/lit/ - Literature

>>12452064
in the story, Vector is destroyed, at the end of the world, but that's the thing: this is already the exact portrait of a destroyed world, just as Heidegger, Guenon, Spengler or [insert here] would have presented it. here it is, the Winter Phase, the Reign of Quantity, the Gestell, teleoplectic Empire. but wait, there's more!

>Vector is destroyed in the end of the world, and in its place rises Kefka's Tower. Though much of the tower is built of dirt and debris, many areas in Kefka's Tower bear Imperial banners or esper capsules, showing that Vector, the Imperial Palace and the Magitek Factory were integrated into the tower.

tell me this isn't a fascinating detail. Kefka doesn't actually destroy the world himself - he is simply the revelation that in a much deeper sense, it already was destroyed; it just didn't know it. Kefka's tower is the symbol of the affirmation that lies, perhaps, underneath the Imperial repression, but what emerges out of it isn't even a positivity, but semantic oblivion. Vector fails to capture what it is that Kefka is all about; but what Kefka is all about is nothing other than a reflection of the emptiness that lies at the core. it's two apocalypses in one; hence the anti-climactic feeling of the final battle. by that point, it doesn't really matter. the joke - that there was no joke - was revealed long ago. Vector was already death long before Kefka showed up. and the Tower only reveals you the obscene core of what was already there all along, nothing you hadn't seen already.

what really lives, in that world, are the Espers, who are themselves aspects of the divine - fascinatingly press-ganged into a war between the gods, who voluntarily disarmed themselves, in what may have been simply a brutal and attritive war without end. we humans are different: desperation and nihilism gives our own sentiments rocket-boosters. what is heroic in this game isn't the overthrowing of the villain, or saving the world from the Empire. the best parts about it are those scenes, in the WoR, where you look for your friends again - as Leary says, you find the others. more than that, perhaps, cannot really be asked for.

it really is the greatest game i've ever played.