I was a really pious young Protestant boy, and grew up thinking that fantasy was juvenile, video games were brain-rot, and morality was something externally-generated. I was, however, a voracious reader. When Harry Potter came on the scene, I was reading Jane Eyre and thought myself quite superior to my classmates. Everything changed at age 12, when I suddenly lost my faith. After that, I felt isolated from my family and community, and the foundation of my personality crumbled. With no roadmap for how to internally generate a moral compass, I spent my early teens being (for lack of a better term) Chaotic Evil. After a year in the wilderness, I was skipping school in the days and sneaking out in the nights. There were a lot of glowsticks. Sandstorm, I'm Blue, and Sucks to be You were some of the more popular rave tunes. I even got a girlfriend: "L". Around that time, crystal meth was hitting the scene and there's about a four month period there that is a total blur. I was running with a pack of fellow naer-do-wells, and for a time I felt that I belonged. We'd mug people for cash, and I got pretty good at flourishing with a knife. The "good times" didn't last, though. L ran out of steam, and never rolled with the gang -- we drifted apart and eventually broke up. One day me and this other kid in the gang got in a scrap. I learned that knife fights aren't like the movies, where you dance in a circle and cut at each other. When it's real, you just run at each other, the whole thing takes 3 seconds. If you live, you win. I sustained a pretty bad wound, and left those people behind. I sewed myself up and managed to hide it all from my family. I didn't know what happened to that other kid, but I knew I couldn't go back -- that meant I was cut off from my main supply. I weened myself off of drugs until a family vacation in Paris, where I had to deal with proper withdrawal. My family didn't quite know what was happening, but at that point I was so good at lying to them that I managed to hide the more obvious symptoms and pass it off as a cold. My french really came in handy and I managed to make a few connections and get some help. I remember one particularly bad night, I was alone on the steps of Notre Dame, wondering if God was going to come back to me in that moment. So melodramatic lol. But, as I sat there and thought about it... I realized that's not what I wanted at all. I just wanted the feeling of being a part of something Good. I realized that it was up to me to make Good for myself.
The reason I tell you this sob story is to let you know the frame of mind I was in when I started playing Final Fantasy VII. A few months after returning home, my half-brother (ten years my senior) was working abroad for a year and left his things in my family's garage. That included a Playstation and a small pile of games. In my household, video games were still the devil, so I couldn't openly explore the possibilities. I had now formed a night-owl rhythm (that persists to this day, btw XD) and so in the dark of night, I snuck down to the basement, opened my bro's bags, brought the Playstation up to the television, set it up, and started playing my first video game.
What immediately struck me about the story was how desperate everyone was. It was a world in which everyone had lost everything, except of course for the oppressors. Even Cloud was dealing with some trauma in his past that even he didn't want to confront. I felt like I could relate to the characters in a way that I hadn't been able to relate to anyone in fiction before. And the realistic, sci-fi nature of the story didn't immediately trigger my "fantasy is for babies" reaction. The music was great, the game was easy, and the story moved along at a brisk pace. I saved my game on the way to the second bombing mission, packed up and hid the Playstation back in my brother's stuff, and got three hours of sleep. I was flummoxed that a game could be more than just goombas and platforms. The next night, I met Aeris and went to Wall Market. The next night, I got lost in the train graveyard. The night after that, the pillar fell, and I was irreversibly hooked. "Life isn't fair, but carry on anyway" could have been my personal motto at the time, and being with these characters as they took hit after hit after hit was pure catharsis. Their determination was inspiring to me.
Because I had no frame of reference for Final Fantasy games, I figured that the showdown at Shinra HQ was the end of the game. Lots of us have talked about that "Oh shit" moment when you leave Midgar and enter the World Map for the first time. The story's twists and turns each had their intended effect on me, but none so much as Bugenhagen revealing the truth behind mako energy. I didn't believe in the soul - still don't. But then, in that case, what exactly is life? It's just energy, Bugenhagen told me. Energy contained in a body, fueled by food and sustained by organic systems. Energy that - according to physics - cannot be destroyed but must be transformed. Around this time, L was shot and killed by her stepfather, and what I learned from Final Fantasy VII informed my grieving process - it still does, in fact. It encouraged me to explore the eastern religions, and even encouraged me to give the Bible the old college try, scouring the ancient poetry for metaphors that might shed more light on this idea that we aren't individuals, not really, we're merely articulated pieces of the world/universe, that we all come from the same thing, will all return to that thing, and that this existence is just an ember of the fire, a drop of life in the stream.
The memory card got corrupted. I started the game again - don't think I got much sleep in highschool. But hey! I was going to school and staying there. Someone at school told me that Aeris died. "What!?" I asked. "Yeah, Sephiroth stabs her." Perhaps it was because I knew it was coming, perhaps because I'd already lost a friend, but her death didn't have the same impact it had on many people -- I was more impressed that the story was ballsy enough to go there. The impact of her death has always been at arms length — something I know that I care about, but can’t quite feel.
My bro returned and took his Playstation back. I burned the PC version from a friend and secretly hid the game away in a maze of folders on the family computer, and started the game again. By this point, I was so enamored with the story that I felt the need to share it -- to share this beautiful story with people who might otherwise look down their nose at a "juvenile fantasy" or a "brain-rotting video game." In reality, I was writing it for my younger self. In any case, I started writing The Jenova Project, even as further circumstances forced me to restart the game again and again without ever finishing it. I won't get into every hiccup, but needless to say I wound up memorizing the script to most of the game by total accident. In 2005, I got the hell out of my podunk town and moved into an apartment with my brother, able to continue my old save file on his PlayStation! I was finally going to beat Diamond Weapon! When I finally finished the game in the winter of 2005, I got a tattoo to commemorate the occasion — once upon a time, I believed that marking your own skin was an affront to God. My parents still do not know I have it.
Final Fantasy VII was my gateway drug into Dungeons & Dragons -- SATAN'S GAME, which is now my #1 hobby. I can’t credit Final Fantasy VII for making me an actor or a writer, but it opened my eyes to genre fiction, to allegory and myth, and made me a better storyteller (if a bit long-winded). It occupied my idle hands when I had nothing productive to do, it gave me a new perspective on death as I grew into my atheism, it helped me take the reins on my identity when I was adrift.
Final Fantasy VII saved my life.
- but I can relate to that feeling of wanting something to save oneself, and yes, I have to say Final Fantasy VII gave me -and still gives me- a reason to smile and be happy.
)
yeah, I wish my mom was here physically so she could enjoy the game with me, she really liked the story (and she liked Sephiroth too, she said he's really handsome! 
