The World Trends With You

For a game that went into development in 2005, elements of The World Ends With You feel outright prescient. This was a time before Facebook or Twitter even existed (or at least, before they were open to the general public), when ‘social media’ meant MySpace and Livejournal. Unfortunately, largely because of how Facebook and Twitter, and their explosive success, have changed social media and social patterns, other bits of the game haven’t aged well at all.

The good first: TWEWY has a ‘trends’ mechanic whereby most equipment in the game has a ‘brand’ and different brands are in vogue in different areas. Over time, trends shift and brands rise and fall. Equipment with trending brands gets bonuses. The ever-shifting trend chart will feel pretty familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, as will the way trends shift unpredictably and arbitrarily over time and from region to region.

What feels less in-touch is how you interact with these trends. You can boost a brand by wearing it and fighting battles, and some plot events involve using protagonist Neku’s mind-reading powers to manipulate others into setting or following trends. Neku, trapped in a shadow version of Shibuya, invisible to its ordinary inhabitants, becomes a sort of spooky, subliminal influence, enacting the unintelligible whims of vast and sinister powers.

For 2005-7, you can see where the developers were coming from. I’m sure that people who know the ins and outs of the fashion industry have some sense of where the trends one sees in the street come from, but otherwise it can seem very mysterious indeed. This is particularly true for those of us of a male persuasion, who are socialised to find fashion completely opaque.

Having the combat promote brands is one part pure ludus, of course, but it’s also a metaphor for being seen wearing. This is how fashion brands work, or at least how they’re supposed to – people see someone influential wearing <brand> and want to imitate them. That TWEWY also has supernatural forces and mind control at work to create this effect is a pointed comment.

But our understanding of trends – and certainly the definition of the word ‘trend’ – has been transformed over the last decade. There’s nothing in TWEWY to make you feel involved in trends. Neku stands apart from the culture he influences, boxed off by the metaphysics of the Reapers’ Game. Trends happen to the background humans, even to the point that in the end they are all brainwashed into one particular pattern of thought.

And there’s another quirk of the game that takes this from being merely dated[1] to actually off-putting. Neku is a misanthrope; we are first introduced to him as he bitches about how noisy and irritating other people are. The enemies you fight to promote your brands are collectively referred to as ‘Noise’, too.

One of the few insights the game gives into Neku’s character is his preference for one particular designer’s work and philosophy, but the philosophy in question is a conceited, shallow existentialism that feeds Neku’s contempt. Neku seems to hate other humans for existing (and to assume they can generally do no more than exist). His dislike of noise isn’t a now-familiar objection to the ceaseless howling of twitter or the noxious stew of Facebook[2], he’s just petulant and self-centered.

Yes, by the end of the game Neku has begun to open up. One of his final lines is “I have friends now”. But there’s no sense that this is part of a wider development of his empathy. His friendships were developed in isolation from humanity, just like everything else that happens in the game.

It’s the isolation that no longer feels resonant. It’s not just that we see ‘trending’ differently now. It’s that the idea I remember having in 2007 of how trends work seems naïve. Had I played the game then, I might have felt reassured by its portrayal of trends and fashions as the work of a sinister corporate nether realm. But the failure to address how we ‘ordinary people’ participate in and propagate trends is now obvious.

The separation between Neku, along with the other residents of Underground Shibuya who can shape and exploit trends, and humanity at large grants the latter group the comfortable innocence of the powerless. They are only ever victims of trends, or occasionally unwitting pawns of trendsetters. If Twitter has a general lesson at all, it’s that this is a fiction.

This is where the passage of time really hasn’t been kind to TWEWY. Something that was hidden in its understanding of its theme has been laid bare. There’s more to be said about TWEWY’s relationship to modernity, but for a game touted as a much-needed update to the JRPG genre, its theme now feels simplistic and outdated.









[1] Not actually a sin, for what my saying it is worth. TWEWY feels right to me as a piece of its time – the retro phone graphics of the HUD are spot-on for the kind of phones I had as a undergraduate (2005-8).

[2] Both of which are probably not quite as bad as the hype suggests, but bad enough that I’d be sympathetic now to most people complaining about noise in those contexts.

When Did I Return to Nibelheim?

I’m replaying Final Fantasy VII at the moment, partly prompted by the announcement of the remake and partly to see how Tales of the Abyss relates to it[1]. I’m having a very different experience of the game than I did either of my previous forays into it. I don’t have much to say about the first of those, on the original PC version in about 2003, since I didn’t get very far before losing interest, but in light of the upcoming remake, I do want to talk about the second.

The second time I played FFVII, and the first that I completed it, I was sharing a house with a number of other gamers, all keen fans of the franchise. Foremost among them was a guy I’ll call Tom, who was one of Those FFVII Fans.

I don’t want to disparage Tom’s love of the game. It’s a great game, and unlike me he first encountered it completely fresh and had time at the right time in his life to explore it fully and have his mind repeatedly blown. But as what might be called a ludocentric gamer – whose play focussed on the mastering of systems and surpassing of challenges – he engaged with a very different FFVII to the one calling out to me.

It’s not even that Tom didn’t recognise the depth and complexity of FFVII’s story. It just wasn’t what he focussed on. When I wanted to include Aeris in my party, because I felt that that was what Cloud would do (not an opinion I hold anymore, but I did then), Tom told me off for wasting XP and equipment on her – we both knew she was going to die, but for Tom that made her useless to me in a way that I just didn’t care about that much.

I played through the whole game with Tom breathing down my neck, pushing me to play in a certain way, take a certain attitude to the in-game events. I enjoyed the game, overall, and indeed enjoyed most of my conversations and arguments with Tom about it, but I wouldn’t say it made much of an impression on me. It was a good game, but I couldn’t feel its tremendous influence.

This is not a complaint about ludocentric play. I know I’m complaining about ludocentric play, but the problem isn’t how Tom chose to engage with the game, or what it meant or was to him. My complaint is with the way he insisted the game had to be the same thing to me. (Something similar happened with a number of other games over the years we lived together – FFVII is strong enough to stand up, but some of the others are probably spoiled for me forever).

It’s only in playing the game afresh, on my own, that I’m starting to find the FFVII that matters to me, that will leave an impression on me. Now I can pause and appreciate the blocking in the cutscenes, the exquisite care of the camerawork and sound design, the surprising nuance of so much of the writing.

Why talk about this now? Well, sometime in the next couple of years, a whole lot of people are going to get the chance to come to FFVII fresh, in a game that really won’t – can’t, for better or worse – match the memories of people who played it when it was new. That disconnect could do a lot to hurt the actual experiences people have with the remake, maybe on both sides (I imagine it’s hurting some people in conversations within the dev team already).

The thing is, FFVII is actually a great game to have as a new experience. It’s a game about having an image of something – Cloud’s image of the past, his fateful return to Nibelheim – that is slowly revealed to not match reality. FFVII is a landmark of games history and culture, but the memories of those who ‘were there at the time’ are necessarily personal, even a distortion.

Like Tifa, shaking her head and murmuring worries while Cloud grandly recounts fighting alongside Sephiroth, those of us who weren’t there encounter a striking dissonance between the deeply-held beliefs of our friends and the actual experiences in front of us. Having the space to explore that dissonance has definitely enriched the game for me, but in a different context – with Tom’s memories of the game pressing in around with me – it could be stifling.

Whatever FFVII is to you, please try to be aware of the fact that that isn’t neutral; you aren’t right about it. It’s a game that can be many things to many different people. It doesn’t need justifying. It doesn’t even need justifying in its current half-updated incarnations, like the Steam version I’m currently playing, with its hi-res low-poly models and low-res un-updated backgrounds. The game is strong enough that it doesn’t need nursemaiding through encounters with new players.

I’d say also that fussing too much over spoilers is counterproductive. That’s for two reasons; firstly, that spoilers are inevitable given the prominence of the game. Secondly, what makes FFVII’s major twists interesting and powerful has very little to do with surprise. This is true for almost everything that people worry about spoiling, and surprise is rarely interesting in and of itself[2], but, as someone who knew all along that Aeris would die and that Cloud’s memories are actually Zack’s, I can promise you from personal experience that those revelations don’t lose their power to foreknowledge.

It is all well and good to love a game, particularly if that game has been important to your love of the form (and provided it doesn’t blind you to its shortcomings). But nostalgia for your own experience of a game can be a prison that keeps the game away from other players, even other players who play it for seventy hours and see every bit of content it has to offer. If you love FFVII, please be prepared to let it go, at least a little bit.

Of course, I can say all this now. You might want to save a link to this article to throw right back at me if and when Final Fantasy XII gets a HD remaster/remake, because I will be insufferable as hell during that launch week…







[1] This is a topic for another time, but Abyss has a protagonist with a whole bunch of false memories and a metaphysics based on the Kabbalah mythology from which Sephiroth’s name is drawn. I am pretty sure this isn’t a coincidence.

[2] Okay, that may be a little strong, particularly since I personally hate surprise and the unexpected in all its forms. I do, however, believe strongly that very little that can actually be ‘spoiled’ is valuable in and of itself – most plot twists are either interesting whether or not they’re surprising, or actually not interesting at all.

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