“Tiptoe down to the lonely places,” sings My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher on ‘Loomer’, her sweetly torpid melody rising up from a static haze of tremolo guitar, electrical as Midgar’s skyline.
Loomer is the second monitor from Loveless; the identical album marketed by a billboard overlooking the cobblestones the place Aeris the flower lady picks herself up from a fall, dusts off her gown, and meets Cloud Strife for the primary time.
The album’s title would later be absorbed into the universe’s canon as a stage play in Crisis Core, however its inclusion right here stays opaque. Still, when Bilinda Butcher sings about holy locations, lonely locations, and “sunshine faces carrying their heads down”, it’s exhausting to not image Midgar itself. A metropolis of slums and superstructures, secret police and ID checks, social stratification, and the profound private isolation that blossoms the place expertise grows sooner than neighborhood.
The future Midgar shows is development with out progress. The industrial dominance and colonial monoculture of steampunk with out the romance, and the noir paranoia of cyberpunk with out, on the very least, the dystopian comfort prize of fibre broadband. Perhaps most noticeably, wanting again in hindsight by a lens smeared with 2019’s regurgitated PR spittle, Midgar is a metropolis with its politics splashed throughout it in searing neon.
The metropolis was as soon as a number of smaller settlements, developed right into a sole metropolis by the Shinra vitality company.This was achieved by establishing a round plate above the separate cities and villages, absorbing their geographies, communities, and identities right into a singular metropolis. Where as soon as these locations had names, they have been now numbered sectors. Those residents rich sufficient to purchase dwellings on the higher plate did so, whereas the poor have been left under in an act of gentrification so comically evil that it noticed Midgar’s marginalised residents quickly priced out of precise fucking daylight.
From the centre of the disc rises the panopticonic Shinra constructing. A useful reminder that – as Tony Soprano places it – shit runs downhill, cash goes up. An vitality firm that finally gained the standing of a world authorities by drive of arms, Midgar’s monetary dependence on Shinra brings to thoughts an enormous, sci-fi reimagining of the corporate cities that used to spring up round industrial hotspots and at the moment are making a resurgence because of monolithic tech giants. Facebook owns 56 acres of land in California. Amazon’s campus in Seattle is anticipated to develop to 12 million sq. toes – housing 50,000 staff – within the subsequent 5 years. When your boss can be your landlord, you run the chance of shedding much more than your job when you ever determine to organise.
Midgar looms towards the skyline as an embodiment of this prophetic dystopian trope of monolithic firms snaring staff in privatised economies. We’ve already seen some Amazon warehouses ‘gamify’ labour by providing ‘Swag Bucks’ to ‘associates’ who hit quotas. It’s nightmarishly similar to ‘company scrip’: credit score issued by a enterprise in lieu of precise money and solely redeemable for merchandise made by that enterprise, traditionally at inflated costs. Imagine that for a second: Monopoly cash with Bezos’ shining dome on, nonetheless connected to his neck and every little thing. You solely have to take a look at the rising disaster of working poor – staff who earn simply sufficient to permit them sustenance and shelter (usually their very own automobiles) to allow them to flip as much as work the following day – for the traces between employment and indentured servitude to blur.
For Midgar’s residents, it’s Shinra’s pervasiveness in each side of their lives that’s so chilling. You clock off your Shinra job and return to your Shinra-rented residence and drink Shinra bottled beer in entrance of Shinra sponsored information broadcasts on televisions powered by Mako vitality.
Travelling by the town, you’ll meet people dwelling on subway trains, and placing on their finest garments to scavenge for valuables, dreaming out loud concerning the smooth and shimmering metropolis above. But it’s the buildings within the slums that inform probably the most revealing tales about what it’s prefer to reside there. The repurposed industrial scrap that makes up the structure is each a gutpunch in its stark depiction of poverty and a raised glass to working class ingenuity. Folk arrange store in busses and reside in big rusted pipes. Furniture is a scrappy bricolage of metal crates and wiring. Ramshackle homes creak underneath tin patchwork roofs. If your dad knew a bloke who had a cousin who chipped PS1s so you could possibly get the games low-cost, or fastened up bikes, or offered cigarettes off the ferry, you’ve seen a extra on a regular basis model of this drive to make ends meet – impromptu economies and technique of existence, popping up like defiant saplings by strangling concrete.
A short time previous Final Fantasy 7’s introduction, Midgar’s architectural symbolism for the poor being crushed by these above them takes a tragically literal flip. Citing retaliation towards resistance group Avalanche as an excuse, Shinra sends its secret police drive, the Turks, to destroy the help that holds the gargantuan plate aloft the Sector Seven Slums. The plate topples, obliterating every little thing under in a single act of callousness. From his snug workplace on the zenith of Shinra tower, the president listens to classical music and surveys the harm under.
The wealthy will finally remake the town in their very own picture, or at the least to their very own profit. Whether by deliberate motion (see Camden Market, or the displacement that occurred within the wake of the London Olympics, or continues to happen in London), or else negligence (see the Grenfell Tower tragedy.) Writing for The Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty lately thought of how paltry acts of conspicuous altruism offers the Paris elite free reign over the reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral. As wealth funnels upwards, solely the wealthy can afford to protect the previous, and so any remaining proof of historical past turns into a testomony to the achievements of a choose few. Public landmarks and areas are consolidated, privatised, and branded. Gucci presents: Notre Dame cathedral, rebuilt with funds siphoned from public coffers. Shinra presents: Mako vitality, siphoned from the planet itself. It appears oddly prescient, as we watch the Tories carve up and privatise public companies, that the one noticeably public park within the slums finally ends up lined in smoking particles after the plate’s collapse. In makeshift, dirt-paved alleys, derelict dwellings share area with discarded mecha arms and carved Greco-Roman columns. Even earlier than the plate falls, Midgar’s slums are, fairly actually, the scrapheap of historical past.
In distinction, the “sparkly n’ springy n’ sleeky’ metropolis above is a dehistoricized, late-capitalist utopia. A spot the place each the previous and future are flattened right into a faux-spiritual ‘now’. The higher flooring of the Shinra constructing comprise not solely canteens, however gyms, lockers, and beds. It’s harking back to a pervasive corporatised bliss tradition, the place ‘self-care’ is championed not as a method to attain private happiness, however to extend productiveness. Socialising turns into ‘networking’. Artistic expression, dialogue, opinion, and even the pathologic self-surveillance of our complete waking lives within the type of liveblogs, turns into ‘content’. We study to see every little thing by way of capital, till work/life steadiness turns into ‘work’ and ‘time we spend recovering’.
Geographer Maria Kaika, as Paul Dobraszczyk notes in Future Cities, has stated that skyscrapers exhibit a “pathological self-absorption”, severing them from the remainder of the town. I’ve primarily talked about artwork and plot right here, however I feel it’s attention-grabbing to take a look at how Midgar makes use of the conventions of conventional JRPG exploration to make some extent, too. The standard city/dungeon cut up is reconfigured. Midgar’s most expansive dungeon isn’t some dank subterranean labyrinth, however a glowing skyscraper. Although just a few residents may inform us to piss off as soon as we’ve entered their houses and exhausted their dialogue choices, the homes within the Slums are largely open, welcoming, and freely explorable. In distinction, the Shinra constructing is segmented, remoted, and deeply paranoid of outsiders. Our journey upwards by the tower is us steadily climbing the company ladder, having access to ever larger strata by gathering keycards. If there’s an inspiring message right here, it’s this: Illegitimate energy and company greed is at all times terrified of unveiling its interior workings to anybody not already indoctrinated into the need and legitimacy of its personal particular model of bullshit.
There’s one other of Midgar’s dungeons that stays with me, and that’s the practice graveyard that Cloud, Aeris and Tifa emerge into from the sewers under Don Corneo’s mansion. Final Fantasy 7 is replete with each defined and unexplained supernatural components, however I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that the enemies you encounter listed here are precise spirits. The practice graveyard is an city analogue for a fantasy mausoleum: its spooks are the spectres of light desires and cherished reminiscences that hang-out this liminal area between inertia and movement. As anybody from the arse finish of nowhere will inform you, practice stations symbolize greater than only a technique of transportation. They symbolize freedom, and upward mobility, and the possibility to construct one thing higher, someplace higher, even when you don’t fairly have the means or the drive to depart but.
There’s a crimson-coated practice guard that stands on the platform. When you communicate to him, he’ll begin to reminisce concerning the hopes and aspirations he’s seen wither. If you communicate to him once more, he’ll snap again into conductor mode, and repeat the identical chilly, practical details about practice occasions, without end. It’s in these transient moments he lets himself slip that Midgar’s true soul reveals itself, I feel. A metropolis of brilliant eyed souls, crushed by the nightmare of late capitalism to the purpose the place, to paraphrase Frederic Jameson, it’s simpler to think about the top of the world than a practice to someplace higher.
With Final Fantasy 7’s remake looming, it’s not the up to date music or visuals or fight I’m most wanting ahead to. It’s seeing Midgar expanded, and its largely unvoiced inhabitants given their flip within the neon highlight. It’s the aspect tales, the misplaced laments, it’s taking one other journey all the way down to the lonely locations.
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