Writers need to read. Professionals in every field learn from their peers, and writers are no exception. There's no other way to understand what others can accomplish with language and voice, and if you don't gain that understanding, you run the risk of having your own words molder.
Reading is great, but it's not the only avenue to learn more about the possibilities of storytelling. I have had my mind broadened by more than a few movies; somewhat more controversially (for my parents at least - HI MOM AND DAD), I can say that the same is true of more than a few video games.
I'll list a few here without going into detail about any of them; hopefully I'll get a chance to do that in a future blog post:
Final Fantasy XIII-2 (seriously guys, it's really good)
And the latest video game whose release inspired me to start my Final Fantasy story retrospectives: Final Fantasy Type-0. I finished this game at the lively hour of 4am last night (I guess technically that should be "this morning") and then spent the next hour unable to sleep as I marveled at what the game accomplished with its story. Sure, objectively speaking the larger-scale story was both convoluted and nonsensical; but the personal journeys of the twelve cadets was...
... I'll stop there before I write out my retrospective two months ahead of schedule. It's not the point of this rambling anyway. My point is this: I finished Final Fantasy Type-0 and was immediately inspired to try and put some of the emotions I felt into a story of my own. I won't go into details as to how, but suffice it to say that the story I'm working on about my daughter's stuffed animals now has a much needed injection of drama and stakes.
I'll end this by saying that movies and video games cannot be substituted wholesale for books; things like style and pacing and imagery and a host of other writerly considerations can only be learned through the written word. But I will say that a story is a story no matter how it is told.
[If you're wondering what this blog post series is about, read the introduction. The
first section of this article deals with the opening of the game; the
second is marked as containing spoilers for the rest of the game.]
I should have been more excited about Final Fantasy X. The first Final Fantasy introduced for the PlayStation 2, it promised to be a technical showcase for the power of the console.
And yet... in the months and weeks and days leading up to FFX's release, I felt curiously flat about the game. Two years removed from my college graduation, I was now living on my own for the first time in my life. I had outgrown roommates, outgrown the overwrought dramas of FFVII and FFVIII, and no longer appreciated the nostalgic adorability of FFIX. Had I outgrown the Final Fantasy series as a whole?
"Yes" might have been a legitimate answer, but at that time I was not yet ready to let go of the relics of my younger days.
The Opening
The opening is a bit schizophrenic.
On the one hand you have a peaceful moment around a campfire set to the strains of a beautiful piano melody. It's quiet and sedate and wistful, and it feels like the setup to an intriguingly introspective game. On the other hand, you have what comes after: a frenetic and confusingly busy cutscene accompanied to metal rock, movie seemingly designed to appeal to a targeted demographic looking for a hardcore game experience. After watching the opening, the question became - which hand would win out?
A quick note: FFX was also the first Final Fantasy game to feature voice acting, and boy, was I nervous (and if you've watched dubbed anime, you know why). I'm glad to say that my fears were unjustified; the voice acting in this series has ranged from surprisingly bearable to excellent.
The Rest of the Story
. . . SPOILER WARNING . . .
The gist of the plot is this: Tidus, a star blitzball player, is transported to another time where a monstrous entity known as Sin threatens to destroy the world. Yuna is a summoner whose father - along with Tidus's father - turned back Sin ten years ago. She and Tidus and others embark on a journey to prevent this destruction, only to learn that the the situation is not as simple as it seems.
This is a fairly generic summary, and in all honesty I found much of the game to be similarly generic. Other than Tidus and Yuna, the characters are not all that interesting to me - not even Auron, the "cool" laconic wandering samurai - so I'll skip the bulk of the story and just mention the parts that stood out.
Before talking about what's really going on in the story, let me talk about two relationships.
The first is the romance between Tidus and Yuna. At the time I found it lacking in both drama and passion. Now when I think about it, it feels honest and surprisingly subtle. Again, I don't know whether my mind is playing tricks on me; but I will say that my views on love fifteen years ago could be charitably described as "naive". Now I'm... well, perhaps I am still a bit willfully naive, but I also appreciate that a good relationship requires steadiness and a thousand quiet moments that build into something strong and lasting. And I think FFX does an excellent job depicting that.
The second relationship is that between Tidus and his father, Jecht. Abandoned as a child (it's not revealed until later that Jecht left to join Yuna's father in a quest to turn back Sin), Tidus harbors a deep-seated resentment towards his father. It's an intriguing bit of darkness within an otherwise sunny personality.
Although Jecht is presumed dead, the truth is far more complicated. Although Sin is presumed to be turned back every ten years through the trials of a summoner and a guardian, it turns out that this cycle is what actually allows Sin to renew itself. Each journey to defeat Sin merely destroys a form, one that is almost immediately renewed through the body of either the summoner and the guardian. And so when Tidus and Yuna and the others embark on their quest to turn back Sin, they are unknowingly also seeking to destroy Tidus's father once and for all.
Twining together two threads of the plot - the world-spanning one and the highly personal one - is a neat device that adds weight and consequence to both. It all comes together in one final battle that is preceded by an emotional meeting (1:39 - 7:00).
Okay, the animation is stilted and the voice acting is excessive, but I still find the dialogue effective: beneath the spoken words you can infer everything that the characters are leaving unspoken. There is subtlety in the scene, and it's hard not to appreciate that.
Then, of course, we get another heavy metal ballad. To further belabor my point, I'll mention the tragedy of the ending where Tidus and Yuna are pulled apart, and praise the emotional maturity of both characters upon realizing their fates. Then I'll mention that there's a sequel - Final Fantasy X-2 - that completely undoes this ending. I only know this because I read the plot of the sequel on Wikipedia; the game itself I found to be honestly abhorrent.
That's the FFX experience It's a haunting tale covered
in layers and layers of unfortunate excess. When I played it I was
unable to separate the two, but now I find myself feeling far more
charitable towards the game. Was I overly judgmental back then, or is
my memory kinder now? I'm not sure.
By the time he reached a certain age he knew exactly what to do when his heart broke. He would take a firm grip upon his right arm with his left; then he would guide his right arm - ever so slowly and ever so carefully! - down his throat, using his limb like a precision surgical tool.
You might think that it would be difficult to do something like this without doing severe damage to your internals; but by the time he reached a certain age he could do it almost without thinking. His right arm would slide down his esophagus and brush behind the aveoli of his lungs and then it would be at its destination: his heart, beating oddly and insistently - or insistently oddly? - within the cage of his ribs.
It was simple from that point on; remember, by the time he reached a certain age he had performed this procedure upon himself tens of times. He would simply use his fingers to feel along the raw surface of his wounded heart until he located the break; then he would massage the break closed, gently pressing and folding the sad material of his heart until the break was sealed.
And then he would use his left arm to retract his arm, smiling all the while; for by the time he reached a certain age he knew that his self-operation would lead to health and success. His heart would be healed, beating steadily and in time once more, and he would be free to go back into the world and have his heart broken all over again. beep-beep-beep...
I'm aping the style of a classmate of mine from a writing course; she wrote beautifully strange pieces that used grotesque metaphors to heighten inner turmoil and conflict. I'm nowhere near as good at this technique as she is; my stories tend towards the literal rather than the metaphorical, and I don't have a good enough grasp of imagery to heighten the surrealness of the tale to memorable levels. Still, it's fun to try once in a while. And yes, I do honestly feel that a broken heart mended is simply one that is ready to be broken once more (but it's better than having a heart turn to stone).
Last Sunday my daughter was in a foul mood, overtired after an exhausting day. It was the early evening, and after finishing her work she slammed her butt down in a chair and slumped over to play a computer game. I was a bit concerned. I tried talking with her, I tried teasing her, I tried making her laugh - but everything I did resulted in a grunt or an annoyed stare.
It's possible that I should have just waited her mood out; sometimes that's all you can really do with a person. But I had to leave for a week-long business trip in a few minutes, and it hurt my heart to see her like this. So I decided to try one more thing. After seeing that her game involved guiding a polar bear through arctic waters, I went to her room and fetched her stuffed polar bear. Then I sat next to my daughter and slowly guided the polar bear next to her hand.
She looked down. "Oh," she said. "Hi polar bear."
The polar bear jumped up and down excitedly and nosed at the polar bear on the computer screen. Then he backed up slowly, confused, and looked up at her with a questioning sound.
"It's not real," my daughter said. "It's a computer game. I'm controlling the polar bear. See?" She demonstrated the keyboard and mouse controls to the fascinated polar bear, and as she did so her body quickly filled with the liveliness and energy that I'm used to seeing and that I love so much. And right before I left for the airport I was rewarded with three hugs and eight kisses (yes, I counted).
My daughter and I share many similar traits, and I'm telling this story because it made me realize that we share one more: we both fall easily and naturally into the stories that we see around us. Whether it's a curious polar bear or a head pig or a cabal of small stuffed animals planning on getting rid of the mean dragon that keeps punting them off the bed ("CHARIZARD! We talked about this!"), I can count on my daughter to perk up and join the tale with much enthusiasm and delight. She is a storyteller's dream.
It's something that I do as well, except I can't always control the stories that pop up inside my head; put another way, the problem with having an imagination is that you imagine things. This scenario has happened to me more than few times: I'll be walking by myself down the sidewalk when some odd environmental detail suddenly catches my eye. A story ravels itself together, and the next thing I know I'll be audible actor in the theater of my mind, and there'll be a person half-a-block in front of me quickening his pace and glaring back at me.
It's something that I've learned to control to a certain extent; experience has taught me the dangers of falling too deeply into the fictions that my mind can create. And yet I don't think it's the worst quirk a person can have. For example, I suspect it's the reason that I can read other people's moods so quickly. Plus, a credulous imagination can certainly liven up a boring day!
This trait that my daughter and I share is probably neither good nor bad in and of itself, but merely something else that needs to be moderated within. Here's hoping that we succeed!
I remember being raised by the library for large chunks of my childhood. This is not a criticism of my parents in any way - they both did (and do) wonderful things for their children, and in all honesty? The library was my preferred babysitter, one that I would pout about not getting to see.
Around first grade or so I snuck out of the children's area and started trawling the far more imposing shelves of the adult sections. It's a bit of a laughable cliche to say that 'books are worlds', one used to try (and usually fail) to persuade a recalcitrant child into reading. At the same time, what I learned growing up is that those three words are completely true: books are worlds. Brushing my fingers along the spines of shelved books was like spotting a new planet through a telescope. Pulling one down and reading the cover flaps was like sending a probe into the upper atmosphere. And when I finally worked up the courage to read one...
... well, I remember telling my first grade speech therapist that I had just read my very first Stephen King book. "Oh Mainn," I remember her saying, "please don't read those." I readily agreed, and if I noticed her shock through my childish self-absorption, it's only because I was pretty shocked myself. 'The Long Walk' (review) is one of King's more existential horror novels, and it more than broadened my horizons; it shattered them. Through that book I glimpsed hazy vistas of mortality and pain and sacrifice and the implacably uncaring nature of life. After reading 'The Long Walk', I wanted nothing more than to return to my safe and comfortable world of fairy tales and easy adventures.
Except a) I couldn't, and b) I didn't really want to.
I'll spare you the rest of my childhood, except to mention that whenever I was particularly disobedient as a child (this usually involved really not wanting to practice a musical instrument), my mother would threaten to take the library away from me, and I would throw a tantrum for a few minutes before giving in.
Fast forward 15 years or so. As a freshly employed college graduate I was overcome by the high of having an income of my own for the first time in my life. How did I waste my money? I bought a laptop and a Playstation to play the newest Final Fantasy. I bought a few DVDs. And then I went to the bookstore and purchased whatever book I damned well felt like.
I marched out of that bookstore supremely self-satisfied. I returned home to my new apartment, plopped down on my sleeping bag (did I mention that I didn't think it necessary to buy a bed?), started reading... and made a terrible discovery: the books I had picked were terrible.
What I hadn't realized is that although the library had taught me to love books, it hadn't taught me to be discerning about choosing them. Taking a book home from a library is cost-free; if you make a mistake, just exchange the book the next time you're at the library. The return policy at a bookstore is not always so forgiving.
And you know what? I think that lack of discernment is great! Books are worlds, and while it is easy and safe to visit and explore worlds that are all the same - and there's nothing wrong with wanting a comfort book - we don't broaden our horizons that way. We don't grow, we don't change, we don't challenge ourselves. And I think that's a bit of a shame.
I don't have a grand point here (just a desire to force myself to write a bit every single day), so I'll end somewhat anti-climatically with a few numbers. In the past year I've checked out 89 items for myself from the library. Assuming an average cost of $10, that's a savings of $890. And the psychic savings for not having paid for the five or so books that I thought were terrible and did not finish? Well, as they say in that old credit card commercial, that's priceless.
[If you're wondering what this blog post series is about, read the introduction. The
first section of this article deals with the opening of the game; the
second is marked as containing spoilers for the rest of the game.]
If I remember my gaming news articles correctly, Final Fantasy IX was consciously developed as a course correction. The previous Final Fantasies had lost the fantastical feel of the early games in favor of technological dystopias, and the series was growing increasingly somber and dark. So Square decided that Final Fantasy IX would be set in a medieval world and created a story with a lighter heart (although with some serious themes).
I was disappointed. In some odd way the Final Fantasy games and I had grown up together. But now I was a fresh college graduate with his first real job, and it was like my 'friend' had retreated back to the safety of elementary school.
Still, Final Fantasy was Final Fantasy, and so I bought FFIX on release day, hoping to quiet the skeptical voices in my head.
The Opening
The opening did not reassure me.
The first three minutes are frankly bizarre - sedate rural county fair music and visages of characters that we don't know overlaid with ponderous quotes that are meaningless without context.
The opening cinematic proper starts three minutes in, and it begins a bit more promisingly with three hooded figures stranded in a tiny boat fighting against the raging ocean. But that's just a half-remembered memory; the cinematic cuts to the present where Princess Garnet is alone, preparing for a kingdom-wide birthday celebration. She's distracted by the sight of an airship flying against the rosy skies, and then we see glimpses of Zidane, the monkey-tailed thief, and Vivi, the wandering black mage with wide spotlight eyes. And then the cinematic is over.
This opening does a few things well. Show, not tell is the classroom maxim, and I think the cinematic performs well in detailing two characters. First, there's Garnet's loneliness and desire to experience the larger world. And then there's Vivi childish confusion, innocence, and wonder. Square's cinematic department does an excellent job with subtle motions and facial expression.
However, for me the opening falls short in another area. FFIX is the only Final Fantasy game I played whose opening I could not recall from memory. Why? I think it's because it fails to provide the tension and conflict needed for viewers to quickly invest themselves in the story. Start off with a bang!
The Rest of the Story
. . . SPOILER WARNING . . .
The rest of the story is also similarly unmemorable to me, so I'll just list the general arcs of the characters that I do remember:
Zidane: the archetypal good-hearted thief and main protagonist of the game. Has a secret connection with Kuja, the main villain of the game. He and Garnet become romantically involved. And then...
... honestly Zidane's just not that interesting; he feels like a character that could have been spit out by an extremely simple plot-generator program.
Vivi: one of many artificially created black mages constructed to be weapons of war with limited lifespans. But his 'programming' cannot overcome his essentially kind nature, and his creators try to hunt him down as a defective. This is a 'can-robots-become-real-people' story in a fantasy setting!
Vivi's arc is well-told and moving, and I can't quite explain why it didn't connect with me more. Thinking about it, I suspect it's because I played FFIX when I had just graduated from college and was trying to assert myself as a non-clueless adult who possessed complete mastery over the ways of the world (spoiler alert: I was pretty clueless). I think people are often most embarrassed by the things that they secretly identify with. Garnet and Eiko: although Garnet is a princess, she is actually the adopted daughter of the evil queen who once destroyed a village of summoner mages and stole away the baby who would grow up to be Garnet. The only other survivor from the village is Eiko, who is an extremely temperamental young girl.
Although initially in conflict over a shared affection for Zidane, they each gradually realize that the other provides a missing piece of their lives: for Garnet, knowledge of her forgotten origins; and for Eiko, a sense of family that she never knew that she needed. And in FFIX's most dramatic cutscene, their shared understanding allows them to unleash a great power.
For me, the image of Garnet and Eiko with palms pressed against palms, sharing acceptance of themselves and each other, is the enduring image of the game. In my opinion it is their story that forms the emotional heart of Final Fantasy IX, not Zidane's. They should have been the central protagonists.
There came a time when the dragon grew tired of fighting the knights that came to him weekly. Although 'fighting' was too kind, as each encounter consisted of an idiot knight marching up to the mouth of his cave and shouting imprecations - rude ones! - until the dragon could no longer ignore the buzzing in his ears, whereupon he would stick his neck out and fry the knight with one quarter-powered blast of flame.
Dragons live long lives, and after a hundred years this dragon realize that this situation was unlikely to change unless he did something about it. So he took wing and visited Merlin. The wizard quickly acceded to his request, merely asking for a small donation of dragon scales which the dragon gave. Then Merlin waved his wand, mumbled some nonsense words, and poof! The dragon turned into a young human man.
A person might think that it is difficult for a dragon to live his years out as a human; if so, then that person clearly does not know what a dragon's daily life entails. Although the dragon-turned-man no longer had many of his former skills - flight or fire-breathing among them - his draconic spirit and can-do attitude carried him a long way. He quickly amassed a fortune - no mean feat within the strict social castes of the Dark Ages - and lived a life of safety and comfort and hard, hard work.
And yet - there came a day when the dragon-turned-man woke up and realized that his tasks and difficulties of the coming week were much the same as those of the week before and the week before that. And what of the next week and the week after that? An unending parade of drudgery, no better than when he had been a dragon.
So he bought a fine suit of armor and a fine longsword and rode away on a fine horse. As he approached a local dragon's lair, he wondered briefly: did he hope to defeat the dragon, or to be consumed by it? And that was when he realized that the answer didn't matter one whit to him, and that understanding gave him a freedom that he had never felt in all his years as a dragon or as a man.
beep-beep-beep...
Sometimes you really want to write about dragons. What can I say?
I didn't get the beats or consistency of this fable right, but I think this is a reasonable start. Small note: I originally gave the dragon a name, but after shuffling through hundreds of choices and settling on 'Drason', I gave up and made him anonymous. Hey, it made me happy.
