Destination Ivalice [part 2]
Part 1 | Part 2
V. Re: Mewt & Me & Final Fantasy
I just realized that I had forgotten to mention the full contents of that tall black wooden cabinet to the right of my video game soundtracks that we had briefly covered back in ch. 1. (I feel that I must reiterate that the following list of games is not some sort of materialistic brag—I swear, there is a point to this whole thing that relates to the main theme of the essay; if you think this is some sort of masturbatory indulgence to convince you—the reader—that I am some sort of epic old-guard gamer, you would be wrong [seriously, that’s not what’s happening here]). There’s actually a lot of grade-A nostalgic childhood stuff that I feel you should know about in that cabinet. The cabinet itself is about 6 ft tall, separated into a top and bottom section as if a master swordsman had cut a perfect horizontal slice right through the middle of a trunk of wood without sundering it and then meticulously hollowed the inside into spacious squares with a small hand axe and then painted it all pitch. Each section is accessible through a panel that opens via an arched handle screwed in from the inside of the panel itself, and both top and bottom sections are divided into three subsections (or shelves); starting from the bottom-most shelf, a variety of Sega Genesis games that have all been touched by these same typing hands, just much younger, all obtained from my eighth to twelfth year on this planet: Ecco the Dolphin, Gunstar Heroes, Elemental Master, Phantasy Star 1 through 4, Street Fighter 2, Vectorman 2, Sonic 1 through 3 and Knuckles, Gaiares, Strider, and last but certainly not least, Altered Beast. (The Sega Genesis I played these games on has sadly been lost to time, although I still have the cords and controllers for it somewhere in my attic). On the shelf above the Sega shelf sits my collection of PlayStation games, all of which were obtained from around my thirteenth to sixteenth year on this planet (as you can tell, these shelves kinda materialistically trace my growing-up): Final Fantasy Anthology, Final Fantasy Chronicles (missing the Chrono Trigger disc, unfortunately [but—if you’ve been paying attention—I have a copy of this game on DS, so no big deal]), Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII (already mentioned, worth mentioning again just so you don’t forget), Final Fantasy IX (refer to the previous parenthetical), Chrono Cross (refer to previous parenthetical), Dragon Quest VII—(these are, as you can probably tell, not in any sort of logical order whatsoever)—Tales of Destiny 1 and 2, Chrono Cross (I have two copies for some reason), Grandia (never beaten this one), Breath of Fire III and IV, SaGa Frontier II (love this game, but also mentioned before), Ehrgeiz: God Bless the Ring (any self-proclaimed Final Fantasy VII fanatic should know about this one), and Phantasy Star Online. (Yes, I know that last one is a Dreamcast game, but it’s here in the cabinet regardless; it’s actually the only Dreamcast game I still have, as my old Dreamcast [& games] were lost in a move years ago.) And above the PlayStation shelf is a collection of old strategy guides that were obtained haphazardly throughout my youth: Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation (this guide is thick, nearly 400 pages long, and somehow in near-mint condition), Phantasy Star Zero, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (also an incredibly thick guide [it came with a poster that has since been ripped out; teenage me not understanding that hanging posters on walls is a very temporary thing, more ephemeral than the guides themselves, considering that people move and things change and whatnot]), The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (much thinner than the aforementioned Zelda guide [and I actually got this one in my early-early twenties]), Metal Gear Solid 3 (and a separate art book that came with it [some pages are missing from this one, used as wall art for my old room at my mom’s old old house that she no longer lives in [foreclosed by the bank after she filed for Chapter 11—which is a whole other thing that we’re not going to get into here; but does go to show that those precious walls you put stuff all over are not permanent by any means]), and SaGa Frontier II (which was gifted to me by a friend of a friend who worked at Babbage’s [now GameStop] who, when I must have been twelve or so, came by with this huge box of strategy guides he was trying to get rid of [for whatever reason, I don’t know] and told me to pick two; I picked SaGa Frontier II and Valkyrie Profile [the latter of which has been lost to time] due to being impressed by the cover art alone—this was really my first time seeing non-Westernized video game artwork in close detail, thus kinda kicking off my whole obsession with Japanese role-playing games and anime). The top part of the cabinet is less interesting, containing miscellaneous stuff like headphones, sunglasses, air duster, and other tools and accessories that I use day to day; however, there is one interesting thing, a black cloth bag containing a handful of Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games, including but not limited to: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (the very game this essay is supposedly about).
I must admit that, growing up, I would take Adderall (which was prescribed to me from the ages of 10 to 20 by a legitimate medical doctor [nothing illegal here]) and veg out in front of a television set drinking Diet Cherry Cola while eating saltines and playing all these aforementioned video games for over 15 hours a day (provided I didn't have to go to school, but if I did have to go to school then I would get home around 3 p.m. or so and play said video games until around 2 a.m. [sometimes even later—many all-nighters were had—considering I would often double up on Adderall, which wires you to the point of not being able to fall asleep if not also taking some other sleeping medication with it, which is actually a dangerous yin-yang upper-downer stimulant-depressant chemical combination that would not be advised by any medical doctor worth their amphetamine salts]). At this point you may be asking something like, “Where were your parents during all of this?” And my response to that would be that my parents were divorced, and I lived with my mother who, despite loving me very much to the point of absolute spoildom, did not helicopter me at all, not even one bit, to the point where I had near absolute freedom, which—as one might imagine—led me to neglect schoolwork completely in favor of playing video games (and other various downstream negative stuff that we won’t get into here, for the sake of time).
As to why I was so deep into video games: I can only speculate. Maybe it was an escape from the tedium of school, which I found incredibly unchallenging, or perhaps I was attempting to outrun the ambient sorrow and pervasive loneliness that was always kinda there in the background ever since my parents divorced—who actually knows. Maybe I was scared; maybe life was too intimidating for me; maybe I recognized the rat race of it all from a young age; maybe I had to block it out; maybe I was trying to forget about the inevitable; maybe I wanted to forget about Corbel; or maybe I was just lazy; I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that I was obsessed with video games, and Final Fantasy was my favorite video game series—just like Mewt—and I would lose myself in those games, every day, from sunrise to sunset; even in school I would be drawing pictures of Final Fantasy characters, writing fanfiction about Final Fantasy characters, reading Final Fantasy strategy guides that I had smuggled in from home, &c. &c. I can’t tell you exactly why I was so obsessed. I was running from something, though. I was filling a void with Final Fantasy. I loved Final Fantasy more than life itself.
I loved Final Fantasy about as much as Mewt did—still do, really. Our destinations were always Ivalice. Losing ourselves in fantasy worlds was the goal, whether we were consciously aware of it or not.
In many ways, I was just like Mewt: totally lost in a fantasy world, to the point where I was not thinking about anything else at all. We both used fantasy to fill the void in our souls. We did so without a single care for our own mental health or for the people around us; in fact, we sucked everyone else in, too—forced them into our little misery nexus.
For me, it was my parents who, after a while, became extremely concerned for my health—anorexic from the amphetamines, my disposition always sour, my grades abysmal, and we had parent-teacher conferences every other week—and I didn’t care; as long as I could play Final Fantasy, I didn’t care. My escapism wasn’t only affecting me; it was affecting everyone around me.
For Mewt, it was his friends and family who were affected. Because of his sorrow over his dead mother and his terrible treatment at school, he sucked everyone into his fantasy vortex where everything was perfect—for him—whether the others liked it or not, and he refused to let them leave. His escapism wasn’t only affecting him; it was affecting everyone around him in a very direct way.
And Marche was right—it wasn’t healthy.
VI. Conclusion or: Beware the Ides of Marche
I could have ended the essay right there with the last sentence, but the whole concept of escapism is far more nuanced than just “it’s not healthy!” In fact, Marche’s whole worldview is harmful overall—he’s just situationally correct in my previously covered teenage amphetamine saga and in the very specific circumstances presented in the game of which he is insisted to be the protagonist (go figure).
Yet, typically, by the end of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, players are left with the strong feeling that they were actually playing as the villain the whole time; and this is a hard feeling to shake, as evidenced by even the simplest of internet searches:
“Is Marche a Huge Dick?” “Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: 5 Reasons Marche Is the Real Villain” “Evil Marche Theory” “Think Stalin Was Bad? Meet Marche from FFTA.” “Want to Play an Evil Villain in a FF Game? Play FFTA!” “Marche Is Worse Than Kefka” “Twist Ending Should Have Been Mewt Kills Marche and Drinks His Blood.”
So, the question becomes: is Marche actually the bad guy? And in this final chapter, I will attempt to answer this burning question, which has inspired many a Final Fantasy fansite forum debate, once and for all.
Marche is kinda like your stereotypical conservative father (pardon the memes), criticizing or destroying anything he views as a distraction from the quote-unquote real world. He’s the type that would tell his crying child to “shut up,” then later apologize because he feels bad but still sneaks in a “but you really should man up” somewhere in the apology. (Having children myself, I can attest that the urge to tell your crying child to “shut up!” is kinda always there—not because you want to impart some sort of “man up” lesson onto them, but because the sound of crying is annoyingly polluting your airspace and/or disrupting your concentration on whatever you happen to be doing at the time. Therefore, the “look, son, I’m sorry I yelled at you, but I just want you to be able to handle these things like an adult” justification is usually just post-hoc self-serving bullshit to resolve the parent’s own cognitive dissonance over the contradictory feelings of simultaneously loving your child yet wanting them to shut the hell up sometimes. The same goes for spanking, which is always just the parent letting out pent-up anger accumulated from the everyday stresses of life, but is always spun as some sort of tried-and-tested fear-based disciplinary tool that just ends up making your children see you as some sort of inhuman monster lumbering around the house waiting to dole out pain.) As such, Marche views Mewt’s Ivalice as an escape from problems that need to be faced head-on, as if the reality of someone’s mother dying is something that one can just “get over” without any sort of coping mechanism. Essentially, Marche wants Mewt to “man up.” (Again, pardon the gendered language; I am not above the meme mind pollution, which is likely why I can’t think of a better way to phrase this.) It follows that, in Marche’s view, he is giving Mewt a spanking to “whip his ass into shape,” or so they say. And since a broken clock is right at least twice a day—or so they say again—Marche’s conservatism just happens to be right in this specific scenario because, unfortunately, Mewt is forcing everyone around him to stay in Ivalice against their will. If Mewt had just gone to Ivalice by himself, leaving everyone else out of his fantasy, then this would be a whole different essay; after all, Mewt is entitled to do whatever he pleases, as long as he’s not hurting anyone else; but since Mewt forced everyone to stay in Ivalice against their will, he is therefore encroaching on the freedoms of others and is therefore in the wrong, and thus Marche is in the right for destroying Ivalice in this specific scenario (i.e., Marche is not the villain of the game; the villain is actually the wish genie that’s revealed at the very end of the game, which kinda trivializes the entire ethical quandary that the game’s narrative builds up over 70 hours of play [which is a common Final Fantasy trope, something I’ve coined “The Necron Paradigm” after a particularly egregious example of this trope from Final Fantasy IX], which is something I don’t want to get into right now).
But all of this is an easy answer; the real problem is that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance’s narrative isn’t so concerned with the whole “Mewt is forcing everyone to stay in Ivalice” angle; instead, it focuses on criticizing escapism in general, which ends up leaving the player feeling really fucking weird, as if they had just snatched a child’s favorite toy and broken it right in front of them, then laughed and spat on their dead mom’s grave.
“It’s not real . . . It’s escapism . . . It’s not healthy!”
The whole narrative of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is tinged with this conservative-leaning subtext that video games themselves are an escape from reality (considering that the world of Ivalice is from a video game called Final Fantasy within the game’s actual universe [i.e., the whole meta thing we went over in ch. 2]), which is nearly paradoxical because, as we both know, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance itself is a video game. The game makes you—the player—feel like Mewt while at the same time heavily criticizing Mewt; therefore, you feel as if you are being heavily criticized yourself. It’s a very weird thing. It’s as if the game itself doesn’t want you playing it, and if you choose to keep playing it, then you’re some sort of loser (i.e., Mewt) who is ignoring the so-called real world, thus wasting precious time that could be spent on other, more quote-unquote productive things.
Other games, like Metal Gear Solid 2, may tell the player to “turn the game off” in this sort of postmodern, funny way, but none that I have played—outside of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, of course—has ever criticized the player so heavily for simply playing it. And considering some of the grindy end-game elements, the game itself starts to feel as if it’s designed to keep you playing while at the same time making you feel bad for playing it, which, as you can imagine, creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that swirls into this existential what-am-I-doing-with-my-life nexus of dread, which, as far as I know, is totally unique to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
So, yeah, if you want to play a game that makes you feel like shit sometimes, then Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is the game for you. (I’m now realizing that some of my essays also serve this same make-you-feel-like-shit function; but, spoilers: this essay has a nice ending [at least, I'd like to think so].)
Here's the important part: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is wrong—escapism is healthy.
The point I wanted to illustrate with the previous chapters was that all of us—yes, even you, dear reader—are trying to escape from something, whether you realize it or not; from the video games we play to the books we read, and to the little lies we tell ourselves in order to trust the world around us (refer to ch. 3), and the labels that we pretend bestow some grand meaning or uniqueness upon us (refer to ch. 4), to watching television, to obsessively hoarding old plastic because it reminds us of the good ol’ times (see ch. 1 & 5), to going out for a drink with the gang after a long day’s work at the construction site, to having a glass of wine alone after a long meaningless workday sending emails and editing spreadsheets, to watching the Georgia–Florida game whilst barehanding a 13.5-oz. bag of Cheetos® Flamin’ Hot Puffs™, to taking ecstasy and vibing out to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica in a dive club then going back to some shady hotel room with a person you barely know—(OK, this one might not be that healthy)—to building model robots, to writing long essays about video games, to playing sports, to literally anything else that isn’t simply working for rent money or eating stuff to survive or whatever: We are always escaping something, be it the tedium of work, the responsibility of family, the cosmic boredom that is always festering away in the background of everyday life, the pain that you feel simply from existing in this world full of profound suffering, or the fear of death—oh yes, especially the fear of death.
If we are not directly fighting against death, we are trying our damnedest to forget that it even exists. (“Exists” being a slightly paradoxical way to describe “death,” but I think you know what I mean. Note that I also considered the following phrasings: “. . . that it even happens” and “. . . that it’s even a thing”; the former being the most technically correct, but I decided that “exists” flows better when said aloud, so I went with “exists” and just wrote this lengthy parenthetical to cover my ass instead.)
Consider the evolution of society from tribes into chiefdoms, into little cities, into big cities, into states, and then into complex civilizations—all because it gave us a better chance to survive the harsh reality we inhabit wherein microbes cause our skin to bubble up and burst, and lions and dingoes eat our children, and other people will kill us at the first opportunity if they’re desperate enough; even the development of air conditioning, the plow, irrigation, sewerage, complex systems of law, the hut, the house, clothes, surveillance systems, prisons, whatever—it’s all a practical form of escape; an escape from the inevitable fate to which we all are subject to: DEATH. It seems to me that one of the main reasons we even have children (on purpose) is so that we can live on beyond our own deaths using some sort of biological loophole that only ends up self-perpetuating this fear of death by producing more people who are afraid of death who then go on to create even more people who are afraid of death &c. &c.—it’s really all quite diabolical when you start to think about it.
So, let’s not think about it.
Let’s play a video game or read a book or write an essay or do anything else rather than think about This Dreadful Shit. Really—what’s the point of dwelling on suffering and death when we could be doing anything else? We need fantasy. We need an escape from the hard-coded fact of death. (The word “Fact” is a bit of a weird choice here, but I am sparing you the anti-realism philosophical solipsism for now; instead, I am assuming that you, reader, live in the same general reality and experience the same general-type things as I do, death being one of those same general-type things; and yes, I am aware we could be brains in a vat or some sort of computer program or part of some giant whale’s dream [and I assure you that I’ve thought about these things at length—mostly when I was a teenager after smoking some strong weed or eating mushrooms—and have concluded that they’re all pointless word games and/or wastes of time that only serve to foster a malaise of inaction in response to the numerous plights of all creatures]; so, for now, let’s just table the whole whale-dream thing for another essay [or never] and, instead, operate under the assumption that we’re both living, breathing creatures that feel pain and/or bleed when we’re cut. [i.e., Re: “what is real, actually?” from ch. 3].)
Basically, what I’m trying to say is: Humans need fantasy to cope with reality. Escapism ensures we don’t succumb to the existential dread of being alive. And while we may end up in the grave—our destinations have always been Ivalice.
Yes, Marche was correct in Mewt’s specific instance. Just like, say, if I spent all day playing my video games instead of working, thereby not being able to pay for my home, thus becoming homeless, or if I spent all day writing instead of feeding my children, thereby them becoming little withered husks huddled all fetal in the corner of the room of which I may or may not have locked them inside in this specific hypothetical scenario; in both cases, my escapism is harming those around me—that’s true. But—(and I apologize if this comes off as a cop-out answer to the whole escapism problem presented in this essay)—it’s ultimately all about moderation; if one can get away with playing video games all day without harming others, or themselves, or whatever they care about, then they should play video games all day if that’s what they want to do. At that point, who cares? It’s that simple.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance may make you feel like playing video games is a waste of time, as if you could be out there working an extra job or getting a PhD or whatever instead (keeping in mind that there is no “ceiling” to this rat-race mentality, thus making the whole “productivity” nexus an endless pursuit in which you will likely never be satisfied with simply being alive because there is always something “more productive” you could be doing, which, to me, seems like a depressing and, frankly, suicidal way of living life). But Final Fantasy Tactics Advance does not have any right to make you feel as if you are wasting your time—you are the only person (or thing) that has the right to decide if you are wasting your time or not. That’s it. That’s the conclusion. It’s not profound or even that deep.
The way I see it is that there may be times when you’re sitting there alone playing Final Fantasy or watching television or reading a novel or whatever, and you may think to yourself something like, “wow, I am wasting my time; I should be doing literally anything else that’s more productive than this,” and in that scenario, you would be correct; but there may be other times when you’re sitting there alone playing Final Fantasy or watching television or reading a novel or whatever, and you may think to yourself something like, “this is the most fun I've ever had or ever will have in my entire life, and I want nothing more than to just be sitting here doing this thing forever because this makes me incredibly happy,” and in that situation, you would be correct too, because the truth is that these things are not so simple—the truth is that we contain multitudes.
Go find your Ivalice.
If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.
#ComputerGames #Ethics #Autobiographical #FinalFantasyTacticsAdvance #Essay