Weeks 10-11: The Final Fantasy of Commander Shepherd, Nora Witcher

In which the podcaster takes you down a rabbit hole but doesn't guarantee he'll lead you back out. But don't worry, it's not a real rabbit hole, not really. Or is it?

Remember, I'm now posting these on Odd Saturdays, so the next episode will appear on the fifth Saturday of this month, August 31. And hopefully it won't go up as late in the day as this somewhat special episode did (though I still got out in on Saturday!).

Enjoy! 

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 11 – WEEKS 10-11:  

The Final Fantasy of Commander Shepherd, Nora Witcher

[LEGION: Shepherd Commander] [Fade in FF6 - Menu ♫]

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 11, covering Weeks 10 and 11 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

[FF6 - Prologue ♫]

You pick up the controller. The screen lights up and lets you in. Three soldiers in full-body mechanical armor march through the night across a barren, snow-swept plain. You are on point, the fearsome green-haired one. Ominous chords build and break like thunder. In the distance appears your mark, the lights of an old mining town nestled on a mountain. You approach slowly, relentlessly. You have trained your whole life for this. You lead your squad through the gates and into the normally peaceful streets. Guards and soldiers appear, having lain in wait. Resistance! [FF6 - Battle ♫] Your armor shoots rays of energy, poison, and elemental magics. The guards are no match for you. The wolves they set on you even less so. You advance through the town wiping out squad after squad until you reach the mine. There lies your goal, your prize. You enter surely and meet another trap – the way is blocked by a giant whelk towering before you. [FF6 - Boss Fight ♫] Its shell is full of lightning and it zaps you again and again. You heal and counter when you can as it pokes its head out to gloat. At last you strike the final blow and it explodes [FF6 - Victory ♫], leaving you to mend. [FF6 - Magitek Research Facility ♫] Ahead, finally, is what you came for: an ancient, powerful creature encased in ice. As you approach, it begins to glow, to pulse, faster and faster. Your companions disintegrate. Your armor vanishes, and you are left alone, unshielded, paralyzed and mesmerized. Why does this creature seem so familiar? What is it? And perhaps more troubling, what are you? You black out.

[FF6 - World of Balance ♫]

I was 37 when I played my first video game. Late to the party as always, I know. Years before I’d tried Pac-Man and Space Invaders once each in an arcade, but quickly found them irritating and abandoned them for my true love, pinball, where I could wrestle for hours with Newtonian Physics. The fateful act took place in late 90s Austin where I shared a flat with an evil roommate. On that particular day I had one important task to complete, which was to call writers around the country with information about the upcoming Austin International Poetry Festival, which I was helping to organize – only to find the phone line dead. [FF6 - Prologue ♫] Turned out evil roommate had “forgotten” to pay the bill, but swore he’d go pay it in person right away, like sometime that afternoon, just as soon as he borrowed money from so-and-so, etc. Since I was fuming even more than usual, he handed me a joint and a beer and turned on his Nintendo, saying he’d be back soon and here try this, you’ll like it – argh. With no useful alternative, I lit the joint and the screen lit up to three soldiers marching across a snowy plain. Seven hours later, having just escaped from the Phantom Train, I realized suddenly that seven hours had passed. And I was hooked.

[FF6 - World of Balance ♫]

This was the game we know as Final Fantasy 6 and I could not stop playing it. The phone got turned on and I couldn’t stop. I managed to make the calls the next day and really just wanted to get back to the game. This was my first experience fighting monsters and learning magic and opening so so many treasure chests (my favorite part), and it has fourteen playable characters. Can you believe that? I had no idea how good I had it. I commandeered the system so often that evil roommate finally just gave it to me (not his evilest act ever, but up there). Sure there were a few other games, but FF6 was it for me. I had to save the world from Kefka, the insane clown sorcerer (sort of), again and again. Until, that is, Final Fantasy 7 came along. [FF7 - Reactor 1 ♫] That one convinced me to buy a PlayStation console (now called a PS1) just so I could feast on it, and it was (and is) one of the greatest JRPG’s of all time. (For the uninitiated, that stands for Japanese Role Playing Game. In an RPG, you play a character – or several – often through an epic story; the Japanese invented them and have their own anime-ish style. Thus.) I mean, FF7 had it all – an evil corporation killing the planet, an amnesiac hero who may not be who he says (or thinks) he is, a giant amusement park in a gianter world (for the time, at least), a ragtag bunch of planet-savers, and the most tragic scene in any video game to date. People actually cried. Of course then there was Final Fantasy 8 [FF8 - Prologue ♫] (futuristic, with flying military schools and an interdimensional sorceress), FF9 [FF9 - Main Theme ♫] (cutesy Medieval castle politics and magic), FF10 on the PlayStation 2 [FF10 - Blitzball ♫]  (which made me play team sports on top of buying a new console, grrrrr), FF12 [FF12 – The Sandsea ♫]  (with big complicated politics, psychedelic locations, and characters that actually spoke, like out loud), all the way up to Final Fantasy 15 [FF15 - On the Road ♫], the roadtrip one (skipping the massive multiplayer ones and countless sequels and spinoffs and those on consoles I didn’t own). I really like those treasure chests. But Final Fantasy eventually wore thin (there was originally supposed to only be one!), with repetitive themes and magics and an offensive tendency to make its female characters weaker and prone to being kidnapped. (C’mon, Japan, catch up!) And with #15 came the PS4 and a big jump in graphics quality and gameplay, and I discovered broader horizons and brighter dawns.

[Horizon Zero Dawn - To the Hunt! ♫]

You’re in a dense, steaming jungle and you’re in trouble. You’re being stalked, you see, by a brutal adversary that also happens to be invisible, at least most of the time. If you’re lucky you can catch a glimpse of them, like a large black cat with a long scorpion tail, but metal, of course, with grinding teeth that would like nothing more than to turn you into biomass. If you’re really good you can stun it with a shock arrow or a trip wire, then if you’re really fast you can freeze it up and take it down before the others move in to pounce. Fucking machines. You’re a better shot than you used to be and getting better all the time, but these things are strong and vicious and near perfect predators. You crouch in the dappled light of the foliage, insects buzzing in your face and coppery hair that glints like fire in the sun, barely breathing, watching, watching – and there it is! One at least, guard down and visible for a moment. You draw your bow back hard, aim, and thwack! you stun it good. Then quickly load a tearblast arrow and rip that stealth generator right off its back. It limps away, and as you pull back a precision arrow to finish it off, two more attack from either side. The one on your right hits a tripwire and goes down sizzling, but the other hits you hard from the left and you go flying. You roll fast to the side, and look around – where is it? You know it’s loading up an explosive dart that will end you – then there’s that shimmer straight ahead. You leap and swing your spear – blam, you think you staggered it – and again – blam, now it’s visible – and again, and again – and it’s down. [*breathless*] [Horizon Zero Dawn - The Cavalry Breaks Through ♫] They always hunt in threes so you know you’re safe. You polish off the broken one and stretch long in the glade, get your breath and bearings. You’re a proud Nora warrior and you’ll live another day to try to learn the secret of your birth and of this strange world of warring tribes, metal monsters, and ancient ruins reaching into the sky. But for now, night is falling and it’s the perfect time to take out that raider encampment that’s been raining havoc on the nearby villagers. You head out.

[Horizon Zero Dawn - Prologue ♫]

Horizon Zero Dawn, which arrived on the PS4 in 2017, was the next big game that I dove into after all those Final Fantasies, an action RPG that remains one of my favorite games to date. In this one you play – scratch that, you are a smart and snarky fire-haired 18-year-old woman who leaves her matriarchal tribe to discover the cause of an evil that’s spreading across the land. That evil, worse than a roommate in some ways but not all, comes in the form of large, animal-like robotic machines which had in the past been peaceable but over several years have begun slaughtering people without warning. As Aloy the Nora you set out on a trek through gorgeous lands that (small spoiler) you soon realize are what’s left of the high plains on either side of the Rocky Mountains. This post-post-apocalypse world is just 900 years in our future, and whatever happened happened fast and big time – Denver for instance is in crumbling vine-covered ruins, and no one alive has any knowledge or notion of the past at all. And I have to say, the story behind all this, alongside the gameplay and characters and visuals made for one of the best and unexpectedly believable science fiction experiences I’d had in years. It didn’t hurt how immersive it is as well – this world and its many environments and topologies is expansive, its primitive(-ish) tribes and cultures quite varied, it’s people diverse, and its countless sidequests each help you to understand more about the land and people and history in many ways. This shit is engaging, is what I’m saying, and as with the earlier games I spent hundreds of hours in it, and more so than the others I really didn’t want to leave. I loved being there. Sometimes I’d even forget I wasn’t really in that world (and no, I wasn’t in virtual reality, just staring at my old and currently absent 40” TV). In a few particularly tough fights or while launching myself across a precarious gorge where I could actually fall to my death, I found myself leaping out of my chair and around the room without even realizing it, sometimes knocking over furniture and even myself. (My neighbors love me.) 

Unlike the Final Fantasy games, where you selected from a menu what you wanted the characters to do, this felt like real fighting and exploration and interaction and discovery. You were climbing mountains and riding (robot) horses and delving through ancient ruins…. And the rewards were many – yes, there were treasures to find, but I also learned to use a bow and other hand-made weapons and strategies for getting through battles physical and otherwise, and I made a lot of friends and uncovered the history of a world yet to come (or hopefully not). And the immersion in it was perhaps the biggest reward. This was around 2017-18 during a particularly abrasive and pugilistic Federal “administration,” and there were many days when I thought, Fuck U.S. politics! I care about these people and want to help them live in a better world – which at the time didn’t always feel like a viable option in this world. And I did help them achieve that – proudly – twice, and then moved on the world of Witcher 3.

[WITCHER: Oh, that’s rough. My sympathies.] [Swordfight sounds from Witcher show.]

Fuck! Swordfighting is so up close! Here were more pissed off bad guys and bigger monsters that were very much alive, and as Geralt of Rivia you gotta get right in with em. From the same era as Horizon Zero Dawn, its battles are challenging, its opponents often unpredictable and dangerous. Human or otherwise, your combatants are smart – this was some of the early use of AI in gaming, and it’s a great place for it. (Sidenote – I’m not actually against AI; I just don’t like the use of technologies when they mess up people’s lives.) Here it forces you to learn to play your best. And Geralt needs to be at his best, cause there’s a lot of tentacles and claws and shields and supernatural beings to hack through.  [Witcher 3 - Hunter’s Path ♫]  And boy does he – like everything else in these games, this world comes across vividly, stench included, whether you’re ripping the guts out of those fuckers (if you can), dismembering and beheading nasty soldiers and ruffians (with blood spurting everywhere), or trooping across fields of rotting bodies. This is decidedly not a lush world, far from it, much of it scorched or denuded by what seems like endless medieval warfare, and you are dragged right on into it. 

It was a fitting game for the pandemic, I guess, [Witcher 3 - Kaer Morhen ♫] bleak and full of courage, with swords and axes that required accurate aim, potions and oils to poison and heal, monsters and battles and castles to scale, though the politics were sometimes a little too close to home. The treachery and guile were much like this world, though unlike this (for most of us, anyway), you can slice and gore your way into a future. And I say a future not the future by design, because here we enter games of consequence, with many branching plotlines, where one wrong kill or dialog choice can end the lives of many, including those you love, sometimes far down the road. And you often have no way of knowing, which is really how this game grabs you, as it often captures, amidst the fantasy, the complicated tint of real life. 

Speaking thereof, now we move on to the guns.

[Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune - El Dorado Megamix ♫]

First you should know that there are different kinds of shooters, the most common of which are first-person shooters and third-person shooters. In first-person shooters you see only from the protagonist’s perspective – i.e. the weapon and what you’re shooting – but never them. Essentially you have complete anonymity. I don’t tend to play those – though I’ve tried a few, I find them pretty creepy. Are third-person shooters any less creepy? Good question, but at least you can see the character you’re playing. (Note that agile dodge…) It happens that in real life I’m a naturally good shot (read: you want me on your side when the shit hits the petunia) – not that I have a lot of practice, I really don’t, but when there’s a gun in my hand, I usually hit what I’m aiming at no matter how fast it’s moving. (That really didn’t sound right, did it?) Anyway after playing through menu-driven strategy, bow-hunting giant animal robots, and lopping everything apart with swords, I was curious to see what the shooters were like.

[Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune - Grave Robbing ♫]

The first one I tried was Uncharted, about a fortune hunter named Nathan Drake who’s descended from a certain Sir Francis. He goes around the world looking for lost treasure, solving lots of puzzles, and shooting lots and lots of mostly brown-skinned people, at least in the first game. I found that rather unsettling (I’m being polite here), and the fact that it was released in 2007 didn’t seem much of an excuse, no matter how fun the game was. But they were going for, in their defense, a storyline in the tradition of Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, and the old movie serials in which the soldiers were usually local mercenaries hired by rich evil white men, in this case with a connection back to the Nazis. Which helped to mitigate all that a little, though it didn’t make it any less “unsettling” to be personally gunning down indigenous peoples of Central America and the South Pacific. So why did I play it all the way through? Because it was very popular and I wanted to see exactly what kind of representation and message had leaked into the culturesphere. Nothing new here, I’m afraid, beyond an entertaining rendition of the treasure-hunter genre made disturbing (to me at least) by the medium itself. Since then though the developer (Naughty Dog) has produced several more Uncharteds, with notably a better eye to cultural representation, and in fact have gone on to make The Last of Us, a shooter in the survival horror genre which has become a lauded HBO series, that is pro-queer and doesn’t have an intolerant bone in it (unless you count being zombieist). I tried playing that game too, but it scared the shit out of me.

[Mass Effect 1 - Main Theme ♫]

So I moved on to Mass Effect Legendary Edition, a space opera trilogy that kicks fucking ass. I just don’t know how else to say it. I know you’ve heard of it because I bring it up all the time. The series follows Commander Shepherd, 

[Liara T’soni: Shepherd] [James Vega: Shepherd] [Aria T’Loak: Shepherd] 

[Legion: Shepherd Commander] [Jack: Okay, Shepherd, what the fuck?]

gender choice yours, whom you can play anywhere from loving and supportive to scathingly nasty, all with not-always-predictable consequences. The series follows Shepherd and crew as they fight to save, well, everything from the Reapers, a massive “race” of sentient squid-like AI spaceship things that show up every 50,000 years to wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. It has a big plot. (Have you noticed I kinda like epics?) The level of characterization and diversity of alien species are probably comparable to a mid-career Star Trek series (DS9 maybe, though admittedly I’m not a Trekker), and the whole thing, [Mass Effect 1 - Breeding Ground ♫] the characters and plot and history and backstories and settings and intricacies and details are written and constructed marvelously and best of all with a great deal of humor. For a storyline facing the end of all life, it’s often very funny and the many core characters are to die for (but it’s better to live). It addresses class struggle and bigotry and the ambiguities of war, and by the third game it even gets around to letting you have a same-sex romance (though you can have a go with some of the ungendered species in any game). Plus you get to [Mass Effect 1 gunfight] shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot many, many, many things worth shooting at, with all sorts of pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, rifles (I’m a sniper rifle lover myself), with ammo that incinerates, freezes, electrifies, and just plain fucks em up, along with the occasional grenade, missile, and mini-black hole launcher. (Those things are great.) 

[Shepherd: What kind of guns does this thing have? 

Liara T’soni: It’s a taxi. It has a fare meter.

Shepherd: Wonderful.] 

[Zaeed Massani: That’s goddamn suicide!] 

[Mass Effect 1 - Galaxy Map ♫]

I’ve played the whole trilogy through almost three times in a row, on increasing difficulty levels (I only stopped due to a certain video fast, hrrumph), and I am such a better shot now and I suspect that might be the case in the “real world” as well (whatever that is). And I mean that interrogative more seriously than I usually do, because these game worlds are fun to be in, and they’re part of the real world, aren’t they? I mean, we put them there. They have camaraderie and joy and amazing places and things to look at, which are far and few in this world, along with lots of other stuff we also have like terror and pain and greed and hatred, but there you always have some chance of overcoming them. So all in all it’s a much better balance in the game-worlds. Much better. And who’s to say they’re not real. I mean, you experience them, don’t you?

So I have to pause for a second and ask, what’s so wrong with spending a lot of time in these games, when the world is bleaker and with far fewer rewards? I mean I am speaking from the perspective of a working adult (I really do generally support and feed myself). And I’m avoiding any evaluation of teens and younger people’s gaming behavior let alone world-views because I’m in no position to – remember I was already kind of a “working” “adult” (at 37) when I first turned on Final Fantasy. Why not live in these worlds? And what’s so wrong with inserting a dopamine IV right into your brain, when there’s nowhere near that much pleasure (and usually just not much) in day-to-day life? Or is that my over-dopamined brain talking?

But what if I could somehow blend those worlds with this one? Here’s the thing: I suspect that some people do.

Now I just said that I don’t want to evaluate the behavior of youngers – and I don’t (though I am 63 so that’s a lot of the population). But I’d like to speculate about what might be potentially the situation of some other gamers, age-independent, even though I’m generally wary of speculating anything about anyone, because it’s goddamned close to assuming and I have a big thing about assuming, which is I THINK IT’S WRONG to assume or guess anything about someone when you really DON’T FUCKING KNOW. So with that caveat, I’m going to step carefully into the fire for a minute.

One thing I do know is that I lived for several decades on this planet before video games even existed, so I know what life was like without them. I don’t know and I’m not sure I can imagine being born into a world full of them – but I’m guessing they feel as natural as stuffed animals or bicycles or human-shaped playthings seemed to people of my era. I mean you’re a kid and they’re just what you play with; that’s what you do. And what do you do in videogames? Well sometimes you shoot people, you shoot and shoot, mostly at those determined to be okay to shoot, which we used to do with toy guns, granted, though without the accurate aiming and realistic splatter. In some games, though, you can pretty much shoot or kill anybody, even regular old NPC’s (non-playable characters) like the townspeople in Red Dead Redemption 2 or in Skyrim. And I think of Jerry Mander’s point in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television about how we emulate what we see and like in the world, including what we see in fictional media almost regardless of it being fictional. And there are a lot, a shit-ton of guns in our cities today, more than ever, and a lot of people shooting at others with, it seems, no concern for the real damage it does, mostly apparently at people they know and don’t like. A lot. And I know from personal experience that the games inure you to the consequences of shooting people; they accustom you to seeing your targets as lacking humanity. And they do make you a better shot; they function well as home target practice. 

There’s another series of games with a notorious rep called Grand Theft Auto (or GTA). Guess what they’re about. They have lots of shooting in them too, and they became infamous when one of the titles allowed you to fuck prostitutes then murder them for their money. Cool! And no shit. But mostly, as I understand it, you steal cars and run errands for organized crime figures. I only played one of them once, sort of, because instead of playing by the rules (are there any?), I just stole my first car, which you do in the first minute or so, then proceeded to drive it recklessly around this city designed to resemble Miami, running through stop lights, causing accidents, knocking down streetsigns, driving through parks and running down pedestrians until there were a bunch of cop cars chasing me, and I kept going (because I was having a blast, and I couldn’t do this is real life, could I?), driving into stores, down sidewalks, and through crowds of people until finally the army sent in a helicopter and blew me up with a missile. Game over. So that’s how GTA handles breaking their rules, I guess. And I can’t help but notice (if you believe the news) that thousands of cars are stolen then just left abandoned in any major city each year. Last year Oakland, CA (where I live) had about 15,000 reported car thefts, and whereas some were never recovered or were found dismantled, the majority were just left abandoned on the streets, some without license plates, some without gas, and occasionally wrecked or set on fire. But most of those car thefts are for joyrides. Is this a new thing? I’m not certain, but those numbers of abandoned stolen vehicles are waaaay higher than decades ago. And the GTA games are very, very popular. Are they popular among car thieves and joyriders? Who knows! Are people taking their dopamine highs out of the games and into the streets? Like I said, I’m just speculating.

Though honestly, as I also say, just from my own experience of playing the games, I have no doubt, of course some people are – because under the right circumstances I could well have done that myself. And I’m convinced that if I think of or want to do something, lots of others do as well. Because that’s part of what we are. I’m grateful that the worst effect this has had on me, perhaps, is that I can’t wait to play Aloy, Nora Warrior, once again. That’ll be enough for me. She’s just so fierce. And that hair!

I’d like to wrap up this episode by letting you know that I had a backslide this week. See for a few weeks, which I’ve mentioned, I’ve been phonescrolling more and more. I’m sometimes not even aware of it, and while it’s not as bad as staring at the TV it’s so goddamned compulsive and feels like taking hits on a crack pipe and I hate it. That’s not the backslide but it might have been a trigger. Anyway whether it was that or the dumptruck-load of stress I’ve been carrying around in my head, or just plain old inescapable existential dread, on Sunday morning after a fairly productive week, I woke up just having to play a game. I had to fucking play one. So I opened one of the games on my phone which through oversight or unconscious omission I’d neglected to uninstall. That was Chrono Trigger [Chrono Trigger - Theme ♫], one of the classic old-style JRPGs and a particularly good one. I started a new game and binged it all day long. After dinner I found myself at my desk fidgeting between Facebook on my laptop and Chrono Trigger on my phone, then I stepped over the line again and opened the MAX app on that nice big 17” screen and put on a movie. I purposefully chose a dark, upsetting one that I’d never seen, thinking maybe I’d be unable to watch it through. Yeah, right. That choice was the nihilistic home invasion film The Strangers with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and liked it anyway. It was pretty well-crafted, their relationship was really well-played with lots of nuance (before the screaming), and that’s what got me engaged (then the screaming kept me there). Or maybe I just liked watching. Then I played the game for a few more hours and scrolled myself to sleep. It was like going from the pipe to a lost day of mainlining.

I could say WTF but I think it’s more constructive to say, at this point, Folks, I think it’s time to learn more about dopamine. So I’ve picked up a couple of recent books about the Big D, and in our next episode two weeks from today on Saturday, August 31, we’ll take a much closer look at those bright little screens and we might just have ourselves another book report. Yay!

In the meantime, please spread the word if you’re liking these, give the pod a nice rating if there’s one available, consider supporting it with a monthly subscription. And if you need any advice on how to take down a Thunderjaw in Horizon Zero Dawn, or how to get through the best battles in Mass Effect 3’s Armax Arsenal Arena, give me a shout.

This has been Episode 11, covering weeks 10 and 11 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks a bunch for listening! I hope you enjoyed this adventure-filled episode. I sure did.

[SHEPHERD (mostly): I’m Commander Shepherd and this is my favorite <podcast> on the Citadel.]