Kupo Chronicle #23 - Foundation Myth

Or, The Warrior Of Light With A Thousand Faces

Welcome to the Kupo Chronicle, the premium edition of the Wark Digest newsletter, where we explore the Final Fantasy universe in long-form and drill down into unique moments of the series’ history. I’m Chris, aka Hoogathy, and today, as Final Fantasy celebrates another birthday, join me as we give the original game the mythical treatment and dissect how its themes and structure remain so relevant to its offspring.

This week’s newsletter is 2931 words, a 14-minute read.

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“And so, their journey begins….”

On this day, 37 years ago, Final Fantasy was released on the Nintendo Famicom in Japan. (Granted, it’s not one of the more auspicious birthdays, one of the nice round numbers that people celebrate.) I’ve talked about the impact of this game on the industry, and on my own life, many times, up to and including FFU’s first book. Even as the years go by and the game feels more dated to more people, it has an indelible place in my heart.

Fans of this series often ask, “what is ‘Final Fantasy,’” (we’ve even waxed philosophical on that question in the pages of this very publication multiple times in its first year). And while replaying the Pixel Remaster recently, it occurred to me that the answer (or at least, one answer) might still lie within the actual game Final Fantasy itself… if we look at it through the lens of mythology.

After all, video games are a big part of our modern mythology. Where the ancient Greeks would listen to orators like Homer spinning grand yarns like The Iliad and The Odyssey, or audiences in the Renaissance would watch the works of Shakespeare and other playwrights, today humans turn to tales of imagined worlds and superpowered individuals in movies, television, and video games.

They entertain us, sure, but subconsciously they also help us reflect on what it means to be human. We escape our everyday concerns with movies about average people with superpowers, or tiny heroes embarking on massive quests to destroy an ultimate evil, or whiny farmboys who become knights with laser swords. Whether we realize it or not, we can see something of ourselves and our world in these tales.

And that applies just as much to video games. Here, we are not merely the audience, but the active participant, living vicariously through our digital avatar. We don’t just hear about Odysseus’ exploits, we are the active agent in them.

With this in mind, upon the anniversary of Final Fantasy, we’re going to look at the original game through the context of other mythological works, and see how it continues to inform the many games that have picked up its torch over the last 37 years.

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The Hero With A Thousand Faces