Truth in RPGs

Or, an ontological dive into why I'm not feeling Final Fantasy XVI so far

Mar 02, 2023

A thing you should know about me: I’m a big Final Fantasy nerd. Final Fantasy VI, in particular, is my favorite video game of all time, instilling in me a lifelong love of how games portray narratives.

This past Tuesday, Square Enix allowed a handful of media outlets to get a first play of Final Fantasy XVI, the newest mainline installment in the series. I’d been looking forward to the game for a while, but watching that footage, I felt a lot of my initial excitement melt away.

[I promise this isn’t going to be a “what happened to my version of Final Fantasy!!” post, at least not the way you’re expecting. Or, I hope not. But if you want to tune out now, I won’t blame you.]

On the plus side, that early footage helped me articulate the reason I haven’t really enjoyed a lot of the more recent mainline Final Fantasy games. Are you ready for a hyper-specific complaint?

I don’t like Final Fantasy games where you only control one party member.

There’s a mechanical reason for my complaint, sure; it’s fun to select commands and think up strategies for a whole collection of characters with diverse skillsets and powers. But the more I thought about why a one party member limitation doesn’t work for me, the more I realized my hesitation runs deeper. Only having access to one character limits my in-game perspective in a way that I find not just mechanically frustrating but narratively incomplete. It feels like I’m being cheated out of the full emotional and philosophical experience of the game. It feels, honestly, like the world of the game is less real.

So, uh, let me explain that.

I’ve had two teachers in my life that I could rightly call my Mr. Feeny (and both of them would probably scoff at such a lowbrow reference). One of them was Emeritus Professor William Schroeder, an expert on continental philosophy at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who presided over three of the classes that most impacted the person I became: Phenomenology, Nietzsche, and Philosophy of Film. Professor Schroeder’s lectures taught me about pursuing passions and nourishing the soul; they taught me how to make sense of complex interpersonal and social dynamics in friendships and in romance; they introduced me to David freakin Lynch. And, they taught me something about capital-T Truth.

Professor Schroeder believed there was such a thing as objective truth, and he used a pretty unforgettable metaphor to explain why. Consider the state of Wisconsin, he would say (I may have the exact state wrong, but I swear it was Wisconsin). There are so many different ways you could make a map of Wisconsin – you could draw out its major roads, you could plot its forests and lakes, you could outline where different types of birds could be found, you could just dot where all the cheese castles are along its highways. All of those maps offer some tiny slice of accuracy, of truth. Now, merge every map of Wisconsin you can imagine with the individual perspectives of every single person who lives in Wisconsin, who makes their own mental map in the course of their day-to-day life. Those, too, offer some bit of the True Wisconsin. Now fuse those actual maps and those mental maps with the perspectives of every person that’s ever existed who’s experienced Wisconsin, plus every possible map you could ever make of the state. If you synthesize all those perspectives across time and space, what you’ve got is the Objectively True Wisconsin.

Now, obviously, to actually accomplish this synthesis – to understand every potential perspective – is impossible. In fact “the synthesis of all possible perspectives on reality” is probably a reasonable if clinical way to describe the concept of God. But neither Professor Schroeder nor I were religious people. Instead, I saw what the Professor was describing as part inspirational, part aspirational. There is objective truth – and though we can never grasp it all, we can take real steps to try to earn a more complete experience of the world by understanding as many perspectives as possible.

See where I’m going with this?

With impeccable timing, yesterday morning the YouTube algorithm fed me this video by essayist Max Derrat about Final Fantasy VI (again, my favorite video game of all time). In it, Max argues – I think very correctly – that FFVI is revolutionary because it’s the first video game with a truly profound story. And what makes that story profound in large part is that it juggles over a dozen characters – there are 14 playable if you find all the hidden folks – to create a surprisingly deep and moving narrative about persevering through literal world-ending despair from all of their unique perspectives.

Derrat points out that Final Fantasy VI is one of the only games in the entire FF series without a single “main” character, meaning your party composition can completely change from one hour to the next – and certainly it possesses the largest playable cast of any FF game. That means that, practically every time you strike out on a new quest or reform your party, you’re approaching this epic story about community, nihilism, and unimaginable loss from an entirely new angle. When you’re playing Terra, you’re ruminating on a lost mother (and the potential of lost motherhood). Locke – a lost love. Celes – a lost identity. Edgar and Sabin – lost time. The list goes on.

And while not every one of the 14 characters’ storylines is a complete banger, they all merge together into this complex and lovely tapestry that you are in charge of weaving; your mechanical choices of who to play affect what parts of the story you experience. In a way, as corny as this sounds, you are the main character of Final Fantasy VI. And as you maneuver all of the playable characters into working in tandem to rebuild their own personal worlds and also the literal world, you don’t just carve out a heroic path in the game – you kind of gain an understanding of what it might look like to carve out a heroic path for the communities you care about in real life. You start to see that the process of rebuilding requires the synthesis of myriad unique perspectives that respond to tragedy in ways both intensely personal and inescapably global. You learn that by taking up the struggles of others, you end up making progress on your own, too. And in the end, everyone in your party stands side-by-side and calls upon the bonds build between each other to reject the void of all-consuming nihilism. In a way, FFVI feels like a metaphor for being alive today – a point which this other amazing video essay, by YouTuber Corrupted Save, deftly makes. Profound stuff indeed.

No other Final Fantasy game offers the breadth of characters Final Fantasy VI does, but VI comes from an era of FF games defined by, among other things, the ability to charge into a terrible situation with a whole party of heroes and come out victorious on the other side by working together. Again, corny for sure, but also heroic as hell.

Somewhere along the line (I genuinely don’t know where – definitely by XIII but I never played XII), mainline Final Fantasy games stopped doing that … mechanically, anyway. The stories are still largely about friendship and the strength of interpersonal bonds – Final Fantasy XV is literally the tale of a bro road trip – but Square Enix limits your in-game perspective to just one character. You can still suggest patterns of actions for your other party members in battle (well, maybe not in XVI?), but you only get to control one of them. And I just find that deeply unsatisfying.

Obviously I’m not saying that games where you play only one person are bad. I love the Zelda series and I can’t wait to get Tears of the Kingdom. But that’s a different (divine) beast, with different thematic and mechanical strengths, experiences, and goals. When it comes to Final Fantasy, unfortunately, I was cursed by the first-ever video game that I loved, and now I look to games in the FF series to deliver deep and moving stories explored through myriad perspectives both narratively and mechanically. At least at this time, it looks like Final Fantasy XVI is continuing the trend of not doing that. I’m sure the game will be good – honestly the preview media looks great; I kind of dig the more serious Game of Thrones vibes – but it’s missing the diversity of viewpoints I need to feel like I’m getting the true Final Fantasy experience. As my friend Craig said, “if I only want to control one person, I’ll just live my life.” When it comes to Final Fantasy, unfortunately, I want the world. I want the Objectively True Wisconsin.

PS 1: You know how sometimes you randomly Google someone just to see if they’re still out there doing okay? I did that for Professor Schroeder last year and found out that he passed away in 2021. I wish I’d kept in touch with him after college, but people always say that. Even though I’m not sure he would have had the patience for an extended discussion of Final Fantasy (maybe, though! We did talk about how wildly uneven J. Michael Stracyznski’s run on Amazing Spider-Man was once – a cool thing to agree with your philosophy professor on), I’d like this rumination on a piece of media that’s important to me to serve as my meager tribute to him. For the man who cofounded the University of Illinois’ Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, perhaps that will do. But, also, a lot of the ways I continue to live my life are inspired by the things Professor Schroeder taught me — hopefully that’s a better tribute than a Substack post, lol.

PS 2: It didn’t fit in the body of this essay but I did want to touch briefly on Final Fantasy XIV and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons. I love FFXIV; I think, along with V, VI, and VII, it’s about as essential as a Final Fantasy game gets. Now, being an MMO, FFXIV is a game where, by definition, you only control one character the whole time. But the thing is – that’s your character, your avatar. And that avatar exists in a world populated by a whole bunch of other avatars made by other real people like you. In other words, the real-life circumstances of FFXIV provide that broad and magical perspective that Final Fantasy VI and other previous entries had to construct their whole story around portraying. And while nothing in FFXIV moves me quite like Celes’ “leap of faith” at the beginning of act II of FFVI, I’d put Heavensward and Shadowbringers up there with the great Final Fantasy narratives no questions asked (and I haven’t yet played Endwalker, which I understand is also tremendous.)

As for the D&D connection – in his incredible book Playing at the World (another hugely influential piece of media in my life), Jon Peterson talks about how D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had a vision for the game that dungeons would just kind of perpetually exist for groups of players to organize parties and take on at their leisure. Basically, what they envisioned for the grandaddy of tabletop RPGs was MMO instanced dungeons. As Final Fantasy has its roots in Dungeons & Dragons, there’s a way in which I see Final Fantasy XIV as the ultimate expression of the type of worldbuilding and immersion Gygax and Arneson wanted from their game, which is pretty awesome.

And, man, when you’re talking about telling deep, moving stories by synthesizing the diverse perspectives of multiple characters all providing their own emotional angles on the same narrative base… that sounds a whole lot to me like what happens at a D&D table, doesn’t it?