Skip to main content

And Then the World Opens Up (Final Fantasy VII): Platypus Nostalgia

Squaresoft stopped working with Nintendo right about the time I was finishing high school.  I and Nintendo went one way, Square went the other.  In retrospect, it seems like Squaresoft made the right decision.  Nintendo's killer apps remain wonderful, but they've been lagging ever since.  Now what all this means is that I only played through an hour or two of Final Fantasy VII when I was a teenager.  I remember sitting in a friends attic one summer and getting a look at it.  Then other friends came over and we moved on to Resident Evil...  Anyhow, time marched on and I never did manage to pick up a Playstation.  Then, just this past Christmas, some of my students tipped me off to the fact that Steam was selling Final Fantasy VII at an absurdly low price.  I jumped on it and have logged about fifteen hours on the game.

I have to admit, it took me a little time to get used to post-apocalyptic, heavy-industrial feel of the game.  Once I got my bearings, however, it turned out to be an enjoyable experience.  Midgar seemed like an interesting, quirky world that I could enjoy getting to know.  Then Sephiroth killed the president of Shinra Corp. and Cloud and company drove right off the map.  Suddenly, I realized that what I thought was the entire world of the game was only one little city in a vast world.  The feel of taking those first few steps beyond the dome and seeing the old, familiar map screen was enchanting.  That's how far I've gotten -but now I understand why people put Final Fantasy VII forward as one of the best games of all time. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more