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Alex Anderson

Video games have always been there for me.

Growing up I didn’t have too many friends, I wasn’t really getting any attention from my folks, and the pixels on the screen always felt more like my family than the real people in my life.

Depressing? You betcha. But, that’s why we go to therapy in our adult life, right?

I played whatever I could get my hands on, but the one series that’s been there since I could formulate thought is Final Fantasy.

I never ended up getting past that first castle in FFI. I have vague memories of a few others, though I didn’t play them all. There’s a castle that travels through the sand. There’s a point where your whole team gets petrified all over the world. I do remember the amazing art of FFVI and how awesome I thought the Magitek Armor was.

Then, there was Final Fantasy VII. The game that changed everything. I’m not just talking about myself here. It made such a global impact that it’s pretty much the only remake of anything that nerds haven’t complained about. It made that jump from 2D to 3D, and oh how AMAZING those blocky graphics were at the time (even as a little kid I remember thinking, “This is the future. Look at how REAL it is). FFVII is often credited as the title that made lots of westerners fall in love with not only RPGs, but Japanese culture and eastern storytelling in general.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was doing a lot more than just entertaining me. I wouldn’t see or feel the effects until years later, but Final Fantasy VII was radicalizing me into the off-the-grid-living, folk-punk-loving, Kerouac wannabe that I grew into.

Spoilers moving forward. If you haven’t played FFVII or started the remake, what the hell are you waiting for?

I was seven years old when FFVII came out in 1997 and only really understood story to the degree a seven-year-old could. The goal of this story, like many, many stories before it, is to save the world.

The bad guy is Sephiroth: the experiment to find out what happens when you inject fossilized alien corpse cells into a fetus and teach it about colonization. I didn’t understand the convoluted story of Sephiroth’s origins at the time, but I knew he had a big sword that was SKINNY whereas my main guy had a big sword that was THICK, so it only made sense that we would be enemies.

What I wouldn’t get until years and years later is that the real bad guys were the people in charge. Specifically, the mega-corporation SHINRA that ran the world, another concept I didn’t fully understand as a kid. But boy howdy did it all start to make sense when I was a rebellious teen who was just realizing that my country was just a series of SHINRAs in a trench coat. The older I got, the more I started to put the pieces together.

I mean, the first act of the game is essentially a cool black guy with a gun for a hand explaining to you that the only way to make a real difference is to commit acts of environmental terrorism.

Later in life, I learned how to make friends. In high school I found my way into different social circles but always gravitated towards the more philosophical crowds like musicians and nerds and punk rockers who pretty much dressed like Final Fantasy characters. I spent more time figuring out what my ideology and morals were than the work assigned to me in class.

A lot of said figuring out included just getting really stoned in various vehicles in various parts of town. I would explain my spirituality to people. Jaded by the one-soul, one-god, one-heaven dogma that made my life a living hell growing up Mormon, I yearned to figure out meaning, and purpose. I would sit around smoking bowls and cigarettes explaining how I thought that the eastern religions had it right, that when we die our souls return to the planet. Our energy can’t be created or destroyed, so it had to go somewhere, and it had to turn into something else, right?

I know it’s a common thought in many spiritual beliefs, but I didn’t know then that I was pretty much just quoting Bugenhagen in his universe projector room in Cosmo Canyon. 

I formed a lot of my ideals and beliefs in that rebellious, teenage, era of my life, and most of them would stick around. Also, most of them were all ideas and beliefs that I initially ran into playing Final Fantasy VII when I was seven years old. Even now, my wife of seven years, partner of thirteen, reminds me how much I would use Final Fantasy as a reference point to my thoughts and beliefs when we were first together back in our early twenties and throughout our life together. 

I’m not going to say that I wouldn’t have probably come up with a lot of my beliefs regardless. The world kind of sent a lot of us down the path of the anti-authoritarian, eastern religious following, pinko commie. But it was the first step in my realization that the world is fundamentally flawed, and we should really do something about it.

FFVII set me on a course that ultimately affected how my life would turn out. I ran away and joined a traveling family with the Renaissance Festival, desperate to avoid the mainstream lifestyle that led to Mako Reactors and SOLDIER PTSD. I lived in punk houses and got stick-and-poke tattoos. I planned the revolution in every state I went to, always so sure that the only way to really save the world was to follow the ideals of AVALANCHE.

I spent a very large portion of my life as an angry young man who was hell bent on saving the world however I could. I always said I probably wouldn’t be the first one to throw a Molotov cocktail, but I’d sure as shit throw the second.

Now, I am older. My knees hurt, and I’ve had enough rubber bullets and tear gas to last me the rest of this life.

Do I still think that we probably need to burn down the existing establishment to ultimately save the planet? Yes.

Do I still pretty much believe that the lifestream of the planet is the perfect metaphor for our souls and energy? One hundred percent.

Do I still play Final Fantasy? Obsessively.

I’ve played every Final Fantasy that has come out since VII (besides XVI, it’s on my to-do list, get off my back), and I consider the existing remakes of VII to be pretty much the closest thing to perfection that mankind has ever achieved.

And I’m still learning lessons.

FFVII radicalized me, but there are so many more lessons from the amazing storytelling of the Final Fantasy franchise. Hope, the importance of family, love, dedication, freedom, the License Board.

My current obsession is the MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. I started twelve years too late, and I’m just finishing the third of five really amazing and comprehensive expansions. There’s over a decade of content and, on hour 400+, I feel like I’m just starting to scratch the surface. It’s everything I want out of an MMO, but more than that, it is one of the most incredible storylines I’ve ever had the opportunity to lose myself in.

FFXIV came out with its most recent expansion Dawn Trail last year. Every few years there is a whole new adventure to go on. Another threat, another set of friends to meet, another world to explore and save. They keep coming too. Dawn Trail is supposed to be the beginning of another ten years of FFXIV expansions.

I’m in my thirties now and I still have my old enemies: politicians, corporations, cops, and fonies, but I don’t actively go out and face them anymore. My BBEG these days all live in a much smaller space in my immediate surroundings: my mental health, my habits, my relationships, and boundaries. I’ve come to realize that the biggest and best way to improve the world is to improve myself, and the results of fighting this battle have been so much more profound than those of my rebellious youth.

At the end of big battles in FFXIV the world will shower you with accolades and make you feel like the hero that you are. But more importantly, an NPC will usually always tell you to rest. You deserve it, you’ve earned it, you need to rest. We don’t hear this enough. As an aged punk I’ve come to find rest so important that I look at it as a form of rebellion in and of itself.

There’s always going to be a grand evil whose dark shroud encompasses the world. There is always going to be a Big Bad Evil Guy that you can face down. You may even BEAT the main villain here and there, but SquareEnix is going to come out with another expansion, and the world is going to be in trouble all over again. It’s still important to try your best to be the hero, but you can’t do that if you aren’t in fighting shape. You shouldn’t go out adventuring if you aren’t well rested. You aren’t going to get the experience bonus.

There’s always going to be monsters out there. If right now what you want to do is make an Udon noodle dish that will win over the favor of a longing lover’s potential father-in-law, do that. 

The gathering and crafting system is a whole game outside of the main story, and it might be my favorite part of FFXIV. It has whole questlines with entire stories that feel so slice-of-life compared to the universe-ending events that would take place if it weren’t for you and your fellow adventurers.

The world is always going to be in trouble, and you definitely have the choice to focus on that. But there are also dresses to sew and friends to make. You can let the importance of defeating evil eclipse the sun and give you tunnel vision, absolutely, but my biggest takeaway, my most recent radicalization is this:

Evil is always going to be out there, in one form or another. You can spend all your energy on saving the world, slaying demons inside and out, but there’s always going to be another Ascian(bad guy). If you don’t slow down enough to look at the world while you’re traveling all over, you’re never going to actually see it.

I know it’s a really simple lesson. I know that I’m essentially just saying, “stop and smell the roses.” But I think this is something that people need to hear more often and in more ways until it sinks in. It feels like the farther we make it in the game, the fewer opportunities there are to do this.

I know I really could have used this advice when I was younger.

It really isn’t up to you, individually, to save the world. You need friends, you need community, and if you’re too damn tired from fighting all the time you’re going to burn yourself out.

You can’t fight evil if you’re too tired, babes.

Take some time for yourself. Build a cabinet. Go fishing. Learn to play the washboard. Play some video games. Kiss your partner. Race a Chocobo. Write an article about how Final Fantasy VII radicalized you when you were seven.

The world isn’t going to stop for you, but there isn’t much you can do if you’re too sick with worry and exhausted to face your problems.

Ignore the main story for a while, get obsessed with crafting. You won’t regret it.

You can find Alex Anderson at Counter Culture Media and at their Instagram here