Final Fantasy VII — Can We Ever Find a Sustainable Energy Source?

My favourite video game of all time is Square Soft’s Final Fantasy VII. It was released in 1997 and became the best-selling game by the end of the Play-Station’s lifespan, only beaten out by Gran Turismo.

Broadly speaking, Final Fantasy VII follows a surly mercenary named Cloud as he joins an ecological terrorism group known as AVALANCHE. The fantasy/steampunk-themed world of Gaia is ruled over with an iron fist by an enormous energy company known as Shinra Electric Power, who discovered a way to use the Planet’s “Lifestream” as an energy source, by carefully refining it in large “Mako reactors”. Mako can also be refined into Materia, glassy orbs of magic that can be used to cast spells. (Hopefully you’re still following along — apologies if this gets info-dumpy at any time.)

Originally just a small weapons manufacturing company, Shinra’s influence grew and grew when they monopolised the technology to refine Mako energy, leading to them becoming the de-facto government of the entire planet. They own the entire military, and they also have a black-ops unit for any unsavoury business that needs to be covered up. They drove many people out of the coal mining jobs in the northern frontiers, and when an Asian-esque island country known as Wutai refused to have a Mako reactor built on their land, Shinra waged a war on them and promptly banned them from making their own Materia or supplying their own energy.

Featured above is the capital city, Midgar. It looks like an overly industrialised, dark and unpleasant place to be, lit by only glaring neon lights and surrounded on all sides by large steel walls and pillars. Midgar’s infrastructure is particularly noteworthy — the richest (usually Shinra workers) live on the “upper plate”, which has been built directly on top of the slums beneath. As in, several hundred feet above a slum-dweller’s head. In fact, it is mentioned early in the game that the slums are the remnants of various towns that used to make up the area around Midgar. “Nowadays, nobody remembers their names.” One can only imagine what the towns were like prior to Shinra’s heavy urbanisation, but presumably they were nothing like what you see below.

This disparity between rich and poor in Midgar is particularly stark. It’s no wonder that when wandering around the slums, the surroundings are extremely dark, gloomy and grimy, and the buildings are ramshackle constructions of scrap iron and tin. Very little natural light gets in through the plate, and nature has abandoned the Midgar slums so thoroughly that there is only one place in the entire city with soil that can sustain the growth of flowers. (Naturally, one enterprising young lady named Aerith makes a living selling them to people who have grown up in a city so separated from nature that they have never ever seen a clear blue sky.)

One of the early locations in the game.

AVALANCHE, the ecological terrorist group, has taken note of the terrible damage Shinra is doing to the planet. Midgar is a city surrounded by a wasteland, which never used to be there until Shinra drilled their reactors deep into the planet and started siphoning off the vital energy that fuels the planet and indeed, the very circle of life itself. When somebody dies in this world, they are said to have: “Returned to the Lifestream” or “Gone back to the Planet.” The cycle of death and rebirth must continue if the Planet is to survive, and now, due to the Shinra Company’s actions, the Planet supposedly on is on its last legs, according to non Shinra-affiliated planetary scientists, and the higher-ups in AVALANCHE. You want the environmental crisis? You’ve got the environmental crisis.

However, while it is clear that the Shinra Company are headed by a cabinet of tyrants who care little for the planet and for the disadvantaged people whose lives they have ruined, I found myself thinking about how Shinra could have perhaps started out with noble intentions.

Fossil fuels such as coal and oil were used in the past before the advent of Mako technology, as we know from the translated spin-off novels — named On The Way to a Smile — written by Kazushige Nojima and released in 2009. (They have been translated by the team at TheLifestream.net, and are also available as high quality audio books.)

The stories are set a few years after the cataclysmic events (colloquially referred to as “the Crisis”) that resulted in the near-destruction of the planet and also completely dismantled Shinra as a governmental force. Mako Reactors are only in use while the planet recovers and older energy resources are brought back into vogue. The characters Barret and Cid make reference in their chapters of the sheer difficulty of going back to coal and oil. Cid, a pilot and engineer, has to find alternate sources to fuel his airships and other projects, due to 40 years of relying on just one energy source.

Matthew Patrick, creator of the popular Game Theory web videos, voices his opinion here:

Mako is, on paper, a wonderful idea for an energy source. The Lifestream is a source that should be infinite and perfectly sustainable. If an animal, human, or plant dies, its life force returns to this ethereal stream of spiritual energy, flowing around in the Planet and eventually being birthed anew to complete the circle of life. (I am not responsible if you get the Lion King soundtrack stuck in your head!) According to young Marlene in the introduction to the film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the Lifestream is like an eternally flowing river, and people were able to live “comfortable lives” because of Shinra. “But wasn’t that because we were taking from the Planet’s life?”

Yes, yes they were. Mako energy, as it turns out, is not sustainable. The world is slowly becoming a dried out husk. In a way, the harnessing of the energy of the Lifestream is reminiscent of that of hydroelectric power resources. Geography and environmental studies textbooks will inform their readers that while it sounds like a good idea to build a power plant in a coastal area where you can harness energy from the flow of water almost constantly, the subsequent environmental and geological damage, along with the sheer energy and costs taken to build a hydroelectric dam will ensure that it will be nowhere near profitable to invest in hydro power as a resource.

Over the course of the game, AVALANCHE’s intentions become less and less ecologically involved, yet their mission is still the same. They have to stop Shinra, as well as other antagonists such as Sephiroth, and the Weapons — and as the game finishes, Shinra have been completely dismantled.

Adaptation to new sources of energy has been difficult, as mentioned above. In fact, without Shinra’s stranglehold on utilities, just about every facet of modern day life that’s usually taken for granted is now unavailable. The Playstation 2 spin-off game, Dirge of Cerberus, starts off with a festival in a town named Kalm.

Summer solstice, perhaps? Mardi Gras? May day? What is the reason for all this gaiety?

…The Worldwide Network (aka the Wi-Fi and 3G phone network) was just switched back on for the first time in three years in this region. Without Shinra, there has been nothing to replace not just the way we harness electrical power, but communications have also been ground to a halt. Like Mat-Pat was saying in the Game Theory video above, if OPEC, the real world coalition of oil-producing countries, wanted to, or did wind up falling due to a future lack of oil, they could potentially cripple the world as we know it in a similar manner to the collapse of the Shinra Company’s empire.

Although a few years is a relatively short time to expect the planet to be healed, a city has been constructed in Advent Children, located just outside of Midgar. In what appears to be a depressing cycle of repetition, Edge City looks very, very reminiscent of Midgar.

This environmental damage is due also in part to the enormous wave of the Lifestream that burst out over the Planet during the Crisis, but this is view of the city is just as grim and depressing as the original cityscape of Midgar.

Over 1300 words and I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what makes the story of this game quite so interesting from the perspective of Writing and the Environmental Crisis. I’m sure I’ll return to a part two, perhaps looking into the movie Advent Children, and what that has to say about the Crisis — particularly, in how unforgiving the Planet has been in the years following the climax of the original game.

For now, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed geeking out while writing it.