Returning to Zero: On Returning to What You Once Loved (The Nostalgia Trap, part 8)
Because we write about nostalgia so much, I’ve been revisiting a lot of things that I enjoyed when I was younger. In all honesty, it hasn’t been terribly rewarding: the games and television of my youth, which seemed so deep and meaningful when I was growing up feel shallow and hollow now. It’s been said that empty vessels make the loudest sound, but I find they ring hollow and the noise is just that: simple noise, with no message left.
Phantasy Star IV (1993) — Everything a pre-adolescent child thinks is awesome.
For example, in the past year I downloaded on my phone the Phantasy Star Classics by Sega. I remember renting Phantasy Star IV from the blockbuster near my house (which has since been turned into a gym, it seems,) and being enraptured by it. This game had a seminal effect on me: it introduced me to the genre of the JRPG, which eventually led me to Final Fantasy and Xenogears, the latter of which encouraged me to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and eventually moved me to start writing (Edgar and I met due to reviews left on one another’s work, notably the novel that I was working on which was basically a rip-off of Evangelion.) It also encouraged me to get deeper in to video games, and eventually tabletop games, which were my principle hobby through high school and college, and which I still do today, and have written about extensively. Wanting to share it with other tabletop gamers led me into hacking games and trying to assemble it from available parts (poorly.) A desire to play it after my Genesis failed led me to learn how to work an emulator and introduced me to a fairly sizable community of people (I feel justified doing this – I’ve bought the game twice, now. I paid for it.) It’s the first game I ever beat.
You could say that this game made me who I am.
It’s not terribly good.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s got its charm, and there are certainly worse games out there. But it isn’t the deep, legendary story that I recall it being.
Here’s the basic premise: the setting is a fictional star system, three worlds orbiting the star Algo. There’s a pastoral world inhabited by human-like Palmans, a desert world inhabited by owl-like Motavians, and an ice world inhabited by green-skinned Dezolisians (the planets are, respectively, Palma, Motavia, and Dezolis, with variation for translation.) Every thousand years, the demon Dark Force emerges and wreaks havoc, and is beaten back by heroes, the leader of them wielding a holy sword called Elsydeon.
The first game is very much influenced by Alice in Wonderland, while the second one matured into an 80s Cyberpunk story, and the fourth one is a post-Apocalyptic story. The third one is the odd one out, taking place on a generation ship far away from the solar system the other three are set on, and being more of a Romeo and Juliet thing, at least at the beginning.
In addition to everything else, there are also catgirls and robots. It’s extremely anime, and even more 90s.
The fourth story takes place after the destruction of Palma, and the environmental control systems all over the solar system are going haywire. After the “Great Collapse” detailed in the second game, the first planet is gone, turned into an asteroid belt, and all of the environmental systems that had been responsible for terraforming Motavia into a garden world have begun to fail, the planet reverting to a natural desert state, the factory that was producing livestock and friendly animals malfunctioning and spitting out horrifying monsters.
The people of this world had reverted to something very much like a medieval society (though, oddly, the game never dealt with politics or religion, outside of a villainous cult that had summoned some demonic monsters. It was a sanitized medieval stasis, very much influenced by fairy tales.)
In the game, you play as an apprentice monster hunter, and it spirals out from an extermination job in the basement of the one university on the planet (which is two floors and has four classrooms and a Dean’s office.) Then it’s a missing-persons case, finding the professor that brought back the basement full of monster-making machinery, but he’s been turned into stone by an evil wizard. Then you have to go find the native Motavians who have a medicine to deal with this – you’re guided on this task by a good wizard, who peaces out and is replaced by an axe-wielding Motavian out for revenge. After you turn the town back into flesh-and-blood people, you go to shut down the monster factory, and are joined by what is essentially a cat-girl ninja (it’s all wrapped up in series lore, but she’s a clone of a character from the second game who was killed off at the halfway point of that game; this character, Rika, survives.) After trying to get revenge on the evil wizard, who is messing with the terraforming machinery, your mentor is killed, you rejoin with the good wizard to kill him and find a space ship.
That’s the first six hours or so. It’s that kind of game.
The second time you fight Dark Force, he’s a crab that lives in a flesh tower. Perhaps it’s inevitable that I turned out like I did. Image taken from a Let’s Play by Meteor9.
By the end of the game, you’ve fought Dark Force – supposedly the ultimate evil – three times, and learned that there’s an even more ultimate evil, the Profound Darkness, that is breaking out of its weakened prison because one of the three planets (actually four – there’s a hidden fourth, crystal planet inhabited by spirits,) has been destroyed. Once it breaks out, its mere proximity causes a whole town full of people to lie down and die, and then you have to climb down to the bottom of the acid trip it lives in and beat it to death with a sword, backed up by the good wizard, a seven-foot-tall android, the cat-girl ninja, and one of the four other friends you made along the way.
I will say that the scripting is pretty solid – the system can only handle five characters in the party at a time, and it’s always clear why you only have five characters at a time to the point where, when you do have options for your party, it’s when you need protective gear and only have five sets.
It had some good, lasting effects on me. The blending of fantasy and science-fictional tropes — past and future, essentially — has stuck with me: I was disabused of the idea that a story had to be just one of those things. It depends on the story being told, and the writer should conform to the needs of the story, instead of declaring that there is some platonic rubric that they need to conform to (I can’t have robots, this is fantasy.)
This is supposed to be a moment of humor. This sort of thing was just sort of floating around in the culture. Image taken from a Destructoid Community Blog by “Lord Spencer.”
The dialogue, however, is painfully bad, mostly because it’s written at about a fourth-grade level. There’s kind of an implied romance plot between the central character and the aforementioned cat-girl but none of the characters are really that well-drawn: they’re ciphers, upon which someone can project their own characterization. This made it easier for me to get into it when I was younger, but it also meant that I’ve long outgrown it.
Replaying this game is, essentially, a reunion with the person I was when I first encountered it.
The problem is that I don’t really care about who I was at that point in time. I can’t change the past, and I can’t regain any sort of meaning from hanging out with a fourth-grader (I think; I honestly can’t remember how old I was when I first played it.) It’s not that returning to it is an unpleasant experience, it’s that I feel I’ve scraped just about everything out of this piece of media that I can get.
Perhaps returning to the things we loved when we were younger is more meaningful for other people than it is for me. I would bet not, though: what we long for isn’t the thing itself, it’s the feelings that we experienced during those times. It’s the affect of the long bygone days that we want to return to, not the days themselves. It’s my assessment that we want to feel as we did, not to be as we were.
The problem is that you aren’t the person you were before you played that game or read that book or saw that film or TV show. Maybe experiencing it again will change you again, but there’s only so much you can squeeze out of it. The desperation you feel to regain the halcyon days is the desperation of realizing that the canteen is nearly empty, the anxiety of not knowing when you will next come across an oasis.
That watering hole is dry. Best to strike out and find the next one, and then the next one after that.
The Big O (1999) — everything a high schooler thinks are awesome.
Recently, Edgar and I have been revisiting another piece of media from my youth – the anime The Big O. It’s similarly a mashup, this time of mecha anime and film noir, but rewatching it feels like a more rewarding experience (admittedly, this is only the third time I’ve watched the whole thing – the first time being when I saw it on Cartoon Network’s Toonami and then [Adult Swim] blocks, with a gap between the two seasons.) Part of this is being able to share it with Edgar, who is experiencing it for the first time. Another part is contrast: while it might not be quite as deep as I remember it being, it is deep enough that it seems profound, at times, in contrast to the other things I’ve been revisiting.
Still, it is a wonderful mixture of 70s era anime, Paul Dini’s cartoons, and Mike Mignola’s comics – nothing exactly new, but it is a surprising juxtaposition. Elements that don’t necessarily seem to mesh forced to cooperate.
Concept art for Lightning, from Final Fantasy XIII designed by Motomu Toriyama and Tetsuya Nomura.
It seems more innovative than the current major JRPG news, which is the release of the Final Fantasy VII remake’s demo. I haven’t had a chance to download and play it, but from what I understand it’s basically the same as the old game, with gameplay elements lifted from later Squaresoft and Square-Enix properties (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XII and XIII, etc.) It’s honestly about time they’ve done this – Squaresoft and Square-Enix have been trying to remake Final Fantasy VII for years, trying to recapture the same affective response (see: them explicitly saying that they wanted the lead character of XIII to be a “female version of Cloud.”)
The history of the latter Final Fantasy games – from VII onward, I would say – is the Nostalgia Trap writ comparatively small: ever since that high water mark, the games’ creators have been trying to recapture the same experience, to deliver the same ultimate affect that they delivered once. There’s nothing wrong, ultimately, with that. The problem comes from thinking that it’s possible to recapture it by repeating the same aesthetic beats, by remixing the same narrative elements.
They’ve been trying to manufacture the magic of a grimacing, blond Son Goku minifig for 23 years. Image taken from Eurogamer.
But each time such a thing repeats, it loses force. That’s something that separates a pleasant experience from a traumatic one. They’ve tried to make up for it with a grander and grander scale each time, but at the same time, they’ve been zeroing in closer and closer on simply repeating the same story, to the point where now they’ve just said it’s a remake and left it at that. I would predict that people will hate it, but such a prediction is useless: it doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong.
But there’s an overwhelming focus on the what, when the important question is why: not what did you love but why did you love it. If you can answer that then you can free yourself from the past. If you can answer that, then you can make a new future.
And if you’re looking forward to the remake, if it formed the cornerstone of your childhood, just know take it from someone who took that homeward journey – Thomas Wolfe was right in this case, if no other one. You can’t go home again.
You have to go onward.
※
If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)