Uplink 10

The Final Fantasy Issue

October 2007

Contents:

• Final Fantasy 12

• FF12 Micropolitics and Geopolitics

• The Wii Turns One

• Twilight Princess

Introduction

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series has long been one of the most popular and enduring franchises of videogame history. Yet the latest iteration of the series, Final Fantasy 12 (hereafter referred to as FF12) is much more than just another Japanese role-playing game. Thanks to a combination of topnotch writing, stunning voice-acting, savvy micropolitics, and sophisticated geopolitics, all tied to some sparkling game-play innovations, FF12 deserves wider recognition as one of touchstone media works of the 21st century.

Next, we have an update on the supernova success of the Wii, Nintendo’s superbly designed console, which incarnates much of what is best about the videogame culture.

Lest we be accused of succumbing to creeping Nintendo fanboyism/fangirlism, we also have a blunt critique of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the latest iteration on the long-running Zelda franchise. FF12 succeeded in moving beyond the limitations of its franchise; alas, Twilight Princess did not. Hopefully the next Zelda game for the Wii will push the series in a fresh and innovative direction.

Final Fantasy 12

Few videogame franchises have displayed the longevity or consistent quality of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series, which began in 1987 and has continued to this day. That said, the series has also suffered from many of the characteristic defects of the role-playing genre – lackadaisical character development, cloying teenage romances, cardboard villains, and the usual panoply of racist, sexist and imperialist stereotypes typical of the Anglo-American fantasy genre.

Final Fantasy 10, the immediate precursor of Final Fantasy 12 (game number eleven was a massive multiplayer game and therefore not a true sequel) is a case in point. Released in 2001, FF10 was a fine game with sophisticated voice acting and deft game-play. However, its female characters lacked depth and complexity, while the storyline never really succeeded in raising Tidus’ teenage rebellion against his problematic father to the level of a credible geopolitical allegory.

After five long years of tortuous development, Final Fantasy 12 was released to widespread acclaim in 2006. The most immediate change was a drastic transformation of game-play. FF12 employs a real-time battle system, which eliminates the tiresome and repetitive turn-based play typical of role-playing games. Instead of forcing players to key in the same commands a thousand times over, players act and react to opponents automatically, in real time, in the same 3D game-world used for exploration and travel. There is no loss of player control, because you can pause the action at any time to issue specific commands, if you so wish. FF12 also did something new, by abolishing the traditional character-class or job-slot system of most role-playing games, an archaic relic of the dismal racial and, frankly, imperial typologies of fantasy fiction. Players can customize each character as they see fit, since there are no automatic limitations on any particular character’s abilities.

The most dramatic change, however, is in the area of game writing and character development. For the first time ever, Square Enix’s designers consciously moved away from the stereotypical sword-wielding heroes, J-pop heroines, and cardboard villains littering past Final Fantasy games.¹ Instead, they portrayed complex, adult relationships and friendships between some of the most remarkable characters ever created. These characters alone would have earned FF12 a place in the pantheon of the greats. But what transformed a terrific game into something truly epoch-making was the capacity of the designers to set these characters in motion towards a 21st century geopolitics.

The story is set in a country called Dalmasca, a desert country in the center of the game-world of Ivalice. Two years prior to the events of the game, Dalmasca was conquered by the mighty Archadean Empire, for mysterious reasons which the storyline will later unravel. If this sounds like a patent allegory of the US invasion of Iraq, that’s simply because that is exactly what it is. The capital city of Dalmasca, Rabanastre, is a style-sheet of Middle Eastern architecture; conversely, Archades, the capital city of the Empire, is filled with New York-style skyscrapers and brownstone neighborhoods. You can’t walk a meter in the world of Ivalice without stumbling over a reference to Empire or imperialism.

The story begins from the perspective of Vaan, a 17-year-old native of Rabanastre whose brother fell in battle against the invading Archadeans. At first he is simply a petty thief, but during an attempt to break into the city palace, Vaan unexpectedly meets the other characters in the storyline. Eventually, he ends up joining an armed guerilla movement against the Empire. Over the course of the game, we learn that what is at stake is not just the independence of Dalmasca, but the very future of the world of Ivalice.

The conquest of Dalmasca is part of a larger three-way struggle for mastery over Ivalice, between the Archadean Empire, the Rozarrian Empire and a third force which will have to choose between these two sides, the non-aligned city-state of Bhujerba. Bhujerba has little military power, but has become a major economic power due to its exports of nethicite (nethicite crystals are laden with magical energy, and serve as the power-source for the economy of Ivalice). Interestingly, nethicite plays much the same role in FF12’s storyline as that other great symbol of imperialist Capital, Tolkien’s all-consuming, all-devouring One Ring, played in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Simply, there are particular forms of nethicite which, very much like the Ring, are so powerful that they literally cannot be used.

One of the canniest decisions made by the FF12 design team was to sharply differentiate Bhujerba from the national cultures of Japan or China. This short-circuits the possibility of misinterpreting Bhujerba as the site of a renascent Japanese neo-imperialism or an exotic neo-Orientalism. For example, Bhujerba’s official language is modeled on Sanskrit (the city guides use the term “bhadra” for “sir”, etc.). The game’s initial narrator, Marquis Halim Ondore IV, ruler of Bhujerba, speaks in a gentle South Asian lilt, in a very fine piece of voice-acting by veteran performer Tom Lane. Bhujerba’s semi-independence vis-a-vis Archades thus suggests a Southeast Asian trading entrepot – rather like a cross between Goa, Portugal’s former colony turned federal state of India, and Singapore.

Last but not least, Rozarria is clearly meant to symbolize the European Union, thanks to the Spanish accent and flashy rockstar sunglasses of Al-Cid Margrace, a member of Rozarria’s ruling family. Given the Middle Eastern undertone of the game, it’s not difficult to read Al-Cid’s preference for peacekeeping rather than war and his advisory role in Rozarrian politics as a patent reference to Javier Solana, the Spanish official in charge of administering the EU’s foreign policy.

With these geopolitical clues, we can now read Ivalice as an anagram of the contemporary world-system, dominated by the struggle between the US Empire (Archades), Rozarria (the European Union) and Bhujerba (a stylized East Asia still partly under the aegis of the US Empire, but increasingly chafing under its rule).

-- DRR

FF12 Micropolitics and Geopolitics

What keeps FF12’s exquisitely crafted geopolitical allegory on track is an equally sophisticated micropolitics. FF12 eschews the simplistic reactionism of the various petro-fundamentalisms and neoliberalisms, which either demonize Americanization or swear eternal fealty to such. Rather, FF12 sets the basic ideological premises of the US Empire in motion towards its reality – its rhetoric of freedom towards the reality of conquest, its rhetoric of opportunity towards the reality of exploitation, the ideology of benevolent rule towards the reality of colonial violence. This is nicely symbolized by the conflict which breaks out between Larsa Solidor and Vayne Solidor, brothers in the ruling family of Archades. Late in the game, we travel to the city of Archades, and even Vaan comes to realize that most Archadeans are not malevolent or evil.

This is a videogame refreshingly free from cardboard villains. Even the most retrograde characters wish to do the right thing, and have reason to believe they are making sound moral choices. It is only that they have been so twisted by power and Empire, that they end up steering Ivalice towards catastrophe. The evil lies not in individuals, but the system of Empire as a whole.

This complexity and subtlety applies to the game’s micropolitics, too. Ivalice teems with racial and ethnic diversity, ranging from the lizard-like Bangaa and the froglike Seeqs, to the rabbit-eared Viera and catlike Moogles, to name just a few. None of these races are marked by occupational or class difference, though some are marked by minor linguistic and cultural variations. Miguelo, the shopkeeper who raised Vaan after the latter lost both his parents, is a Bangaa, and one of the most significant player-characters in the game, Fran, is Viera.

What makes the category of race especially interesting is the way it is juxtaposed with gender. Here is a CGI in-game shot near the beginning of the game, showcasing two Viera visiting the city of Rabanastre:



These Viera are clearly marked as women of color. This fact becomes crucial to the storyline when Vaan accidentally runs into Fran and Balthier.

Any other videogame would have marginalized Fran as literal and figurative background color for heroic white characters. Not FF12. One of the obvious reasons is that Rabanastre is meant to be a Middle Eastern city, which means its native characters (Ashe, Vaan and Penelo) are Arabized, as it were, i.e. rendered non-white. A fourth character, Basch, is originally from Landis, a regional power vanquished by the Empire, which is possibly a metaphor for the occupied Palestinian territories, or maybe a nod towards Turkey’s complex status as the first Middle Eastern society on the way to becoming a member of the EU. The last player-character, Balthier, is the only unambiguously white character in the game, since he is from Archades. However, he is also a rebel who fled the Archadean (read: American) Empire, which puts him in conflict with imperial whiteness.

This brings us to FF12’s master-stroke, the plot twist which transforms the storyline from anti-imperial fable into aesthetic insurrection: Fran and Balthier’s relationship.

Yes, they are an item. And what a romance it is! This is not only the first credible interracial romance in videogame history, it is also one of the first credible romances in the history of the multinational media culture. By credible, we mean neither trite, racist nor condescending to the characters or cultures involved.

In many ways, FF12 doesn’t really get off the ground until Balthier and Fran arrive on the scene. Sky-pirates by profession, their sophisticated repartee, verbal jousting and subtle wit quickly steal the limelight from Vaan and Penelo. Like the lifelong partners they indeed are, they complement each other in countless ways: Fran’s intrepid sagacity and cultural wisdom is the perfect foil for Balthier’s brashness and quicksilver humor. Both are fiercely independent people, and end up as dissidents from their respective societies. Fran leaves her forest village homeland forever, while Balthier discards his upper class, urban life-style and his Imperial privileges. Yet they balance their personal quest for independence with an equally unyielding commitment to their friends and to each other, something relayed as much by the amused looks they cast each other as by the occasional double and triple entendres they lob into the conversation – digs aimed not at the other characters, but at the videogame audience itself.

A great deal of credit is due to Gideon Emery and Nicole Fantl, the voice actors for Balthier and Fran, respectively. Emery is an experienced stage actor from South Africa’s vibrant theater scene, and gives Balthier his requisite drollness, panache and energy. While Fran was Fantl’s first major voice acting role – she had a few minor parts in Hollywood films – her performance is so stunning as to defy description. Fantl used her real life linguistic skills as a speaker of five languages (she grew up in Sydney, Australia and later lived in Europe) to create a heavily accented English for her character. The result is an eerily placeless, stateless English, which cannot be directly traced to any specific European language or cultural group. Rather, it evokes the nuanced, richly cadenced versions of English spoken by the educated and professional classes of the former Anglophone colonies. (The most prominent literary example of this is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Roy grew up in the southern Indian state of Kerala, but writes in English.)

Here is a sample of the dialogue, which occurs about one-third through the entire storyline (you can also listen and watch a Youtube recording of this sequence -- thanks to Keith3D for posting the clip):

Party’s path through Golmore Jungle is blocked by iridescent magical barrier.
Vaan: “What is it?”
Fran: “The jungle denies us our passage.”
Ashe: “What have we done?”
Fran: “We? No. I.”
Fran walks away, Vaan tries to get her attention.
Vaan: “What’s that mean? How’re we supposed to get through that?”
Balthier follows Fran.
Balthier: “Making an appearance?”
Fran: “I am.”
Balthier: “I thought you’d left for good.”
Fran: “Our choices are few. This is as much for you as it is me.”
Balthier: “Oh?”
Fran turns and gives him a piercing look.
Fran: “You are ill at ease. The nethicite troubles you. You’ve let your eyes betray your heart.”
Balthier: trying to be dismissive but failing: “Right.”

This is some of the finest scripting, voice-acting, and post-production ever created for a videogame, and yet it’s just one tiny fragment of the epic canvas which is FF12.

There’s so much more to be said about this videogame, ranging from its politics of sexuality – in particular, the wonderfully deft way it metrosexualizes virtually all its characters and shreds the heterosexual and patriarchal stereotypes of the role-playing genre – to its politics of history, a.k.a. its thoughtful critique of the categories of Empire, colonialism and resistance. Alas, these are topics which are far beyond the scope of an article in this humble publication, and will have to wait for a full-length critical study.

Suffice to say that FF12 has done more than just raise the bar for future videogames. It has shown that it is possible to depict powerful, complex characters of color, without exploitation or condescension, and to access the media cultures of the periphery in solidaristic rather than neocolonial ways.

-- DRR

The Wii Turns One

Ever since it launched in November of 2006, numerous US-based analysts and industry observers have tried to dismiss the Wii as a fad. Many of the leading videogame critics, professional websites, journalists and analysts said it was too simple, too much like a gimmick or toy, and that it didn’t have enough processing power or storage capacity to compete against the 360 or the PS3.

Consumers think otherwise. The Wii is on track to become the fastest-selling home console in videogame history. Sales of the Wii, plus the ever-popular DS system, have propelled Nintendo’s revenues past the $10 billion mark. Most remarkable of all, the Wii’s popularity continues to build. In spite of dramatically increased production, the console sells so quickly that it can still be a challenge to find it on the shelves of major US retailers.

How could so many people who know so much about gaming be so wrong? Much of this disconnect is due to the fact that the people who cover games are very different from the broad mass of the game-playing public. Simply, most people who write about, analyze, or deal professionally with videogames in the US – let’s call them the “game-professionals” – are marketers, PC enthusiasts, PR specialists, journalists or game staffers. As a rule, this group is highly paid, well educated, and overwhelmingly white and male (though less so than a decade ago). By contrast, the gaming audience is much closer to the overall demographics of the US as a whole – nearly half the US population is non-white, while 40% of gamers are women.

Many game-professionals grew up on a steady diet of PC titles, competitive multiplayer games and action-adventure shooters, which tends to skew their critical radar. Gamespot’s reviewers are well-read and highly literate, but they gave Microsoft’s entertaining but emotionally vacuous Halo 3 a 9.5 out of 10, while the epoch-making game design, storyline and characters of Final Fantasy 12 garnered a mere 9.0. That makes about as much sense as giving Spiderman 3 a higher ranking than Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

Ironically, one of the accidental victims of this sociological and critical skew is Nintendo, which produces a vast number of games which appeal to a wide audience, especially women. The result in the rankings is a noticeable pattern of lower scores for the Nintendo platform as a whole, as compared to Sony or Microsoft games, even though Nintendo has one of the most consistent track records of quality game-play and design innovation in the industry.

This is not to argue the critics are always wrong, because sometimes they have very sharp insights indeed. Rather, this is simply to point out that videogame journalism and criticism are still in their infancy, and game-professionals need to become much more self-conscious, historically-minded and critically reflexive about how game narratives operate.

Let’s apply this critical mentality to the single most persistent critique of the Wii: the notion that it is outdated hardware, i.e. essentially a slightly more powerful Gamecube with motion controllers. This is simply untrue. There is copious evidence, based on the design specifications released by ATI and IBM, that the Wii’s hardware is eight to ten times more powerful than the Gamecube. Sure, this isn’t the same boost as the leap from the Playstation 2 to the Playstation 3 – the latter is at least thirty times more powerful, in sheer processing power, than the former. That’s not a problem, because the Wii doesn’t need that extra power.

Motion-controlled games work differently from other styles of game-play. Simply, your brain is engaged in creating physical movements, while paying attention to the visual effects is strictly secondary. It is the difference between watching a tennis game, where visual fidelity is important, to actually swinging a racket on the court. While you swing, you have no time to observe the color-shades of green in the blade of grass underneath your opponent’s foot. You’re busy tracking the ball, moving into position, and waiting for the return volley.

Nintendo’s Metroid 3 is a case in point. It is a wonderful game, a science-fiction first-person shooter with the twist that you can transform into a ball and bounce around the playing-field. During battles, you are tracking opponents and objects on the screen with the Wii controller and rolling around like mad. Additional visuals would add absolutely nothing to the game. Some of the most entertaining sequences are quite simple, graphically speaking, e.g. the MetaRipley battle, where you combat a dragon-like creature in mid-air while hurtling down a kilometers-long tunnel.

By contrast, a game like Insomniac’s Resistance relies on the PS3’s massive processing power, to make its environment – a fictional 1950s England under attack by aliens – come to life. It is a very different game-play experience, which requires players to descry opponents at longer distances, and to track objects against cluttered environments of corridors and narrow spaces.

Both are wonderful games for wonderful systems, and it is nonsense to argue one game is better than the other, or that one system is superior to the other.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Wii is that it has dramatically expanded the game-playing public, on two levels. First, it has pioneered new forms of game-play. Millions of consumers who previously considered videogames too complicated to use are discovering it’s easy to bowl, swing a tennis racket or play golf with their friends on the Wii. Second, it is affordable. The consoles cost $250 today, but will drop to $100 over the next three years. By 2010, roughly 1.5 billion consumers in Russia, China, Brazil and the urban regions of Indonesia and India will have the purchasing power to buy a Wii console of their own, which augurs an extraordinary expansion of the game market.

None of this means that the PS3 won’t be a wildly successful console in its own right, which it surely will be. The 360 will also be successful, the moment Microsoft fixes the hardware defects which have caused so many 360s to fail. (Hopefully soon.) It’s just that consumers finally have some real choices in terms of game-play. This is a dramatic step forwards from 2001, when the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube all offered a more or less similar console experience. That’s good for gaming, good for game-artists, and good for the videogame commons as a whole.

-- DRR

Twilight Princess

For decades, Shigeru Miyamoto’s long-running Legend of Zelda franchise has consistently delivered quality game-play, immersive game-worlds and richly detailed character designs. Twilight Princess is the latest iteration of the Zelda franchise, and while the game showcases some of the potential of the Wii, it also suffers from some surprising weaknesses.

Certain parts of the game have great polish and panache, and are hugely entertaining. The high points include a boss battle deep under a volcanic mountain, the motion-controlled swordplay, and whacking giant clams, which is as fun as it sounds. Plus, the grapple is back, better than ever.

Yet other episodes are poorly executed. The wagon escort episode is an especially egregious offender. You have to Z-target a flying bird and shoot it down before it drops a small bomb on the wagon train, diverting it from its gate. Unfortunately, the scene occurs at night, and you are busy fighting off wolf-riders, which means you frequently have no idea where the bird is located or what it is doing. On forum chats, many players have complained about going around in endless circles, unable to target the bird in time.

The underwater boss fight has similar issues. The first two stages are nicely implemented, but the final stage is frustrating due to the clumsiness of the swimming controls. Your character is wearing magic underwater armor, which means swimming should be simple and easy. It’s not. You button-mash to swim forwards, causing your player-character to career back and forth like a drunken submariner. You have to grapple close to the monster’s eye, which should be easy, but turns out to be quite frustrating.

Movement control is also an issue when you ride your horse. While the ride is visually stylish, if you even touch a wall, you come to a dead stop. This breaks the sense of immersion and is unnecessarily frustrating for players who are simply trying to ride in traffic.

Tenuous movement controls, the odd lapse in level design which sticks out like a sore thumb – this reviewer counted nearly one per level – and poorly-executed action sequences are the classic hallmarks of a game which was rushed out the door to meet a deadline. In all likelihood, Twilight Princess suffered from having to match the release date of the Wii’s hardware debut. Nintendo did not want to take any chances on the Wii being less than an outstanding success, and it made perfect sense to have a Zelda title on hand to spur launch sales. As things turned out, the Wii didn’t need the extra help, but the result is that Twilight Princess isn’t everything it could have been. In a rare case of commercial success correlating with aesthetic success, sales of this Zelda title have been far less impressive than previous games.

Yet the most disappointing aspect of the game is not the mechanics, which work most of the time, but the storyline. The character development is surprisingly weak, and the cities and towns feel empty, simply because they are filled with characters who are not part of the storyline. Instead of evolving the adventure quest into the 2000s, Twilight Princess is content to retread the canonic 1990s role-playing games.

This is most evident in Link’s sprite-like sidekick, Midna, who seems at first glance to be a refreshing update of the guardian angel or magical spite. Midna is a creature of the twilight, replete with puckish grin, gleaming eye and rakish hair which can transform into a hand, capable of manipulating objects (this may be a glancing reference to Okami’s final boss, the disembodied hand). Midna and the shadow-beings are black, but they are by no means evil. Rather, they are under the domination of a malevolent spirit, which suggests a refreshing openness to the utopian visions of blackness and multiracial solidarity generated by US artists and communities of color.

Alas, this promising new character is quickly undone by the heavy-handed deployment of race and gender. This is not, as one might assume, due to the fact that Link is invariably portrayed as a young blond, blue-eyed male. In fact, Link’s character design is a combination of Anglo-American elf, European Robin Hood, and Japanese anime icon. The problem is that there are no almost no credible female characters in the storyline, while Ganondorf and the villainous orcs are consistently racialized in terms of threatening or corrupting black bodies. During the very last sequence of the game, one of the orcs turns out to be surprisingly human, but this is the exception and not the rule. Even Ganondorf’s red beard is one of the oldest and least credible stereotypes of early 19th century European Romanticism, namely the red-bearded adventurer.

This isn’t to say Twilight Princess is a throwback to the 1980s. At a certain point in the storyline, Princess Zelda sacrifices herself to keep Midna alive, an interesting inversion of the classic Hollywood stereotype of a bit character of color who is sacrificed to save a white character. But the progressive potential of this moment is sabotaged when Midna sheds her nimbus of blackness and stands revealed as a half-black, half-white creature. This is a reprise of that dreadful staple of 19th century racial politics, the tragic mulatto, updated to the Information Age.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 12 was careful to develop the character of its own woman of color, Fran, by means of a richly evocative geopolitics and an engaging back story involving the Viera of Eruyt. There is no corresponding exploration of the Twilight World. In fact, I would argue that Nintendo threw away a golden opportunity by not fleshing out the back story and making Midna a playable character.

Why didn’t they take this route? The ending of Twilight Princess contains a crucial clue. When Ganondorf is defeated and the curse on Midna is lifted, she stands revealed as a doe-eyed, red-haired beauty, who elicits Link’s startled (and clearly sexualized) gaze. Ganondorf’s threatening blackness and demonic red hair are inverted into an anagram of alluring female sexuality – but an anagram which is promptly whisked off-stage, before romantic complications can ensure. Racial and sexual otherness is briefly invoked, only to be promptly sealed off behind a renewed wall of repression.

Midna’s fate recalls to mind the red-haired Lucia in Devil May Cry 2, the least successful game in the Devil May Cry franchise. Lucia was a potentially interesting character and starred in a few playable sequences of her own, but the game-writers drastically underscripted and oversexualized her role. Devil May Cry 3 would correct its predecessor’s mistake, by desexualizing its female protagonist, Lady, and insisting on a friendship of equals between Lady and the main character, Dante.

In fairness to Twilight Princess, there is a strikingly similar recontainment of race and gender at the end of Final Fantasy 10, when the romance between Tidus, the American sports hero, and Yuna, the budding J-pop star, is disrupted by Tidus’ banishment. It is as if the script could imagine the destruction of entire civilizations without missing a beat, but could not bear the thought that a single multinational (in this case, Japanese-American) relationship might actually be consummated.

Still, there is one scene in Twilight Princess which points in a different direction. This is a nightmare sequence where multiple Links, possessed by demons, seem to plot the destruction of the world. This borders on the self-recognition of a toxic whiteness, the understanding that Ganondorf is the embodiment of Empire, while Link incarnates the resistance to Empire. Yet to do justice to this insight, to truly rebel against a repressive, dominating whiteness – a whiteness which is nothing but a mask of the market fundamentalism which has done such violence to our world – that identity-politics must be systematically critiqued and negated, throughout the length and breadth of the world-system. No radical geopolitics without a correspondingly radical micropolitics.

Nintendo is one of the most creative companies around, and there’s no doubt that the next iteration of Legend of Zelda will feature wonderful new forms of game-play for the Wii. But this shouldn’t detract from the urgent need to invest in scriptwriting and character development. The Zelda series does not, as some critics argue, need to grow up. Rather, it simply needs to return to what made its previous incarnations so wonderful: the ability to see solidarity and redemption in difference, precisely where adults see only projections of their own internalized demons.

-- DRR

Stay tuned for Issue 11: The Portable Gaming Issue, January 2008!