Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “Are you a Jessie or a Johnny?”

You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.

-Socrates, Plato’s Apology

As classic games like Final Fantasy VII become the matter for more reflective and retrospective sorts of discussion and enjoyment, the question arises of the best way to revisit them.

What might be some of the tradeoffs involved in watching a playthrough versus actually playing the game? The one saves considerable time, of course, while the other provides the full experience. Each supplies ample frustrations, too, whether from the playing side, with random battles inhibiting your exploration and then the limited save points through this whole Midgar section making it tricky to budget the time you actually want to spend playing at a stretch, or from the watching side, being unable to determine anything, from where to go to whom to talk to.

I’ll always opt for playing firsthand if at all possible, setting the speed of text and battle faster to get through some of these things more efficiently. But either way, watching or playing or just thinking back, what we want to interrogate is the experience of playing, rather than the nitty-gritty of dealing with the mechanics.

If the random battles become tedious, there’s comic relief in the rescue of Aeris.

In a bizarre pseudo-call-back to Donkey Kong, we have Cloud up in the attic of the old church, pushing barrels down on her pursuers, only instead of falling on the enemy in a satisfying, swashbuckling way, they tend to miss completely, and Aeris sort of scoffs and deals with the foes herself.

To me, this suggests that mirth is as good a response to random encounters as annoyance, and that the developers are at pains to keep things fresh. The fact that it takes time to proceed from save point to save point, too, makes playing the game really different from watching it, where you can pick up at any point, leave off at any time; different too from reading a book, for example, where you can skim and flip pages and put it down whenever; but they are in a way like the chapter breaks in a text, indicating natural points of pausing and gathering, or indeed, rushing onward to see what happens next.

With greater flexibility now, being able to put the system to sleep or use an emulator’s save state, to say nothing of watching a playthrough, we move further from these artifacts of the design and the technology at the time of its release. 

In whatever way you encounter it, part of what makes FFVII so powerful is not simply the narrative that’s being displayed in front of you, but the recompense for the time you spend with it.

Investing effort in fighting extra battles, for instance, rewards the player in tangible ways, with Gil and with your party getting a little stronger. Unless you’re embarking on some sort of speed run, you’re going to get that AP, you’re going to get those Limit Breaks that take some extra time to develop.

You literally see different things in the game depending on how long you choose to be there.

In the train security-breach sequence, you can run forward like you’re being told to do, or you can stop and talk to some of the people in the different cars and still make it through to the front of the train. Although the stakes are pretty low in this case, it’s a taste of the way that your exploration has an actual effect on what you get to do in the game, your co-creation of the overall experience.

With that, perhaps, comes some self-knowledge of the sort of person you are and where your values lie. In the very first compartment maybe you realize you ran right through it because of that countdown marker and feel rather foolish, because it means you missed out on a chance to interact with the characters on the train. On the other hand, dallying too much and talking to all of them potentially means you’ll never get through in time.

In either case, the player’s perspective has to find a balance between the ostensible goal of escaping and the bigger one, whatever it might be, of our purpose for playing the game in the first place. Is it simple escapism, or is it just the opposite, an unprecedented immersiveness, we’re after–particularly when you remember how symbolic the train is for the game and the series as a whole? However you look at it, there’s more to the situation than just getting to the end of the train.

Fortunately, games are iterable.

To get more gold or score more points, or to attempt to understand the story in a deeper way, might require playing a game through differently on subsequent re-plays.

This is where reading and discussing, analysis and commentary all comes in, I think, providing the benefit of others’ perspectives adding to our own. We get a gorgeous illustration of this in the train scene, too, with the dialogue between Barrett and the hapless Shinra manager. We’re already seeing some of the class dynamics going on in Midgar, and here, with Barrett standing in front of him and then slapping the window, intimidating this more staid citizen trying to do his job, there’s this two-tiered aspect of Midgar coming into contact on the train in just the way that all sorts of priorities and perspectives have to jostle for attention online nowadays.

This is not to say that YouTubers are all hooligans and terrorists, or that everyone writing for the major news and review sites is a corporate hack, quite the contrary: both Barrett and the Shinra employee here have a kind of pathos in their confrontation, the one justly aggrieved, the other bravely standing (or sitting) his ground.

Some of us rush through RPG dialogue as if there were always a clock ticking, because it seems less important than the action of a plot; some of us explore everything we can, try to talk to every person, find every item. It’s almost as if the game is not just that, but how you look at life itself. 

There’s a couple of dangers here, too.

First, there’s Jessie’s attempt to do something special with Cloud’s ID that messes everything up. This non-playable character, who’s relatively minor, derails the whole operation, and all because she intuits that there’s something more to that story of Cloud’s, and wants to become part of it.

We see another way this can go wrong with Johnny, the kid from Sector 7 whose parents are worried about him–and with reason. He gets mugged on the train; you can try to recover his Gil for him, but when you meet him again at Don Corneo’s Honey Bee Inn, he doesn’t mention it. He’s waiting outside the entrance, innocence still not quite lost.

He comes up again and again as a foil, hinting at further stories.

Taken together, Jessie and Johnny, representing the start of a budding relationship or of a misguided adventure, suggest two ways of going astray in the game: overdoing it with misplaced love, or simply not knowing how to navigate it successfully. They highlight the blank slate of Cloud’s persona collecting interest to itself, this individual who has nothing yet promises everything, onto which people can project things, their own internal wishes, including what he represents or what he provides for us as the player.

Art by Roberto Ferrari

If he is a sort of blank onto which we project ourselves, what does it say about us?

What does it mean for Cloud himself that there are people like Zack and Sephiroth in his background, extraordinary and successful people that he, in turn, fails to compete with? To take the Buster Sword as symbolic of his intellect, Cloud is totally undifferentiated from the closer of the figures he’s attempting to identify with in the beginning, and much the inferior of the other–for now.

Unlike most games, part of what an RPG does is to make explicit how players put themselves into the character, allowing us to see the events from a third-person perspective but simultaneously to experience the emotions of our avatar. In this, we are something like the daemon for Socrates, though that only ever told him No. So that reflecting on the game, you experience differentiation between you and the character as well as between you and the other people playing, including the person you were when you last played.

Art by Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863)

Schematically, we might posit a series of differing approaches to playing games–the evolution of video games as a medium maps onto it nicely, from Donkey Kong to Mario Bros. to Mario RPG to Mario Maker…

Initially, you’re just getting to the next thing, the next level. That’s the thing that the game is basically for, right, to play and have fun in, and so you go for a high score. Then maybe you explore more and more. Then as you start to think about it, to talk about it with other people, to replay it, even to read about it, you want to know what you missed or what you want to get to do differently next time.

From there, the game–played, remembered, and imagined–becomes a kind of canvas upon which you see a version of yourself. As a kid that can be pretty strong, to the point where you really do identify with that character and take ideas from the game and see how they work in real life, or vice versa. It’s probably a healthy thing to do, because by playing things out at that age you get to sort of experiment with them in a way that’s relatively safe, and you’re learning from something that you actually care about, not something assigned at school.

Once you begin to have more sophisticated or abstract thoughts about this whole movement, then it becomes really interesting to think about how to design the game such that certain experiences should arise, certain kinds of conversations and sites for the characters and the players to undergo something together, giving rise to real emotions in the real world. The person playing still has to guard against the dangers of Jessie’s love-token (a paralyzing self-consciousness) or of Johnny’s ineptitude (a total loss of progress), but at least in the context of the game, these negative ramifications should be little worse than a waste of time. 

But what about the moral interactions and their implications?

Time and again we have the opportunity to either say something sassy and derogatory or to be nice. Are you like me, trying to be nice every single time? I feel bad if I’m not. When I see that dialogue in my avatar’s name, when I see the other characters look at mine in disappointment, I upbraid myself that I didn’t play the role right.

It comes back to how part of role-playing is the playing, and part is the role: doing the right thing in this sort of game is about inhabiting your role correctly and consistently in relation to the narrative you find yourself in–or subverting it, if you’re into that sort of thing. Again, the consequences in-game will tend to be orders of magnitude less than they’d be in life, where friends and teachers or coworkers let you know if you’re out of character, worrying about or simply reprimanding you.

The right thing to do might be as simple as saying something supportive.

There are other situations where a choice presents itself: do you steal the kid’s money from his secret drawer in between the two drawers? I mean, you can. That minor transgression the game invites you to has no real repercussions.

Depending on which role you want to play, and how closely you want to model it, there’s not necessarily an ethical requirement here, but something more like an aesthetic one: that you should make the game more interesting or exciting by your choices.

You can call Aeris the slum drunk or the flower girl, and that won’t have any effect on the greater storyline. She’s still going to join the party, and she’s still going to go through everything that entails for her. Nothing changes from this dialogue, except for the impact it has on the person Cloud spends time with at Gold Saucer later on. So what are we experiencing when we select either of these answers, knowing that it doesn’t change much of anything, that it’s just a bunch of ones and zeros in an algorithm?

Somehow, we still become engrossed in the story. 

Plainly, part of what the game shows us is that even in situations which seem to our rational intellect as if they shouldn’t matter, it’s not just our rational intellect determining the weight we lay on them. As Haidt puts it, emotion is the “elephant” here, reason merely the “rider.”

Cold-blooded analysis will not be the greatest determinant of our action, if the game has any effect on us at all.

It tells us just enough about ourselves to help us understand the sorts of decisions we might make in a real situation, and in that respect, it’s potentially a very valuable and powerful tool for understanding human nature. Depending on who you ask, studies suggest playing games won’t increase the incidence of physical violence, but perhaps a mental, moral contamination is still possible. What does this crude (or virtuous) action, and the time spent indulging in it (or aspiring to it), leave on the mind as its imprint?

That’s precisely the thing I want to get out there with ethics as role or as playing a character: it might just as likely be a positive as a negative outcome. Even if a word or action in that situation is not terribly morally consequential in isolation, it does form a pattern over time, one that can potentially be iterated, either contributing towards or detracting from the person you want to be, and the company you want to keep.  

Again, the Gold Saucer date…

When we get there, it’s the glimmer of a consequence for these little choices that you make, going way back to the start of the game, the emotive payoff, if not terribly important to the narrative, of your investment into the machine. Undertale spoofs this, while embedding the consequence-mechanic much deeper into its own story, to surprisingly resonant thematic effect.

For fans of FFVII, even something this minor adds to the replay factor of the game.

You can’t see all three scenarios without playing at least that far three times. You get to see just one–unless you YouTube it, or, back in the day, go and hang out with someone else playing it. Finding out what it was like from their perspective playing the game serves to broaden your experience, too.

Being as kind as possible to people like Jessie and Aeris, knowing they’re inevitably going to die, is a little quixotic for two reasons: (A) they’re not alive.

Why don’t I treat the people around me, who are definitely actually going to die someday, with the painstaking care I give to these scraps of code? Is it because I don’t always have two clear choices put in front of me, offering such a contrast between right and wrong? I just don’t see how every interaction can be simplified to find that right thing to say or do in the moment. But the game makes possible the experiment–or the metaphor–for what moral choice is about. Playing the game, you can skim right over that, and maybe that’s the purest way to play it, but you can also muse on it for hours on end, and replay it until you get it right. 

In any case, now we come to (B) on the other end of things, in the same way as Cloud has been doing, Jessie highlights the pathos of an NPC acting like a hero.

Needless to say, we’ll consider Aeris’ sacrifice, over which the player similarly has no control, in its proper place. Ruined and losing concrete memories, having to recreate them as we go along, we identify with Cloud and the rest a little differently when we’re viewing the game from the standpoint of being past our prime, rather than from the standpoint of being kids.

Wesley Schantz (the Bookwarm Mage) coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA. FFVII Myth & Materia comes out of his podcast series with Alexander Schmid and Vincent Reese.

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