Non-magical Final Fantasies: FF7 and FF8 contrasted

Neither game has good world-building by today’s standards, and perhaps not even by those of the 1990s. I will argue, however, that with respect to magic, the world-building in FF8 makes sense and it’s superior to FF7’s. You don’t need to have played either of the two games to understand this post, but of course it’ll be more relevant if you played at least one. The spoilers are few and small on purpose:

For readability, I don’t use Roman numerals.

FF7 world

Humans aren’t magical by themselves, but they do have access to it. When a life-form dies, they “return to the planet”, which is to say, their souls go back to a river of energy flowing underground. Sometimes, that river seems to leak to the surface and crystallize, and those crystals are called materia. Humans can then use materia to cast magic. The same spiritual energy also appears as mako, a green substance that is consumed in reactors by Shinra (an evil corporation-turned-state) to generate electricity, to the dismay of the AVALANCHE eco-terrorist organization.

Yes, a corporation has an army (the only one in Midgar, in fact) and it’s literally burning the souls of people’s ancestors to generate power. The protagonist is a mercenary hired to blow up one of the reactors.

So far, so good. God-tier setup, in fact.

But then you play the game and people apparently… don’t use magic in everyday life? And there are no civilian institutions built around the fact that there is magic? Even in places where they don’t have (or lose) access to electricity? This is a high-tech, high-magic society, yet it looks like our world, somewhat. No magic in sight, just some dystopian technological society. Contrast that with what I would expect in a world with materia:

• Hospitals where doctors cast Esuna, and even Resist (a spell that makes you more resistant to status ailments), Revive, Restore, etc.
• People using Haste for a million things, including commutes.¹
• Stop for emergencies (holding objects about to fall, preventing machinery accidents, etc).
• Maybe refrigeration should at least involve Ice materia, rather than depending entirely on mako-generated electricity. I would have loved raiding some sucker NPC’s fridge for Ice materia.
• Security guards shouldn’t be shooting intruders down, they would realistically cast Sleep.
• Sneaking into places seems easier if you can make yourself tiny with Mini.
• Quake/earth materia for mining or demolition work.

There are a million more civilian use cases we could come up with, to be sure. Yet it’s somewhat implied in the game that materia is only a weapon (e.g. Wutai rid itself of all materia when it de-militarized). It would have been a lot of fun to explore a world that tried to be consistent with its own premises, making interaction with NPCs way more interesting. It would have been much, much more engaging for the player.²

FF8 world

As in FF7, this world looks almost as non-magical as ours. At least when it comes to human settlements, but arguably pretty much everywhere. But contrary to FF7, here magic is limited. In order to use magic, humans need to junction GFs, this game’s version of summons.³ This is what allows them to both extract magic from monsters and other sources, and cast it. But GFs, while known, are avoided in many places and they seem to be relatively rare. So most people don’t know how to use magic, and they’ve never experienced it. They might not even see it in their entire lives, since it is more often used militarily, it seems.

So the designers could get away with a non-magical human world. Magic is the stuff of monsters and GFs, not of humans. When humans have magical power beyond the GF/junction system, they are deemed sorceresses, who are extremely rare, powerful and often tied to historical events. There is a fun contrast between sorceresses and GFs here, since both are conscious, intelligent beings capable of magic, yet GFs mostly keep to themselves.⁴

So magic is rare, cool. But even so, you could think it’s strange that magic would be used only militarily. Where are the civilians with junctioned GFs, and therefore access to magic? I promise their absence makes sense. See the footnote for the spoiler.⁵

Further, since monsters are magical (they don’t require GFs), you could expect that some people would use them, like farm animals. This doesn’t happen though, but you could say it’s somehow impossible to make them comply because they’re monsters, not animals. Whatever.

Further contrast: the items question

To close, I want to discuss items and the extent to which they replace magic or not.

In FF7, wherever magic and items overlap, materia wins for ordinary civilian uses because it’s cheap and very reusable. It’s not a consumable. The only potentially expensive materia is the higher-level type, i.e., materia that you’ve trained to give you stronger spells. It takes a lot of grinding, so it’d make sense for hospitals to be the main buyers of this (since they are the ones who would use it every day).

In FF8, in contrast, magic is a consumable, so wherever they overlap, items outclass magic (think Potions and such) for the sole reason that they are way less scarce and can be used by anybody.⁶

There is a problematic class of items in FF8, however: spell stones, which, well… cast spells. If regular humans could use these items, they would be casting spells without having access to magic. So, sure, let’s assume they can. Even then, they are just a few spells, and only some seem to be useful for civilians (Shell, Protect). Would we see a world different from the one in FF8 if regular people could use these?

I think not, mostly due to access. These items come from sidequests/mini-games, menu abilities, or drops from extremely rare enemies that don’t belong to the normal world.⁷ In any case, it seems that these stones don’t belong to plausible supply chains. The only way in which these stones could be mass-produced requires assuming that GF menu abilities like Card Mod and refining are more available than they seem to be in the game. My feeling is that GF menu abilities are gameplay, not lore, but your call.

Conclusion

FF8 has many problems, especially gameplay-wise (it’s rather broken); but it has superior world-building with respect to magic, if nothing else. My favorite of the two will always be 7, but I’m enjoying replaying 8 quite a bit. These games hit differently now that I’m older: I can better appreciate the choices and values of some characters, their growth, etc. And, it turns out, I can also appreciate the world-building of 8 and notice the weirdness of 7. This blog post has been way more fun to write than it has a right to be!