Kupo Chronicle #32 - Masters of Illusions

Wield The Will Of The World

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 in this installment we’ve conjured up the origins of summoning magic, and pondered its deeper meanings.

This week’s newsletter is 2852 words, a 13-minute read.

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You may have already heard the news, but the Kickstarter campaign for Final Fantasy Union’s second book went live this week! This time we’re looking at the history of the franchise’s most over-the-top feature, summoned creatures, breaking down the appearances of all 88 summons featured in the main series.

So in honour of “The Guardians of the Crystals: An Unofficial Guide to Final Fantasy,” let’s pull back the focus a little bit to examine the craft of summon magic and those who practice it—the etymology of the term, the history of its inclusion in FF, and the deeper meaning behind it all.

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Fight Monsters With Monsters

Given the popularity of summoning magic in Final Fantasy, you may be surprised by its somewhat mundane origins… or at least, as one creator recounts it now.

In the 35th anniversary celebratory roundtable Square Enix hosted in 2023, the godfather Hironobu Sakaguchi claimed that this momentous mechanic actually came about on something like a whim. “Can’t remember who it was, but somebody said they wanted to do them, I think. […] The actual reason is down to the cartridge memory we had. It doubled from FFI to FFII to FFIII… and for FFIII we actually had some spare memory.”

This led Chiaki Matsuzawa, the interviewer, to ask, “so the summons were space fillers?!”¹ Sakaguchi explained “we were like, ‘someone could draw a big old monster? Maybe it could be an ally?’ […] I think that was where it was started.”