Cloud Strife

There's something to be said about the days of old, our youthful existence revolving around dragon slayings, ancient curses, and what could be lurking through the threshold of that impossibly large door down the hall. There's almost a romantic quality to the mind of a child, the way that reality has yet to be fully established and imagination can take care of the things we're yet to understand. How do cars work? Little mice on wheels. What are clouds made of? Cotton candy. Why? Why not.

I occasionally have wondered about this before, and why the world we live in doesn't seem to be as magical as it once was. Every day comes and goes as the last did, with the occasional blip in the rhythm of monotony. Where did the wonder go? Why does everything need to have a logical explanation? I used to think that there really was a Land of Giants somewhere when I was little. And that Pennsylvania was where vampires came from. And I wasn't necessarily wrong about that, but that's besides the point. I just feel like something beautiful gets lost in the translation from child to adult. I try and hold on to it, and I can see glimpses of it sometimes, but it seems to be a fleeting luxury.

There's a blog I read online that mostly deals with music called Paste. It's pretty standard stuff about indie bands and whatnot, but lately they've been doing this repeating segment on a grown man's journey through one of the greatest videogames of our generation; Final Fantasy 7 on the original Playstation. Throughout the journey, he keeps writing to a fellow journalist (who has already played the game and loves it) about his experience with the game and how he thinks it stacks up with the mighty praise that the game has gathered over the years. And he seems, through the magic of polygons and badly translated text, to have stumbled upon this mystery of youth that I've been pondering for a while. Here's a little snippet from the article:

"So when you suggest that that Final Fantasy VII could not, then or now, be made in the west, I'd say that if anything, it's less likely now. I'm afraid that fact suggests that the reason this game so captures peoples' hearts and spirits is that its developers didn't have the technology required to cut our imaginations out of the equation entirely, else they would have. I only draw that conclusion because over the last ten years, Square's (and many other developers') designers have finally gained the technology required to make their wildest concept art into a million-polygon reality, and sure enough, they have allowed their own imaginations to take center stage while pushing ours aside without a second thought. Perhaps that means that no one has "forgotten" about imagination at all; they simply no longer need to rely on it."


After reading a few of these articles, I got the itch to play the game myself, so being the ardent gamer and techno-dude that I am, I found an emulator online and threw in my copy of FFVII that I still have lying around. Yes, I still have some awesome PS1 games lying around. Hush. Anyway, I was expecting an enjoyable time, given that I've played the game to varying points throughout the years and loved every minute of it, but I wasn't really expecting a full-blown switch in the way I thought about games, and in turn, my youth.

The game, for those unlucky enough to have missed out, is an RPG (role-playing game) out of Japan about a spiky-haired kid saving the world. Standard stuff really, and the story's not that important for my argument. The graphics are supremely lacking compared to today's standards, but I think that's what makes it so intriguing. I can't really see this guy's face, so I have to make it up and give him an identity that might differ from what the developer thought I would. I don't understand what's happening here, so I invent an activity. And it somehow all works. It's like playing a book. That's the simplest way I know how to describe it.

Today's games are so photo-realistic that you're not able to flex anything in your mind, you're just pressing buttons in a pre-defined world, already planned, mapped, and fleshed out for you. But in the older games, the ones so many people hold dear to their hearts, we were forced to use our imagination to fill in the blanks made by developers due to lack of technology. Mario looks like a blue and red blob, but I knew him through and through. Link, the wordless hero from Zelda, battles countless ridiculous monsters in a desert with a sword that shoots more swords, and that wouldn't mean anything unless I made up a reason for him to be doing that. Games used to be dots on a map, milestones that the player drew the lines between. Now they're fully mapped out movies and we're just along for the ride.

And this all leads back to imagination. We loose that childlike wonder because the world explains itself after a while. We understand the rhythms and reasons for things, and we're not forced to connect and create "between the dots" like we did as children. I like to think of myself as a big kid, and I'm pretty sure I'll never fully grow up because I don't see the point of being so serious all the time. There's a certain enjoyment and undying happiness that comes from thinking that zombies might attack tomorrow. Or that, despite years of failure, somehow every time I get a new pair of shoes I can run faster and jump higher. I swear I can.... Anyway, I'm just saying that despite the perks of being on top of the real world (money, knowledge, general sanity), it's also a good thing to encourage imagination and suspended reality. Because I enjoy playing blocky games about spiky-haired kids trying to save the world rather than games about doing my taxes.