea who this guy is, and I never saw him again, but that “You’re alright” has meant a lot to me. Why? Because it could never have happened, but it did.

The world is full of amazing potential. All sorts of things can happen, and they do, and if we don’t pay attention, then we miss them. I’m a Christian, and we believe in a God who predestined everything, but I feel like the Japanese have something in the ichi go ichi e concept. What if things are left up to chance? What if some things are set in stone (maybe meeting my wife) but not everything (like meeting those brothers I wrote about above)? Chance encounters characterize the world as beautiful, surprising, amazing, and something to be cherished and pondered over, not just rushed past and tossed to the side.

And I think it’s this quality of beauty and surprise that the Japanese see in the world that keeps their games from being too depressing. Now, there are certainly games or other media from Japan that are terrifyingly lonely. Japanese science fiction can be full of wonder, but it can also be really, really creepy. I remember reading one story about a person who was slowly fed parts of their body until only their mouth remained, and it still snapped and yearned for more meat (ugh, it was such a creepy story). Japan has its own problems with depression and grief. But the concept of ichi go ichi e is still present, no matter how much Japanese people gaze into the abyss. The concept leaves a place for people to come back to and remember that the world is a lot better than it could be.

So what are “traditional” RPGs

The types of games that we think of as RPGs (especially JRPGs) came about in 1986 with Dragon Quest. Prior to DQ, most RPGs followed the success of Western games like Wizardry and Ultima. In Japan, games like Dragon Slayer and Hydlide (both 1984) furthered certain aspects of these Western games, but in general they were very difficult to play. Stories were given in the instruction booklets (if there were any stories), and the main goal and progression of the games were rather opaque. In this day, players were expected to experiment with different paths and only found things through trial and error. PCs died easily, which doesn’t sound like much fun these days, but consider this era of games to be like Tabletop RPGs like Call of Chthulu, where some of the fun is that your PC lives in a very dangerous world and is highly expendable. Some of the fun, too, was simply being able to play a video game. That alone was something remarkable.

Enix came along, however, and saw potential. They wanted to make a RPG (or “simulation game”) that was more accessible to a wider audience, had interesting graphics, and wasn’t so difficult to finish. Dragon Quest was a big hit with audiences in Japan, because it did all these things: Toriyama Akira did the monster design, the music was mysterious and interesting, and it was a lot easier for the PC to die. Following the success of Dragon Quest, many DQ-clones were published to a Japanese audience with a deepening hunger for RPGs.

This hunger did not get passed on to the rest of the world. Dragon Quest (branded as Dragon Warrior in the US) was released three years later in 1989 when, in terms of graphics and systems, the gaming community had moved on. Final Fantasy was a moderate success, but it wasn’t until the SNES that RPGs began to take off, with Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as the pinnacle of the genre. The success of these games, and the ever developing powers of game creators to make games with better sound, graphics, and story, made gamers interested in what would come next, not how what they already had could change and grow.

Dreaming of what could be

It wasn’t until the success of Final Fantasy VII (1997) that gamers began to dream outside of the boundaries of the RPG genre. FFVII was widely popular in the West, and the game set a new standard for what RPGs could be. In the years following ‘97, we saw a wide variety of games that both shared various qualities with FFVII but also were (either subtly or not-so-subtly) different. Gamers in the US began to get tired of what they considered the same-old-same-old, and even in the early 00s were calling out for “something different.”

I want to pause here for a moment to draw attention to something. Both Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger were monumental upgrades in what RPGs could be. The graphics were more detailed, the music was phenomenal, and the stories did a lot more with the limited memory of the cartridges than previous games. Why, then, didn’t these two games see the same reaction as FFVII? Why did gamers call for RPGs to “evolve” in the late 90s when they didn’t in the mid 90s? I’m not sure exactly when the term “traditional RPG” began to be used, but in a way, FFVII became both the first and the last “traditional RPG.” Before 1997, people were excited about what RPGs could be; after 1997, people were interested in what RPGs could turn into. Why?

This is a fascinating cultural moment, but it’s also something that has happened before in the history of human civilization. Many important periods in art came about when artists got tired of the expected ways of doing things and started to try something new, even when similar efforts has failed just a few decades (or years) earlier. William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge firmly planted the Romantic movement in British poetry in the early 1800s, but why didn’t William Blake do the same with his poetry a generation earlier? Partially it was because Blake’s poetry is so strange and mythological, and it was hard for people to grasp, but it’s also because the late 1700s was not the right cultural moment for Romanticism to take root in Britain, while 1798 was, apparently, just the right year for Lyrical Ballads to make a big splash.

Or think of Lord of the Rings. People were doing high fantasy way before Tolkien. Tolkien himself had already published The Hobbit. And even when Lord of the Rings was published in 1955/6, it took ten or twenty years to catch on. Now it’s considered the genesis of modern fantasy, even as authors are pushing the boundaries of the genre that Tolkien’s work created.

This moment of turn, however, is fascinating. What makes a community ready to look beyond the boundary lines of a genre and yet still want to be a part of that genre? Gamers didn’t play FFVII, try a few similar games, and then jump ship to first-person shooters (okay, some gamers did). People didn’t play FFVII and then put games down entirely. People played FFVII and then wanted more of the same but also something different from what they had. It’s like a hamburger. SNES gamers wanted to see what different kinds of toppings could go on the burger to make them tastier. PS1 gamers wanted to try chicken instead of beef, or maybe go with pork, or maybe go without a bun, but they certainly didn’t want a normal burger again. In other words, “traditional RPG” became a thing, and many gamers weren’t satisfied with just the same old thing anymore.

Why the need for new?

In a way, the reason many gamers looked for further developments in the RPG genre is because of how different Final Fantasy VII was from previous and contemporary RPGs. While battles were still in lines with one group against another, levels were gained through experience, and there were random battles, just like in SNES games, the increased memory space of the CD allowed for significantly better graphics and a much thicker story with more dialogue. Video games took a flying leap forward with Final Fantasy VII and other similar games in different genres, and so gamers expected similar flying leaps. And if such leaps were taken in graphics and story, why not expect them in battle systems, diversity of storyline choices, and customization.

The games that came after 1997, however, cut closer to SNES games than building on FFVII. Final Fantasy Tactics (1997, US 1998) came out a few months after FFVII, and while it had great customization, its storyline was confusing and its graphics more cartoonish. Breath of Fire III (1997, US 1998) had a longer story than its predecessor, but in terms of gameplay it was just like an SNES game (and it had huge loading times). Granstream Saga (1997, US 1998) had an interesting battle system, but its character models had small polygon counts, and it was pretty short. Even Xenogears (JPN/US 1998), which I think made a larger leap in story than FFVII, had splotchy graphics and a famously unfinished second disc. The “killing blow” came with Final Fantasy VIII, which came out in 1999 in both Japan and the US. Anyone who expected another great leap with VIII, or even the same type of game as VII, were surprised at the confused storyline, jagged graphics, and truly weird junctioning system. Now, I love Final Fantasy VIII, but it really is weird. There’s a lot of creativity in the game, and Square was pushing into some fascinating new territory, but for US gamers, it wasn’t different in the way that they were expecting.

Expectations have a lot to do with culture, and what might be successful in Japan doesn’t necessarily succeed in other countries. A game set in a mercenary academy made sense to Japanese gamers in a culture that sees their school life as a secondary (or even primary) home. American teenagers tend to dislike school, so why would we want to play as students? Drawing magic from the environment sounds really cool if one of your religions (in this case, Shinto) sees the natural world as sacred, but the West sees magic as occult and mysterious. Japan in the 90s was still trying to figure out what to do with its continued and in many ways present culture of war from the 1930s and 40s, so the question of memory and forgetting was very much on people’s minds. Not so for people in the West, who soon after the release of Final Fantasy VIII were dealing with terrorism in 9/11. Westerners also had Western RPGs, a sub-genre that has historically done poorly in Japan, which was still looking to Dragon Quest games as the standard for what RPGs are supposed to be like.

The people of any culture want to hear stories that make sense to them. In a way, people expect stories to be one part new and one part their story. Lord of the Rings became a best seller, because it was, in part, a story about the natural world told when nature was becoming more and more important (and later, in the 70s and 80s, when pollution was becoming more of a problem). What is now called “hope-punk” was a major theme in Star Wars, which helped it climb to fame in a time when the hope of the 60s of making society better was beginning to wane. Japanese games weren’t telling stories that Japanese gamers wanted to hear. FFVII made it through with its graphics and its introspective story that questioned who a person is in the deepest part of their selves; FFVIII is about love and discovering one’s true family in one’s schoolmates. They’re drastically different stories.

Western gamers also expected different things from their games, and unfortunately these expectations have led Westerners to look at JRPGs as more simple or juvenile than WRPGs. This is unfair. I’m not sure if this is the case in other parts of the West, but gamers and fans of fantasy and sci-fi have a “darkness” bias in the U.S. Stories that are “dark” or “grim,” that tell the “gritty details,” are seen as more realistic than stories that have more open and hopeful themes. This interest in darker stories was a shift from expectations in the 80s; look at Star Trek. The Next Generation had more hopeful storylines than the darker Deep Space Nine. The Federation in DSN was no longer the pinnacle of what humans could achieve, but was instead a false paradise with many, many problems. Americans (and I think I can say Westerners in general, if the success of Expedition 33 can say anything about our tastes) still now prefer these stories, while the Japanese lean more towards stories about overcoming cultural problems. JRPG stories aren’t simpler, they’re just not the stories that Westerners choose to tell.

WRPGs also place a greater focus on player choices, whereas JRPGs tell a specific story. JRPGs play with the leveling and turn-based battle systems, while WRPGs focus more on skill-buy systems and action-based combat. None of these are better than their opposite, just different. In a way, JRPGs were destined to fall out of favor in the West, though our expectations here in the States and in Europe have made us blind to the creativity Japanese game developers had in varying the Dragon Quest theme - or even building beyond that theme.

What Japan was doing

To take the games noted above as examples, we can see the ways the Japanese were continuing forward even as Western audiences demanded that they evolve. Final Fantasy Tactics is still considered one of the best, if not the best, tactical RPG. The level of customization is astounding, with each job class giving multiple skills in five different categories that can be varied between classes. The story might be confusing, and the translation leaves a lot to be desired, but Matsuno Yasumi (the director and writer) crafted an amazing blend of political drama and spiritual thriller. Breath of Fire III may have been slow in pace, but it saw the develop of the hero from child to adult to dragon in a really beautiful way. Xenogears…ahh, Xenogears. Director Takahashi Tetsuya tried to make something more than a game. Planned to be six episodes long, Xenogears was to be the fifth episode, though it was the only one produced. Takahashi’s vision was hampered by time (he had to train his staff, many of them newbies, on how to make games) and the limitations of disc space and company buy-in. He tried again with the Xenosaga trilogy, then again with Xenoblade, only narrating his ideas once he go the right people and the space to do it (and, to be fair, once he got better at making actual games, not movies). Final Fantasy Tactics and Takahashi’s Xeno games are extremely complex and very mature in style and story.

There was also Parasite Eve (1998), which tried to blend survival horror and RPGs. The game has a moody atmosphere that develops from its creepy music, body horror, and its plot, which blends sci-fi and fantasy. Jade Cocoon (1998) had a similar atmosphere but blended RPG with monster-catching. The game is short and a little simple, but mixing monsters used the PS1’s ability to hold various monster types in memory to create some horrifying, hilarious, and fascinating creatures. Final Fantasy VIII’s junction system is confusing at first, but it’s versatile and the most experimental since Final Fantasy II’s system of growing abilities by using them. Chrono Cross (1999) might not be the sequel to Chrono Trigger that anyone, Westerner or Japanese, was looking for, but the element system allowed for a great deal of customization - maybe even too much; resetting characters could become a chore.

Jumping forward, Paper Mario (2000) and Dark Cloud (2000) added a lot to the RPG formula, and Final Fantasy X’s (2001) sphere grid is a customization dream. Wild Arms 3 and Suikoden III (both 2002) did not push the genre as much, but they further perfected their respective series. And Xenosaga (2002) had as many dreams as Xenogears, and, yes, multiple series of 2-hour cut-scenes are a bit excessive, but wow, what amazing stories were told!

I could easily go on. Now, JRPGs weren’t always pushing the boundaries of what RPGs could do, but not all WRPGs did much new either. And while Japanese games on PS3 took a hit because of the insistence of Japanese game companies (especially Square Enix) to develop their own graphics engines, there were still some really creative games: Lost Odyssey (2007), Valkyria Chronicles (2008), and Persona 4 (2008). Again, creativity kept on happening; it’s just that Western audiences were looking for something different.

Love it all

If I could make you walk away from this article with one thing, it would be a greater appreciation for games of all types. Western RPG fans often look down on JRPGs, and while I don’t expect everyone to love what Japanese developers are doing, I do hope that they can see the depths of creativity and curiosity in games that don’t line up with our cultural expectations. One of the awesome things happening in gaming right now is that, in game systems at least, anything goes. We’re so open to different ways of doing things. Let’s see what Japanese game developers are doing and appreciate them on their own terms.

Why, though, is religion so commonly at the center of Japanese RPGs? As cultural artifacts addressing questions in Japanese society, JRPGs rarely make God (or gods, or kami) the enemy but contemplate the role of the spirit, the material world, controlling and directing supernatural entities, and otherwise secular organizations in the modern, Japanese world.

In the discussion below, I write about aspects of games that often touch on the central themes of the games themselves. I often write about a game’s end boss or the ending. If you haven’t finished Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy XVI, Tales of Berseria, Breath of Fire IV, and Valkyrie Profile 2 or if you’re particularly sensitive to spoilers, maybe hold off on reading.

How do you kill a god, anyway?

Killing something that’s immortal seems, at first blush, to be impossible. No matter how hard someone trains in the sword or in magic, immortality is immortality. This thinking is, however, from a Western perspective, particularly from a monotheistic one. Eastern religions do not see gods (or kami in Japanese Shinto, see my article on the difference between gods and kami by clicking here: link) as necessarily immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, or in any way beyond the abilities or knowledge of humanity. Western thought, even non-Christian thought, is heavily influenced by what is called the first ontological argument of St. Anselm of Canterbury, viz. “God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.” The Christian God is defined as the most of everything: the most powerful, the most knowing, the most loving, the most loyal, etc. Medieval Christian mysticism (notably apophatic or negative theology) suggests that any human conception of God is impossible. God, therefore, is not powerful, because our understanding of power is so limited to God’s power. God is not loving, but what humans think of as love is so far below God’s love that it’s really impossible to compare them. How can someone kill such a deity, then, by just swinging their sword enough times and burning it with fire magic?

Again, this is from a classically Western perspective. Modern Western, secular thought differs from this perspective, but instead of limiting God, secular thought denies God. Frederick Nietzsche claimed that “God is dead” many times in his writing, not to suggest that the Christian God had died, but that Western thought and culture had moved on. Whether it really had (or has) or not is a topic of another discussion, and the history of the 20th and 21st century was and has been a very complicated argument about how to answer the question of whether or not God (and religion) is still pertinent or has a future.

The East has a much more complicated engagement with this question. Japan specifically has had a suspicion of Western religions since the 16th century, and its rapid growth from a medieval culture into an industrialized modern one has led to an ambivalence towards all things Western. On the one hand, Japan has embraced much that looks Western, everything from a constitutional democracy to high technology. Japan also, however, makes everything it borrows its own. When riding the highly advanced trains in Japan, one still has to pay attention to very traditional manners. The constitutional democracy is still influenced by an emperor (though I personally wouldn’t call it a constitutional monarchy because of how limited the emperor’s power is). Japan has embraced secularism, but it still celebrates Shinto festivals that involve sacred objects and reverence towards kami. Most family homes have Buddhist altars and engage in ancestor worship. One of the fascinating things about Japan is its embrace of the modern world and its traditions at the same time.

Not only are kami (gods, deities, deified humans, spirits, etc.) able to be killed in Shinto and Buddhism, Japan is itself wondering just what to do with kami at all. One may see the culture as living a dual life, acting as if they believe in kami without actually believing in them. The Japanese are not, however, just going through the motions. They attach great meaning to Shinto and Buddhist ceremonies. I once tried to take a photograph of a graveyard, and the two Japanese college students I was with swatted my camera down, saying that I would be haunted if I took the picture. When ground is being laid for a new building, a Shinto priest often comes to bless the land. In this, and more, the Japanese aren’t being insincere; they live in a world where spiritual thinking and rationality are not as separate as they are in the Western world.

Japanese culture continues to engage, however, with a world that has separated religion and rationality, and without a strong theology of the mind (such as found in some Christian denominations like Anglicanism and Lutheranism, among others), the ideas of a modern, secular world and a traditional world that is at best still “enchanted” or, at worst, simply superstitious will fall into conflict. Japan is creating this “theology” or “philosophy” as we speak, and one of the places where this discussion is happening is in video games. This discussion, however, is highly varied, engaging in various perspectives and coming to a variety of conclusions, if they come to a conclusion at all.

Gods are people, too!

In Japanese religion, people can become kami. The first Tokugawa shogun was deified and enshrined at Nikko (which is a quick train ride from Tokyo and very beautiful). The “patron kami” of education, learning, and academics is Tenjin, who was once a man named Sugawara no Michizane who lived in the late 9th century. So yes, if a person can be made a kami, then they can also be killed. The difference between human and kami is not a wide as it is in Western religions.

There are a number of these human-turned-kami in JRPGs, perhaps the most well-known being Kefka in Final Fantasy VI (1994). Yes, Kefka can destroy the world and split apart continents with his ray of light, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t be killed. The protagonists can become as powerful as he is through the same method he himself gained power: namely through the use of magicite, which are crystalized kami. Kefka may have clothed himself to look much like a medieval, Christian angel, but just putting on a costume doesn’t make one a god. He can still be defeated.

But does killing Kefka matter to the natural workings of the world? In a way, yes, because he is so antagonistic against nature, but in another way, no, because Kefka does not support the world itself. Again, in the West, the Christian God is seen as not only creating the world but also supporting it. If God were to be killed, the world itself would disappear. This isn’t a problem for the world of Final Fantasy VI itself, but it is a problem for magic, because Kefka has usurped the role of the three deities of magic. The question the game poses, then, is not “what will happen to the world when Kefka dies” but “what will happen to magic?” And, more personally, what will happen to Terra, who herself is half esper (or kami).

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (2003) take this a step further. In a wild and controversial twist, the protagonists (the main character himself named “Fayt Leingod”) discover that their entire universe is actually a game created by a man named Luther for nothing other than entertainment. The protagonists defeat Luther and destroy the system running the game, but they find that they themselves, and the world around them, don’t disappear. This is because, as the characters surmise, their own thinking about the world is keeping the world alive. The theology here is a bit wonky: humans, no matter how powerful, cannot think about all of the universe at once, and so it may be that the green field and forest surrounding the characters in the final scenes are the only places that really exist anymore. Whatever the case, Luther and the computer system he created act in the same way as the Christian God in supporting the world. Whether you accept or reject the fix that the game itself puts forward is up to you, though it is notable that every Star Ocean game after Till the End of Time has been set in the past.

Valkyrie Profile 2 (2006) takes this idea a step further. In this game, Odin is controls all existence connected with the world tree Yggdrasil. He is a god, though he was not always in his role, and after the first game in the series (or a knowledge of Norse mythology), we know that Odin’s position is tentative. We see just how tentative it is when a member of the party, Lezard Valeth, who is human, kills him and steals his objects of divine power. Lezard is a powerful mage but is able to kill Odin more through trickery than anything else (though it is true that he is “no mere mage” as he claims!). With his new-found power (again, most of which are tied to the divine items that he possesses), Lezard constructs his own world tree, which the player sees being created as they progress through the final dungeon. When Lezard is eventually defeated, the world needs a ruler; it cannot go forward without someone at the reins. Another party member, who is an elf, takes this position, and although this character was created to be a “back-up” vessel for Odin, he was still otherwise mortal before gaining his powers. All of this makes the role of divine “king” or “leader” as something that can be claimed. Again, this makes complete sense in Japan with its understanding of kami, though can be quite surprising from a Western standpoint.

We don’t need that kinda stuff anymore

One of the simplest narrative found in the “killing god” motif is that people no longer need gods in the world. An older example of this narrative is found in Breath of Fire IV (2000), where gods (or dragons) that are summoned to the world are deemed as no longer necessary for humanity to continue in prosperity. The game’s main question is whether humans are good or evil, and when Ryu and his companions face off against the end boss, Fou-lu, they remember and discuss the various people who have helped them and those who have committed atrocities. As is often the case in this type of game, the protagonists note the quiet, thoughtful, joyful moments and see them as more numerous and more powerful than the murder and genocide that they have also witnessed. This discussion can only be decided by battle, which, granted, seems to suggest that physical violence is a more powerful tool of discernment than open discussion and thoughtful contemplation, but Breath of Fire IV is a game and there needs to be an end boss. When the protagonists win, Fou-lu recognizes their power of will and agrees to rid the world of gods, who are no longer necessary, rather than destroy humanity.

This “power of will” is at the heart of Final Fantasy XVI (2023) as well. As in Valkyrie Profile 2, humans become strong enough to challenge their creator, though here the creator, Ultima, created humanity and the universe and then stepped back. Ultima does not sustain the world, but only created it and designed it for a specific purpose (namely, to gain enough mana in order to remake it “in his own image.” What does this mean, though, “in his own image?” The phrase is a reference to the Judeo-Christian creation story, but instead of explaining the intimate connection between God and humanity, the phrase as used in the game means the opposite: Ultima cares more about his will than any other. In fact, while Ultima was sleeping through the ages, humanity developed their own free will. It is this free will, not the power of the sword or magic, that Clive ends up using as his “weapon” to defeat his creator. Becoming a god or deity, therefore, is the same as having a free will and being in charge of one’s own destiny (Clive also uses his strength and magic to defeat Ultima, of course, as this is still a game, though the last blow is a gruesome and tasteless punch in the face that is more goofy than cool). If gods control the world, as in this game and others like Valkyrie Profile 2 and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, then all one needs to do is to become like those gods in order to determine one’s destiny and cast off the influence of one’s creators.

Games are for kids, but not just for kids

This all can seem rather juvenile, especially punching god in the face. We have to remember that Japanese games are developed primarily for younger audience, and even so-called “mature” games like Final Fantasy XVI do not have mature adults as their primary gaming audience. Many JRPGs narrate the important moment of social and personal development where a young person breaks from a childish and unconsidered following of their tradition of audience and accepts their role in society with their conscious wills. Part of this narration is a rupture with the controlling authority, be that one’s parents, one’s society, one’s religion, or even one’s personal understanding of who they are as a person. Not all late-teens rebel as much as Americans pretend they have to, but the accepting one’s place in society often requires a critical look at that society. This development also makes for great stories, as attested by our modern cultures but also traditional cultures as well. The “dying god” motif is, in the end, a pretty prolific narrative across time and cultures; it’s just that many traditional cultures narrate the rebuilding and reintegration into society as well.

As discussed at the beginning of this article, Japan is in a particularly difficult and yet still exciting place. The culture is caught between their own culture, which is highly traditional, and modern culture, in which everything needs to be new and progressive. Japan is rebelling even as it embraces. And one of the important things that Japanese culture is rebelling against is the idea that their emperor is a living god. Before World War II, the Japanese emperor was thought to be the direct descendant of Amaterasu, the sun goddess in Shinto mythology. This gave the emperor an important role in Japanese society throughout history, either as a leader or, when the shoguns or other important families took over, as the chief priest of the nation - and so never as a mere figurehead. When the United States defeated Japan in World War II, they demanded that the emperor admit he was mortal, which Hirohito, the Showa emperor of the time, did. What happens to a culture, though, when a god says that he is not a god? Do they just blindly accept his word? And even if they do, doesn’t that mean that his word still holds extreme authority equal to that of a god?

A lot of the struggles against gods and kami that we see in JRPGs is a working out of what it means to no longer be ruled by a living god on earth. In a way, Japanese culture needs to kill their god again and again and again, not because they think it’s fun, but because traditional culture still sees Shinto, and therefore the emperor of Japan, as important and powerful. This narrative has become part of Japan’s cultural mythology, if we understand myths as stories cultures tell themselves about who they are. We are witnessing that mythology, which is a mythology of change without any clear end result decided, in the various ways that JRPGs treat gods in their story. And the games will continue to tell these stories until Japanese culture figures out whether to completely embrace a spiritual view of reality or cast it away - or, more likely, given Japanese historical tendencies towards syncretism, the culture will find a both/and solution instead of an either/or one.

We can already see part of this process of syncretism working itself out in games like Tales of Berseria (2016). Now, Berseria certainly embraces the idea that we must rebel against authority and decide our own destiny, but the ending shows that such a way of being necessitates sacrifice. After the final battle, Velvet joins with her brother Laphicet in a loving, eternal embrace that sees their duality merged into a sort of godhead. It seems to me that Velvet here finally learns humility and uses her free will to give herself up for the salvation of the world (to use a Western phrase). Rational secularism is therefore joined with a unity with one’s creator deity, accepting both with classic Japanese syncretism. Is this the norm in JRPGs? Not at all, but it does show that Japanese culture is, in some part, accepting both its traditional ideas and modernism in a mysterious connection that brings forth healing, not strife.

There’s a great scene, unfortunately deleted, in the 2001 film The Fellowship of the Ring where Aragorn goes to visit his mother’s grave. She was buried in Rivendell, a haven of the elves, who are immortal. The grave is marked by a stone with carved letters and a statue, and all are covered with branches and dead leaves. The carved letters are full of moss. Aragorn pulls out the moss, wipes away the leaves, and pulls back the branches in a very beautiful, reverential way. The sense I get from the scene is that Aragorn is lovingly washing his mother’s grave, which has been otherwise ignored by the elves, who do not think about death in the same way.

Nor do they, because maybe the elves left the grave to become part of nature on purpose. Why keep a grave pristine, which sets it apart from the forest and the landscape? Perhaps letting the leaves and dirt remain is also a way to give reverence to the dead and see them as a continuing part of the world? If so, then we in the West are closer to Aragorn, and the Japanese are closer to what I’m suggesting about the elves.

There’s a lot to say about this, and I have to keep myself from getting pulled into a long discussion of how we see nature in the Western world (and how my own religion, Christianity, has both helped and hindered us in respecting nature). I also have to mention a huge caveat to this image of the Japanese. There’s not much of what we in the West would call “nature” in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Many neighborhoods are crowded houses linked by concrete roads and without many trees or rivers. When I lived there, I remembered seeing a grassy field once. Once. It was in Shikoku, the smallest and perhaps the most rural of the four Japanese islands (though Hokkaido is also rather rural, too). And it was very, very small.

Japan has a deep connection to its land, especially through the religion of Shinto, and this has a direct influence on how Japanese artists construct imaginative worlds, but, from the outset, we can’t idealize the Japanese viewpoint just as much as we can’t damn the Western one. Cultures are complex, and they’re often contradictory. I lived in rural Shiga prefecture on the banks of Lake Biwa. A friend lived in the concrete jungle of Osaka. We both experienced Japanese views of nature, both the good and the bad, in these very different landscapes. Neither one is more “valid” than the other. Both are constructs of Japanese culture, and both construct how the Japanese understand and create “nature.”

Walking and looking, sitting and looking

In the history of Japanese literature, there is a fascinating duality with how the things of nature are viewed. On the one hand, poets like Basho sit beside or among nature and compose poetry. There is a tradition of poetry contests under the moon, or in groves of cherry trees, or beside a river. Japanese poets speak of the different sights of nature and the seasons, from the cherry blossoms in the spring to the sounds of deer in the forest in the autumn.

You can’t really get away from nature, either. Japan is about 70% mountainous, and much of the rest is farmed (or it was before big cities). Any form of art was done cheek-to-jowl with nature. A friend of mine, after our first year in rural Japan, said that he had a new appreciation for nature, because Japanese houses are much more open to the natural world coming in. I’ve heard it said that Japanese houses are traditionally made for comfort in the summer more than in the winter; walls are thinner, doors open more easily, and people go outside more than here in the United States.

This reflection on and closeness with nature was codified by a 10th century poet named Ki no Tsurayuki. In his preface to the Kokinshu, he wrote the following:

The poetry of Japan takes the human heart as seed and flourishes in the countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interest of so many kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds coming to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog that lives in the waters—is there any living thing not given to song? It is poetry which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women, calms the hearts of fierce warriors. (quoted from The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, ed. Miner, Odagiri, Morrell, pg. 6)

Not only is nature reflected on by the eye, ear, and heart, but nature is the means of reflecting on life and explaining what that reflection means. Human and nature (the water, the frog, the warbler, the blossoms) are connected, not as categories in a hierarchy of being or scientific classes, but by their means of expressing their innermost selves. Even the character for “word” itself, 言葉 kotoba, uses the character for “speech” and “leaf.” Nature is in us, and we sing forth like nature, too.

So Tsurayuki and Basho sit and look and listen, but they also move through nature. Tsurayuki wrote the first Japanese travel diary (and interestingly from the perspective of a woman), and Basho composed many of his famous haiku while on walking tours throughout Japan. Movement through a place is an important component of the Japanese poetic sensibilities.

At first blush, this division between a singular, stable view of nature and that of a movement through nature seems obvious. The difference, however, is critical. Think about moving through a forest on a trail. Your perspective is constantly shifting, you see trunks and branches from multiple angles, what is in the distance rises up to your feet - and all of it in incremental moments. You don’t take a snapshot of the forest, step forward a few times, then take another snapshot; each second and millisecond is another view of the forest that the brain puts together in a single, fluid continuum.

Things take on a life of their own in this movement. They become three dimensional. But most importantly, there is an inherent narrative in movement. You know the of a tree of something when you’ve walked around it. You see its character not just from the position of where your feet are but from all around it. And it is this narrative of the single moment that Japanese poets try to capture in their poems. The famous Basho poem, translated here by R.H. Blyth, speaks of this narrative:

The old pond;
A frog jumps in —
The sound of the water.

There is movement here, there is a story. You’re supposed to (I think) see the movement of the frog, not the single image of the frog, as it leaps into the water, which itself is moving with the sound. One of the many interpretations of the poem is that it tells about the moment of enlightenment gained while gazing upon nature. The sound of the water - splash - is the movement from one type of understanding to another. And it is the movement that is important.

That’s not to say that the stable image is bad. You may need to sit for a while to see the movement of the frog. Or the tree must remain still as you walk around it. The Japanese idiom ichi go ichi e can be understood as treasuring the unique eternity within a single moment. Here, again, is the singular (the moment) and the narrative movement (the eternal) all wrapped up into one.

The best fantasies have maps

What, though, does all this have to do with fantasy? Here I have to turn to video games, manga, and anime. Very little Japanese fantasy literature (at least that I’ve come across) is accompanied by a map in the front or back of the book. This isn’t the case with Western fantasy literature, which draws from J.R.R. Tolkien’s love of maps, though games, anime, and manga seem to borrow more from the Tolkienian tradition.

Any JRPG fan will understand what I mean when I say that a big part of the genre is about maps. Early games had world maps that the player could explore, and modern games have large fields with hidden treasures or monsters. Interestingly, many open world RPGs fill these fields not only with treasures but with special areas of particular beautify. Most recently, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth has mako points hidden in land that is often drained of its natural beauty. These areas are a breath of fresh air as players explore often hellish landscapes. They are “singular meetings” within the “eternity” of the landscapes broad movement. They are the stable point within motion.

Many JRPGs detail the player’s interaction, through the characters, with the natural world around them. Some games, like Jade Cocoon (1998), make the world too large and mysterious for the player to full explore; others, like Final Fantasy VI (1994), VII (1997), and XVI (2023) explore ruined landscapes almost completely devoid of nature. The former games ask the player to enter into something larger than themselves, eliciting awe, while the latter games drive the player to fight against what is destroying nature. In both cases, nature is something important and that grants wisdom.

The cases of Final Fantasy VI and VII and wisdom is particularly interesting. Aeris (yes, I still call her Aeris) has a light-hearted, joyful, and kind personality that is too much for the slums of Midgar, and at Cosmo Canyon the party learns about what the natural world can teach them about themselves and their ultimate fate. Both Aeris and Cosmo Canyon represent the “wisdom” that the natural world represents (or better yet, what is communicates).

Final Fantasy VI is a little less obvious, except if you consider Espers to be similar to kami, which are not supernatural beings but more natural beings. They cast magic, yes, but magic is elemental. It’s part of the world itself. It is natural, which is why it is intrinsic to the Espers. The events that happen in the middle of the game, and how they anxiety they produce for the rest of the game, question whether the natural world can exist without magic and Espers. What if only humanity is left? Can the world truly move forward, or will it die?

Pausing without hitting start

There’s a lot to say about the Xeno series and nature, but the publicity images for the first Xenoblade Chronicles characterizes the main character, Shulk, as a contemplative figure. In many of these images, he is looking out on an otherworldly landscape. You only see the back of his head, not his features, so it is up to the player to determine what he thinks of all this. Or, rather, the otherwise “blank” gaze of Shulk becomes our gaze. We are drawn into the scene and pause to look at the landscape with Shulk. Our vision becomes his vision. Our reaction becomes his reaction (see Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog for a Western, Romantic example of this same device).

I’m often struck by the level of detail in modern games. If we run straight through areas, without pausing, we could miss a sight that a programmer spent hours on rendering. I played Final Fantasy XVI during the day when I was off and the kids were at school, and my television is directly across from a window. XVI is a pretty dimly lit game, and I know I missed a lot of it because of the glare from the window. And indeed I did miss these details. I missed an important part of the game that is the filling of the world around the characters. Looking at the landscape to the Clive’s left and right and at the tiny items on the bottom of the shelves is integral to getting the most out of games.

I personally miss games with turn-based battle systems not just because I’m nostalgic (that’s definitely part of the reason…), but also because they allow the player time to stop and take everything in. The player can pause and think about what to do next, but they can also listen to the music, ponder what the characters are thinking, reflect on the plot, and look at the background. Action RPGs and even Final Fantasy’s active time battle system push the player to keep moving, and while I’ve learned to really enjoy this pace, I also still enjoy the demand to slow down and drink the game in.

That’s not to say there aren’t times in modern games that call for the player to pause and appreciate the created world. Developers create life-like characters, but they also create worlds for the characters to move around in. Nature is not something to simply utilize as an open field, however - remember, we’re in worlds created by Japanese with a Japanese sense of the natural world. Stop and look at the mountains. Look at the forests and the sloping plains. Watch the grass move. There is wisdom in doing so.

But what is this wisdom? What is the wisdom of Aeris’ innocence and joy in Final Fantasy VII? Of the Lifestream? Why is playing in Midgar so painful? Or what of the Espers with their magic in FFVI? Why is the wild west setting so important for Wild Arms? Why are Mana games so colorful? And why is each region of Octopath Traveler (1, 2, and 0) so tightly bound with each character? What do we learn from pausing and gazing at the landscape?

There is something that we are taught in nature, and sometimes we can put words to it. Forests are older than we are. Sometimes they’re ancient. I’ve walked in the forests of the northeast of the US and stood beneath the towering redwoods of the west. I’ve stood with Shulk and looked at Satorl Marsh. I’ve climbed through the jagged cliffs of Nibelheim with Cloud. I’ve climbed the End of the World with Justin, Sue, and Feena. And so have you. That experience taught us something when we played these games back in the 90s and 00s and 10s. They still teach us something today. And what is that something? I can’t tell you, I can only show you, because it’s more than words can contain. The landscape teaches us about ourselves, our relationships with others, our ultimate destiny and the power of individual moments. They lead us towards a path of enlightenment, just as Basho’s frog does. And all of this because we’ve stopped, and waited, and looked.

I really like this story. It’s funny, sweet, a bit heartwarming, and very, very interesting in terms of Japanese culture. Kawakami is a fantastic author, writing both realistic fiction and fantasy, the latter being much more about vague senses and dream worlds than elves and dragons and magic. I definitely recommend her novel Manazuru and her collection of stories Dragon Palace, though many people seem to really like Stranger Weather in Tokyo (センセイの鞄, Sensei’s Briefcase in its original Japanese) the best. Many of her works have won awards, Kamisama included. I found most of her books at my local Barnes & Nobel, which is nice and convenient if you want to take a peak at her style, but her books are also readily available elsewhere.

But is this bear a god? My Japanese isn’t really up to part to quibble with professional translators, but I think this is an important question that we often get wrong. Before I even get to the translation of a highly enculturated word, we should ourselves quibble over the question of god versus God.

God, deity, gods, god, kami, kamisama, etc., etc.

A trip to the extremely useful etymonline.com (click here for the entry on god) finds that the word “god” has a common definition among English’s sister languages in the Germanic language family. It is, unfortunately, of uncertain origin, which means that historical linguists are not certain what word “god” came from before it appeared in written sources. This is often because a word does not have many (or any) clear analogues in other languages, or that it has many potential analogues and linguists haven’t yet agreed on which it is.

There are two possibilities, at least as given on etymonline.com (which is a pretty good source). First, it could share a root with Sanskrit and Old Church Slavonic words meaning “to invoke.” In other words, a god is something or someone you call upon for a certain need or to serve a certain function. Second, it could come from a similar root as Greek words meaning “to pour,” suggesting that “god” is connected to pouring out a libation (an act of worship and sacrifice) or to the pouring of soil on a grave (a prayer for or an act of worship for the dead). There is no connection, so the authors insist, to the adjective “good,” so the modern phrase “God is good” is not actually linguistically accurate.

Therefore, at least linguistically, a “god” in the West is something that a person calls upon for a certain function, worships, sacrifices to, or is connected with the dead. All are possible, but (again, in the West) all are functions of gods in Western cultures. In the European cultures that I’m most familiar with (i.e. English, Nordic, and Celtic), these are certainly how people act towards pagan gods: they’re generally feared as more powerful than humanity, serve agrarian and weather-related functions, and are prayed to so that they might grant a person’s (or, more usually, a community’s) needs or requests.

In English, we distinguish general deities “gods” with the Judeo-Christian creator “God” by the use of a capital. God is similar in that he listens to prayers and is feared/respected as more powerful than humanity, but God is also the creator of the universe. This creative function is made more complicated in the Christian understanding of the universe in that Jesus, as an incarnation (not, though an avatar or manifestation) of the ineffable, inaccessible creator deity, brings creative functions to a person and community in a highly personal way.

Turning to the Japanese, I unfortunately don’t have a great Japanese etymological dictionary. I’ve found some, but they’re in Japanese, and my language abilities aren’t yet good enough to dig into technical Japanese. We’ll have to stay with patterns of translation.

At least from what I’ve seen, kami is often translated as “god” and kamisama, which contains the reverential suffix -sama, is translated as “God.” I’m not certain what a Japanese person would think of when they see kami versus kamisama, but at least in the case of Kawakami, a kamisama can be a bear who gives people noodles and who sits by the riverbank. And while I think that it may help our understanding of Jesus to see him doing the same thing, though in a 1st century AD Jewish context, a bear taking a walk is hardly the same as a creator deity who thinks the world into being and judges the souls of ever person to have lived and died on this planet Earth (and maybe aliens, too, if there are any).

Because some people don’t read footnotes

Should translators just give up “gods” and “God” as translations for kami and kamisama, then? Certainly, definitely, yes, yes, yes, but also no, not at all.

First, kami are pretty different from Western gods to begin with, and they’re certainly different than the Judeo-Christian God. We Westerners might think of kami as “spiritual entities,” but in a way they’re actually often physical - and sometimes more physical than we humans are. There are certainly “spiritual” kami, and some of the oldest literature in Japan records kami creating the world or especially the Japanese islands. The story of Izanagi and Izanami is in one way like many creation myths in that the eye of a kami becomes the sun, but it’s also like the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, complete with the journey to the underworld and the injunction to not look back at one’s deceased spouse when rescuing her from death.

Most kami, however, are not creator deities but are pretty common, everyday beings. Inari, the kami who governs rice, harvests, and commerce, has shrines all over Japan. These shrines often have long “tunnels” of red-orange gates that are pretty stunning. That said, I also saw a smaller version of these gates strapped to a telephone pole in a common suburb. When I asked about it, a Japanese friend told me that it was put there because drunk people often pee on that pole and that the symbol of Inari (which is a symbol of a passage to the otherworld) gives people pause, even when they’re drunk, to maybe hold it until they get home. Imagine putting a cross somewhere similar.

Kami can also be people. Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa shogun, has been “deified” (or kami-fied) and enshrined at Nikko, a magnificent complex built among towering conifers just a short trip from Tokyo (if you’re ever in Tokyo, make sure to spend a day at Nikko. It’s amazing). It’s not, though, that Tokugawa became more “spiritual,” though people do pray to him for their needs. This is Western thinking: we assume that anything “more” than human is “spiritual.” Jesus is actually a help here, at least in part. It’s often said among Christians that there has only been one true human being in the world, and that was Jesus of Nazareth. One might say that Tokugawa Ieyasu is “more human” than other humans, though parting from Christianity, other people can be “more human” as well.

The thing is, Shinto (which means “the way of the kami”) is a very physical religion. Buddhism, Japan’s other major religion, deals with death and the otherworldly, while Shinto deals with the things of this world. In fact, this is some of the reason why both Shinto and Buddhism have been able to coexist (kinda-sorta) in Japanese religious history for so long. As long as politics doesn’t get involved (and it normally does, unfortunately), the two religions have separate spheres of concern and influence. Shinto shrines are build in forests and on mountains, not because these places are somehow closer to Heaven, but because forests and mountains are holy places in and of themselves. “Holy” doesn’t mean “connected to an otherworldly source of power” but “is a place of power.”

This is a pretty different idea of gods and the holy than held in the West. It’s probably hardest for Protestant Christians, though even among more liturgical Christians with the holiness of an Altar or the Eucharist, it still is something to wrap one’s head around. Muslims may understand it through the way they understand Mecca or the Dome of the Rock, but even still, from what I understand about Islam, these places are powerful for their connection to Allah, not because they hold power in themselves (though I might be wrong here). Western culture has gone so far as to embrace the mundane and the physical, so much so that the culture as a whole has left religion behind and embraced a scientific viewpoint as a completive explanation (though science is an investigative method, not a set viewpoint).

It’s hard to wrap the head around this idea of physical holiness. I’m a Christian, and I feel like I always want to spiritualize everything. My atheist friends want to unspiritualize everything. We Westerners have trouble with localizing power within a physical thing. Actually, the 20th century Christian commentator and apologist C.S. Lewis is helpful here. In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis describes the power of giving thanks for something in the enjoyment of it. A Christian ought not step back from a beautiful thing, Lewis writes, in order to thank God for it’s presence in one’s life, but one must simply adore it and in adoring it address God emotively. It’s like watching your kid play with toys or try to figure out a puzzle, and we parents standing off in case we’re needed but also simply loving the sight of our children thinking and learning to think. I wonder if watching sports (or playing them) is something similar. I think enjoying birdsong in the spring is certainly this kind of adoration. We don’t look past the birdsong or the child to something “more real,” but instead see the virtue in the birdsong or in the child.

Although it’s from a Buddhist, not a Shinto, perspective, I’ve found the short talk by monk Suzuki Shunryu very helpful (click here for the video). “Noise,” for Suzuki, is just random sounds, while “sound” is “more real.” Indeed, it is so real that we can become that sound and enter more fully into the world.

Does Middle Earth have gods; does Final Fantasy have kami?

That’s…a lot. The section above is just a cursory glance at what God and gods are in Western culture and what kami are in Japan, and it’s already more than what could be put in a footnote in a book or manga or as a sub- or super-title on screen. Like many enculturated words, you lose something when you translate a word or concept, and you can’t really expect someone enjoying a book or movie to stop short and read a chapter on what a single word means. I tend to like learning more about individual words in different languages, because then I feel like I understand a fictive world better. I have a friend, though, who despises footnotes, because, for him, they interrupt his reading and break immersion. My response was, “Dude, just ignore them,” but he said that even the presence of a footnote on the bottom of the page is so annoying that he has to read it. He has to break immersion. Not everyone is as persnickety as my friend, but I understand the frustration.

It’s a translator’s dilemma, of course: how much should a translate inhabit the original language and culture, and how much should it inhabit the reader’s world. Again, I read books from non-English cultures, because I like getting away from my own culture, but not everyone feels the same way. Kawakami’s Kamisama does the work itself by having such a character so unlike a Western deity that the translation “God” challenges how the reader interprets the word, but what about in a fantastic world? If kami are so particular to Shinto and Japanese culture, how can the word be used in a world where neither Shinto nor Japan exist?

Westerners have this problem, too. Our authors use the terms “gods” and “God” in worlds where paganism, Christianity, and Islam do not exist. Some authors just use the words and rely on their audience to understand that the idea of a god in our world translates to their created world. Others, like J.R.R. Tolkien, tries to avoid the use of “god” and instead uses the name “Valar” to refer to creative spirits akin to angels. Tolkien’s analogue to the Christian God (remember, Tolkien was a Roman Catholic) is named Illuvatar and referred to as “the One,” and never, to my knowledge, as “God.” Not everyone has the skills in making mythology as Tolkien, but not all readers are patient or interested enough in the minutiea of translating Elvish into modern, British English.

A word immediately invokes a culture. This may not seem to be all that problematic with a word like “tree” or “ book,” but what about the different names for a long sandwich? Hoagie, sub(marine), po boy, hero, or torpedo are all different ways to refer to this type of sandwich, and while I use some of them (hoagie, sub), I would never, ever call them po boys or heroes. Similarly, although I would love to find a gender-neutral alternative to “you guys,” I just can’t embrace “ya’ll” because it sounds so southern to me - and I’m from New Jersey. Americans use “bloody” when they want to sound British, but in Britain, the word is a swear. Using these terms immediately invokes that culture to which they belong.

If a fantasy writer is good, and they’re writing in a world that isn’t connected in some way to our world, then certain terms of speech shouldn’t exist. An elf shouldn’t refer to the leaning Tower of Pisa or quote Shakespeare in saying “All the world is a stage.” Maybe I’m being a purist here, but if a Bagaltan living on the moon of Zelerbub is eating a Big Mac, then we’re either in a satire or the world is poorly conceived.

So then, at the end of the day, how do we translate kami. I personally prefer to keep the word in the Japanese and hope that the reader looks up the word themselves. Keeping the dictionary or wikipedia open when reading a fantasy novel isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but I would encourage people reading in other cultures to have a curiosity in the culture that they’re reading. Stories can be so much more rich if we know about where the author is coming from. And in a world without gods or kami or hamburgers, well, the sky’s the limit.

For I time, I was in the camp of gamers that looked down on recent entries in the Final Fantasy series. Not that they weren’t fun (I actually had a good time playing XIII, at least when it wasn’t preachy), but that they had parted in some important way that made Final Fantasy games Final Fantasy games. On the one hand, I have a lot of nostalgia for the earlier games of the series. I think most of them still hold up really well, as long as you can get past some tough loading time, and Square Enix seems to have made a conscious decision to change things up. Modern Final Fantasy games aren’t like old Final Fantasy games, and so I don’t like them as much. On a good day, that’s called preference; on a bad day, that’s called prejudice. For most of us who complain that the old is dead and gone, it’s prejudice.

Luckily, a $20 pricemark at a local gaming store helped me get over that prejudice, and I gave Final Fantasy XVI a chance. I found I liked it quite a bit (again, when it doesn’t get preachy, which it does a lot), and that it isn’t as grim and dark as it was pretending to be. It is certainly bloody, but you can have blood without the grimness. The thing is, all of Clive’s friends are really good-hearted souls who turn into a family. People tear up. They talk about their dreams. They get starry-eyed. The plot gets pretty heavy-handed at the end, but again, when Clive and his friends aren’t playing the grim, brooding type, they’re having a great time with one another and bearing their souls.

While playing the game, though, I started wondering what it really means to be a Final Fantasy game. I realized that what I was looking for was emotional connection in a particular way, connection that moved me with a very specific type of music, character, plot, and world. It’s unfair to expect modern games to do the exact same thing that their predecessor did. The people who made these modern games are not the same as those who made those on the SNES and PS1. And I’m just one player. Who says that my emotional connection to Terra or Yuna is the emotional connection I should have for Lightning or Jill?

That said, the game is called Final Fantasy, and it therefore claims some connection to the past entries. But what connection is that? What does legacy look like in video games? What does it look like in the modern world, and more specifically, what does it look like in Japan, where this game was created, and for the Japanese, for whom this game was primarily created?

How much is a game beholden to its past entries?

Final Fantasy is pretty special in having sixteen entries. Most RPG series barely get up to five or six. Dragon Quest has eleven mainline entries, but Yuji Horii, who helmed each game, has a very different answer to what it means to have a legacy. Series like Suikoden, Wild Arms, Star Ocean have similar trajectories: the first or second game is the pinnacle, the third and fourth game try and change things up, then there’s a fifth game that tries really hard to recapture the atmosphere of the original games but doesn’t quite make it. Then the series heads to handheld systems and dies (all except Star Ocean, which keeps on trying and trying and just not getting it right). Later games in these series try to tap into their legacy, but the historical or creative moment is gone, and the creators either try too hard or else don’t try hard enough. Or just try in the wrong way.

Some series (again, like Dragon Quest) are able to push past this legacy-barrier. The first three Dragon Quest games built on each other, until the third game, which was a kind of culmination of everything that made the series great. The fourth game was a bit experimental, but still worked really well, and the fifth game is the sort of heart of the series. Subsequent games continued the legacy until Dragon Quest IX and X, which either turned the system on their head or else went online in Japan only. Somehow, Dragon Quest XI was able to mix the best of its legacy with modern expectations and is a great game. At least for Dragon Quest, getting past the legacy-barrier was to keep on making quality games, experimenting just enough to keep things interesting.

Pokemon and Atelier games, and others like them, work the same way: each is just a little bit different than the one before it. Tales games also change slightly from entry to entry, though the series is sustained mostly by its fantastic characters. Then there are games that continually change, such as those in the Mega Man franchise. Capcom produces game after game until the series feels old and tired, but then, at just the right moment, reinvents the series into Mega Man X, or Mega Man Zero, Battle Network, or Star Force. Mega Man continues as a series, then, by hiding its changes behind new settings and sometimes drastically differently play styles.

Then there is the Xeno series. Xeno games differ from other series, because the same creator, Takahashi Tetsuya, keeps trying to explore his vision on hardware or in styles that don’t do that vision justice. Xenogears is an amazing game, but it’s clearly held back by the Playstation as a machine. It was also held back by time and money constraints (and, from what I have read, constraints on the experience of his team, who Takahashi had to train up from scratch). The Xenosaga games are more like movies than games, which is great if you like the story, but it’s a slog if you don’t find Shion, KOS-MOS, and their companions all that compelling. In Xenosaga III, Takahashi was finally able to combine a great story with its lore and a great game, but I wonder how many players were able to get through the first game, with its long cut-scenes, and the second game, with its lack of dungeons and its odd character graphics. Xenoblade games were much more successful, as Takahashi found a balance between deep and heady lore with really fun gameplay.

So does the Xeno series pay homage to its legacy? I think it does, even though -gears, -saga, and -blade are such different subseries. That legacy, though, is planted firmly in the mind of Takahashi Tetsuya and his continued drive to get his vision right. Think about the relationship between Fei and Elly (or Lacan and Sofia) in Xenogears and Noah and Mio in Xenoblade III. There are clear narrative parallels, but also major differences. Fei, Lacan, and Noah are very different characters, and they make very different choices; so are Elly, Sofia, and Mio. These characters are not reworkings of one another but different iterations of the same, basic themes. Takahashi has been able to explore his vision in a variety of ways, so that he can reference prior games without making his new games just simple, cookie-cutter updates of games that already had their time in the spotlight.

The Final Fantasy legacy - if it has one

As I said above, Final Fantasy is different in that it has so many entries, but it also has diverse groups of people working on them. The creators have tried to continue the themes of Final Fantasy through each entry, so that there are shared ecological questions in VII and XVI, political questions about militaristic empire in VI and XVI or religious empire, in XIII and again in XVI. As in the Xeno games, we think about these themes differently in their different contexts. VII’s ecological questions (and, for that matter, those in VI as well) concern how humanity can damage the planet beyond its ability to heal itself, while in XVI, the ecological problem is the impetus for the quest but also has its root in more divine machinations. We learn about how to challenge problems made by humans and those that we inherit in the variety of perspectives. I think that the different representations of love in the series is particularly broad and poignant; think about Terra in VI, Squall and Rinoa in VIII, Sazh and his son in XIII, and Clive and his brother in XVI. Love is not purely romantic, but all forms of love presented lead to a character’s growth and become the foundation of their ability to face adversity.

These are themes in the plot, world, and characters, but what about the actual gameplay? Sure there is magic and eikons/espers/summons, there are Active Time Battle bars, characters gain experience and, often, ability points, and the player faces off against multiple waves of small groups of enemies and singular bosses instead of whole armies, but most of these exist in other series as well. Many people see Final Fantasy’s battle systems as being more about change than continuing a single style (as in other series which continue to hone a particular type of battle), but there are overlaps between each successive game, if not across the entire series. Some systems are tied more to characters (IV, VI, IX, X) while others are tied to the story (VIII, XIII). All use the job system to some extent, though in some games the jobs are open to all characters (V, to some extent XIII) while other games explore the jobs in individual characters. I think that XVI is interesting in that Clive is a kind of summoner but also a dark knight.

Does a game need to pay attention to its legacy?

Thinking about these connections, at least for me, makes the series more interesting. I like seeing patterns and exploring similarities and differences. I think the good, old practice of compare and contrast that most of us learned in school does a lot to dig up some of the meaning in a game - or a book, movie, or story of any kind. But does a game have to pay attention to the games that came before it? Is a game beholden to its legacy, or do creators have the freedom to do whatever they want.

Well, on the one hand, I don’t like thinking of game series as mere vehicles to sell more games. I think more people would buy Final Fantasy XVI than they would a game called Battle for Freedom or Clive the Fire God. Series that continue by tweaking a battle system or being set in the same world don’t have this problem, but Final Fantasy battle systems can be so different, and their worlds are rarely connected, that the very title Final Fantasy could be seen as a marketing tool to get more people to buy games. And certainly it has been used that way (companies want to make money, after all), but I think the games lean on each other more than just being one money grab after another.

In a way, a series of game is both a body of work and the body of work of a team’s successors. Think of it like a poet or any other artist. Basho wrote poetry and travel logs, publishing them under his name, even though they were rather different. His style developed, he used different types of poetry, he wrote some collections with his students or friends, and that single name - Basho - bound them all together. Think about the first five Final Fantasy games as the main poet, in this game, Sakaguchi Hironobu.

Then, after Basho had gained fame, he took on students. Some of those students wrote in Basho’s style, while some of them took his ideas about poetry and traveling and used it to develop their own styles. Final Fantasy VI to X represents the work of a student, in this case Kitase Yoshinori. Now, in most cases, the student never really rises to the level of the master, but I think in the case of Final Fantasy, Kitase directed game much better than Sakaguchi did. In Western fantasy, we might compare this to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who learned from George MacDonald but who were, in my opinion, considerably better authors than their teacher. That’s my opinion, at least.

So does Kitase owe anything to Sakaguchi? Does Tolkien owe anything to MacDonald? Did Basho’s students have to continue on their master’s style? Well, yes and no. Kitase and Tolkien are different people, and they have their own visions, ideas, and styles that may have been shaped by Sakaguchi and MacDonald, but are still distinct from their teachers or forbearers. I love Final Fantasy IV, but we wouldn’t have the revolution in gaming that was Final Fantasy VII if Kitase kept on making games like Sakaguchi. Final Fantasy could have continued up until the sixteenth entry if Sakaguchi’s style were the standard (look at Dragon Quest games), but the series may also have faltered like Wild Arms or Suikoden. Kudos to Kitase for parting from his forbearer.

That said, the past is not just a series of influences or lessons that we can take or leave. Our teachers have entrusted us with their wisdom, and it is our task to continue parts of that wisdom - note, parts of that wisdom. There are some things that our predecessors want to pass on that are not worthy to be continued. That’s a strong way of putting it, as if things like random battles or grinding is somehow not “worthy” or automatically “lesser” than our own modern ways (hey, maybe we’re wrong that grinding is a pain in the neck; maybe we’ve lost something in ignoring that part of our tradition). But think of it more broadly. Part of our legacy in the United States is the quest for freedom for all people, but part of our legacy is also slavery. Part of our past is democracy, but another part is empire. And those opposites - freedom and slavery, democracy and empire - are playing out in our world today. It’s our job in the United States to use our rational minds and the wisdom that we have learned both as growing communities but also from those who came before us to figure out which legacy to put aside and which legacy to carry on into the future. Games are the same.

We have been given many gifts, as people and as gamers. Some of those gifts are tremendously important. Some of those gifts bind us to terror and oppression. We can take or leave those gifts, but what we can’t do is ignore them. We can’t pretend that certain wars didn’t happen or that certain people groups were oppressed. We also can’t pretend that there wasn’t a time when you had to play battle after battle to be able to even go toe-to-toe with a boss encounter, or that the soundtrack to Chrono Trigger didn’t happen. You just can’t. These are parts of our history, however series or unserious they are. First, you can’t understand the present unless you have a firm and open understanding of the past, but the past also helps us appreciate the history of human endeavor. Final Fantasy XVI is better because VII made us consider how magic could bleed the world dry, or that love isn’t best explored between a man and a woman but by a woman and the children she’s sworn to protect. Final Fantasy’s legacy is a conversation that grows the more you know about it, and it deepens our understanding of the human condition the more games that join that conversation.

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The fantastic leads to an awesome life

That’s a pretty bold statement, I know, but it’s true. We read about the fantastic, the mythic, the strange, the completely-made-up, and we engage more fully with the world around us. I first encountered this idea when reading J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but I lived this idea when video games, anime, and manga brought me to Japan. After wandering the mountains and hills, walking through rice fields trying explain my faith to a Buddhist monk (who then told me about his beliefs), and traveling from tip to tip of the country, I then returned to my native United States to study what makes creativity work and why humans spend so much time inventing things that are completely untrue. These studies, specifically in medieval myths and legends about the source of creative inspiration, I was led to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. That’s a different story, to be told another time, but importantly for here, I was also led more deeply into the games that I loved as a kid and that I continued to play as I grew older, got married, and had kids. Japan, and the United States, and my family became more alive, because I believed fully in the power of these stories.

Wisdom is meant to be shared; otherwise, you turn into a dragon

I’ve done a lot of thinking about games, manga, and traditional Japanese literature - how they work, why they’re fun, what makes them so meaningful - but I’ve always wanted to share my thoughts and ideas with others. I also have a lot of questions. I experience stories a lot differently than others may. There are so few venues, however, to do that: to share and to talk. As a priest, I create places for people to talk about what means most to them. Here in this substack, I hope to explore my thoughts through writing them down, but also to prompt and encourage you all to think more deeply about the games they play.

Here’s an example

Think about it like this: what does it mean that the Final Fantasy series has sixteen entries? The games are connected only through lore, sometimes only through names. And yet the series has a legacy that it plays with. I just finished Final Fantasy XVI, and I saw a lot of continuing themes and others that were mirrored. There is a blighted landscape, like in FFVII, and a War of the Magi, as in FFVI. Clive, however, is a Dark Knight that does not redeem himself in the same way that Cecil did in Final Fantasy IV; Clive is no Paladin. There is also no real party, and the game is played mostly with Clive off alone with his dog. At first, I really didn’t like this paucity of party members, but as I played the game more and more, I realized that this gave Clive a sense of loneliness that isn’t as apparent as with other, similarly brooding protagonists like Cloud and Squall. Actually, it reminded me a lot of the first Dragon Quest, when it was just a single, silent protagonist and a sword against the entire army of the Dragon Lord. How odd is it, also, that game creators lead their players to feel lonely when many gamers often struggle with loneliness.

These are just a few observations and reflections, but they’re also topics that I want to explore here in this substack and with you who read my posts.

Observations and longer posts

I plan to write long posts for subscribers but also a lot of shorter reflections for free. I also play games daily (usually at least), and I hope to post ideas that pop into my head while I’m grinding or saving they world from another empire.

Don’t just read!

I don’t write just to send things out into the void. I’d love to hear your thoughts, your memories, and your experiences of these games and the Japanese fantasy off the screen, too.