Video Games as Something Beyond Fun

On my ninth birthday, my parents bought me the original Sony Playstation game system.  In the months before, I had spent nearly every day going over to my friends house and watching his older sister play games like Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III while we waited to play Tekken 3 and Need for Speed.  Being as young as I was, RPG’s seemed boring considering I just wanted to play racing and action games, but within a few weeks, I came to love watching her play, the graphics of Final Fantasy VII were breathtaking and the characters memorable, it was almost like watching a movie or reading a book and I fell in love with the game.  Naturally, I eventually bought Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Xenogears, and other RPG’s I had watched her play.  They all entertained me, but as I was so young, I never fully grasped how to play them correctly, didn’t pay much attention to the text, and usually got stuck a few hours into the game.  That was over ten years ago, and in the past two years I have now became obsessed with going through my collection of PS1 RPG's and playing them through. 

Final Fantasy Vii is now considered one of the best games of all time

 This obsession has paid off greatly, I realise I would be missing out on a great experience if I let these games simply collect dust.  But the point of this article is not to talk about how I much enjoy all these older games, but to state my opinion that over the last decade or two, many video games have become more than simple entertainment.  They have become immersive experiences with intelligent stories that demand players to use their brains in similar fashion as when reading great literature or watching mind-bending films.  Instead of feeling brain dead like after shooting Zombies in Call of Duty for hours (This is still a ton of fun, don’t get me wrong), there are games out there that make me feel like my brain has had a real work out; whether from strategizing in a challenging boss battle or trying to wrap my head around immense plotlines and philosophy’s that are present in many of the games.

Last week, I finished Chrono Cross, a JRPG made by Square Soft that came out for Play Station in 1999.  I am still blown away by the experience and trying to fully grasp just what went on during this game. The game starts out innocently enough, you control a young boy named Serge, and your first goal is to meet your crush on the beach and bring her a gift.  Once you make it to the beach, Serge blacks out and then wakes up, thinking he just fell asleep and missed his date.  He heads back into town and is surprised to find that nobody knows who he is.  When he says he is Serge, people act surprised, because apparently Serge is the name of a boy from the town who drown ten years ago!  Naturally no one believes that Serge is really Serge.  The game had me hooked when Serge finds his own grave at the edge of the ocean, with his name, date of birth, and date of his death engraved on it.  Serge meets a thief named Kid, and they infiltrate a government mansion to find information.  We learn that ten years ago when Serge died, the universe split into two dimensions because of a powerful storm (still trying to understand this).  In one world Serge stayed alive, in the other he died.  Kid has an item called the astral amulet that allows you to travel between the two dimensions using a wormhole on the beach.  The game is spent travelling in typical JRPG fashion, with Serge trying to figure out how to bring the two worlds together while travelling between both.  The player can choose many different paths, recruit over 30 party members through side-quests, and experience multiple endings based on the paths they choose.  Things only get more crazy as the near forty-hour game unfolds; there is the philosophy of the parallel universes, a vast darkness beyond the universes where even time does not exist, the frozen flame; a relic from a God named Lavos that lived in the earth billions of years ago, powerful entities that are disguised as great dragon gods, and a super computer in a futuristic city that essentially controls the world without their knowledge.  Wow, the poor boy just wanted to give his crush a necklace! I have had a much easier time picking through Chaucer in English class then this. 

Chrono Cross had a unique art stlye

Luckily, this is only the beginning of games like this.  The gaming industry has many intelligent and deep games like Chrono Cross.  For example, Xenosaga, a JRPG for the PS2 was full of Freudian Philosophy in regards to the universe and life.  Not to mention the powerful entities, the Gnosis, monsters that exist beyond tangible space, are influenced by horror fiction writer H.P Lovecraft and his idea that the universe is full of horrible entities that exist outside our own realms.  It is a shame that so many people miss out on these games; they are very time consuming and require a lot of dedication to fully enjoy.  But if there is anything we can take from my wild (and much belated) ride through Chrono Cross, is that many games deserves to be called more than fun, but artistic masterpieces with serious intelligent value.  Gaming has come a long way since simple side-scrollers and shoot em ups, and with games around like the Mass Effect series, Bioshock series, and many more modern titles that offer truly immersive and thought provoking experiences, people should begin to see games as something more then mindless entertainment.  

Written by Michael Easton