Matt Wrench

Marge: Come on, Homer. Japan will be fun. You liked Rashomon.

Homer: That’s not how I remember it.

The Simpsons, “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo”

Full spoilers for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Remake, and the original FFVII follow.

Aerith dies.

Growing up, I was a Nintendo kid. I did not own a PlayStation until I was a man. Nonetheless, Aerith’s death at the hands of Sephiroth’s Masamune is common knowledge for anybody who knows the acronym JRPG. Seeing this moment recreated in glorious high-definition was the main appeal for picking up Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Technically though, I also grew up playing Rebirth. I started the game shortly after its release as a late-young thirtysomething and finished it a year later as a young-mid thirtysomething.¹ FFVII Rebirth is too long. Beating the game took me under one hundred hours, so this is not the longest JRPG ever created. Yet it drags so damn much. I would play for a week or two at a time but grow bored every time I set off to complete all the world intel for each region. Inevitably, I would put the controller down for a few months, play something else, and then pick Rebirth up once again. Remake’s shorter, forty-hour runtime felt like a light snack in comparison to Rebirth’s all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas–if I like these things, why should I apologize. The same with having a beer with you…

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

Some rivalries are lopsided: Coke versus Pepsi. Globetrotters versus Generals. Roadrunner versus Coyote. And despite both bands’ critical and commercial successes, the Beatles versus The Rolling Stones can be included on that list as well.

A hundred years from now, the Fab Four will still be the quintessential rock band. “Ruby Tuesday” is charming, but “Yesterday” is legendary. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road are seminal works that define not only the rock genre but music as a medium.

But liking the Beatles is fairly meaningless. Their work has been absorbed by the popular culture. Enjoying the White Album says as much about you as eating at McDonald’s; you would sometimes prefer to listen to harmonious sounds than silence. As Stephen Hayden explains in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, “If I’m honest, I’ll admit to being a Stones guy because being a Stones guy just seems more interesting. Loving the Beatles is ordinary by comparison; it says nothing about you other than your unquestioning acceptance of inevitable truths. Siding with the Beatles is like siding with gravity.” I wish I was a Stones guy.

The following essays contains spoilers for all Star Wars films and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

For the first six months of dating, my partner believed I hated Star Wars. Any time the franchise was brought up I would express visible disgust. Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker was still too fresh on my mind, and that film had buried my love for lightsabers deep down. But the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The truth is I love Star Wars. I always have and always will. But the franchise is hard to love because it has a fundamental flaw. And that weakness is not a recent development arising out of the sequel trilogy. That problem started a long time ago in theaters not so far away.

Episode IV: A New Hope is a classic hero’s journey. The film is the most prototypical example of the monomyth, and Joseph Campbell’s influence upon George Lucas is well documented. Luke Skywalker answers the call to adventure, crosses the threshold, transforms himself, and in doing so saves the galaxy.

The morality of that first film is obvious and binary. The Rebels are the good guys. The Empire are the bad guys. Luke is robed in white, and Darth Vader is dressed in black from head to toe. From the moment Luke discovers the charred corpses of his aunt and uncle, the audience never doubts his mission to stop the Empire. And the guiding lights for Luke on this adventure are Obi-Wan Kenobi and the very idea of the Jedi.

I have killed countless innocents including women and children. My decisions have sown genocide across worlds. I have shot my allies in the backs of their heads. Worst of all, my atrocities amused me.

Fortunately, however, every one of those sins occurred digitally. After all, playing violent video games is fun. Hitting pedestrians with my car in Grand Theft Auto V frequently makes me crack a smile. What worries me more is when video games bore me.

Gaming has been a passion of mine since I first picked up the controller. In middle school, my afternoons were spent playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. Rather than talk to girls, my high school years were dedicated to Halo 2. The majority of my free time this past weekend was used to play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Yet despite this longstanding fascination, I find myself frequently bored with video games since I reached adulthood. Oftentimes, I will pick up the controller, play for less than half an hour, and then step away. The reasons for this are numerous: