A Middle-Aged Marxist's Perspective on Why Final Fantasy VI Matters

Video games, as an art form, never should have been one. Subject to commercial pressure at all stages, originally built for children and adolescents, and designed under severe time constraints, they ought to all be trivial garbage—and, don’t get me wrong, plenty of video games are precisely the vapid entertainment that the uninitiated (non-gamers) consider them to be. However, there exist video games that are, in terms of artistic craft, impact, and achievement, seriously good. They aren’t even all that rare. Video game plots do not reach the complexity standard expected of serious artistic literature, but have influenced and will influence the next generation of literary novelists.

In this analysis, I’ll focus on one such video game—Final Fantasy VI, released in 1994—but it deserves to be noted that there are hundreds of such games designed with a paradoxical level of care, a degree of artistic integrity that almost cannot exist in a capitalist society, in their construction. Although the video game industry in general is ruthlessly capitalistic and aggressively exploitative, to the point that only the obscenely passionate (or the young and delusional) would ever want to enter it, there are at least five games every year whose creative teams had enough ability to resist commercial compromise, as well as raw talent, to create something genuinely good. I do not focus on one such title, or a small number of them, to the exclusion of others.

The early 1990s is when video games had enough room (2–8 MB) to tell interesting stories; breaking out of simple loops made interesting by artificial difficulty (“NES hard”) became possible. Now, the stories of these games do not rival complex literary novels for intricacy of detail, but neither are they trite or lackluster. As we would not judge the lyrics of a rock song by the same standard as we would judge poetry—other elements matter, and impose constraints—we should not attempt to compare Final Fantasy VI’s story (a knowingly melodramatic one) to award-winning literary fiction, or its pixel art to visual masterpieces, or its music score to the most inventive compositions, or its programming to that of a Haskell compiler. These contributions, all excellent considering the constraints, all had to work together. In all honesty, I don’t want to oversell old games. I would not say that Final Fantasy VI is excellent by modern design standards—random encounters are out of fashion; the game is unbalanced (consider Gau’s rages) and unchallenging unless a player chooses in advance to avoid the most game-breaking strategies. Still, in the context of a 1994 video game, it was outstanding. No mainstream game, to that point, had ever told a story so ambitious.

Spoilers ahead. Final Fantasy VI has an ensemble cast and it is character-driven more than it is class-driven. You don’t design a party based on class strengths, as you would in an older role-playing game. The plot, for most of the story, determines which characters you have, but the game’s low overall difficulty means it never becomes unplayable, even when the available characters are ill-matched to one’s preferred strategy or play style. In the game’s first half, the player follows a gathering a resistance movement against a militaristic, oppressive empire—this is not a new theme, nor was it then—that has rediscovered a force thought extinct: Magic. Breaking from the fantasy-must-be-medieval paradigm, Final Fantasy VI goes steampunk, the first in the genre to depart (mostly) from castles and knights. The story investigates how a proto-capitalist, 19th-century empire would use magic, and the results—a “magitek” vehicle used to represent a militarized person—are ugly, but also pertinent to the game, as one of the main characters, amnesiac and coerced into this empire’s service, opens the story inside one of these devices. The player discovers that it grants combat power (in the nearly unloseable tutorial) but limits movement; the game is begun by a character who is (through no fault of her own) mostly machine—not really human. As the story progresses, relationships between the characters build with a depth that was groundbreaking by 1990s standards, and the player explores a world in the midst of a defensive, losing war of conquest. Twelve characters (out of fourteen; two are unavailable until the second half of the game) are enlisted in this fight; some are better depicted than others, but most have deep personal grudges against this empire.

It seems to become clear that, while this empire is no doubt evil, it is principled and strictly less-evil than one of its minor figures, a comic relief villain of insignificant power (but just you wait) named Kefka. The cities of Jidoor (rich, effete) and Zozo (poor, dismal) illustrate the social and economic effects of this empire on the world. There is an opera scene in service to a bizarre plot to trick an abductor of beautiful women (this wouldn’t fly, pun intended, these days) into kidnapping the wrong one, therefore gaining access to his airship. There is a banquet scene with the emperor that tests the player’s social skills to a very limited extent (although, no surprise, betrayal is inevitable.) Toward what seems to be the very end of the game, the characters follow their imperial antagonists to a floating continent, fight a fearsome boss (an ancient threat, awakened by the empire’s hubris) that has nothing to do with the main conflict or plot, then—at the apparent end of the game—watch helplessly as Kefka, betraying and killing the empire, uses an unearthed magical force to… become the most powerful man in the world. The player has defeated Kefka in combat before, but this time he cannot be beaten. The characters lose and must retreat. (Don’t forget to save Shadow!) The lawful-evil adversary is gone; chaotic evil is now in charge. This brings the transition from the World of Balance to the World of Ruin, and the second half of the game begins.

In the World of Ruin, Final Fantasy VI comes into its own, not because its gameplay mechanics change, but because, well… there’s a bit of back story here. In Japan, what we call the NES was named Famicom and it was very much marketed as a family console, so Nintendo took an interest (from today’s perspective, an extreme one) in ensuring that its products (a) were appropriate for children and (b) would not be drawn in to religious or political culture wars. Censorship in the U.S. was especially restrictive, for a historical reason. In the early 1980s, Atari was quite liberal with its licensing, resulting in a slew of low-quality games—E.T. is still infamous for this—as well as pornographic ones, such as the deservingly despised Custer’s Revenge (TW: sexual assault) and Beat ‘Em and Eat ‘Em (TW: public lewdness). The flood of bad video games led to a video game crash in 1983, and Nintendo of America was determined not to repeat it. We’d consider the degree of censorship applied to these games severe today. Swear words were verboten, but so were religious references, artistic nudity, political commentary, and references to substance use including alcohol. Many games deliberately avoided words like “die” or “kill.” Delicate matters, if confronted at all, had to be disguised; a euphemistic language emerged in which beer became “soda.” Now, one the first scenes in the World of Ruin, if read as an adult would, depicts (TW) suicide by a woman who believes she is the only person left alive. The World of Ruin, by 1990s standards, is heavy. By all standards, it is a fucked-up place. The world’s topography has been altered beyond recognition—it is shown that people die in the transformation. Animals have been mutated and mutilated. Kefka rules over all of humanity from a tower that (deliberately?) looks like a misshapen penis, has forced millions of people to join a religious cult of devotion to him, and indulges in genocide on a whim. Children live on without parents. Agriculture seems to have collapsed; grass has yellowed and the ocean is a loathsome purple. The overworld’s music itself is grim and dissonant. The player, starting from the vantage point of a woman whose attempted suicide fails, must travel this ruined world and find the other characters, all of whom have had their lives destroyed by the conflict, and most of whom have lost their will to go on. The impending battle is therefore existential—both in the sense of putting the world’s survival at stake, and in that of creating meaning—but also, for the characters, personal. The World of Balance was ordered, with a clear storyline and progression; the World of Ruin is nonlinear, chaotic, frustrating, and frenzied, to the point that, for a new player, the second half of the game is spent wondering what the fuck just happened.

What does any of this have to do with Marxism, though? And why am I, a 41-year-old novelist (Farisa’s Crossing) and computer programmer, writing about a game released three decades ago for a console that is no longer made? Why do people in middle age still discuss and play these games? It is not just nostalgia. There is a lot more to it.

We cannot discuss the fantasy genre without also discussing the bourgeoisie. We begin with the sword-and-sorcery tradition. The hero of Dragon Warrior (or Dragon Quest) is not given a complex back story. He is Level 1, and this is all you need to know; inexperience is his defining trait. He can’t do much of anything now; he has limited resources. The game loop is easy to explain. You as the hero must make financial decisions—do you buy better weapons, or stock up on medical herbs, or rest at the inn to heal?—and then execute your emerging business of monster-killing, in which you acquire both more resources and more experience (increasing your character’s level.) It was a simpler time. The behavior of removing a dead animal’s teeth, horns, and tail for sale to a creepy collector in town was never depicted; it was just assumed that a mutant aurochs or shambling zombie would possess gold coins for some reason. If you believed, as many people in the 1980s truly did, that hard workers were destined for independent prosperity in business, you could see the sword-and-sorcery loop as indicative of the power of industry and progress. Of course, I must remind the reader that these fantasy worlds are nothing like ours. Inns, in these games, are fairly priced. Rent doesn’t exist. All the forces that exist in our real world and ensure that 99+ percent of people lose are, in video games, not present—they would make a shitty game. If Stardew Sharecropper, a variant in which bills and land rents consume nearly all of one’s monthly earnings, were made, no one would want to play it.

Am I saying that our beloved console games were capitalist propaganda? Not really. To start, most fantasy games were set well before modern capitalism existed. Sure, the financial choices players face in game worlds are more interesting and progressive than the depressing, odious choices faced by subjects of modern capitalism, but there’s no reason to think there was a propagandizing intention, as the power relationships that characterize labor today, not being depicted at all, could not be glorified. It is as true in these games as it is in real life that all money is blood money, but fantasy games allowed you to believe, as player, that your character was going out and killing evil. (Sure, you sought it out to kill it, chased it down even if it fled, and ripped open a rabbit’s belly for the two gold coins you knew were there, but it was an evil fucking rabbit, a minion of the demiurge you would kill forty levels later.) We shan’t litigate the sword-and-sorcery formula for too long, though. It is this kind of stuff that gives us leftists a reputation for being insufferable.

I doubt I’ll ever play Dragon Warrior, the original game, again. Released in the mid-1980s, it’s a linear grindfest with no character development or story to speak of. Watching a machine generate random numbers to simulate fantasy combat was once fascinating; it no longer is. Still, what I remember from this period, with some nostalgia, is not the silly story about knights and dragons, or the constant search for better equipment in order to play the same game (in essence) on slightly better terms, but this: video games made it feel like technology was a force for good. Computers were being used for harmless entertainment, to tell stories (simplistic stories with clipped writing that you had to play a sometimes-tedious game to reveal, but stories) in an interactive way. This was all getting better every year. Graphics and story depth and gameplay and overall enjoyability improved rapidly. We used computers to do something fun, and nobody got hurt. The world of the 2020s, in which workers are surveilled by cameras and robots so they can be terminated by AI if their bathroom breaks take too long, was unimaginable. Only in extremely dystopian science fiction was it imagined that robots would be used to incinerate children who happened to be born in the wrong few square miles, as is today happening.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, we saw technology as the way out of the pernicious scarcity and power relationships that had plagued humanity for thousands of years. “Thou hast done well in defeating the Slime.” This was Space Age stuff; remember when we used to call it that?

There are about a dozen games from the 1990s that seem to represent, for a lot of people, the moment when video games transitioned from simple entertainment to an artistic medium capable of interesting storytelling. This was before the moneymen understood the emerging form well enough to extract value; creative people could do honest work because the shareholders did not know what was going on. Earthbound. Chrono Trigger. Terranigma. These were all very good games, but I still think Final Fantasy VI stands alone. Again, to explain why, I’ll have to drop some spoilers. Terranigma features a supernatural protagonist and a plot that could not, as it involves characters from radically different points in our timeline, be taken literally, but is instead overtly allegorical. Earthbound satirizes modern life, but with a light touch, and uses an antagonist who is not representative of human power relationships but, on the contrary, an extraterrestrial alien beyond comprehension. You fight your school bully but do not kill him—corrupt cops and dangerous people “go back to normal” when defeated. The only things you actually destroy are robots and aliens. Chrono Trigger, also with an extraterrestrial antagonist, is an excellently crafted game with occasional social commentary—such as in a trial scene that treats the character unfairly no matter what the player does, a commentary on the Japanese justice system in which acquittal is extraordinarily rare—but is too light in style and tone, by design, to carry the weight that Final Fantasy VI does.

What I think makes the sixth game in the Final Fantasy series distinctive is that it is a game where one’s objective is to hunt down and kill a human. Kefka is not a cosmic adversary, not an eldritch god, and not an ex-human made immortal (e.g. Chaos/Garland in I, Exdeath in V) by evil magic performed hundreds of years ago who would have otherwise died of natural causes. He is a living, breathing person. Still, his actions leave the world in such a wretched state that it is impossible not to want to go and end his life, not because it will necessarily heal the world, but because it is the first step toward making healing possible. In the first half of VI, you are following a resistance movement trying to prevent calamity; in the second half, you learn that you have failed—calamity has already happened, and will keep happening until a very powerful man is dead. In the final battle, late in it so it is likely only to be heard if the player is on track to be successful, the music shifts in tone from frenzy to… sadness. The villain, an extreme nihilist who killed millions simply out of boredom, seems to feel a humanizing sorrow at his impending death. You don’t feel bad about killing him, but you understand why a more empathetic soul might.

A superficial read of Final Fantasy VI might be that lawful evil is less pernicious than the chaotic kind, since the world governed by a lawful-evil empire is still the sunny World of Balance. I tend to disagree. On the contrary, the game is fatalistic about the tendency of one to lead to the other. Good and evil, in my view, are real; lawful and chaotic alignments are mostly not—good people will ignore evil laws, and evil people will use law and chaos both if there is personal advantage in it. Gestahl’s empire was always going to lead to Kefka; there was no other way it could have gone.

More interestingly, I think we find in Kefka a radically accurate depiction of capitalism, even though the man is not, in any sense, a capitalist; his power, although ill-gotten, is magical and innate rather than bequeathed by the state, and in this particular sense he is the opposite of a capitalist. But here is where he and modern capitalism converge, and it is revealed even more intensely by an accident of American censorship. Before the game’s final battle, Kefka taunts the characters with the promise, in the Japanese, that “I will make a world of death!” As I’ve said before, Nintendo of America in that time did not like the word death and thus the translator bowdlerized it to: “I will create a monument to nonexistence.” That, in North America, is what we have been left with, and while censorship usually diminishes language, in this case I consider it a promotion. A villain’s rather ordinary taunt was, in this change, made brilliant. Lots of evildoers (in fiction and real life) cause death, to the point that mass murder is not an interesting trait, but commonplace. On the other hand, it takes a Class A nihilist to create monuments to nonexistence.

So let us now discuss capitalism. Capitalism does not seek to cause death; on the matter of human life or its ending, it is generally indifferent—if a life is deemed useful to the system, it shall be preserved; otherwise, the person is abandoned and left to suffer, although capitalism is reluctant to supply the bullet. Capitalism’s relationship with death is, in essence, complicated. It loves some wars, but hates other wars. It wants guns to be pointed at the poor; it prefers that they not be used often, since killing humans interferes with their productivity. It is simply not the case that capitalism seeks to “make a world of death.” His motives depicted thus, Kefka is not expressing the will of capitalism, but rather that of one very sick man. Monuments to nonexistence, though? In this line, he becomes a familiar force to all of capitalism’s subjects, because we are surrounded in daily life by layers upon layers of sheer meaninglessness—by, in essence, monuments to the repudiation of life’s value: the ugly buildings capitalism creates, the ugly personalities it rewards, the ugly art it generates solely because to inflict ugliness is a gesture of domination. It was not designed by some villain seeking the maximize the monumental footprint of meaninglessness, because it was never designed at all, and yet it performs that function with superhuman efficiency.

The best way to understand our socioeconomic system is that it is a measure-and-destroy apparatus. The first thing we do, as a society, when we discover something useful, interesting, or valuable, is attempt to monetize it—to “convert it into dollars.” We have learned that something has value to someone; we must now measure it. How valuable is it to that person? How much can we get them to sacrifice in order to have it? What is the price level we can present that makes the choice we want them to make only slightly more palatable than the other options? We measure, measure, measure until we have firm numerical estimates of what everything is worth. That is, in essence, what money is. It is not necessarily evil; to an extent, it is something societies have to do.

The “destroy” phase isn’t programmed; it just happens. There is no way, in a society like ours, to prevent money and political power from being easily convertible, one into the other. What this means is that those with money have the means to get more money, while those without it are destined to lose—to go deeper into debt. If you’re rich, you can buy more money and it’s easy to do; if you’re poor, you exist in a game-theoretic trap that was designed to be inescapable. Thus, in a society like ours, money always flows to the people who have the most of it—who need it the least, who get the least utility out of it. Resources that could be used to save lives are instead used to give celebrities and billionaires the opportunity to defecate at altitudes of 105 kilometers. First, our society measures what humans value with unprecedented numerical efficiency; then, it calculates where all those valued things can be placed so they do the absolute least amount of good, and puts them there. Our society does not (at least, not in the developed world) enjoy causing death—it uses the threat of death, through private health insurance, to motivate workers, but it recognizes that profits would be lost if they were killed in large numbers—but it absolutely revels in pointlessness. Consider that, in the modern business corporation, a massive amount of a worker’s time is consumed by meetings that exist only to remind subordinates of who has the authority to call meetings. The ability to waste another person’s time is, in business, the rawest and most celebrated form of power.

There is no Kefka. He is a ridiculous fictional character. Somehow, though, we ended up living in his world. The institutions that employ us, that govern whether we have freedom of movement, that decide who has property “rights” over whom, are all monuments to nonexistence. They exist to cause anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and anomie—and they work. Organizations in our world are mostly ineffective at what they tell us they do, but exquisitely capable at causing mass psychological hardship for the benefit of those in power.

It can be argued that sword-and-sorcery fantasy (e.g., Dragon Warrior) tells a sunny tale of the early modern era. The young man who leaves his village to slay slimes to gain levels so he can slay orcs to gain levels so he can slay dragons in order to return home with rescued princesses and hoards of gold is, it can be argued, an allegorical representation of the medieval peasant who left the manor to join the historical bourgeoisie. (In fact, it was mostly defrocked priests, as well as third sons and bastards of nobility, who were successful in joining the bourgeoisie. Most peasants who tried their luck in wage labor ended up in factories, mines, and brothels.) Leveling up in character power and equipment mirrors capitalism’s promise—abandoned in the 1980s, if not before—that people who engage with it in good faith will see an increase in the quality of available opportunities as their skills improve.

Until 1994, fantasy worlds in video games featured this loose allegory for the modern world’s genesis—the adventures of those who became the historical bourgeoisie, the New World gentry, the titans of industry. Final Fantasy VI, on the other hand, brought focus to this propertarian era’s final days. The characters are not 16-year-old farmboys seeking adventure; they come from all over the world, and share little in common, other than that they really would rather not live in the empire’s (or, later, Kefka’s) world. It is not the sunny kind of fantasy world one explores to see what is in the next town; there is a pressure on the characters (and, thus, indirectly, on the player) from the beginning that is unrelenting, and the world only gets uglier as they move through it. The game pulls very few punches; the process by which lawful evil—rational, methodical, restrained and with redeeming qualities (General Leo!)—yields to chaotic evil and its pure senselessness plays out in front of the player, who is helpless to prevent it. The World of Balance proves false; in truth, it was never balanced, but always destined for collapse. The World of Ruin asks us if, after capitalism has evolved through proto-fascism (2010s/1920s) and early fascism (2020s/1930s) and metastatic internationally-destructive fascism (???/1940s) and burn-it-the-fuck-down-ism, we have it in us to come together and try to do what it takes to heal the world.

It is too early to tell which generation or generations shall inherit the collective role and obligation of being the ones to vanquish capitalism. We are discussing an achievement that could occur within five years, but that could also take five cneturies. We might feel the spirits of Terra and Celes and Locke and Cyan inside us; we do not, however, seem exist within an authored story from whose structure we could infer any likelihood of success. It is tempting, when considering society and the issues we face, to “feel” the frantic music of a boss battle or the final ascent of Kefka’s Tower. This sensation, however, is not necessarily indicative of imminent success. As the Returners were unable to prevent Kefka’s rise to power, we may also be unable to bring about the final demise of all propertarian societies until decades more of damage have been, by our capitalist elite, done. It is too early to tell. The upcoming—in fact, current and ongoing—global war between the ruled humans and the bourgeoisie is something that has never been done before; there is no map or script for it.

There was a time in which I thought Sabin’s Blitz inputs were unreasonably difficult.