In Which I Rage Pointlessly About a 90s Game I've Never Played

(I very often feel like this, in spite of the fact that I'm ****teen years old. Credit: Fox)

I'm very much not a gamer. I have a little too much fear of installing anything over fifteen megabytes on my computer to really become one. That said, I have a lot of respect for the medium and I'm always on the hunt for games that are artful, tell interesting stories, or will generally give me worthwhile experiences. My backlog is pretty enormous (and Steam sales certainly aren't helping to keep it small), but someday I hope to be well-versed enough in interactive storytelling that I can work in it myself and finally create my dream game. Text adventures still sell, right?

Among the games I'd like to someday experience is, of course, Square Enix's 1997 PlayStation classic Final Fantasy VII. I have heard nothing but downright reverence for this game. Every screenshot and music track I have been witness to makes me more convinced of how much I would love it. I love the aesthetics of the whole thing; there's really something special about late 90s pre-rendered backgrounds (shoutout to Grim Fandango, another game sitting uninstalled in my library that I'm 100% sure I'll love). What I'm saying is, I really want to play this game.

The problem? Square Enix is making it really hard.

(I mean, like, come on. Credit: Square Enix)

The game industry knows that there are many people like me in this world, people who have little to no reservations about pirating games that aren't legally available. So their solution is to make all of their games available in the most bog-standard quality possible. It's what Disney has done with all the classic LucasArts adventure games---imported them into ScummVM, slapped a $5 price tag on them, and called it a day. It begs the question why I wouldn't just download the files from the Internet Archive and play them in ScummVM myself. Plus, if I do that, I don't have to accept Disney's EULA.

The same thing is going on here. Square Enix is publishing basically the exact same game that was available in 1997. Sure, they're including updated textures and HD support (things that fans have been doing through mods for years), and technically it's running natively rather than being emulated, but when it comes to a game with 1997 system requirements, one could hardly argue that makes much of a difference.

The fact that it's based on the game's original 1997 PC port actually leads to problems of its own. The PC port, unusually, includes even further censorship to the dialogue than was present in the PlayStation version, replacing a brief outburst with symbols and even obscuring a use of the word "wench" for some reason. It is absurd that Square Enix is asking $12 for a license to a game that is even more censored than it would be if you just emulated it.

Note that I said "a license to a game" rather than "a game." This leads me to my biggest criticism: when you open the game on Steam, you don't get the actual files. You get a proprietary launcher that requires a Square Enix account to use. $12 and I own some intangible license that can be revoked at any time. It feels insulting that people in 1997 owned it more tangibly than I ever will. Legally, at least.

This is not even to mention that it only runs on Windows, which is discouraging to me as a new Linux devotee. Thankfully Steam has offered a solution through Proton, but would it be so hard for Square Enix, a billion-dollar triple-A studio, to get it running natively on Linux? Of course not. But given how much of the triple-A landscape is paid off by Microsoft, Proton looks to be the only way.

Valve founder Gabe Newell once stated that piracy is a service problem, and that it would decrease if companies provided a better service than piracy gives them. Here is what I am offered by downloading Final Fantasy VII from the Internet Archive and running it in RetroArch:

• Actual ownership of the game
• Ability to run it mostly tinker-free on Linux
• Years of fan updates, bug fixes, and mods
• Uncensored (or less censored, as the case may be) dialogue
• Ability to play the game offline
• Free

Here is what purchasing Square Enix's launcher offers me:

• Cloud saves (note: you also get those with RetroArch on Steam)
• The impending threat of having access to a product I exchanged real money for revoked from me without any course of action, and the law requiring that I shut up and deal with it

The conclusion is obvious. Square Enix is providing something infinitely worse in every way, and charging me for it. To buy into this is to perpetuate the American public's abusive relationship with corporations who see ownership as a threat to their control over us. I'm not going to pretend emulating Final Fantasy VII is a meaningful act of rebellion, but at the very least, it is opting out of something I consider to be genuinely harmful.

But what does this mean to me at the moment? Pretty much nothing. I'm going to be away from video games (and really entertainment in general) for the next two years, so I'm not going to be playing it anytime soon. Even when I get back, the game is pretty low on my backlog (I've still never played either Portal game, so that has to happen first). But unless Square Enix manages to have a legendary, generation-defining change of heart, I'm stuck between a rock and a beautiful grassy field, and there's only one solution in that situation.