Returning to FFXVI after Rebirth

 I'm at a stage where the one two things I have to do in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth other than continuing on through my Hard Mode run (where I've just gotten to Cosmo Canyon) will require a patch to fix a bug (I've returned to the normal difficulty levels to clear out some Musclehead Coliseum fights and Chadley virtual encounters) because the sidequest "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" currently won't give you credit for beating the UPA's high score on G-Bike or whatever it's called. Square has evidently acknowledged this bug and are working on a fix, but for now rather than beat my head against the various mini-games that grant Dark Matter so that I can upgrade all the unique trinkets and thus max out my crafting skill to then allow me to make the Genji pieces, I've decided that I should probably get around to actually finishing Final Fantasy XVI.

But the contrast has not been kind to XVI.

It's remarkable to me how much XVI feels like a game from many years ago. While the character models and visual effects are great, the animation in dialogue scenes is really stiff. Compared with the NPCs (and player characters) in VII Rebirth, who have exaggerated, anime-like expressions and movements, I keep coming across scenes in which Clive is talking to some friendly merchant or community leader, and they're just locked off, his mouth flapping with what is genuinely a great vocal performance, but without the animation to match it.

The side quests in XVI are there to flesh out the world, often really reinforcing how brutal and rough that world is. And plot-wise, there's a high drama here to be sure. But there's really, really weird pacing. Seemingly every dialogue scene has a couple-second-long establishing shot showing the characters standing around before they get to the important task of... actually playing out the scene.

I guess what's funny to me about this is that, as a numbered entry in this legendary video game series, XVI feels like the side project compared to the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy. And I don't want to be insulting to the people who worked hard on XVI - clearly a lot of people put a ton of effort into building that world, designing the look of it, scoring it, writing the complex (if a little brooding and bleak) story. But you just get the sense that Square Enix really held their most experienced people in reserve to remake VII.

The VII remakes so far have been the most ambitious attempt to remake a video game I've ever encountered, and have honestly rejuvenated a love I have for JRPGs.

Naturally, XVI's biggest departure is that it has fully transitioned into being an action game. There are levels and stats, of course, but the progression systems are simpler than games like God of War that never pretended to be anything other than an action game (though I'd argue that at least the Norse-era God of War games are environmental puzzle games with combat interspersed - and I say this as a compliment).

Now, maybe I've just defaulted to builds that reinforce this, but I keep feeling like XVI lacks any real strategy when it comes to the combat - it's reflexive, making sure to dodge at the right time. But I basically just unload all of my special abilities in a rotation and by the time I've used them all I've usually got the first one I used back and ready to be used again.

By comparison, VIIR creates this beautiful melding of action-oriented combat (the ability to dodge and block attacks, having to think about positioning) with the command-sequence combat of the old turn-based system. (I know that you can create button commands for various abilities, but I think anyone who uses them is a philistine! You use that slow-down menu every time you're going to do a Focused Strike, mister!)

When I'm engaged in VIIR's combat, sure, there are patterns and rotations I'll use, but there's enough variety in enemies and how they interact with the characters that there are some real considerations to make - I think the way that lots of monsters have complicated things you have to do to pressure them, for example, really opens up design space for interesting monsters. And things like Synergy Abilities and Limit Breaks, along with limited MP, create trade-off strategic choices that make you consider your strategy in the thick of battle. Hell, just having to earn your ATB charges creates moments of choice - is saving the MP on casting Cura worth a second ATB charge to get a free Pray off? Sure, Barret's down pretty low (because he's been using Lifesaver) but Tifa's at like 75% and Cloud's fully topped off.

It's frustrating, because there's so much about XVI that should make it an amazing game. The Kaiju-style fights are cinematic and epic (though arguably some go on too long - is a 40-minute boss fight epic or just tedious?) and while the characters are a mixed bag, I really like Clive, and obviously Cid.

The return to medieval fantasy is... ok, I'll be honest, I don't really care for it. But it is an interesting change of pace.

It's interesting: I have mixed feelings about the number of minigames in Rebirth. The core gameplay of its combat system is satisfying enough that I found times when, for example, I was forced (maybe more accurately pushed) into playing a whole Queen's Blood tournament on a cruise ship, that I wished I could just get back to fighting monsters.

But returning to XVI, where there basically aren't any minigames whatsoever, it leaves the various side quests and much of the main quest feeling like the same stuff over and over. You cannot complain that Rebirth lacks variety.

I also think that Rebirth, and FFVII in general, has as perhaps its greatest strength a great party of adventurers that you just like to hang out with. As my roommate was playing the game earlier this evening, I was drawn to compare Rebirth in particular as being a "Hang-out Game" in the same way that a lot of sitcoms about people who just happen to be friends with one another (like Friends or How I Met Your Mother) are "Hang-out Sitcoms." Some people have complained (or worried, beforehand) that Rebirth is set in what is the least eventful stretch of the original FFVII. But in a strange way, I kind of feel like that's an asset. We get to hang out with this group of characters just being together in the world, their friendships developing, and seeing their opportunities to just be goofy and fun and, you know, get us to care about them.

It's not that Clive isn't likable as a protagonist. But even though he often travels with allies and friends over the course of FFXVI, there's never a real sense of a "party," because there isn't one. Gameplay-wise, we essentially never step outside of Clive's perspective, and we don't really get to see the world or its conflicts from a different point of view. And that, I think, also kind of shrinks down the rogue's gallery of the game into just a sequence of people to take down. The bad guys in XVI sort of bleed into one another, even if, upon close inspection, they do have contrary motivations (though I feel in particular that Barnabas wound up being kind of forgettable after a lot of build-up).

Naturally, VII's all building to the final confrontation with Sephiroth, but the lesser villains come into focus in different ways, not just because they have their own aesthetics and techniques, but also because different characters have different histories with them - Barret has a particular reason to take down Scarlett, for example, while Red XIII and Aerith would naturally care more about defeating Hojo.

And this is a matter of taste, of course (though this is all taste - I'm sure some people like the simpler action gameplay) but I really miss the silly bullshit. A character like Roche, for example, and the fantastic exchange of "Oh, that jackass? He's... a jackass." "We know, sir!" talking about him. And yet, even Roche has his own little arc and nuance - he's a crazy jackass, but he's also got this kind of chivalric sense of honor, and ultimately has this kind of tragic fate.

Anyway, even though it's a remake, I can imagine that a decade from now I'll be looking back nostalgically on this project and all the amazing things that were accomplished in it, but I seriously doubt that I'll still be giving much thought to XVI.

And that's a bit of a bummer, isn't it? I mean, getting a really good remake of a beloved game is something that gamers often want and very, very seldom get. No one could possibly accuse Square Enix of half-assing their re-creation of Final Fantasy VII. But much as I love that this has allowed me to get on a bandwagon that felt like it left me behind when I was eleven years old back in 1997, it feels like it would be better if it was the brand-new entry in the series that brought with it the expert craftsmanship and stunning gameplay.

JRPG Storytelling and Hiding Character Knowledge in TTRPGs

 Like many people born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, my first exposure to RPGs was not D&D or any other western-style TTRPGs, or, for that matter, even Western-style computer RPGs like Baldur's Gate.

No, for me, the very idea of an RPG was introduced to me through JRPGs. In the mid-90s, there was this incredible run of amazing JRPGs that came out of SquareSoft (I don't recall when they merged with Enix, which had its own perhaps lesser-known hit, the Illusion of Gaia). Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI (released in America as III,) Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, all came out one year after the other in '93, '94, '95, and '96, respectively, for the Super Nintendo. (FFVII came out in '97 for the PlayStation, so it's not like this roll stopped there). Now, ironically, the games of these four that I think are probably the more impactful and important projects are the ones I wouldn't play for several years.

Still, at least within my narrow band of social peers (my childhood best friend was a year older than me but in the same grade) there wasn't really the sort of "community continuity" that would introduce us to D&D, and in fact, despite growing up non-religiously in a very secular mixed-faith (or rather, mixed religious heritage) household, the specter of the Satanic Panic did actually linger a bit over that specific property.

I wouldn't actually get into D&D until the end of my 20s (as chronicled on this very blog). But I was kicking Lazy Shells and fighting Dark Liches back when I was in Middle School in the late 90s. And when I got a used PS2 my sophomore year of college, I actually tackled my first legitimate Final Fantasy game (X) and then picked up some PS1 ports that were playable thanks to backwards compatibility, focusing primarily on Chrono Trigger (which I never actually finished, but damn if it's not one of my favorite games of all time).

The structure and I'd say the appeal of JRPGs of this kind as compared with western RPGs are pretty different. Most JRPGs involve playing through a story that is mostly pre-written by the game's creators, with characters they've designed and created. While this can certainly happen as well in western RPGs, often the main appeal of these games is the freedom of choice, especially in creating a character of your own design, and then, depending on the series, you might have a huge array of options for how you want to play the game. In the Elder Scrolls series, for example, you can have a pretty significant and full game even if you ignore the main quest line, perhaps instead treating, say, the Dark Brotherhood quests as your main campaign.

There is a problem that you run into, though, with the freedom to create your own original character, which is that the game doesn't really get to tell much of a story with you. Necessarily, the edges are sanded down a bit - you can't really come up with much of a complex backstory for a character who, from the game's perspective, must ultimately be given the same options regardless of whether you're a shady rogue with a criminal past or a holy knight on a sacred quest or a wizard obsessed with plumbing the depths of reality to seek out some deeper truth.

Even in a game as brilliant as Baldur's Gate 3, which does so much to allow a player to forge a unique identity through their choices and actions, your "Tav" character will never get the full catharsis of seeing their individual story thrown in the spotlight the same way that the pre-written characters like Shadowheart and Astarion do.

It's necessary because ultimately, the creators of a computer game must create something that is more generalized and can work for multiple players.

This, of course, is a limitation we are free of as the game masters of TTRPGs.

However, there is a delicate balance to strike. See, often JRPG characters will learn something they did not know about their character. It's often quite shocking, throwing their whole identity into question. This is usually what happens with the "main" character, because in most cases, JRPGs have a central, main character. Often, these games begin with just that single character even being playable, easing you into the complexity required to make sense of its systems, but even as the party expands and you get more characters, this one will often be a mandatory member of the active party (perhaps with some story-dictated moments where they aren't) for a good chunk of the game, and are typically the character you're controlling outside of combat, and choosing dialogue options for.

But beyond this idea of a "main character" (and to be fair, FFVI's philosophy was that "every character can be the main character," and really makes it an ensemble) the notion of hidden, shocking knowledge is one that can be challenging to run in a TTRPG context.

But before we delve into this, let's talk about the characters in JRPGs.

We're going to be spoiling a whole bunch of games: for sure Final Fantasies VII, X, and XVI.

Spoilers ahead:

Hard Mode in the FFVII Remake Trilogy

 Having beaten Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I found, as I had with Remake, a desire to keep playing. There are some games where I finish the story and feel fully ready to move on, but usually when a game nails the "good feeling" of gameplay, it inspires me to find any opportunity to keep playing. For example, I'd have loved a New Game Plus (or even just the ability to have a second save file) for Control, so even after I'd finished the main game and both DLCs, I'd wander around the Oldest House and just look for Hiss to fight.

Remake and Rebirth are both games built to allow both a sense of closure with finishing the game and a sense that you can continue if you just want to play some more. Remake was, of course, a bit more linear, with brief interludes that included some side quests, but mostly just an ongoing narrative (and, like early Final Fantasy games, the plot dictated who was in your party at any given time).

Rebirth is a lot less linear, with tons of activities you can do in the world outside of the main story quest. Both games give you "chapter selection" when you finish the game - a kind of NG+ but one that allows you to jump around, perhaps to replay the parts of the game you enjoyed the most (or the parts where you want to get certain missed items - I remember in Remake missing Aerith's staff you need to steal off of the second boss in the Train Graveyard and making that my first pit stop after beating the game proper.)

But with all these side activities, especially those that are less about some new challenge and more about discovering parts of the world, they allow these things to carry over when you return to a chapter. Thus, your World Intel progress will remain completed, and you have an option to reset side quests (I'm not sure if this includes the protorelic intel) or simply leave them completed.

This does result, of course, in passing through the world a lot quicker. As soon as I exited the Mythril Mines, for example, I was basically ready to head into Junon and fight the big sea monster, and not long after that head up to the whole inauguration parade for Rufus.

Now, playing through this on the same difficulty is all well and good (there's also "Dynamic" difficulty, which is available from the start, and I assume scales monsters up to your level - which is probably wise if you're going to early-game areas with an endgame-leveled character unless the whole point is to utterly destroy everything in your path with ease).

But, as with the previous game, beating it once also unlocks Hard Mode. Hard Mode is truly hard. Not far into it, most of my characters hit the level cap of 70, which did grant more skill points, but the true incentive to do this is that each boss you take down grants a manuscript for one of your characters - my sense is that if you beat the whole thing, you'll have enough SP to unlock every skill in your Folios. Granted, at that point you might be wondering what there is left to challenge you.

Hard Mode, like in Remake, has two other major changes: the first is that you can't use items. Weirdly, you can still get items in Hard Mode, but they basically just go into your inventory and chill, I suppose until you decide to play in a different difficulty setting. The other is that resting at a bench or an inn will restore HP, but not MP. Finishing a chapter will restore MP, and there is a little bit of passive MP regeneration, along with skills and materia that can help with that, but you basically need to be clever about conserving MP (Aerith does have Soul Drain, which will likely get more use). There is one exception to the no-item rule, though, which is that you can use a Cushion on a Chocostop, and furthermore this will actually restore your MP as well. Still, any "dungeon"-like environment (including, for example, climbing Mt. Corel) will require you to really think about when to expend your precious MP. And without potions or ethers, you need to play very carefully.

However, in my experience at least, the non-boss monsters are mostly pretty trivial - they don't seem to scale up very much, and so between the free elemental damage skills and just the raw power of where your characters have gotten makes it pretty easy to get through these fights without having to spend MP, and often not even taking any damage (outside of combat, when you don't have to worry about building ATB charges, the base Cure seems like the most efficient healing-per-MP-expended). If you know for certain that a particular character won't be forced into your party, the HP/MP materia actually could work pretty well for a permanent back-line healer, though I haven't done this (and many of these more narrow "dungeon" environments split the party up anyway).

Anyway, if the non-boss enemies are pretty trivial in Hard Mode, boy howdy are the bosses not. These seem to be balanced not just around your being max level (maybe the first few aren't quite) but also requiring pretty excellent execution. Bosses that were thrilling but relatively easy to get through on the first attempt are quite difficult. I'm been able to one-shot a couple of them, but most have required at least a second attempt.

There are some systems I haven't entirely figured out - party level, for example, I think derives its separate XP from doing side quests, and that means that at some point I'll have to (if I want to cap this out and access the last of the skills in the Folios) actually finish the "Ultimate Party Animal" challenge at the Gold Saucer. Beyond that, there's also weapon XP, and that I genuinely don't understand and can't seem to find an in-game explanation.

Anyway, on Hard Mode I'm now on the modified Valkyrie at Mt. Corel, doing the Red/Cloud/Aerith half of the mountain before we go on to Yuffie/Barret/Tifa. I did one attempt, which was going ok until Red went down and I tried to use a synergy attack to stagger the boss, but happened to do so right when it was using a big attack, so the party got wiped. I don't think it'll take too many tries, but we'll see. (In Remake, Hell House took me many, many attempts on Hard Mode).

Tom Zane: Villain or Ally, Filmmaker or Poet, Creator or Creation?

 Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game is mysterious. We never see his face, only ever experiencing him as this person in a diving suit that is also, possibly, just a bright light beaming out of it. Still, ultimately what we learn of him feels like it more or less adds up: he was essentially the first person to go through what Alan does, seeing his romantic partner lost in the lake and then using Cauldron Lake's strange properties to alter reality and allow her to return. He's the predecessor to Alan who screwed up and didn't see the limitations on this power, and allowed his beloved to become a vessel for the Dark Presence.

Thomas Zane, the poet, has a pretty strong bit of evidence in support of his existence, which is Emile Hartman. Before Hartman got doubly infected by the Dark Presence and the Hiss and transformed into something showcasing a lot more body horror than anything else I've seen in Remedy games, the not so good doctor fit pretty neatly into the story, linking Alan's experience with the story of Thomas back from 1970, a 40-year gap bridged by this narcissist seeking to exploit both artists.

But all of that starts to get thrown into doubt starting in Control.

The same poem that Hartman seems to misinterpret and make the slogan of his unethical laboratory masquerading as a mental health center, Jesse quotes when speaking with a therapist. For a time, she seems to understand that Thomas Zane is a poet, but her therapist corrects her, finding that the only artist with that name she could find was a filmmaker from Finland.

Modern-day (or at least 2019's) Jesse believes that she was wrong, and that Zane really is a filmmaker. It's an odd thing: Alan Wake II establishes that some people are immune to the re-writing of reality performed in the Dark Place, as Saga and her grandfather and great-uncle see through the fiction that Logan drowned. One might imagine that a parautilitarian as powerful as Jesse might have a similar immunity, but then... perhaps not. Her powers might not be the right ones to allow for such an immunity.

There's a possible reading of Alan Wake's story that we can't really rely on any of it being "real" within the world of the story, where there is nothing but interpretation as to the fundamental facts of what happened. This anarchic reading is a valid one, but it's also one that I think leaves us little room to speculate within.

If we don't take that view, I think that this suggests to me that Thomas Zane really was a poet. The notion that "Tom the Poet" was actually a character in a film by filmmaker Zane (a distinction I usually make by referring to "Thomas" as the poet and "Tom" as the filmmaker, though the name of that movie confuses it a bit) does seem to push more in the direction that "Tom" is the real one, but given the nature of these games, I find it plausible that either Thomas "fictionalized" himself (as he is described in This House of Dreams as having written himself out of existence) by making the real him into this character from a movie, or that an external entity has laid claim to him by fictionalizing him.

That leads to the next question: is Tom Zane, then, a villain or an ally?

Tom and Alan have two face-to-face meetings, which take place within film strips that Alan discovers in the mostly-empty Room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (interestingly, while he also goes to Room 665 in these films, the layout is entirely different.) In the first, Tom is a wild and off-putting character, but a seeming ally: one who warns Alan not to let Scratch get his hands on the manuscript, and points him to the hotel as a potential source of inspiration. He dresses and acts more like a rock star from 1970 than a filmmaker (and I know there's a theory floating around that he might be the Loki from the Old God of Asgard) and seems paranoid when Jesse Faden appears on the television in the room.

It is noteworthy, of course, that his warning about Scratch altering the manuscript ultimately leads Alan to a self-destructive act. As we discover (it's not the most obvious plot point on a first play-through, or even a second) at the end of Initiation, Scratch isn't really there for any of those confrontations that Alan has in the writer's room. One finds a manuscript seemingly written by Scratch and begins making changes to salvage it (the one after, interestingly, the chapter that has us go around the Oceanview,) the next comes in after having gotten the impression that Scratch drove Alice to suicide and shoots the first one in the head, only to realize his mistake and pass out, getting summoned to the beach at the end of Return's first chapter, and then the last walks in on the carnage, seeing that first one and wondering what the hell has happened (this one actually being the Alan from Initiation's first draft, after the level in Caldera Street Station). The point is, Alan's actually turned against himself, thinking in each case that his other selves are actually Scratch (which... is sort of also true, but not in the sense that he thinks).

We get a preview of Alan getting more violent at the start of the chapter that ends with him shooting his other self in the head, because when Alan visits Zane's room again, he starts the film off aiming his gun at Zane's head. Zane acts innocent, trying to calm a confused Alan but also confessing that, yes, he did collaborate with Scratch because Alan had stopped writing. Weirdly, though, when Alan seems to be calming down, or at least redirecting his emotions from rage to confusion, Zane's face contorts into one of... well, villainy. A smug smile curls his lips and, through film edits, he trades places with Alan, seemingly about to shoot Alan in the head. But as they blink back and forth, Alan pulls the trigger and shoots Zane.

But once we're out of the film, we see the rest of it play - a bit of footage that extends past the final edit, where Zane appears to still be alive, his violent death only a moment of drama for his own film. He also does this beginning with the second half of one of Thomas Zane's poems: "Oh mercy. Thousands have gone missing beyond the labyrinth of me. When you're lost, you're lost in your own company."

So... what the fuck? (Alan literally says this, likely simultaneously with the player.)

It seems to me that Zane is trying to provoke Alan to shoot him. But much as Alan is safe in the writer's room (even when the writer's room becomes a setting for his story, because that kind of makes it a new writer's room) Zane seems to be able to step outside the fiction of his films and survive even when the character he's playing dies.

That, though, raises a very interesting question: is Tom Zane really just a character? And if so, who the hell is playing him?

Zane claims that Yöton Yö is a companion piece to Return. When we see the film, Zane plays Alan Wake in it, and the plot is more or less that a cult ritually sacrifices Alex Casey to die and take Alan's place in the Dark Place to allow for Alan to return.

This does, of course, kind of happen in the game. The Dark Presence is blown out of Alan and then enters Alex Casey, who... travels into the Dark Place or perhaps brings the Dark Place to downtown Bright Falls. Very briefly, Alan is technically out and free - though he's also in a world swarmed by Taken and with no hesitation jumps back in to save the day (or at least try to).

But it does strike me as interesting that, as far as I know, nowhere in Alan's writing does he say that for one person to escape the Dark Place, another has to be taken by it. Alan does say that a sacrifice needs to be made, which is why he chooses to stay in the Dark Place and make Alice's escape possible. But this is the choice of a hero, not the sacrifice of a victim.

Casey, in Nightless Night (I guess I should just use the English title to avoid having to make so many umlauts,) is for certain a victim. He doesn't choose to be sacrificed for someone else's benefit. He's just led in and trapped.

It's also, though, interesting that Zane casts himself as Alan in this story. Naturally, there's a meta weirdness here because the actor who plays Alan's body is the same as the one that plays Zane, and throughout Nightless Night, the convention seems to be that because it's a Finnish film, the Finnish mo-cap actor for a character also provides their own voice. Thus, if we were to see an authentic, non-Zane Alan in Nightless Night, it would still be embodied and voiced by Ilkka Villi anyway - severely blurring the line between Zane and Alan even further.

Thus, if I had to guess, I think Zane is probably plotting to essentially take Alan's place in escaping the Dark Place.

Which... when you think about it, is kind of what the Dark Presence wants to do, right?

Sure, maybe Zane is actually the real Scratch, the true imposter Alan that wishes to enter into the world and wreak havoc. But wait, we can go more unhinged.

It's nearly two in the morning as I write this, and I don't want to lose the thread here. The question of whether Zane created Alan or Alan created Zane is fertile ground for debate and discussion, but I wanted to present a different take:

Is Zane future Alan?

The change in voice is, of course, a little hard to account for here. But on a metaphorical level, I think there's something potentially potent: if we take the idea that Zane wants to exit the Dark Place, and can only do so by leaving Alan within it, could that actually be something more metaphorical? Our future selves are constantly replacing our past selves. Personally, I think the continuity of consciousness is the strongest evidence for something existing beyond the material world, but on a physical level, our bodies are constantly undergoing a cycle of destruction and creation. It's just happening on such a staggered scale that we never notice it - we have cells that die and cells that reproduce, and the factoid I always heard (though it's the sort of thing that could be bullshit) is that about every seven years, every cell in our body has been replaced. This raises some Ship of Theseus questions about personal identity (the soul essentially being a popular answer to that question that, as someone who is not religious, I nevertheless feel is a comforting one).

But if the Dark Presence is, in a literal sense, the Jungian shadow, and that arriving at the self requires a confrontation with and an integration of the shadow, it could be that Zane as a persona was created to be a kind of guide into the darkness - a demon whose very villainousness is required to put Alan on the path to reaching that place of self.

I'm not entirely sure we'll ever get a definitive answer here. Indeed, it's possible that Remedy will want Zane to be a part of the whole RCU beyond even Alan's story (Tom the Poet having been an element even as far back as Death Rally). But even if the guy's tailor-made to make us speak feverishly about what the hell he could mean, it's not like I won't enjoy doing so.

Elden Ring, Alan Wake, and the Trick of Getting Players to Care About Lore

 Because I remain obsessed with the game, I recently listened to/watched an interview with Sam Lake discussing the making of Alan Wake II. In it, he made a really interesting point about the delivery of exposition and lore in games - namely, that if you present characters with a lot of deep lore in some grand compendium, players will often ignore it. But if you hide that lore, making it a puzzle to piece together, you inspire players to seek it out.

I was talking with my best friend about the games of From Software, likely specifically Elden Ring. We were talking about game story, and he argued that From's games don't really have much of a story, while I thought they had a deep and interesting story that demanded to be unpacked and explored. Ultimately, we came to a compromise in positions: that we could separate the idea of "story" and "lore," and say that the story of Elden Ring is, while not non-existent, at least deeply enigmatic and arguably thin, while the lore behind that story was every bit as rich as someone who watches the Tarnished Archaeologist, Smough Town, Quelaag, and VaatiVidya would know it to be (Oh, and Ziostorm).

Remedy's games are, I think, present more of a true story in this sense, but there's a similar use of obfuscated lore to draw the player in.

In a sense, I think that the experience of From Soft's lore is almost an out-of-game experience. That game, so to speak, is played watching YouTube videos and, well, writing blog posts (I'm too lazy to be a YouTuber). From Soft's games also happen to be extremely satisfying to play in the moment-to-moment - I think the precision of control (and yes, the difficulty that requires mastery of that precision) makes it easy to come back to these games over and over (I think I've beaten Elden Ring on something like seven or eight characters, though the eighth admittedly hit a point where I didn't really have any new builds I was excited to try). But I think I've relied a great deal on the online community to piece together the world of that game - even if practically ever assertion becomes a matter of interpretation (for example, that the Omens are really just an expression of the wild nature from the Crucible Era).

I think Remedy comes from a place of being a little more accessible. While I think they like there to be some ambiguities in their lore, I think for the most part they want you to have the basic idea of what is going on simply by playing the game.

But, more broadly speaking, I think that Lake's assertion that hidden lore gets players' attention better is correct.

It has been over a decade since I finished the Mass Effect trilogy, but I remember that their approach to the game's lore involved a large compendium one could access in the pause menu. I actually thought this was a pretty successful technique, but perhaps only because that setting was such a detailed, well-thought-out science fiction universe. There were certainly some elements that were open to interpretation - for example, some believing that Shepherd, at the end, has become Indoctrinated by the Reapers (which I don't really believe,) but the setting was one of a technologically-advanced, highly interconnected galaxy where it made sense for this information to be easy to come by.

Still, the information in the compendium was simply there for people who were curious to read/listen to it, outside of the primary gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI did something interesting, which was its "Active Time Lore," a cheeky riff on its old Active Time Battle system (a term that, frankly, they've re-used to mean different things - the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy has characters build up "ATB charges," despite being a totally different combat system from the original game). Anyway, XVI builds up a Game of Thrones-inspired complex political landscape with many different factions warring against each other in a world with dwindling resources (it's the first Final Fantasy game I've played without one singular world-spanning empire to contend with - there is an empire, but it's just one of several factions). During any cutscene, you can pause and get little one-or-two-paragraph descriptions of the characters, the location, and any major topics that the characters are discussing, and you can also access more of this stuff via a friendly NPC.

But I think in both of these games, complex as those worlds are, I really don't find myself drawn into meticulously unpacking every element of the lore the same way I do with Remedy's Alan Wake and Control games, or From Soft's Bloodborne and Elden Ring (ironically, the Dark Souls series that put From on the map is one I've never been quite as interested in).

I'd also suggest that part of what makes Remedy's lore tidbits so exciting is the fact that they're in-universe sources. While there's a certain unreliability to the narrator of From Soft's item descriptions, there's not really any particular author of these descriptions whose motivations and biases we can investigate. Remedy's most common collectable lore bits are things like Alan Wake's manuscript pages or the various memos found in Control's Oldest House.

In the former case, we're often learning more about characters from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator - but that narrator is also the eponymous writer, and we know because we're playing as him (or at least half the time as him in the second game) that he sure as hell isn't omniscient, and doesn't even remember writing these pages. Indeed, most of the time we're playing as Alan, we're really playing as the version of him that he is writing at the time, and that version of him is as ignorant as the player is.

Personally, though, I think it's the latter case where this style of lore development works best (I think Alan Wake II is the - as of yet - crowning achievement for Remedy as a studio, but even if I think AW2 is arguably the "better" game, I think I might like Control more. In fact, I might even say that I think Alan Wake II is the better work of art while Control is the better game - but we're comparing two monumental achievements here, so I don't make this comparison to make either sound bad). In part, Control's various memos and files hold a lot of different perspectives. We have, for example, the various Dead Letters, which serve as one-page creepypastas but also mysteries to interpret. Which are genuine and which are just people writing about nonsense (one heartbreaking Dead Letter is a woman who thinks that her neighbor's kid has somehow hacked reality to make her husband die, and is hoping that if the world's a simulation, someone could just fix it. In-universe, probably not actually true, but you can feel the desperate hope that has led her to thinking that just maybe it could be fixed. And, on a meta level, it is kind of true.)

The files, recordings, and other bits of information you can collect in Control can serve to give you some straightforward exposition (such as from most of the Doctor Darling videos) while others create a whole mystery to unpack. The entirety of the "Blessed Organization" is introduced through files and recordings that are not explicitly linked to one another, but when you find all of them and think about it, you start to realize the possibility that there's this grand conspiracy that could be a major threat to the FBC (and, I maintain, helped Alice Wake regain her memories and return to the Dark Place).

Control, of course, lives in that corkboard-and-red-yarn world (a trope I feel the need to point out pre-dated that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode) and I actually think that this style of worldbuilding kind of activates whatever pleasure centers in the brain that addict the conspiracy theorist, but knowing it's all a work of fiction makes it feel fun and safe to explore. I've long felt that conspiracy theorists are seeking a feeling of esoteric revelation - to know something grand and exciting that others do not. (Such a drive is also part of mystical practices, and things like esoteric alchemy.) And I'll confess that if Control 2 or any other future Remedy title comes out and the Blessed Organization proves to be a major part of the plot, I'll feel a certain glee at being one of the few people who actually knows about it.

Even at this stage, while I think every lore-review of Alan Wake II I've seen is convinced that the "organization" that helped Alice Wake recover her memories was the FBC, there's a little smug nerd in me that feels... a bit superior, I guess, for knowing (not that I do know, as I could totally be wrong) that they've been mislead, and that they'd ignored the clues that I was able to piece together that suggest it was Blessed, not the FBC, that she worked with.

But the point of all of this, even the fact that it's showing a part of my personality that I'm not terribly proud of (I grew up in a very intellectual, academic household, and so I unconsciously developed something of a deep need to be the smartest person in the room - which is something I've been working with a therapist to unpack,) is that by making the discovery of the deep and complex lore of these games a game in and of itself, you get the player to actually care about it.

Sephiroth's Fall

 I started Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's Hard Mode today, playing through the game's first chapter, which is a flashback to Sephiroth's descent into madness in Nibelheim. What struck me when I first played through it was the tragedy of it all - Sephiroth, prior to this incident, looks like he was genuinely a heroic, benevolent figure (albeit one who was fighting for an evil corporate empire, but then, who wasn't back then?) Shinra Manor, the facility that, according to Tifa, provided the bulk of Nibelheim's funding thanks to the rent they could charge for it, is right out of a gothic horror story - a decrepit mansion with dark secrets in its basement. And the story told of Sephiroth there fits well with the gothic horror vibes: a terrible truth that causes someone who once seemed like a noble man to turn into a bloodthirsty murderer.

The theme of madness and monstrous transformation in gothic horror often pairs well with the more recent genre of cosmic horror. And, as is fairly common, FFVII does contain strong cosmic horror elements.

What I hadn't realized when I played through this the first time was a classic cosmic horror and science fiction trope: the scientists who meddled with things they did not actually understand.

I'd be tempted to put this behind a spoiler cut, but this is all stuff from the original 1997 game, so the statute of limitations on this expired a while ago. Reader beware.

The world of FFVII is one in which the "Ancients" (real name being the "Cetra") once ruled before being overthrown by humanity. (I'll take a moment here to quibble with the idea of any "race" or "family" or "people" being older than any other - in the real world, at least, every human's ancestors have been on this planet for just as long as anyone else's, because they all converge at Mitochondrial Eve. Admittedly, the Cetra are presented as being a separate species from humans, but A: they're clearly co-fertile with humans given that Aerith exists and B: we don't have any origin story in which the gods descended upon the world and put the first humans there). Anyway, when Jenova is discovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (though they seem to be reaching back only 2000 years, which would argue for the former) the scientists believe her to be a remarkably preserved Cetra.

And I hadn't realized this, but Sephiroth reads these studies on them and believes the same: he thinks that, as a Cetra... created by kind of cloning Cetra tissue, that he should thus count humanity as his enemies - the people who wiped out his people. This is what leads him to believe that he deserves to inherit the world and why he feels justified in wiping out humanity.

There are two giant ironies here.

The first is that, in fact, Aerith is a Cetra, or at least a half-Cetra (there are actually a weirdly large number of recurring plot elements that VII borrowed from VI, with Aerith and Terra both being half-long-lost-magical-being and the main villain being a kind of prototype super soldier who develops godly aspirations). Infamously, in the original game (and whether or not it happens in Rebirth is something I'll still consider a spoiler) Sephiroth abruptly kills Aerith. It's not clear to me if he realizes that he's killing the actual last Cetra in the self-righteous aim to reclaim what he thinks is his birthright. It seems rather fitting that the one who might at this point still think he's the rightful "guardian of the planet" thinks that his role is to kill, while Aerith, an actual guardian, seeks to protect and bring about harmony. He's all vengeance and hatred, but Aerith, we see, doesn't really hate anyone (not that she doesn't get mad). And if their respective spells, Sephiroth's Meteor and Aeriths' Holy, represent these two worldviews, despite the fact that he ends her mortal life, on a spiritual level, she's the one who emerges triumphant.

The other irony, of course, is that he's not Cetra. Jenova does look like a human (well, Cetra) woman in the facility where he finds her, but that's not because she is one. In the last major dungeon of Rebirth, we go through the Temple of the Ancients, and there we find records left behind by the Cetra that an eldritch horror from outer space came and devastated their civilization, and it was able to do so because it could mimic others - taking on the form of lost loved ones and seeming like an angelic visitor. Only at great cost were the Cetra able to imprison Jenova, sealing her in the rock where a bunch of Shinra scientists would dig her up thousands of years later.

I think there's an interesting question - and perhaps one that has been explored in the various prequels and side-projects related to FFVII - as to whether Sephiroth was doomed to madness and evil all along. After all, he has some kind of parasitic Lovecraftian monstrosity in the very core of his being. Maybe this was all inevitable. Still, it's remarkable how likable the guy is in the bulk of that flashback. He just goes from good guy to mass-murderer very quickly.

Granted: Cloud is an unreliable narrator in this flashback - he's imagined himself performing the great feats of heroism that Zack did, a close friend whose entire existence he's forgotten about. While Tifa doesn't remember his being there, it seems pretty clear (and I believe confirmed in the original game) that the nameless Shinra Trooper that doesn't get dragged away by the river is actually Cloud - we see him crawling, wounded, toward the Strife house as it burns, calling out for his mother. He was probably just too shy to take off his helmet and let Tifa know that he was there.

But we could also imagine that perhaps the portrayal of Sephiroth in this flashback might not be fully accurate - the story we're told is of a man finding out his life is a lie and jumping real quick to "I'm going to murder everyone." I mean, that could still be the case, this being high melodrama and all.

What Comes Next for the Final Fantasy VII Remake Series?

 I've said many times that no matter what you think of the FFVII remake games, you could never accuse Square Enix of half-assing these games. Taking a beloved classic and making an entire, long game out of essentially each disc of the original, creating a brand-new combat system that blends the fast-paced action of more recent Final Fantasy games with the strategic menu-navigating choices of the original, creating vastly detailed environments and tons of fully voiced characters - it's a whole lot.

Remake came out in 2020 - not long after the Covid 19 lockdowns started, which made it something of a lifeline for those of us suddenly shoved into isolation. It was another four years until Rebirth was released. But this is not the last part of the series. Rebirth ends with a highly significant moment in the plot of the game, but still leaves a good portion of it to go.

So, what can we expect from the next installment? And when can we expect it?

To talk about this, we're going to go into spoiler territory, so here's a cut for the spoiler-averse.