Despite the fact I’m about fifteen years late to this party, I feel as though it’s about time someone defended the idea of ‘emo’ in the Final Fantasy series. For better or worse, the entire series has been fairly dark and hopeless, but that was because in every game the situation was dire — one way or another, your protagonist was going to suffer, and the world’s end was looming.
It’s hard for current gamers to imagine this kind of setting as particularly unique — after all, we’ve just come out of the age of the brown shooter. It may have been our time with protagonists who were constantly (and purposefully) developed so that they were always hard done by, and always charged with a super serious tasks, that we confused emotional with emo, and equated introversion with being a whiny tosser.
And none have suffered more than poor Squall.
While the complaint of ‘emo’ wasn’t just confined to FFVIII (usually, FFVII and sometimes FFIX also carry this particular stigma), Squall is the poster boy for this train of thought. Sure, he looks like he has the charm of an alcoholic clown performing at a retirement home, but there are some good reasons for that. See, the difference between Squall and some pasty white kid who thinks his parents suck ‘just because’ is that Squall had real problems. Orphaned, raised in a military academy, and engaged in warfare at the tender age of 17.
In comparison to games now, the inner dialogue of Squall might seem insufferable – but only if you throw out all of the surrounding context.When you’re playing FFVIII, you cannot escape the fact that you’re playing as a teen. You attend class, sit at desks, endure other characters high school bravado and listen to their naive philosophies and exaggerated dreams of glory. You train. Perform tests. Go to the school dance and have a crush on the prettiest girl there, who in turn likes the school douchebag. Basically, it was Square’s interpretation of a genre that had been alive and strong during the 80’s and 90’s — school dramady.
Aside from the issues that arise naturally whilst going through that period of ‘transformation’ (thanks, hormones!), Squall and his classmates are trained to kill, their ultimate goal to take down the Sorceress. I’d explain more, but I feel like you should google it. I can’t do all the work around here.
Anyway, this accomplishes two things — firstly, in the spirit of FF, it sets a short-term and seemingly achievable goal for our protagonists before setting the stakes higher with a grimmer task. Secondly, having been exposed to the world, thoughts and environment of teens whose lives are going to be dictated by combat and suffering, you begin to understand how momentous their undertakings truly are.
The other thing that separates Squall and a person who thinks it’s perfectly ok to scream ‘I WISH I’D NEVER BEEN BORN’ before slamming the door is the willingness to take action. Check out the opening clip to FFVIII:
This is not a guy who thinks he’s hard done by and whines at the first sign of adversity. This is a guy who gets his face cut open and decides that he’s going to repay the favour in kind — not exactly your usual emo fare.
Further, in spite of the fact that a lot of the dialogue in the game takes place inside Squall’s head, he’s a leader — during the later stages of the game, he’s given command of the entire academy. And in this clip (around 56 minutes in), he’s commanding his friend to put a bullet between the eyes of the Sorceress.
That’s bad-arse.
Oh, and he gets tortured. If you play the game, you’ll notice that he doesn’t retreat to his room and weep to Good Charlotte.
The thing is, I have no idea how it seeped into the collective gaming conscious that this was ‘emo’ (and negatively so), whereas the constant narrative of the moral ‘grey area’ of modern gaming hasn’t yet received a collective sigh and a universal rolling of eyes. Being morally dubious for the sake of being morally dubious isn’t interesting. It makes characters look bi-polar, and it makes decisions look arbitrary. Even if Squall was as infuriating as a North Shore poet whose works concerned how terrible it was to drive a second-hand car, it would still make for a stronger character than ‘omg guys war is bad yet we’re doing it but srsly I actually am very nice :)’.
I’d like to hear your thoughts though — do FFVIII fans agree? What have non-players heard about him? Let me know in the comments.
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