How Final Fantasy VII radicalized a generation of climate warriors

In September 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released for the original Playstation in North America. The tie-breaker swapped the motif of swords and witchcraft and sunspot forests from the series for bombs and machine guns in a dark and rainy futuristic urban metropolis. It was a time before the the Lord of the Rings and Harry potter movies, a time when sci-fi and cyberpunk were all the rage and when the old heavy wizards and sword-wielding heroes of fantasy worlds reeked of the distant past (e.g. 1992).

While FFVII wasn’t the sequel I expected, eventually even SNES JRPG diehards like myself came to appreciate the change in style, as well as the breadth and ambition of what he was trying to do. ‘accomplish. No one had ever told such a big story on consoles, and moving away from 2D sprites to a (sort) 3D world was a huge technical step forward for RPGs and games in general.

Thanks to a corrupted 3rd party memory card, I was never able to beat the game on this original hardware. It wasn’t until this year that the Switch reissue (and the coronavirus lockdown) gave me the chance to breed chocobos, find KOTR materia, destroy JENOVA, and kill Sephiroth.

It was then that I discovered that, over 20 years after the initial release, FFVIIThe end still had the power to shock. Whatever I expected from the game’s conclusion, it wasn’t what I saw as the end of human life and civilization.

Play for the environment

The final scene takes place hundreds of years after the events of the Endgame, when Cloud and the gang are, presumably, very dead. We see a member of the Red XIII space group / coyote (whose species has lived for thousands of years) and his children roaming the ruins of the world’s forgotten and uninhabited metropolis, Midgar.

As nature reclaims the land and the coyotes frolic, no sign of human life is visible. It seems that humanity and all traces of its civilization have disappeared from the earth due to the invocation of METEOR.

It’s a shocking storytelling moment, especially compared to the endings of most ’90s video games. Hooray, you beat the game, kids! Plus, humanity has had a great race, hasn’t it?

But the ’90s saw environmental themes popping up everywhere in games. Niche games like Ecco the dolphin made this explicit, but even iconic hits like Sonic the hedgehog asked the player to free adorable trapped forest animals that Dr. Robotnik was attempting to turn into cyborgs. When they return to their habitat, the birds and squirrels leap and flutter off the screen, chirping happily.

Final Fantasy VII, however, took an extraordinary leap in asking the player to take on the role of violent ecoterrorists bent on blowing up a reactor inside a densely populated metropolis. One of the game’s first epic cutscenes ends with the bomb exploding and the reactor destroyed. Of course, some people died as “collateral damage”, but it’s okay… you guys are the good guys!

In the game’s finale, the planet itself is saved, but at the cost of what seems to be the cost of all human life. No matter how you choose to interpret the ending, it is sobering.

With nearly 13 million units sold worldwide, FFVII had a huge influence on a whole generation of gamers. It also helped to move Final fantasy, and RPG, in the Western mainstream. It is easily one of the most beloved and influential games of all time.

But its impact wasn’t limited to the industry: the game’s radical environmental themes and Shinto-tinged philosophies ended up influencing a generation of environmentalists.

Pay attention, children

Bobby Pembleton, now a business director at a leading European university (and member of my Mario kart online group) is among those who have found FFVIIhis environmental message has remained engraved. And he has the tattoo to prove it.

“Me and my two siblings were totally radicalized by gambling,” Bobby told me. “When we first finished it at the time, our conclusion was, ‘Oh, civilization is over, and that’s a good thing. “

“We hadn’t seen an uncertain ending (in any media), this level of complexity was new to us,” he added. “It took a few days to sink in, but we concluded that all the humans were dead, and it was a good ending.”

Bobby’s younger brother, Jaclyn Dean, now works in the healthcare industry. Jaclyn was 8 at the time, so more of an observer at first, but remembered, “I would assign characters to my brothers, enlist them to do character voices with me, and really play the dialogue to immerse us in. in history. “

After a year or two, Jaclyn would take over the game on her own. “As I developed my agency, I was like, ‘I can do that too, girls can play video games! ”In the end, she went so far as to print a strategy guide, becoming the first 100% Pembleton in the game.

Dylan, the middle child from Pembleton who now works in the film industry, recalled that the ending made them all feel that “we have to be stewards of the earth, like those old talking coyotes. Our conclusions were that major industrialization is bad, and understanding how the flow of life and the planet works is much more important, because look how cute these coyote puppies are! “

Dylan says it’s hard to overstate the impact gambling has on his choices as an adult. “FFVII affects the way I vote … everywhere I have lived I have started a community garden. I worked as a horticulturalist. I know what I’m trying to do, and yes it’s basically based on the philosophies of FFVII. “

“At the time, we did not know [Final Fantasy VII] could be an allegory of what was happening with the extraction of capital from the working masses, the extraction of oil and resources from the planet, distributing this to the richest 0.01%, up to Midgar ”, Bobby remembers. “It was very influential for all of us. We spent two years playing the game over and over again. We left the Playstation on while we went to bed so we could indulge in the opening theme music.

“It prepared us for this concept of a battle between workers and a hyper-capitalist machine determined to extract every ounce of value from the planet,” he continued. “A little after [the game came out] September 11th arrived, the war in Iraq… there was a growing understanding [for us] that bad things were done to make people richer.

“Twenty-five years ago, playing this game, we didn’t realize how important this fight was – more and more, [now] we realize how important this is. Now people are going vegans, trying to help the world move towards an economic system based on well-being – we all envision increasingly extreme actions ourselves in order to lead the fight. “