Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (9 page)

13
For discussions of other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy as it relates to the
Final Fantasy
series, please see chapter 2, “Kefka, Nietzsche, Foucault: Madness and Nihilism in
Final Fantasy VI
,” by Kylie Prymus; chapter 11, “Sin, Otherworldliness, and the Downside to Hope,” by David Hahn; and chapter 12, “Human, All Too Human: Cloud’s Existential Quest for Authenticity,” by Christopher R. Wood, all in this volume.

PART THREE

ABILITIES YOU NEVER KNEW YOU HAD

7

FINAL FANTASY
AND THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

Greg Littmann

Hey, where are you four brats off to now? What . . . ? You’re going to go save the world . . . ? Did you get hit on the head or something!?

—Woman in Ur, Final Fantasy III

The oldest game in the world must be pretending to be someone else. Even before children learn to speak, they start to copy the adults around them and they soon start to act out better and more exciting lives, whether it be putting a stop to crime or exploring new planets. Some people grow out of it as they get older. Suckers. The rest of us just start playing more sophisticated games. Thanks to the steady advancement of computer technology, things have never been better for those of us who enjoy exploring lives that are not our own, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the
Final Fantasy
series of video games, which has offered new lives to hundreds of thousands of people since 1987. The phenomenal success of the
Final Fantasy
series makes it a natural resource for investigating the question of the purpose, or the best purpose, of life in the real world. After all, role-playing games are only successful if they tempt us with lives that seem worth living.

Of course, just because we enjoy pretending that something is happening doesn’t automatically mean that we think it would be good in real life. For example, we might be having fun when a Cactaur impales us with a thousand flying needles in a
Final Fantasy
game, but that doesn’t mean we think that suffering a comparable injury in the real world would be a good thing. Similarly, if we are playing
Final Fantasy XI Online
, we might regard it as a little harmless, black-humored fun to run around the Batallia Downs slaughtering the poor little Pixies, but no sane person thinks that killing intelligent creatures just for fun is all right in real life.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of what kinds of lives we should be living in the real world, by contrasting the “lives” that are held to be well lived in the worlds of
Final Fantasy
with the sorts of lives recommended by philosophers. In particular, we’ll look at what the philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), and Aristotle (384-322 BCE) would say about the lives lived by the protagonists of the
Final Fantasy
computer games and in particular about the lives chosen by players of
Final Fantasy XI Online
.

Hobbes vs. the Hobgoblins

Citizens, unite! Come to the light. . . . Real happiness can be found in obedience to the company.

—President Shinra, Final Fantasy VII

Hobbes believed that the fundamental moral rule is that people should act in their own self-interest. He thought that you have no moral obligation to help other people unless helping them will benefit you in the long run, and whether you harm someone else is irrelevant except insofar as he or she might harm you back. So, for example, it would be immoral to mug a Tarutaru and take its gils if you are likely to get caught, but mugging the Tarutaru would be the right thing to do if you could get away with it. Philosophers call the view that we should do whatever is in our best interests “moral egoism.”

All of this might make Hobbes sound like an anarchist, but in fact, he thought that it was in people’s best interests to live in obedience to an absolute monarch. Most monarchists of Hobbes’s day believed that a monarch’s authority comes from God, but Hobbes maintained that it comes from the monarch’s own subjects. The subjects are considered to be partners in a social contract with one another, in which they mutually agree to give up certain freedoms, in the interest of the common good. In particular, they agree to be ruled by a king, on the grounds that only such a powerful central authority can keep order and peace. Because order and peace are in everyone’s best interests, it is in everyone’s interests to make sure that he or she obeys the king’s law and does nothing to undermine the king’s authority. After all, where there is no law and no authority, everyone is in danger from everyone else. To take an example from
Final Fantasy
, even a badass like Cloud Strife has to sleep sometime, and when he does, he could be murdered by any weakling unless someone else is watching out for him. Hobbes called this lawless alternative to monarchy “the state of nature” and said that life under it is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” a “war of every man against every man.”
¹
Hobbes believed that the very worst form of disobedience to the monarch was to rebel against him or her, because even the worst monarchies are preferable to the horrors that occur during civil war. If Hobbes’s philosophy interests you, I recommend his book
Leviathan.
²

Hobbes would think that most of the protagonists of the solo
Final Fantasy
games are fools. After all, he thought that our guiding concern in life should be personal self-interest, and if there is one thing the protagonists of the solo
Final Fantasy
games are known for, it is putting aside self-interest. In fact, they tend to devote their lives to the well-being of other people. The very first
Final Fantasy
game focuses on four adventurers striving to return the world’s elements to a state of balance, the second on four adventurers striving to save the world from conquest at the hands of the evil dictator Palamecia, the third on four adventurers seeking to return balance again, while the fourth through tenth are respectively about Heroes striving to save the world from the Warrior Golbez, the Wizard Exdeath, the dictator Gestahl, the mastermind Sephiroth, the Sorceress Edea, the warmongering Queen Brahne, and the giant monster Sin. The most recent solo game,
Final Fantasy XII
, is similarly themed. It’s about a small group of adventurers standing up against the might of the evil Archadian Empire. The Heroes of
Final Fantasy
are so altruistic that Hobbes would be disgusted at their obsessive dedication to promoting the common good.

You might think that I’m being naive about the motives of the Heroes here. After all, even though the protagonists are out to save the world, the world they are saving is the world they live in, and saving the world you live in is something that is ultimately in every person’s self-interest, regardless of how selfish he or she may be. For example, Tidus from
Final Fantasy X
may be striving to rid Spira of the rampaging monster Sin, but Tidus is in just as much danger from Sin’s surprise attacks as anyone else on Spira is. At the beginning of the game, Sin has already destroyed Tidus’s home city of Zanarkand, and Tidus has every reason to believe that if Sin strikes his location again, he won’t get away with his life. Similarly, Cloud Strife from
Final Fantasy VII
might be fighting to prevent the world of Gaia from being enslaved by Shinra corporation and the would-be god Sephiroth, but if Sephiroth were to succeed, Cloud Strife himself would be just as much a slave as anyone else was. In light of this, it could be argued that the characters are very much acting in accordance with their own self-interest and so are acting in a way that Hobbes would approve of.

I don’t think Hobbes would buy this argument for a second, though. It might be true that the Heroes are saving their own skins along with everyone else’s, but what we know of their characters almost always tells us that they are doing it out of sheer nobility. The four Light Warriors of the very first
Final Fantasy
don’t seem to have any purpose in life other than doing good for others, appearing out of nowhere in accordance with prophecy to bring balance to the world. Similarly, the rebel Heroes of
Final Fantasy II
put themselves in great personal danger to overthrow the evil Palamecian Empire, danger that must outweigh any personal good they could gain from a change of government. The Heroes of
Final Fantasy III
are trying to restore balance to the world because a crystal they found tells them that it is their duty to do so—taking advice from a crystal may be a strange decision, but their quest is an altruistic one. The Dark Knight Cecil Harvey of
Final Fantasy IV
starts the game secure in a prestigious job working for an evil king, then loses it all by developing a conscience and deciding to be a Hero.

Hobbes might be a little more approving of the wanderer Bartz from
Final Fantasy V.
Bartz is trying to save the world from the Wizard Exdeath. That may sound altruistic, but if Bartz fails to prevent Exdeath’s return, everything on the planet will die, including himself. It is absolutely in Bartz’s best interests, then, to prevent Exdeath’s return. We might try to paint Bartz as a Hobbesian hero, letting nothing stand in the way of his quest to do what is best for himself. Even before Bartz is given this quest, however, we have seen him twice risk his life to save strangers from attacking Goblins, so there is no question where his real priorities lie.
Final Fantasy VI
focuses again on political rebels who are risking far more than they can hope to gain personally from a revolution.

Final Fantasy VII
is a particularly tricky and interesting case. Its main protagonist is, of course, the famous Cloud Strife, the idol of an army of cosplayers and anyone else who loves implausibly large swords.
³
Cloud likes to play his cards close to the vest and never quite makes his motivations clear. As the game begins, Cloud seems the perfect Hobbesian, dedicated to using his gifts for personal benefit by selling his skills as a mercenary. Then he gets involved in the resistance group AVALANCHE, and things get murkier. He devotes himself to opposing the evil Sephiroth, but why? Is it because if Sephiroth is not thwarted, he will gain godlike power over everyone, and Cloud is simply protecting his own freedom? Is it because Cloud wants revenge for the way Sephiroth manipulated his memories or for Sephiroth’s murder of the flower girl Aeris? Or does Cloud, behind the cynicism, really want to protect the people of the world Gaia from an awful fate? We simply don’t know. Let’s assume that Hobbes gives Cloud a nod of approval, if only because Hobbes is self-interested enough not to want a Buster Sword to the face.

Squall Leonhart from
Final Fantasy VIII
just goes from bad to worse in the Hobbesian model. He starts the game obsessed with doing his duty at the military academy, and as if that weren’t bad enough, his friendships with Irvine Kinneas, Quistis Trepe, Selphie Tilmitt, and Zell Dincht and especially his romance with Rinoa Heatilly gradually transform him into a caring and giving individual. The thief Zidane Tribal from
Final Fantasy IX
is a hopeless case right from the start, with the personal motto “you don’t need a reason to help people.” In
Final Fantasy X
, it may be in Tidus’s best interests for the demonic Sin to be destroyed before it strikes again, but Tidus stays loyal to this quest even when he learns that Sin’s destruction would cause his own death. The Summoner Yuna from the same game is just as bad. At the start of the game she is already intending to sacrifice her life to combat Sin, and although she does become less enamored with the idea of dying as the plot unfolds, her main reason for choosing a less terminal approach is that sacrificing her life simply wouldn’t be very effective. Finally, Princess Ashe of
Final Fantasy XII
may be striving to recapture her lost Dalmascan throne, which seems self-interested enough, but she’s clearly doing it because she doesn’t want her people to be oppressed by the Archadian Empire and she wants to put an end to the fighting. So yet another Hero fails to pass Hobbes’s standard. Of course, there are many more playable characters in
Final Fantasy
games than I have mentioned here, but the trend is clear enough. These tales may be fantasies for some, but for Hobbes, they are nightmares.

As if the protagonists weren’t contemptible enough in Hobbes’s eyes for their lack of self-interest, he would also think them fools for their defiance of authority. As you know, Hobbes was in favor of monarchy and recommended strict obedience to the monarch. Yet showing strict obedience to the authorities is the last characteristic we can expect to find in a
Final Fantasy
hero. Hobbes would be horrified at the rebels of
Final Fantasy II
who fight to overthrow the Palamecian Empire, the rebels of
Final Fantasy VI
who fight to overthrow the empire of Gestahl, and the members of AVALANCHE from
Final Fantasy VII
who fight to overthrow the all-powerful Shinra corporation. Even the rebels who support Princess Ashe’s return to the throne in
Final Fantasy XII
would be condemned, despite the fact that Ashe used to be the absolute ruler and was owed complete loyalty by the people of Dalmasca. Ashe no longer rules, so she doesn’t count anymore. It is the Archadian emperor Gramis who rules in Dalmasca at the time of
Final Fantasy XII
, and so it is to him that the Dalmascans now owe their loyalty.