The poor little blonde girl warbled through the air and tossed her bouquet over the edge and O! O life!
Twelve years old and a little twitch of terror shot through my spine, the trembling aftershock of what passes for beauty in the mind of a child. My crackling little box of a TV sat in his corner and beamed, all the twisted light and waves of sound bending the garish flotsam of my room into ardent irrelevance. Behind this door, gentlemen, is magic--and suddenly nothing else was ever good enough again. I felt guilty.
Opera is bombast. Final Fantasy revolves around fashion models, suicides, and knights, in that order, saving worlds and worlds of electric fantasy castle-cities and rococo color palettes from the unending assault of nihilistic mish-mash mythologies. Billy, meet Jane. You two are going to love each other. Aria di Mezzo Carattere, what a gorgeous honeymoon.
I was twelve. There was no defense for this. Final Fantasy VI screamed through the skies and annihilated my entire existence. Suddenly the girls in Mrs. Dickenson’s sixth grade class glowed with unfathomable kineticism, dear secrets bristling on the surfaces of their eyes. The sad sack playground drooped its fauxwood ears around the echo of untenable ball games. I sat and watched. Do you remember four square? Tetherball? I instantly forgot them. Dreams! Donkey Kong Country and Sonic were so over, so done, so mute and unworthy. This mattered, the poor little blonde trapped in a character throwing her ridiculous self into the throes of something much more ridiculous, showers of fake love, of hope, of art. And when the octopus showed again and the timer ticked and battle strutted and fretted its hour upon the stage and the suave gambler in his airship revealed his flowing face and played the stage for all the world—well, I was merely a player, an extra in the play of plays. I had been so reduced. There is something about spectacle that denudes human participation, that clears out the mind by way of overloaded perception, dissolves the self in a swarming sea of annulment. This is in some sense the goal of art, and to a child the trigger can be small, quick, and fierce. Like a drug, this attenuation rode me to the edge and back, one note and word at a time. ~Oh Ma-ri-a~ --and into the abyss !
Sure, the grave had already been prepared by that marvelous introduction : the mode 7 magitech trek through the snows outside Narshe, silhouettes slogging through wastelands to the plodding chords of the backend of “Omen,” a five minute overture of an audiovisualscape with eerie staying power. But it was in the opera scene itself, which Square somehow had the gall to build an entire game around, that I awoke. Uematsu’s little synthesized half-aria is not the best song in the game. “Omen” kills it; “Kids Run Through the City Corner” sounds exactly like a series of hamlets dotted across a green landscape would sound were the world an SNES sound chip; “Dancing Mad” rips through the dense skies of melodrama with endearing gusto; “Terra’s [nee Tina] Theme” is slightly more iconic, riding the xanax edge between hope and despair. We could go on. But the mind of a child is wide and dense. It took this particular cocktail mix of climactic narrative daring-do, signposted musical provocation, and ludological distance to crash through the comforts of innocence and inanity and knock me ass first down the intoxicated stairs of what we might call The Arts.
Final Fantasy VI is the most somber game in the series, but it is painted in broad soundstrokes. The world ends, and our little band of heroes are thrown to the corners of the earth time and again, usually left to contemplate the errors and failures of heroism. But the vibrant score and operatic trappings gird the desperation with a sense of performance. When the haplessly bizarre Kefka prances around the screen to the drunken mania latent in the half military march, half polka of his eponymous theme song, he does so with a wink to the viewer-player, who from that point on can only unconsciously anticipate the literal stage of the game’s most flighty, imaginative, goofy, and almost breathless set piece. When Celes belts out her Aria and tosses her bouquet, the play-within-the-play manufactures our relationship with the game, which can only be measured in delight and distance, a rapt audience on the edge of its seat hanging over the void. Within the game, the entire emotion of the scene is faked, it is nothing. And Squaresoft, in the throes of a decadence they defined so well, says: so what? Play on! And oh, that Uematsu—if music be the food of love! Remove all text from the scene, from the game, and it works the same—the grandiose graphical palette washed in rich, dark hues; the expressive and exaggerated movements of the principle players hopping and waving and laughing across the screen; and above all the equally measured and explosive soundtrack pantomiming a breathless resolve, a titanic and perhaps even overdone emotional landscape. Final Fantasy VI belongs to the romantics, and no soundtrack will ever again grasp the heart of its game with as much assurance and subtlety.
As everyone in the world knows, Celes soon replaced that balcony in the opera house with a cliff on the edge of the world, that aria with the subtly more somber but otherwise identical Celes’ Theme, and that bouquet with herself—and if this is still a goofy game in a goofy series where perhaps the most emotionally daring scene in video game history is both 1) optional and 2) predicated upon feeding a man in a giant poncho a bucket of rotten fish, then there is still something to be said for the way it keys into the irrefutably close bond between the joy of art and despair of death. The opera melts into reality. But for us? Oh, for us!
******
B SIDEWhen the French poet Arthur Rimbaud was seventeen years old, he was already a master, an artist who had charged himself with reinventing the sensory experiences of man. Two years later, he would invent modernity, annihilate all mystic and scientific privilege, and plunge into the addled darkness of hell before fleeing the life of art for good.
When I was seventeen years old, I played Final Fantasy VIII.
Two years later, I would play it again.
…whatever
Liberi Fatali. In the early days of the mainstream internet, I watched FFVIII’s introduction on endless repeat from the game’s Japanese release to its Dreamcast Day (9/9/99) US launch. My eyes glazed and my heart flashed—Final Fantasy VII faded to dust. Great little game, of course. I doodled materia combinations in notebooks during high school classes for months, I spoiled Aeris’ death, “One Winged Angel” caused me to remember things that never happened—a card carrying member of that duteous generation, without doubt. But when the feather from Rinoa’s hand fell back to earth, thundering choir in tow, as a gunblade containing more graphical fidelity than the entire Playstation library up until that point? O world, Final Fantasy VI-2 loomed! The sound and the fury!
Final Fantasy VIII proper begins in the immediate aftermath of that introduction, a second after an eight month loop. The pomp of the battlefield choir fades. Squall lies in an entirely modern looking hospital bed, floating, quite probably, in the middle of nowhere. The Balamb Garden theme plays, a simple melody bleached with something like comfort. The hospital is in a school, where Squall lives as a probably suicidal teenage paramilitary schizophrenic a handful of game-hours away from dreaming lived-in dreams about a father he never knew he had. From there, it is safe to say just about no one knows what happens.
The game is a comfortable dream. Squall is wildly successful. He is a highly skilled and impeccably trained soldier luxuriously living in what could only be described as a floating Neuschwanstein dripping with a coat of magic-tech from a future where everyone is beautiful. His attractive teacher, conveniently a mere two years older than him, desperately wants to do desperate things with him. He has a sword that shoots fire. Against it all, everyone likes him—everyone except his rival, because you can’t be cool if you don’t have a rival.
But he is miserable, of course.
Which is pretty nice, because what seventeen year old playing Final Fantasy VIII wasn’t also miserable? Children of Fate? No, no, not us, neither Liberi Fatali nor L’enfant terrible neither. Just bored, bleak, empty. Swords, pens, magic, spirit, the beating fires of life and death—we had dual shock controllers.
…whatever
Everything shined with confused promise and glory at twelve, but in 1999 I would have jumped off Celes’ cliff if someone could have convinced me to muster the energy to climb it first. I used to wake up bleeding grey from every pore; people would speak and I would wonder what it was like to be a human being.
If the late teens exist to manufacture the death of hope and dreams, and if all the wonderful girls from sixth grade class had by that point already intimated that the death of my hope was probably for the best as far as they were concerned, nothing could stop the little hope machine of Final Fantasy, and no one save Nobuo Uematsu could grasp the controls.
Like me, Squall eventually got out of bed. The music followed him. Balamb Garden’s aural ambiance floated around my room like a lullaby. I ran in circles forever. Things happened, lord knows what, between games of boing-da-boing-da-boing Triple Triad, one after the other, until Garden life burst into FMV and left us with another dollop of song and dance. Not an aria, not this time--but a waltz. The most advanced computer graphics artists in the world turned their attention to a meticulously animated ball room and some dumb guy sliding around in rhythm to a composition the seventeen year old me could only parse as “pretty cool.” I was left to wonder what I had been missing. “Waltz for the Moon” is foreign. Uematsu snapped it from the ether and dropped it in the silent film he had been tasked to prop up, much as he undergirded Sakaguchi and company’s opera a handful of years earlier. To me, it did not sound like Final Fantasy. It was a pin drop a world away, a tale told by a parched traveler in a wild tongue. It still sticks out; not because it is bad, and not because it is good (though I think it probably is), but because this game and this soundtrack lulled me to sleep in dark days through an ethereal comfort. It shaded my being with a familiarity bred by the kind of self-renewed, backwards-looking attachment that has come to define Final Fantasy, and in that comfort popped a luscious scene intent on selling its newness, an explosion of talent and money lazered in on subtle winks and awkward dancing and ¾ time signatures. And now? Can you imagine a video game waltz in 2013? I won’t call it fantastic, but Final Fantasy is about volume and bravado, it does not care for your judgment or mine.
If we are to hash out something thematic or coherent from the decadent husk of Final Fantasy VIII, a game much more lovable than likeable, I would venture to say it is expressed musically. The general verve of the soundtrack, much like the general verve of the game itself, is that of a long series of b-sides. Jazz-synth electronic meanderings and relaxed, understated mood pieces orbit around a trio of fantastic battle themes, Uematsu’s waltz, and the well-publicized million dollar monument to the Fin de Siècle that is the wonderful Faye Wong’s decidedly less than wonderful “Eyes on Me.” The game moves from the waltz to a handful of excuses to promote its single; holds a rock concert date for Squallrinoa in the lazy gut of Fisherman’s Horizon, that supersaturated port town which elsewise looks and sounds and feels a lot like its name; and eventually stages its final battle in the reverberated echo of "Liberi Fatali" and the eight-month introduction. Squashed in the second act, gorgeous vistas and properly rarefied soundscapes. Balamb Garden, Balamb Town, Winhill, Fisherman’s Horizon, Shumi Village—each a musical occasion to lull about for an hour or two lost in a cloud, soft plaintive pianos blooming on windswept Victorian roads, seaside everything, minimalist chimes striking painted notes on orange skies, pan flutes, wine glasses, flowers; I would pick a Laguna sequence, a fragment of a long dream, the story of a dork who rules the world after he loses it—I would load a save, dance around the screen grinding spells in battles with sleep-weapons, zoning out to the white-washed trance-y synth pop of “Man with the Machine Gun,” staring at the ceiling, tapping buttons in time, eyes swimming, not writing poetry, not thinking, toes curled around a blanket, the long trumpet note droning, draw-draw-draw, the clock hands spin in place, the skies darken, people come and go and move and gesticulate and sigh….
