A Dialogue with Nic Reuben
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #184. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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The art of games criticism.
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Nic Reuben is a writer from Wales currently staffed at Rock Paper Shotgun. His recent review of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth impressed me with its imagery and stream of consciousness, which we discuss the inspirations of below. Our conversation revolves around Rebirth, but as Nic’s work moves between the personal and formal, so too do nostalgia and cartography speak to criticism and RPGs.
Since you establish T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and your relationship to it as a sort of framing device, I was thinking about Eliot’s “The Function of Criticism”. Eliot writes “comparison and analysis” are “the chief tools of the critic.” And he later invokes the imagery of autopsy: “Comparison and analysis need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is always producing parts of the body from its pockets, and fixing them in place.” You similarly write you have to “etherise Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.” There is evocative imagery of operating on Cait Sith. Is that what criticism is to you? An autopsy? A Frankenstein procedure?
Not in all cases, because I’m not sure if criticism is any one thing that can be pinned down that easily. In this case, it felt that way because a review, to me, is just kind of Here’s how this thing made me feel and I’m going to express it in in a way to give the reader an idea of how it might make them feel. And that’s the main thing I’m approaching anything like this with. It was as more standard format review than you might think of a piece of criticism as digging into a specific aspect, there’s limitation to that review format I don’t necessarily like.
Rebirth, actually, it gave me a little bit of leeway because it’s one of those exclusives that came to PC later and because it’s Final Fantasy VII, I can assume more knowledge on the reader’s part than I’d usually be asked to do with a review, which allows me to fart around a bit more, making it what I want rather than “This is how materia works” and all that kind of stuff. So, there was that element to it.
[Pauses to move cat]
Specifically, a big part of how Rebirth made me feel is I don’t want to review this because it just means too much to me. It’s this private, precious thing and I’d rather keep the flaws as little grumbles in my head rather than put words to them. And rather than ignore that aspect of it, I figured me reckoning with those feelings is kind of a key part of how I actually experienced the game, so that should be in the review.
Something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently is Where does a review start? And I think especially with established gaming press, even if people are writing in the first person, they’re taking themselves out of the equation. When does the review start when I start playing the game? Does it start when I wake up in the morning and I’m excited to play the game? Does it start 15, 20, 30 years ago when I first played this thing? Or somewhere in between? So, it’s finding that cut off point of elements that I feel are worth bringing forward to give context to the reader of how I how I approach the thing. That’s something I’ve kind of tried and played with.
To go back to the Eliot point, “interpretation is always producing parts of the body from its pockets,” I suppose the problem with using any of that kind of surgical metaphors is they do suggest an objectivity that maybe isn’t necessarily there, like the critic is bringing that part of themselves along.
There’s been a big tension in games media that’s grown over the past decade of professionalization where the fan and the critic, what is the difference there? I think your point resists that. I am a fan. I do have these very strong feelings about this, but I’m going to actually utilize those in a way that fandom does not.
Yeah, for sure. I get that. It’s like how many steps of yourself watching yourself watching yourself do you want to go? Which is obviously the path to madness, so you do want to pick a pick lane there at some point. And again, going back to the autopsy thing, I don’t know if everyone’s the same, but I don’t think in complete sentences and I definitely don’t think in witty one-liners either, so you get a feeling and it’s trying to put words to that eventually. Again, with this I would have been happy to keep my experience with this game as something kind of private and personal.
I feel like your criticism falls into place when you start talking about Chadley. You call Chadley “a grotesque Satnav of a pimple of a productivity app, a creature spawned from fear of Not Enough Game, to squeeze the universe into a ball and wrap checklists around it.” Did that flow out? Did you list each insult? Come back and add to that sentence over time?
I think the key thing there is the bit I stole from Elliot, “To have squeezed the universe into a ball.” I was trying to think of a phrase of this constricting effect that that Chadley’s checklisting has on the world. It’s sort of a grotesque inverse of what a cartographer does. I’m a big fan of the phrase “The map is not the territory.” And I think about that a lot, the idea Don’t confuse semantics with reality. I think about that literally when it comes to open worlds. Final Fantasy‘s world, what Chadley does is he turns it into a case of semantics, this malformed mockery of exploration. “Squeeze the universe into a ball” is again to constrict, to make less than, maybe even to make toy-like, so that fit. And after that, everything was more or less how I feel about it.
I was thinking about this yesterday actually because I’m still playing it and that fear of not enough game is just so wild to me because there’s so much game there. I’m making myself poke around edges now without looking at the map and seeing how the world is laid out. And there are elements of weird little organic discoveries you can have. I think they’re called caches where there are little pockets of treasure chests, although they come across more like dioramas than anything else.
It’s a strange one. He feels like a device born out of fear or concern or worry.
What’s so important about that line, to me, is how your insults at Chadley as a person blend with your critiques of the games as one and the same. And Chadley as a personification for gamification is right there, but it’s how you then sympathize with him that gets me. You illustrate this image of interrogating him and write: “Chadley must have loved this place so dearly he decided to terraform the planet in its image.” Is Rebirth like a Golden Saucer in that way?
It’s absolutely world as theme park, world as ticket dispenser, world as list of siloed attractions. That extends to the fact that even the good, resonant story beats away from the open world are like that because they’ve become these static artifacts over time. It’s like you’re rushing around Disney World before closing time, this is where we learn the fun parade moves for the fascist mega corp, this is where Barrett fails to reckon with his past, this is where we realize Cloud is mentally ill. It’s all the hits.
It’s tourism.
It is tourism. Again, it’s that thing like yeah, I am a fan, and I enjoy being serviced. It’s still beautiful. I still cannot hear half the songs in this game without welling up. When I sat down to review it the first time on PS5 I made all these criticisms that I remember because as I booted it up, I could hear the menu music playing on the side, and I’ve got to open a doc and make a list of criticisms now because once this thing starts, that’s going to get washed away. I’m just going to get swept up in something.
Even when Rebirth is pulling truly tedious shit it’s surprisingly witty and jolly and confident about it that you end up grinning through the pain kind of thing. It’s strange because, again, with Chadley there’s a lack of confidence that he rises from, but the actual form, the actual tone of the events it feels like people are having fun with it. That’s a really strange dichotomy to me, because you can feel these probably young designers who are our age or younger and probably grew up fans of the original game working on this thing, and you can feel that they’re both in awe but they also haven’t allowed that to stop them twisting it in some really bizarre and interesting ways, or letting that tedium – and that’s the other thing (sorry, another tangent) – Final Fantasy VII is tedious. There’s a lot of really tedious stuff in that game. And there’s a tendency when you’re pushing a fucking cart along a train or holding A to do something, there’s a tendency to go “this is authentic to the experience,” because it does reflect it. But then it’s like Well, how much? How much of this is justified homage?
The authenticity is an interesting contention in the game itself. There’s an idea you dig at that the Remake trilogy aims to conjure a similar emotional reaction to what players initially felt, or at least what they remember feeling playing the original Final Fantasy VII. To do that now as all games have gotten bigger, the scale must be exponentiation larger. That’s not something most remakes or remasters ever set out to do. But the way that that comes together in Rebirth is this barely congealed dreamscape of a videogame.
I think the entire reason they did the awkward timeline stuff is to double dip on the surprise of how Aerith’s story ends. They do these huge orchestral concerts of Final Fantasy music, and it’s like here’s this music that you love have these emotional connections to for good reason. It’s entirely ripped from context. It’s performed with so much grandiose fervor that the original feel of the piece is smothered underneath all these winking flourishes, these build ups to these leitmotifs that know what they are. It cannot help winking itself. And down to the micro in Rebirth, characters hum their own theme songs, they sing the victory theme after battle. It’s artifacts. It’s, it’s made into almost a museum piece.
It’s one thing to write “a big lung, breathless,” but your stream of consciousness is a mimetic experience to Rebirth. When did your critique take that form? When did the Eliot poem come to mind as a framing device?
The answer is quite boring. It’s a mechanical choice of having a lot of information to convey. That was the most honest way I could write about it because that’s what it is to me. It’s just a long chain of very short, very vivid, very contrasting experiences. And I’ve just been experimenting with sentence length as one of those fun stylistic games you play with yourself as a writer. So, there’s those two things. The Elliot poem, I think “squeeze the universe into a ball” was the moment. Also, I do have that very strong memory of not wanting to go to this seminar, not wanting to sit around with people and discuss this poem that that meant a lot to me at a time when I was just discovering poetry and there wasn’t much that I sort of felt that way about.
And then there’s the thing of trying to turn a normal review into, as probably a lot of critics do, wanting it to stand up as a piece of writing on its own whether or not people are interested in the game. It’s hard because videogames have you writing about the same thing over and over again, so there’s wanting to make it interesting to myself, but if there’s a sense of mimesis, I think it’s because that’s what the game is to me.
But you do also manage to get in at the very end that the ultrawide view doesn’t always work.
There’s a part of me that thinks, I‘m still writing about videogames at the end of the day, and I like shooting dudes. I don’t necessarily aspire to scrub that part out of my criticism for the sake of something that runs a bit smoother.
My last question is: “Masamune of Damocles.”
The image could have been invented for the game, right? That is the image; It’s what elevates the entirety of Rebirth. Even when it’s bullshit it makes it bearable, it gives pathos and tension. Rebirth is a hang out game in a lot of ways, but it makes it a hang out game in a profound way because it’s like “Wasting time with friends is beautiful and powerful because time is finite.” Here’s 150 hours to spend with Aerith as a treat for waiting 30 years when you were lucky if you got her final limit break. You’d have to really go out of your way to spend time with her as a character.
You could argue that detracts from some of the phantom pain-mechanical loss. It’s a choice. And it’s not just her and Cloud spending time together. You’re seeing Aerith interact with all these other party members. But where it resonates with me is it daring you to let yourself get attached to Aerith, to not put up walls knowing what happens to her.
That Masamune of Damocles, it’s the through line, and it’s such a great image, this huge silver sword above you making the game what it is. That’s another thing I could have written 1,000 words on.
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Autumn Wright is a critic of all things apocalyptic. Follow them @theautumnwright.bsky.social.
