Baroque Pathology: Monkeys Shampooing While I Slowly Die and Play Final Fantasy VIII

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #179. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

———

“Disregarding one another . . . each heading its own way. Leisurely, with no particular place to go, stewards of a new anxiety.” (Izumi Suzuki, “Night Picnic”)

Remembering eventually leads to forgetting what was known and everything that was experienced. The very act of remembering will eventually give way to not being able to recollect either through cognitive decay or death. I speak of the individual here. As a collective, we have means of safeguarding memory, even if through distortion, by preserving what’s deemed worthy. Memory is tantamount. Better to preserve it as a disfigured corpse stuffed with formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde and methanol than to let it fade. My memories of Final Fantasy VIII are in a way a penumbric corpse. I’ll carry it with me until I die.

Memory is at the core of this most controversial entry in the Final Fantasy series. Final Fantasy VIII is a game whose narrative devolves to relying on dei ex machina centered on how using magical beings (Guardian Forces, the game’s version of summon spells) leads one to forget even the most essential parts and experiences of oneself. This narrative ploy works as allegory, or as plot propeller, but it requires a suspension of disbelief to be effective. Satisfaction does not await those who untangle the mess of a plot that director Yoshinori Kitase, scenario writer Kazushige Nojima and character designer Tetsuya Nomura concocted.

In a desperate attempt to conjure halcyon days I played Final Fantasy VIII. I played the game during a horrible time in my life. I was becoming increasingly sick and delusional from an illness whose cold hands were ushering me slowly to another realm. I was living in the Ouémé Valley in West Africa where wild monkeys used my outdoor bathroom. They did unspeakable things with my imported shampoo.

Final Fantasy VIII is a baroque game. Like the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, FFVIII requires thoughtful consideration to appreciate. When I first played it, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. My first playthrough was marred by malady. I will reflect on how internal and external factors when one experiences a work of art are critical to how we appreciate it and remember it.

At 25 years old, Final Fantasy VIII has its detractors. It also has its evangelists who extol its whimsy and young adult story. The Video Game History Foundation‘s Phil Salvador created a blog Final Fantasy VIII is the Best to mark the game’s quarter-century anniversary. The game deserves its praise and is still in serious need of reevaluation. Your humble writer will tell you some stories about the game, my life, and near death, and how all of these things walked side by side for brief but pivotal moments until they didn’t anymore.

Baroque Pathology: A Nightmare Featuring Monkeys Shampooing

I hate Final Fantasy VIII. I love Final Fantasy VIII. Excuse the whiplash. Every time I think about Square Soft’s ambitiously fraught epic, I think of the liminal space between hope and poverty, malady and recovery. To be specific, I think of a time nine years ago at the peak of my idealism when I contracted an infectious disease that nearly claimed my life. Like Zell eats hot dogs with fervor I looked for solace in the game – an uneasy one at that, but, succor, nonetheless.

Let’s start at the ending and work our way to some sort of beginning. But first let’s talk about the importance of attentively playing a game, not flying through it. FFVIII is a massive game. A single playthrough for first-time players can take over forty hours. This is longer than an average European work week. You can read several notable books in that same amount of time. In my time of dying, I could not muster the attention required to immerse myself in a book, let alone work. I laid bedridden (really though I was lying on the floor) withering away. I lost forty-five pounds in less than three weeks. I needed a distraction.

Needless to say, I did not experience FFVIII under the best of circumstances. A near-fatal infection was eating the inside of my mouth like a mole digging a hole in between the front and back of my jaw. I sped through the game’s extravagant story yet mastered and abused its gameplay, junctioning and drawing all the para-magic I could. Keeping my magic at ninety-nine was a precious distraction from agonizing pain, though it made for a less-than-ideal experience. Thus, FFVIII is a game that I’ve never played properly. Yes, I’ve finished it, but under conditions that can only be described as tortuous.

Laying on the floor sweat dripping down my back, I transition between hallucinations and playing FFVIII. I escaped into Squall’s traumatic past and his quest to stop Ultimecia, and then Laguna’s own journey.

At the height of my malady, I recall going outside to shower after a long day of lying on the concrete floor of my living room. I was getting sores on my body from inactivity. I momentarily detached myself from the game and my body’s sweat imprint on the floor. I made my way outside where the shower area was and looked in horror as mischievous white-throated guenons were running around covered in suds. It smelled like mint and eucalyptus. Squall, no I, picked up a rock and threw it at the monkeys’ vicinity. They stared at it for a second and jumped over the wall. They used up half of the shampoo that my mother mailed me from the United States. I fainted.

Final Fantasy VIII is a game that requires patience to appreciate its weirdness. Square Soft went for broke with this entry. After the success of Final Fantasy VII, they opted to have a world and characters that are more relatable to the game’s target audience, teenagers. The world of FFVIII is instantly recognizable to many who played the game in Japan, North America, and Europe. Ideal villages and cosmopolitan flare are the setting for angsty teens saving the world. Squall and friends are in school and ride modern transportation (cars, trains, etc.). The fulcrum of the game’s appeal is that it is fantastical reimagining of the contemporary. All the fantasy is a means to an end. Unlike other Final Fantasies, I fantasized about being part of this game’s world.

FFVIII requires self-reflection from the player. The saving the world bit is secondary to the cast of teenagers becoming adults. All the fantastical elements are ornamentations in its baroque tapestry. At the heart of the fugue is self-doubt, dealing with childhood trauma, romance and finding where one belongs.

I hate FFVIII because it frustrated me. It reflected back at me a world and characters that I in a critical and traumatic stage of my life could not sympathize with. My malady was, understandably, my only preoccupation. Yet I kept playing. The game was a way of distracting myself, of taking my mind off the pain, the stench, my mortality. I only learned from FFVIII in hindsight. Squall’s growth as a character, the sorcerers’ power as a source of their persecution and the ultimate harbinger of Ultimecia’s craven attempt at world domination, in her mind to write a wrong by making everything hers. I get it. When I returned to the game to write this, it ushered in sensations and anxieties that I rather not remember, I left them behind in the Valley of Ouémé for a reason: self-preservation and the biological advantage. To remember pain and trauma is to be weighed down by it.

To play a role, to inhabit a character, to experience a journey through the perspective of another can be cathartic. My time with FFVIII can’t be this. The game is ruined due to when I choose to play it. It is doomed to be eternally associated with something that I don’t want to relive.

In a fugue state, I went outside at night wanting to get some fresh air. The guenons had become infatuated with the imported shampoo. I hadn’t seen them since Squall, no, I threw the rock that safeguarded my half-mint and eucalyptus goodness. This time, they were not only using the shampoo to bathe themselves they were also drinking it. Visibly sick, it vomited inside my water canister. The others laughed and passed the bottle taking gulps. I retreated back inside; I knew a losing battle when I saw one. Next thing I remember I was back on the living room floor playing FFVIII waiting to be picked up and taken for medical treatment twenty-seven hundred miles away in Morocco. Privilege me, like Squall to be saved miraculously from Edea. “Excitate vos e somno, liberi mei”.

———

Luis Aguasvivas is a writer, researcher, and member of the New York Videogame Critics Circle. He covers game studies for PopMatters. Follow him on Bluesky and aguaspoints.com.