In order to not lose momentum on this project in the time it would take me to write a handful of what I’m assuming will be very large essays about FFXIII and its children, I’m going to be keeping a kind of running, informal journal as I work. Call it a “weblog,” of sorts. Maybe we can shorten that even further. Someone should look into that. Anyway, right now I’m going through my (larger than expected) spreadsheet of potential primary sources and I’m turning their contents into PDFs. My aim here is that, once I’m done I’ll have a big ass offline library of, if not everything everyone has written about Final Fantasy XIII etc., then most of what everyone has written. A good chunk of the discourse, at least; a sort of discursive biopsy if you will.
The whole time I’ve been doing this I’ve been thinking about old shit. Sedimentary rock layers. Fossilized remains. The plaster cast molds of Pompeii’s dead. The rings of a tree. The material culture left behind by civilizations we’ll never get to talk to. Going through people’s old blogs and websites for research material has made me acutely aware of how far removed we are in the current online climate from just 14 years ago. In some ways that’s a good thing – I feel fairly confident that no serious games critic would call a game they don’t like “autistic” in 2024 like I’ve observed going back to 2012 – but in some very specific and vital ways things feel… “lesser?” today than they were a decade and a half ago.
I was alive in 2010—just about to graduate high school and start college, brain and ego already full of dreams to become the first Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who also played bass in a punk band. In theory I remember what it was like to be online in 2010. Hell, I was HEAVILY on Twitter at that point already. But this little ~*archaeological dig*~ I’m doing has given me reason to question how true that is.
Another thing I’m trying to do is get into the heads of reviewers, many of whom were roughly the age I am now at the time, trying to imagine the sum of their experiences that led them to feel the way they did about Final Fantasy XIII. What games did a 32-year-old games critic play leading up to this? If we use the same timeframe that exists between the release of FFXIII and today, reviewers in 2010 with 14 years of gaming knowledge likely had every 3D Final Fantasy under their belts, to say nothing of the end of the SNES era, beginning of the N64 era, the fall of the Genesis and entire lifespan of the Dreamcast, and the beginning of the modern console age (PS1/PS2, Xbox/Xbox 360, GameCube).
At the same time, even just the first three or four months of 2010 were absolutely fuckin’ jam-packed: Bayonetta, Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Shiren the Wanderer, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 all came out prior to FFXIII‘s launch date. On FFXIII‘s launch date in the US, we saw the PC port of Assassin’s Creed 2 hit the storefronts as well as Yakuza 3. The next day? Street Fighter IV. A week later? God of War III, Metro 2033, fuckin Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening. Nier would come out a month later; Alan Wake, two months later. Oh, and I guess Heavy Rain is out at some point in this whole mess of actually good video games; that will become important later. You understand what I’m getting at, though. The old world was dying, the new one struggling to be born; 2010 was a time of monsters.
This gives me pause to think about – not the last 14 years of my life, as I was not a gamer in my 20s – but the lifespan of this website. There have been at least two years out of No Escape‘s five that have been considered to be “the best” years for games in recent memory. How will that shake out over the next decade or so? Will we look back on the first half of the 2020s and go “goddamn that was a great time for video games?” I don’t know. Maybe in a decade we’ll be too worried about roaming gangs of ecofascists to blithely reminisce about such things.
Anyway, I better get back to processing this research material. Hey, actually: if you want to help me out (or make my life Worse), if you or someone you know wrote about Final Fantasy XIII, its direct sequels, or FFXV and FFXVI in a critical capacity over the last 10-14 years, feel free to shoot links to that work my way! Email is in the about section. I might have buried myself under an avalanche of material already but that doesn’t mean there’s not room for even more!