February 2020. Atop a sea of distinctly non-colourful heads, Lucien O’Neale struts to the front of the school hall and swiftly silences the crowd. Like all fascists, he is annoyingly well-dressed. He begins a familiar speech reminding us of our innumerable failures, with all the force of a military rant somehow delivered in his signature anime villain drawl. He claims that we are the worst-performing Year 11 group in the county, and, without a shred of irony, tells us to take study cues from Shrek. He sets us off on a benign English task. Unaware of the impending pandemic that would render all of this stress pointless, the students comply, with the unremarkable exception of a single boy lying face-first on the table. O’Neal stalks over.
“Oh? Did we break him?”
“…”
He swaggers off, stilly laughing to himself.
The assembly ends, and the boy leaves the room.
I took a long break from school after that. We had spent weeks and weeks working under intense pressure for a chance to obtain these coveted “GCSEs”, and it was this seemingly inconsequential assembly that pushed me over the edge. I needed a way out, not just a coping mechanism, and thankfully I was lucky enough to get one.
I can’t even begin to explain just how good it feels to just cut off from the world’s noise, even if only for a short amount of time. At that moment, my entire existence consisted of going for walks and playing video games, and no amount of self-care tutorials and name-five-things-you-can-sees have come close to being as effective at fading out the noise in my head. The places I visited, both in real life and virtually, have since become mythologised to me, and it’s these memories that I intend to share here.
The following piece is made up of three sections, each a review (of sorts) of a different piece of media I experienced in that brief, window. Don’t feel obligated to read them all at once, or ever — it’s your choice. You could probably count the number of Ring Fit Adventure truthers on one hand, anyway.
PART I: FINAL FANTASY XV, AND THE FRIENDS WE MADE ALONG THE WAY
Final Fantasy XV is a terrible video game, but I love it anyway.
I’m hardly the first to say this — you can find more detailed criticisms all over YouTube — yet the simple act of having the game “click” for me feels like I’ve been accepted into an exclusive club. It’s a barely-stitched-together tale of misogyny and Cup Noodles, yet to cut through its graveyard of once-trendy design choices is to reveal an emotional core oft-unseen in the high-budget landscape: genuine male intimacy.
The story is a train-wreck. The final main product of developer Square Enix’s much-maligned “Fabula Nova Crystallis” (or “The New Tale of the Crystal”) series, FFXV also perplexingly exists as its own entertainment empire: there’s the main game (released twice on PS4 for…reasons?), five additional story episodes that landlord-ishly plaster over the enormous narrative gaps, a now-defunct online mode, a cutesy, “chibi-fied” phone version that costs £30, a five-part YouTube anime series, a VR fishing game, and even a tie-in live-action movie starring Sean Bean. To experience FFXV is to live and breathe it in every single media format, or at least that was the idea held by some shady Square executive desperately clawing at Marvel’s “everything is connected” business model. Perhaps the only thing the two projects have in common is that they’re completely devoid of any originality: for stories that we’re supposed to inhale at every possible opportunity, you’d think the narratives would be a little less depressingly bland to describe. There are fantasy politics, regular-nouns-used-as-proper-nouns, magic crystals, magic soldiers, magic kings, magic swords, a magic ring, magic… dudes? Angry dudes… with no magic…?
Hey, are you still reading this?
The open world isn’t much better. Despite its overwhelming size and lavish detail (no doubt the result of far too many nights sleeping at desks for its infamously troubled development team), the pseudo-Western backdrop for this story is exactly that: a barely functioning husk. Between damp fields and shining forests, you and your bros can occasionally ditch the car to explore various caves on foot. They’re all the same. After crossing some invisible threshold, protagonist Noctis’ leisurely jog turns to an awkward fast-walk, as though his pants might suddenly fill with the liquid remnants of Ignis’ egg-topped Cup Noodles under too much pressure. You barely have time to summon enough energy to be annoyed when Prompto squeaks out a canned line about how cold / damp / haunted your current location is. “Quit bitching, start killing.” Gladiolus grunts. For once, you find yourself in full agreement.
And of course, you *do* start killing. Surrounded by the same enemies as always, you resignedly hold CIRCLE and watch Noct hack away, uninterrupted by designer nor player. Sometimes, a boss appears. When that happens, you have to arbitrarily hold down SQUARE, too. Yet for all the undisguised nonsense I was forced to sit through, I never wanted to quit. So many games make such little an impression you feel under no compulsion to continue, yet that special week I returned to its warm (albeit Lynx Africa-scented) embrace time and time again. Noct’s friends are my friends, albeit with better hair and worse attitudes. I feel inseparable from them now.
I often hear a recurring sentiment from gamers who grew up in the so-called “golden age of Square”. They paint a picture of a company on top of the world, miraculously producing one instant classic after another; games that captured the imaginations of their audiences despite (or perhaps because of) their limited visuals. With it comes the not-so-subtle implication that today’s games, with their infinite budgets and mile-wide canvases, don’t spark any creativity from the player — after all, what blanks are there to fill in the Final Fantasy VII remake when we can see every pore on Cloud Strife’s face — yet this couldn’t be further from the truth. In their unrelenting willingness to release games with great ideas and even greater flaws, Square have inadvertently created a goldmine of impossible possibilities. Opportunities for fan expression have long existed thanks to the popularity of message boards, with players writing new endings for characters they felt were mistreated by the original narrative, but only in this new age of kinda-sorta terrible Square games have non-official story changes felt like an essential part of the experience.
Playing Final Fantasy XV, it’s impossible not to dream of a more beautiful version, one free of creative, technical and financial issues and developed by a team of master artists who high-five every morning before sitting at their desks. In my version, the lengthy two-part structure is replaced by bursts of linearity and openness, with the car as the centrepiece as it ferries our four friends between Xenoblade Chronicles-sized hub areas on a grand coast-to-coast road trip. Between lakeside towns and mountaintop villages bursting with character-focused activity, our heroes are given a moment to chat, to listen to music, to take in the views of the continent, to rest. The game would be remembered by these quiet moments in the back of the car, with only the vast wilderness and your best friends to keep you company. It would still be a game about masculinity, but my imagined version would do more to combat the original’s sexist storytelling: through lengthy, playable flashback scenes we would get to experience Noct and Luna’s childhood relationship through a shared attempt to run away from the very capital that The Guys™ are trying to reach in the present day. You spend your days scrounging for food and sneaking onboard trains together, their linear nature contrasted with a labyrinthine social network of criminals. Back in the present, as you get ever closer to the city and you ditch the car rides for the same trains ridden by the children in the flashbacks, a feeling of déjà vu strikes the player and protagonist as one.
“I remember this place.”
PART II: RING FIT ADVENTURE AND THE LEGACY OF “WEIRD NINTENDO"
If Final Fantasy XV is a bowl of a-little-too-wet spaghetti you eat outside with your friends, Ring Fit Adventure is the delicate serving of succulent meatballs on top that made it all worthwhile. It’s also the plate of freshly-baked garlic bread. And the glass of Sicilian lemonade. And the dessert after, too.
Confused food metaphors aside, this game is delicious.
Ring Fit Adventure tells the story of the Trainer, a silent protagonist whose only remarkable trait is that they have impeccable hair, and Ring, the eponymous gameplay-feature-turned-sassy-sidekick that seems obligatory for every game Nintendo makes. Together the duo set out to defeat the evil Dragaux and his brainwashed minions, a seemingly overwrought premise until you realise that they intend to save the world through the power of fitness, and the aforementioned demon king looks like he posts deadlifting videos on Instagram. Almost the entire game is controlled via workout routines, from running through its verdant fields to engaging in its turn-based combat. All of the treasure chests are squat-operated, as are the swings and springs; disturb a bee’s nest and you’ll need to tree pose to safety.
Nothing here is wasted. Where FFXV released in a manner strongly resembling a teenager’s notes app, Ring Fit shows shocking restraint in the mechanics it presents to the player, reaching a near-scientific equilibrium that balances joyous surprise with artisanal craftsmanship. Much like exercise in the real world, you’ll find yourself running along the same paths and over the same obstacles time and time again, yet just when the game teeters on the edge on boredom it suddenly shifts, either by recontextualising pre-established mechanics or introducing brand-new ones. Nintendo has long held a reputation for its willingness to discard incredible ideas long before they’ve reached their full potential, simply to maintain a constant stream of pure fun, yet Ring Fit breaks this trend by building a less initially impressive — though ultimately even more valuable — sense of familiarity between the player and the pieces. Playing through the game I found myself subconsciously logging my thoughts on each obstacle as though they were characters in a reality TV drama: I welcomed the rowing boat parts with open arms, while each time I saw those fucking handrails I would grimace with a weary readiness to fight, not dissimilar to that seen from sworn enemies at a boxing match or Crufts contest.
It is also in this state of constant awe of the game’s shockingly masterful design that the player even accepts its more repetitive elements. As a pseudo-parody of the JRPG, Ring Fit features all the trappings of the genre: copious sidequests, turn-based combat, an amnesiac sidekick, vaguely homoerotic melodrama, the works. One might see these tropes as proof that Ring Fit is a “real game” for “real gamers” rather than just an interactive workout DVD, but for me their near-seamless implementation into such a bizarre fitness game offers a subtle, much-needed criticism of JRPG storytelling. In games like Final Fantasy or even Persona, the explicit falsehood and “gaminess” of the number-based battles often results in a vast disconnect between my actions as player and the characters’ actions onscreen, meaning the emotional scenes that invariably follow these fights tend to feel completely hollow. FFXV combined the most obvious trends associated with the medium in the name of “cinematic realism” and played this fact off without a hint of self-awareness. Ring Fit knows full well that it is a video game, and thus asks the player to use their body in uncomfortable new ways that conversely make them feel more connected to what’s happening onscreen. I wasn’t fighting for my life in FFXV, I just pressed the same button several times until some random robot fell over. By comparison, force me to do a hundred sit-ups and I’ll listen to anything you have to say. ***
So what do I want from the future of JRPGs, then? For the games to be controlled entirely via yoga positions? For all crafting menus to be replaced with fun smoothie-making minigames? For everyone to be shredded, all the time? Not really, although that would be pretty funny. Instead, Ring Fit Adventure shows us the possibilities that flourish when you disregard the video game industry’s ride-or-die commitment to realism as the only way to tell compelling stories. I started Ring Fit because I was tired of sitting around and stressing about schoolwork, a spectre which had invaded my enjoyment of traditional video games through a constant feeling of “lack of productivity”, and I ended up reimagining the potential for storytelling in one of my favourite genres. Not bad for a workout DVD, huh?
***(See also the advent of “social stealth” games in the past year. Where stealth segments in traditional games are often decried by players due to their failure to replicate the exact way we expect humans to act, meaning we often end up looking for ways to break the simulation, recent hits like Project Winter and Among Us rethink fundamental parts of the genre: players are pitted against one another instead of against flawed AI, and overwhelming emphasis is placed on a player’s real-life voice rather than a limited number of actions that a character can perform in-game. This not only makes these types of games far more accessible to people unaccustomed to “game logic”, but also provides a far wider canvas for unique strategies for players to invent and share with their friends. This might also explain the immense popularity of those “AMOGUS 10,000 IQ PLAY” videos that cover the internet at the moment.)
PART III: MY NEIGHBOUR TOTORO AND OUR SHARED CHILDHOOD
The final piece of media I recall from my time away isn’t a video game, nor am I even certain I watched it at the time. I simply remember its presence.
My Neighbour Totoro is a film with the texture of an Alpine chairlift; of smooth jazz on a countryside train ride; of scranning a McDonald’s after a long walk and having it taste, for once, like melted gold. It doesn’t challenge or confuse like Studio Ghibli’s other works, and could perhaps be more easily labelled a children’s film as a result, yet where its contemporaries aim simply to “shut the kids up for an afternoon”, Totoro ends up touching on something altogether more profound. Through its idealistic portrayal of primary school life, we are invited to imagine a shared childhood which, despite taking place on the other side of the planet, still feels intimately familiar. Hayao Miyazaki famously never went to film school, instead using his time spent people-watching as a basis for his characters, and that design philosophy applies here: Satsuki and Mei feel like real children, not because of the amount of hairs visible on their heads but because of the way that Satsuki awkwardly shifts her sister’s weight on her back while they wait for the bus together. These are kids you can picture holding their fingers to a car window to imitate a ninja doing parkour across the rooftops, and I think that’s beautiful.
This focus on imagined detail applies to the world of the film, too. Totoro’s idyllic countryside landscapes may technically take place on the other side of the planet, yet in its universally recognisable vast trees, lush colours and warm streetlamps the viewer is immediately able to find a point of reference in their own experiences running around in the sun. There are no exposition dumps that beg you to care about the world; the artists at Studio Ghibli simply trust their settings to be evocative enough on their own. I find the the idea of fiction-as-place fascinating: locations like Spirited Away’s bath house or Breath of the Wild’s, well, wilds, obviously don’t exist in our world, yet I often describe them with the same reverence as I do my favourite places in real life. Of course the aforementioned “soft worldbuilding” technique plays a huge part in creating truly special settings, but most influential, at least to me, are the sounds of such places.
All three works I’ve discussed today have incredible soundtracks — FFXV blends Eastern and Western RPG influences to convey its all-American, no-girls-allowed road trip motif while Ring Fit parodies workout DVD “muzak” in a way that echoes the late 2000s Wii era — yet only My Neighbour Totoro’s offers that warmth we so often chase, with Joe Hisaishi’s ethereal, synth-based score acting as the vital, almost spiritual connection between the film and the soul of its viewer. In much the same way that a horror film might end with a wink and a nod and a “he could be outside your house right now!”, songs like “Path of the Wind” genuinely feel as though I could look outside and see Totoro sitting on an enormous tree that suddenly appeared in my garden, playing the ocarina and watching the wind flow through the fields. I think that’s beautiful, too.
My Neighbour Totoro wants you to stop for a moment and appreciate the world around you. Ring Fit Adventure wants you to care about the weird little things you’d otherwise put aside. Final Fantasy XV wants you to tell your bros how much you love them, ‘cuz they might not be around for much longer. No wonder this is the stuff I remember from my time away. With every passing jab at FFXV, every sporadic session of Ring Fit, and every listen of Totoro’s music, I can’t help but think back to that week-long air pocket of blissful ignorance, where life didn’t seem determined to somehow get worse on a weekly basis. I think we could all use a week like that right about now.
(Final Fantasy XV is available on PC, PS4 / 5 and Xbox One / Series)
(Ring Fit Adventure is available on Nintendo Switch)
(My Neighbour Totoro is available on DVD and Blu-Ray, and is also currently streaming on Netflix in the UK and HBO Max in the US)
epilogue
i loaded up final fantasy fifteen to get footage today
found my old save file
they were all waiting for me
“We can catch some Zs here!” said prompto
like nothing had changed
nothing had,
in a way.
