Political entities in FF7

[Skan]

Was talking to a friend about FF8 and realized why I heavily dislike FF7's setting.

There is very little sense of culture or history aside from Wutai and, to an extent, Cosmo Canyon.

I'm getting the sense it's kind of the point of the setting -- that ShinRa kind of just consumes places or people until they have little to no sense of self left in them anymore. (I forget how many tourist resorts there are ... and none of them have a very strong sense of self, except for Wutai.) Contrast this with Galbadia, Timber, Dollet, etc. in FF8.

But just in case I'm wrong -- is there a hint of any kind of political entity other than Wutai and ShinRa? Are there any towns/city in FF7 where you've felt that they have a strong sense of history, culture, and identity? We all know before ShinRa, there was Wutai (to some extent), and before all of that, there were the Ancients, but otherwise I don't really have a great feel for the world. It simultaneously pleases me as a writer (I get to make up new places!) but also drives me a bit mad (since it's hard to get that FF7-feel unless you do what the game does re: its locations).

I'm also interested a bit in Fort Condor. What backstory do we have on that place aside from, "It's a mako reactor with a giant bird on top."

 

[Keveh Kins]

A few of the villages outside of Midgar seem to be self-governed. Cid seems to be the defacto leader of Rocket Town, Corel had a Mayor/Town leader before it was burned to the ground and then Dio, Mr. Coates and Dyne ran it.

I was doing a politics module last year and it struck me that the FF7 world's lack of a governing body had a lot of political connotations, especially in its representations of a state governed by the markets and libertarianism The world is basically run by the market, which is owned near entirely by Shinra which is a bit of a hamfisted criticism of the notion of a Market-run State.

Roussea had this notion of a state run by people, the collective general will. Basically it says that the government should do whatever the general will of the people asks it do (bit oversimplified on my part but its the gist of it), which is what Shinra does a lot of the time, people turn to them for answers, demands etc. A big criticism of the general will idea is that the general will isn't necessarily what's best for society as a whole and more conscientious voices can be drowned out, which is why Cosmo Canyon is such a minor player in the world despite its great understanding of the Lifestream.

Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but there's definitely some room for political interpretation in FF7.

 

[Skan]

I don't think you're reading too much into it! If anything, I am probably reading too little into it, as I'm not a big fan of the setting in the first place, but I did get the feeling that FF7 is basically, as you say, a market-run state taken to an extreme.

I'm not sure that ShinRa does what the collective will wishes them to do as a rule. I'd probably just say that they make it seem like they're acting out the collective will when in reality they're just furthering their own goals (and if the collective will lines up with the goals, then it's all fine and dandy).

From what I remember of my play-through, most of it feels like ShinRa is basically the defacto government, and while towns and such may have a mayor, the mayors seem to be mayors by name only and pretty much just defer to ShinRa whenever ShinRa comes knocking. This is very fuzzy for me, though, and I may be pulling that out of my ass.

EDIT: I guess I mean to say that there are no states, no borders, no empires (unless you count the fallen Wutai empire), and the individual towns don't give off much of a feel of political identity.

 

[Clement Rage]

There was the now extinct Gi Tribe and Cosmo Canyon, which seems to have a long history based around Nanaki's species as guardians of the canyon, and all those elders.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

My take on the FFVII political state is that it's a bunch of city-states. Even with Shin-Ra being the de facto government, there's no mention of actual countries (except Wutai). Instead, there's regions of the world and the cities in those regions and the jurisdiction of those cities doesn't seem to extend beyond them.

I think what also gets forgotten is that the monsters of the FFVII world are pretty deadly to anyone who doesn't have some type of combat skill. For the average person, it's not that easy to get around without running into some type of complication. Unless there's a really good reason to leave town, most people aren't going to. This especially applies to the cities in the middle of nowhere, like Middeel, Nebilheim and Icicle Inn. So contact between cities probably wasn't that good until modern communications were developed. Shin-Ra's grunts and SOLDIERs do have a purpose for more then enforcement of Shin-Ras goals after all. See why the WRO got formed after Shin-Ra's collapse.

The funny thing I find about Shin-Ra was that it wasn't until it discovered Mako that it became the big super-company we know from the game. Before that it was into weapons development. And this is in a world that needs weapon development because of the monsters in it, no just for wars and such. This also causes me to think that before mako, there wasn't a stable supply of power to the cities, otherwise, power wouldn't be as important as it is.

This also makes me wonder what function the WRO is going to fulfill. I think it would be really easy for it to become another Shin-Ra, only instead of having a power monopoly (thank you Barret), it could have a weapons/military/defense/technology monopoly.

So yeah, I think the main political form in FFVII is the city state. Edge in CoT seems to be this way as it literally sprang up out of nowhere.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

That's how I see it. The towns are left to govern themselves for the most part, unless Shin-Ra needs something or wants to bomb it. Even Banora had a mayor and other officials. While it started as a Shin-Ra project, it did become independent, even with the Shin-Ra shills who served as officials.

 

[Keveh Kins]

This also makes me wonder what function the WRO is going to fulfill. I think it would be really easy for it to become another Shin-Ra, only instead of having a power monopoly (thank you Barret), it could have a weapons/military/defense/technology monopoly.

Awesome point.

The WRO's occupying a gap and they're the only one's who can say when that gap is filled, pretty much. There goal's to restore the world but at what point to they know the world is sufficiently restored? And when it is (if ever) what do they do? Do they dissolve as an organisation? Splinter into different companies in order to create competition and stimulate the economy, as well as decentralize power? The good guy in Reeve makes me think that this is what's intended. It fixes shit and then splits into different parts serving different purposes for the shit it has now fixed. But like you said they can, if they choose, basically be another Shinra, but possibly with Oil or some such thing this time around.

 

[Skan]

My take on the FFVII political state is that it's a bunch of city-states. Even with Shin-Ra being the de facto government, there's no mention of actual countries (except Wutai). Instead, there's regions of the world and the cities in those regions and the jurisdiction of those cities doesn't seem to extend beyond them.

I think what also gets forgotten is that the monsters of the FFVII world are pretty deadly to anyone who doesn't have some type of combat skill. For the average person, it's not that easy to get around without running into some type of complication. Unless there's a really good reason to leave town, most people aren't going to. This especially applies to the cities in the middle of nowhere, like Middeel, Nebilheim and Icicle Inn. So contact between cities probably wasn't that good until modern communications were developed. Shin-Ra's grunts and SOLDIERs do have a purpose for more then enforcement of Shin-Ras goals after all. See why the WRO got formed after Shin-Ra's collapse.

The funny thing I find about Shin-Ra was that it wasn't until it discovered Mako that it became the big super-company we know from the game. Before that it was into weapons development. And this is in a world that needs weapon development because of the monsters in it, no just for wars and such. This also causes me to think that before mako, there wasn't a stable supply of power to the cities, otherwise, power wouldn't be as important as it is.

This also makes me wonder what function the WRO is going to fulfill. I think it would be really easy for it to become another Shin-Ra, only instead of having a power monopoly (thank you Barret), it could have a weapons/military/defense/technology monopoly.

So yeah, I think the main political form in FFVII is the city state. Edge in CoT seems to be this way as it literally sprang up out of nowhere.

Okay, so I as under the impression that it was pretty much only when mako energy started becoming more popular that monsters became especially ferocious to the extent that it became downright perilous to travel. (And even so, apparently it does not dissuade someone like Zack from leaving Gongaga when he's -- what? -- 13-14 and making it to Midgar alive.)

The presence of monsters also doesn't seem to have dissuaded governments and other larger political entities from springing up in other FF games, but I know that may be a nonsensical point. It just boggles my mind that after the Ancients fell, that no city/state rose up, created an armed force for defense against monsters, then developed that force into an army. ShinRa was apparently the only one to really do so on the mainland? It smells of bad development to me. It just feels like FF7 is populated by Midgar, tourist resorts, and a bajillion Winhills.

I mean, all that aside, I can look at the situation and intellectually say that they all seem to be city-states. But in that case I would expect all the towns to be much richer in history and culture than they are -- and I'd expect to see more city-focused identity and territorial jostling, which you don't get at all in the Compilation (though granted, by then it all seems to have devolved into "ShinRa's got everything" already). But there should still be traces of that still floating around, and I just don't see any of it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

It's there. It's just part of the world building for this world that "Shin-Ra's got everything." Wutai has the most distinct identity and Yuffie still feels that it has been tarnished.

Corel had signs of a distinct culture and look what happened there.

Cosmo Canyon is probably the second most culturally distinct locale after Wutai, and while Shin-Ra doesn't have it, they probably don't want it. If they did, they would have it already.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

The FFVII world suffers heavily from video game technology trumping world building. Only the things necessary for the story FFVII has to tell are included. Everything else has to be extrapolated from what we see.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I think it's simply a case the choices made while world-building. Square built the world they needed in order to tell the story they wanted to tell. With the exception of Jenova and the Ancients, there was no need to provide this world with a history that went any further back than the Wutai War, and no point in trying to fill in the 2,000 year gap between the two; it would simply have cluttered up the story with irrelevant detail. In the same way, there was no point in putting towns, cities and other locations on the map if they weren't used in the story. If you can see a location on a map you expect to be able to visit it. I think it's a shame they didn't give more interesting names to the places you pass through, or to rivers and mountain ranges at least. But to assume that the places named on the map are the only places that exist, or even the most important places, is like reading Harry Potter and assuming that England consists entirely of London, Little Whittering, and that village where the Weasleys live.

What I'm saying is that you can't use the evidence in the game to extrapolate a history for the Planet. Given their level of industrialisation, there must be other cities - steel towns, and ship-building towns, and gold-mining towns, and a Silicon Valley somewhere, and so on; an industrial economy consisting of precisely two cities, which aren't even connected by road or rail, would not generate the kind of wealth the Shinras control. The market just wouldn't be big enough. The game offers no evidence of any farming activity, either (except chocobo farming, but man does not live by chocobos alone) - and yet they eat, so we can assume that large tracts of the planet are given over to agriculture, and there must be farming towns, with stores selling seeds and fertilizers and farm tools, and veterinarians, and corn agents and wool buyers...

Wutai could not have transformed itself into the Bali of FFVII unless there was a sufficiently big tourist trade to make it worth their while, and those tourists can't all be flying over from Midgar and Junon.

These places on the map are just tokens, representational of the larger economy and political system: we're allowed to see one mega-city, one port city, one dormitory town, one amusement park, one ruined coal-mining town, one ruined sub-tropical village, one ruined mountain town, one Cape Canaveral, one archaeological dig, one skiing resort, one town in the whole of Wutai....

Or maybe the entire Planet is the size of Lichtenstein?

Remnants of other cultures, coherent communities, linger in Cosmo Canyon and Fort Condor. Mideel doesn't seem to be any different from Kalm culturally; the only thing different about it is its geography.

The world of FFVII has no history and practically no culture. In their spare time people like to watch TV, drink, work out, go snowboarding or surfing, and visit Gold Saucer and Turtle's Paradise.

Although I'm probably wrong, I like to think that this lack of history and culture was done by design, as part of FFVII's overarching theme of memory and forgetting. The people of FFVII's world are modern people: they live in the moment. The past doesn't interest them, and they are not prepared to sacrifice any pleasures today in order to secure a better tomorrow. Most of them are self-centered and hedonistic (Crazy Shopper?) - unless they have suffered personally at the hands of Shinra, in which case they are either bitter or resigned to the meaninglessness of existence.

The past doesn't exist because it's been forgotten: nobody, not even the people in the Slums, can remember the names of the seven villages on which Midgar was built. I don't think that's accidental on Square's part. In FFVII, it takes a conscious effort, and a determined rejection of the pleasures of modernity, in order to remember who you are and where you came from. The only people who deliberately dwell on the past are the Corelians, the Gongagans, the Wutaians, and Cid, all of whom have had their dreams destroyed.

And then there's Cosmo Canyon.

Anyway - to bring this long post to an end - I like to think that prior to Shinra's rise to power - let's say around 150 years or so prior - the Wutaian empire stretched from the Nibel mountains to the Midgar Zolom's swamp, spanning two seas. But it collapsed on itself as empires always do, and the warring city states sprang up in its wake, all of them jockeying for power, but only a very few of them actually named on the FFVII map. The seven towns of what was to become Midgar united in somewhat the same way as the early Swiss Federation, hoping to use their combined powers to dominate their neighbors - which was why, when Mr Shinra came along with his new source of power, they welcomed him with open arms... and the next thing they knew, he was no longer their servant but their master.

 

[Skan]

@ Licorice: Thanks for the lengthy reply!

> Or maybe the entire Planet is the size of Lichtenstein?

Not unlikely, given that the actual game takes place over the course of two/three months.

... it takes 5-6 months to hike the Appalachian, and it takes two to three months for Cloud and the gang to save the world. That road from Midgar to Kalm to the Chocobo Farm looks awfully long, and then the road from the Mythril Mines to Junon ... Honestly, I can't really fathom it. If the Planet were the size of Earth, how long would a journey like that take? Before staring at the timeline, I'd always thought the game took place over a year.


> Although I'm probably wrong, I like to think that this lack of history and culture was done by design, as part of FFVII's overarching theme of memory and forgetting.

I totally agree with this. However, it still drives me mad. Even when you have regimes purposefully trying to wipe out traces of personal identity, it doesn't occur to the extent that is shown in FF7. My mind has trouble coming to terms with the fact that there really seems to be no substrata culture in most of the places you can visit in FF7. And as a writer, it frustrates me, because if I'm trying to stay true to the game in terms of feel, I basically have to carry over that same monotonous, dreary sort of atmosphere right into my stories (unless I'm writing in Wutai).


> Anyway - to bring this long post to an end - I like to think that prior to Shinra's rise to power - let's say around 150 years or so prior - the Wutaian empire stretched from the Nibel mountains to the Midgar Zolom's swamp, spanning two seas. But it collapsed on itself as empires always do, and the warring city states sprang up in its wake, all of them jockeying for power, but only a very few of them actually named on the FFVII map.

Not a bad idea, except for the fact that I'd expect Wutai culture to be very visible in this scenario, but it isn't, except in Wutai. Again, you could say it plays into FF7's theme (and it does, for culture to disappear that quickly), but the tiny bit of historian in me cringes. :/

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I really don't think it's supppsed to frustrate your suspension of disbelief. It should instead make you marvel, in horror if not awe, at just how quickly this rapidly spreading homogeneity disconnected people from social conscientiousness and cultural identity -- and perhaps make you wonder at whether that kind of thing could happen to our own world if The Market were to become The State.

 

[CameoAmalthea]

... it takes 5-6 months to hike the Appalachian, and it takes two to three months for Cloud and the gang to save the world. That road from Midgar to Kalm to the Chocobo Farm looks awfully long, and then the road from the Mythril Mines to Junon ... Honestly, I can't really fathom it. If the Planet were the size of Earth, how long would a journey like that take? Before staring at the timeline, I'd always thought the game took place over a year.
:/

Game play wise I couldn't imagine exploring a Planet the size of Earth.

Spoiler: And here’s why

There's a game you can play with Google Earth where you're virtually dropped at a random location and you have to make your way home by wandering around until you can work out your surroundings and pick the right direction. The first time I played I figured out where I was almost immediately by being dropped in the middle of a State Park with distinctive rock formations and signs.

I was in Utah, which is as luck would have it, only one state over from where I live as opposed to say, the other side of the Planet. All I had to do was head south and I'd be back in my home state. I quite playing the almost immediately, however, because as far as I could figure out the only way to get around on google street view was to click to walk and virtually walking down a desert high way in the middle of nowhere seemed torturously boring. (Maybe there’s a fast travel trick on google street view I was missing).

Essentially, a game that involved walking great distances in real time or enough time that it felt like you’d traveled awhile would not be fun to play (For another example or games in real time with real distances, try “Desert Drive” where you drive from Tucson AZ to Las Vegas NV in real time it takes 8 hrs and the only challenge of the game is being willing to do something that boring for 8 hrs).

I love video games as a story telling medium but I feel like to tell the story and make it playable the game makers have to condense things, including time and geography. I, like Lic, just assume there are other places that exist but putting on the map wasn’t necessary for the story. Likewise, in my fics the towns are more than a collection of buildings but are much larger. In my head canon Old Corel was essentially Albuquerque or Tucson, or at least Safford AZ, but there’d be no reason the game to create cities or full sized towns because all the extra details wouldn’t be plot relevant and would be overwhelming for player and game maker alike. Planet Earth is just so big and full of so many things, creating a world to scale, with the same scope of geography, time and even history would be overwhelming.

However, I do love Lic’s symbolic analysis of the lack of history and it seems reasonable.

My assumption was that, politically, there used to feudal city states but disease, wars, and revolutions eventually led these to give way to democratic city states with powerful governments. However, an economic down turn led push for less government and more freedom. They cut taxes, they cut social safety nets, they let innovation drive the economy in the belief that if individuals were able to get wealthy that wealth would boost the whole economy and trickle down. This coincided with an industrial revolution, which happened minus unions and progressive push back. Without regulation, ShinRa was able to quickly rise to power once it discovered a commodity everyone was able to eager to buy. Since the governments had been shrunk and services privatized, ShinRa was able to take them over and become the defacto world government.

And not to be cynical, but the WRO is an organization run by a formed ShinRa executive, possibly with the assistance of another (COS hints Veld had a hand in it’s formation and had had some sort of alliance with Reeve for years), and financed by Rufus Shinra (who might also have a hand in running it) filling the gap ShinRa left behind. It basically is ShinRa without the façade of being a company. Which is not to say that’s a bad thing because having a central power means security and the former ShinRa executives involved are well intentioned. I honestly don’t know if the people would want the WRO to go away after the world is rebuilt and secured, because they might like having a government. It depends on if they trust democracy enough to replace it the WRO with an organization set up by the people and run by elected officials.

 

[Skan]

Oh, I don't think the game should've involved walking/playing in real-time or anything close to that. But with the timeline asserting that the game only took place within two to three months ... I haven't actually spoken to one person who wasn't shocked about that tidbit. I myself thought it took place over at least one year, another one of my friends thought three years, etc. SE can easily condense play-time and distance and geography without, y'know, condensing the timeline (by that I mean that SE shouldn't have published that FF7's story took place over two-to-three months).

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Yes, I don't believe the "it took 2 months" thing. I always got the vibe that their journey took at least a year. Just think of how long it must take to breed, raise, train and race four generations of chocobos!

 

[Keveh Kins]

Methinks Advent Children is somewhat to blame for the timeline of the game being condensed into such a short span. Cloud seems to warp from Edge to the Forgotten Capital in the space of a day with nary a discernible means of transport aside from his motorbike.

To be more on topic, I've always wondered were the Shinra family previously some sort of nobility or wealthy landowners or something of the sort, given that they have a mansion in Nibelheim. Then some internal familiar strife or scandal blew their fortune and thus, President Shinra went the path of the entrepreneur and became a weapons developer, followed by a massive explosion of wealth after discovering Mako energy, thus reasserting his family's dominance but now on a global scale instead of just in a sleep mountain village

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Being that the reactor on Mt. Nibel was the first, it does stand to reason that the family came from there.

Methinks Advent Children is somewhat to blame for the timeline of the game being condensed into such a short span. Cloud seems to warp from Edge to the Forgotten Capital in the space of a day with nary a discernible means of transport aside from his motorbike.

It's worse than you think. According to the Reunion Files, Cloud woke up at 5:30 p.m. It wasn't yet dark then, he hung around until Tifa woke up (at which point it was already dark), and was still at the Ancients' city by 9:30 p.m. on the same night.

 

[Keveh Kins]

^This revelation confuses and upsets me so

 

[Gym Leader Devil]

Clearly Fenrir contains a teleportation materia or device. Probably stuck in that expanding sword shelf thing it has.

 

[CameoAmalthea]

*Head Desk*

You know, they should have just introduced Cid at that point and had him fly Cloud to the Forgotten Capital so he could catch up with the Remnants who had a head start. That way the travel time would make sense and we could introduce the character to people unfamiliar with the story rather than having them show up with the only explanation for them given being "They're our friends".

Although really, how much do we assume is "canon" do you think in the midst of a on coming crisis the heroes would take time to breed birds or hang out at an amusement park practicing?

 

[Skan]

I can only imagine Cloud actually has a personal jet to ferry him across bodies of water. ... if he got to the Forgotten City in 3-4 hours, it's not all that bad. That's longer than the flight from Atlanta to Chicago ... then again, that means I am once again reducing the Planet to pretty much the size of the continental USA. Augh.

Wow, I'm getting way off-topic in my own thread, but how fast do you guys imagine the airships to be anyways? Have any of you tried to outline a more realistic timeline for the game (if you'd decided it'd taken one year or so instead of two months, e.g. took x days to go from Midgar to Kalm, y days to the Chocobo Farm, etc.)?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Maybe Fenrir is a transformer that turns into a jet-ski? Shinra patent pending.

 

[Novus]

Methinks Advent Children is somewhat to blame for the timeline of the game being condensed into such a short span. Cloud seems to warp from Edge to the Forgotten Capital in the space of a day with nary a discernible means of transport aside from his motorbike.

I actually turned off Advent Children at this point. I didn't complete it until seven years later.

 

[SirVival]

Methinks Advent Children is somewhat to blame for the timeline of the game being condensed into such a short span. Cloud seems to warp from Edge to the Forgotten Capital in the space of a day with nary a discernible means of transport aside from his motorbike.

This is exactly the kind of thing I try not to think about, it will make your head hurt. It's just plain stupidity - from the SE's side. The once fantastic world of FF7 has been completely ravaged. Most of the somehow existing rules have been rendered contradictory and useless. This rant could go on and on..

Now that we are talking about illogical matters, I've always wondered this: How in the fuck's sake do the people in Icicle Inn have any contact with outside world? I mean, the only way to get there is through air. There are no ports or beaches (case Wutai). You need a fucking lunar harp to pass through the forest. To my knowledge there exists only 1 Lunar harp, which is in the possession of Cloud's party. Highwind is in the OG from 10 to 15 years old, at best. Tiny Bronco is probably not older than that.
Helicopters? No idea, but if we consider the fact that planes were actually invented before or around the same time as helicopters... (not necessarily the case in FF7's world). How is that Town populated and how do they handle their transactions with the outside world? Talking to the people there, they don't appear to feel extremely isolated. How did Prof. Gast get there? With a golden chocobo?