Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough by William Irwin, Michel S. Beaulieu Read Free Book Online Page A

been done and redone many different ways, and perhaps it has been better done by someone else.
    Viewing things may give us experience, but those experiences need to mean something if we are going to be good judges. As Hume stated, “By comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and learn how to assign the due degree of each.” 5 We need to compare and contrast the art we encounter. What are the qualities that separate games like Final Fantasy from other games? What makes Final Fantasy VI different from Final Fantasy VII ? If one is better than the other, how do we explain this? This is the sort of process Hume had in mind when he said that we need to compare the art we view. By comparing, we refine our sensibilities and improve our insight into the qualities that make art succeed or fail. Once we start viewing art this way, we are well on our way to becoming good critics, but we are not there yet.
    Charmed by Bias
    If we were simply machines, like Warmech, experience and comparison would be enough for us to be good judges. Okay, so Warmech would probably just blast any art put in front of it. But we are different from Warmech: not only do we like looking at art, but we also suffer from particularly human limitations. The biggest limitation we have to deal with in judging art is bias. If we are biased or prejudiced, we can’t accurately evaluate the relations of the parts of an artwork and how these relations bear on the work as a whole. In order to check the influence of bias and prejudice, we must employ reason in judging art. The careful use of reason throughout judging allows us to recognize when and where biases creep in and gives us strategies for eliminating them from our final judgments about the quality of a work of art. In role-playing games, I have a preference for sword fighters, which is fortunate because so many of Final Fantasy ’s lead characters are sword fighters (Cloud Strife, Tidus, Cecil, and so on). But this does not prevent me from recognizing the awesome power of a black-magic user’s Fire spell or Odin summoning. Reason is a remedy against bias in gaming, as well as in judging.
    Confused by Culture and Blinded by Our Dispositions
    When we view art from other cultures or time periods, we need to keep in mind for whom the art was created and when. We can’t adopt a perspective antithetical to the audience that the art was intended for. Take the first Final Fantasy , for instance. By today’s standards, Final Fantasy I looks fairly dated, its story is very linear, and it is less emotionally involving than more recent installments in the series. But judging Final Fantasy I by today’s standards would be very unfair because the game was produced without the technological advances we have now for an audience that was substantially younger demographically, in a medium (video games) that was still in its infancy.
    The Malboro’s curse of blindness still afflicts us, even with the eye drops of reason. Although reason can deal with many types of biases, some level of bias is inescapable simply because we are human. To deal with our more fundamental biases, such as how we were raised or our idiosyncratic dispositions, we can only recognize that we have them and take them into account whenever possible. Hume believed that these biases are innocent and natural because they don’t completely impede the ability to judge art and there is no way to fully eliminate them. By making sure that our assessment of art is about the art itself and not about what our mood happened to be or what the weather was like, we can avoid most other bias that would undermine our ability to judge.
    In this way we walk a fine line between our biases and the feelings that arise from the experience of art. We’ll never be quite sure exactly whether the feelings arose because we witnessed something in the art or because we harbor some bias or predisposition to react in a particular manner. One thing we can do to sort