“A Great, Never-Ending Sky”: Musical Memory and the Desire for Openness in Final Fantasy VII

While replaying Final Fantasy VII for the first time in many years, one line of dialogue hits me with an unusually strong moment of déjà vu. The first five hours of my playthrough take place entirely in the city of Midgar, a world-in-itself. At the end of this time, I reach the game’s first truly climactic moment: my party, a band of ecoterrorists fighting the world-dominating energy corporation Shinra, raids the headquarters of the company to save their friend. They are apprehended, but the villain—President Shinra—is mysteriously killed during the night. After escaping imprisonment, Cloud, the game’s leading protagonist, identifies the killer as Sephiroth, a powerful fighter long thought dead, now invisibly and powerfully brought into the narrative. The president’s son, Rufus, appears by helicopter and challenges Cloud to a rooftop battle. After Rufus retreats from combat, I run Cloud downstairs, where he tells his friend Tifa, “This is gonna get complicated.”

This comment, far from the most iconic in this long and celebrated game, marks for me the moment I registered during my first playthrough that the game was not ending but beginning. I do not know any other work that has had this effect on me. It is as if the game were turning inside out. And in a sense, it is: the city of Midgar, the setting of the game’s first act, remains a visible (if imposing) object on the world map, but now the world around it becomes open to the player. It is not so much that the walls of the game come crashing down, as that they are revealed as never having been there to begin with. The city becomes a dot on the map, the world merely a location within a universe. It is at this moment of transcendence, of indefinitely expanding the scope of the game when leaving the city, that players are finally greeted with the “Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII.”

This theme, written by the series composer Nobuo Uematsu, is unprecedentedly vast, clocking in at a loop of just over six minutes (Example 1). The opening music of the theme immediately establishes a new musical temporality for the game. The melody itself lasts two measures, but its harmony lingers on an additional bar, suspended in a moment of uncertainty. The melody’s high E at m. 2 bleeds over into the responsory three-bar phrase, where oscillating chords thwart it, shifting the key from G major to F minor. Unpredictable modulations continue as the theme goes on, first to D minor and then back towards G major, seeming to push closure further down the horizon. Like my experience at this moment in the game, closure proves to only be the beginning. After the music finally settles into E major, the ensuing three minutes develop this motive gradually, building to a triumphant brass-fanfare treatment; the final section hesitates, turning to low, march-like chords that trudge along at the pace of softly panted breath, while string chords fade in and out above them, like figures passing in and out in the distance. The “Main Theme” thus coincides with this moment of the gameworld’s expansion in a fantastic way, mirroring from start to finish that experience in its sheer vastness. The feeling of having the horizon of the world shattered, which I get a glimpse of in replaying this game, verges on the incommunicable, but it finds—for this player, anyway—expression in this music.

Much metaphorical, digital ink has been spilled on Final Fantasy VII (hereafter FF7), but the majority of comments would probably fall into one of three categories: (1) claims that it is a unique highpoint, a summit of video games that remained unreached since; (2) claims that it is overrated, which, in a sense, reinforce (1) by acknowledging it; and (3) subjective claims of FF7’s profound, inarticulable significance for its players. As Tim Summers has noted, accounts of FF7 and its music frequently verge into the hyperbolic.¹ When players remark on FF7—in YouTube videos and comments, internet forums, and private playthroughs and conversations—descriptions of the game tend to outstrip its status as a game, becoming an experience, a masterpiece, a world, a site of nostalgia so intense that it surpasses or circumvents the expressible. FF7’s deep (and profitable) nostalgic impact is confirmed beyond all doubt by Square Enix’s big-budget 2020 remake of the game, Final Fantasy VII Remake (hereafter Remake), but innumerable comments from the game’s devotees speak on their own to the strange intensity of the game’s effect on its players. One well-known musician and YouTuber, Alex Moukala, puts it unequivocally: “Final Fantasy VII made me the person I am.”² What does it mean that this can be said about a game?

This essay examines our third claim, embracing its essential incompleteness. It explores the idea of openness that FF7 instantiates at the moment of leaving Midgar, and that it instills in its players as they remember and dwell upon the game. This essay will examine ways that FF7 itself produces nostalgia through its musical and narrative processes. Nostalgia has long been acknowledged to intertwine space and time, as authors such as Svetlana Boym have noted.³ Indeed, nostalgia, in its original seventeenth-century medical definition, was specifically spatial, referring to an unfulfilled yearning to return to a home or native land, especially in the case of military personnel serving abroad.⁴ This essay will emphasize how nostalgia in video games plays on inaccessible space, on a desire for the endless openness that FF7 seems to promise, especially where music seems to make those places accessible. In video games, memory itself becomes a place, a point FF7 both exemplifies and makes thematic in the game.

Within ludomusicology, nostalgia has become a topic of increased inquiry.⁵ Andra Ivănescu has recently studied nostalgia games and their music, with particular focus on where games recreate or evoke a historical past. While her definition of “the nostalgia game” is purposely broad, her work treats FF7 only briefly and in passing. She notes that Shiro Games’ Evoland (2013) references FF7, writing that “it focuses on games which are undoubtedly part of the canon, and it does not deviate from the broadly accepted view of game history.”⁶ This is implicitly a scholarly version of claim two, above, distancing itself from a game that is experienced as deeply intimate for many of its players. While this critical distance is essential in areas where canonization has led to an excess of valorization, I would ask whether it risks throwing out the game too early—that is, whether the impact this game has had on its players has yet played out fully in the work of scholarship. The ways that FF7 and other games with a similar position in audiences’ memories themselves generate nostalgia remains relatively understudied.

Big-budget games like FF7 are often studied from a commercial angle, where nostalgia appears as a force in the ludomusical marketplace. Elizabeth Hunt’s recent work on live video game concerts argues that these orchestral productions make nostalgia for childhood memories tangible, consumable, and profitable. Hunt concludes her study by noting that “videogame music as a nostalgic artefact is a powerful consumerist tool.”⁷ This is certainly the case, as much for Final Fantasy as for the Pokémon franchise that Hunt studies in detail. But analyzing nostalgic game music’s economic significance cannot describe in detail the role games play for their players. That FF7 or other video games enjoy popular acclaim and the benefit of a corporation caching and cashing in on nostalgia should not obscure the intense meaning of this nostalgia for its players or its worth for exploration.

Even when centered on player experience, studies of nostalgia and game music typically treat it as a source of bias. In an essay specifically on FF7 and its 2020 remake, Can Aksoy holds nostalgia and immersion in opposition. Drawing a distinction between nostalgic memory of games and the current experience of playing a game, Aksoy asserts that biases in nostalgic memory force players to evaluate their current playing experience, distracting and detracting from the ability of players to immerse themselves fully in games.⁸ Aksoy provides a convincing reading of Remake’s redeployment of leitmotifs, and this essay will attempt to build on his observation that the music of Remake mirrors the musical processes of the original game. At the same time, the positioning of nostalgia as immersion’s opposite risks flattening the experience of playing this game: as this essay argues, it is the failure of games to fully immerse, their asymptotic approach to immersion, that makes them impactful and nostalgic. The examples Aksoy chooses for nostalgic disillusionment, notably, do not come from reencountering Final Fantasy VII, but from returning to other games. For many players, after all, returning to FVII is anything but disappointing.

These views of nostalgia, while important for unveiling its potentially pernicious sides, risk treating nostalgia too narrowly. They do not describe the more personal, perhaps ultimately inarticulable effects these nostalgic games have on their players, or the means by which they produce them. To make explicit a bias probably already obvious, I, too was raised on FF7; it may not have made me the person I am, but I would be a different person without it. Rather than view (my own) player nostalgia as a bias or liability, this essay views nostalgia as a positive expressive possibility and takes FF7 seriously for its ability to create this intense reaction and attachment in its players—above all, through its music.

Video game scholars have recently launched a renewed attempt to understand nostalgia more broadly, as spatial as well as temporal, an approach that holds great promise for giving us a way of understanding and talking about the ways RPGs like FF7 work on their players. In another recent essay on nostalgia in video game music, Alec Nunes raises the possibility that liminality, the transitional space between the real and virtual, might create a nostalgia “that demands action in the present.”⁹ Similarly, I argue that FF7 produces nostalgia in the present moment of play, including strong instances of liminality, where player input and player-character actions seem to converge on the screen.

In a similar way, Christopher Goetz, writing about side-scrolling adventure games, has recently approached nostalgia in video games not in their relation to memory or pastness, but in their ability to offer what he calls “nostalgic travel” by representing space while refusing the possibility of travel. Goetz describes an experience, probably familiar to many players of FF7—certainly this one—in which play-oriented focus gives way to distraction and stasis, moments where the player puts down the reins of play and its horizontal movement (what one might call immersion, or a flow state), and instead gazes vertically into the game’s inaccessible background landscapes.¹⁰

FF7, I argue, operates in a very similar way on its players, prompting a kind of reflective play by its design. In this essay, I borrow from Goetz the idea that nostalgia includes desire not only for the past but for the more broadly inaccessible, examining how the game uses music to disclose parts of the world—including its past—while foreclosing the possibility of travel. In particular, FF7 primes its players to be nostalgic by incorporating memory into its ludic and narrative fabric, using music to make these memories musically audible and emotionally immediate even as they are impossibly distant from both the players and the characters of the game. This, I will argue at the end of this essay, finds reflection in Remake, where music similarly indexes an inaccessible past shared between players and characters of the game. FF7, and its music, creates an impossible desire for the openness of the past that is still active in its reception—and still underexplored.

Before arguing for the specifically musical nostalgia intrinsic in FF7, I wish to broadly outline some of the features of the game that contribute to its nostalgic effect. As the first game in the series released on Sony’s PlayStation, the game takes advantage of the system’s capacity for 3D graphics, significantly increasing the depth of visual presentation over previous installments. FF7 is also the first of three main-series installments for the system, followed by Final Fantasy VIII and IX, meaning that for many players, this was the first Final Fantasy experience. The historical position of the game thus primes many of its players for nostalgia. But ironically, as I will argue below, some of the very qualities that mark it as a groundbreaking departure in the series also help to make it nostalgic. The game itself, in its narrative and aesthetic properties, produces nostalgia.

That FF7 takes place in huge world and tells a complex (indeed, convoluted) story are clichés of the game, but they are necessary ones in registering the effect it has on its players. Returning to this game playthrough after playthrough, I discover rooms I had never entered, abilities I had never acquired, plot points I had forgotten in the story’s sprawl. This abundance of detail extends to the space of the game. Taking advantage of the expanded graphic capabilities of the PlayStation, FF7’s gameworld is huge and, more importantly, unprecedentedly detailed. In the first section of the game, for instance, during the escape after AVALANCHE’s successful bombing of the Mako reactor, a cloth rustling in the wind from the fire catches the eye, as do signs for the intriguingly named “GOBLINS BAR” and “Vu Café.” Flourishes of this sort, essentially atmospheric, add a horizontal depth that competes with the vertical draw of the game’s narrative and ludic elements. Borrowing language from Christopher Goetz, these details, groundbreaking in their presentation while also tantalizing in their incompleteness, inaugurate a “wish to dwell within [the] game’s inaccessible reaches.”¹¹

This density of the world’s setting—the extent to which each place is unique—makes it all the more striking how much of the game disappears upon playing through it. Compared to earlier games in the series, FF7 boasts a large number of “unrevisitable” locations. The area of the game described above, for instance, is the Upper Plate of Sector 8, a wealthy neighborhood in Midgar to which the players are unable return after this first part of the game. The relative paucity of scholarship on unrevisitable locations in ludology is surprising, given that they are one of the most characteristic and suggestive features of video games. Steven Reale has written on unrevisitable locations in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, drawing attention to what he describes as “barriers to listening” that occur when areas of the game and their music are patched out or otherwise rendered less accessible.¹² In games made before the possibility of the patch, unrevisitable locations are intrinsic features of the game, reliable and absolute. Of course, in many games (for instance, the side scrollers Goetz examines), either everything is revisitable, or nothing is, depending on whether the game allows the player to replay levels. But interesting things happen when the world presents itself as open, but sections of it are cordoned off. When much of the world can be trod over again and again, visited, explored, and gazed upon, locations that are permanently sealed off from the player generate, almost intrinsically, nostalgia, by frustrating mastery over the world, pointing towards the limitations of the player.

Instead of viewing this as a deficiency, the tension between openness and linearity is productive way of generating meaning in video games, and FF7’s success has at least partly to do with its willingness to allow players to experience losses of this kind. While the permanent death of a party member, Aerith, is undeniably the most iconic and emotional example, I would argue that the collapse of the Midgar plate in Sector 7 is the more characteristic of this game, as it has the effect of altering the game’s physical topography, destroying some of its most beloved settings, above all Tifa’s bar Seventh Heaven. This is, notably, the location where players hear “Tifa’s Theme,” destroying both the musical space and its associated flashback, an episode to which we will return shortly. A playthrough of the game will thus leave the player—in every sense—missing places in it as they play.

In all this, FF7, more than its series predecessors, primes its players to be nostalgic for its world, to desire more of it than there actually is or can be—to borrow Goetz’s language, to inaugurate a desire for impossible travel. It is the memory of that intense longing, experienced over many years, that makes this game so nostalgic. In part, this extends an argument made by Mattias van Ommen, that FF7 and other Final Fantasy games make devout followers of their players because of their sheer length, and the extent to which player’s “tinkering” with characters creates a sense of affective identity with this fictitious world.¹³ But the nostalgic situation in FF7 in particular is made even more intense by its music. The music allows for an emotional depth to the game’s story that becomes, critically, especially pronounced where characters themselves reveal their memories, reflecting and reinforcing our own nostalgic relationship to the game, at once intimately familiar and impossibly distant.

Part of the reason that FF7 generates such nostalgia among its players is that its world and characters are already nostalgic, and we recognize some of their longing in ourselves as we play the game. Nostalgia surfaces in unlikely ways in FF7. The gritty political conceit of the first part of the game, highlighted in my introduction, is based in environmental nostalgia, as the ecoterrorist group AVALANCHE’s hatred of Shinra is an attempt to set the clock back, to undo technological progress. The game’s primary antagonist, Sephiroth, also an enemy of Shinra, is arguably driven mad by an ill-timed bout of nostalgia. Facing a question of his identity, he scours a basement library in an affecting montage, and his madness results from the realization that he does not have a childhood or a hometown to be nostalgic for. Most importantly, for my purposes, introductions to primary characters are frequently accompanied by revelations of their past, memories that we are allowed to experience in their retelling as part of the game, facilitated by music. As a result, a remarkable amount of the game takes place outside its strict chronological frame.

I will focus on three threads of musical memory in the game—“Tifa’s Theme,” “Aerith’s Theme,” and the flashback sequence in Kalm—showing how the game primes us to be nostalgic by promising access to these characters’ own nostalgic interiorities, making their pasts visitable and musically audible spaces. In FF7, especially compared to Remake (discussed below), children are treated at a distance, and childhood is a time and place the characters dream of. In large part, this nostalgia for the past is communicated in music: two of the most beloved tracks of the game, Aerith’s and Tifa’s respective themes, are introduced during moments of narration, of looking back and telling, and specifically in sharing childhood memories. Watching and listening to characters in FF7 as they divulge their own pasts grants us musical access to these interior spaces, providing a model for the kind of nostalgic travel that we perform in playing this game.

“Tifa’s Theme” is one of the most popular tracks in the game, despite appearing in only one scene in this long game (the track’s melody appears reworked in “The Planet’s Crisis,” which accompanies the game’s final cutscene). In a synoptic feminist reading of different character themes in Final Fantasy, Thomas B. Yee has recently read “Tifa’s Theme” as typical of the highly gendered nature of character themes. He observes that themes for male characters tend to deploy heroic melodies and brass and drum instrumentation, while themes for female characters (like “Tifa’s Theme”) are more consistently lyrical and romantic, with emphasis strings and wind instrumentation.¹⁴ These musical patterns, in Yee’s argument, reinforce preset sexist notions of male characters as active agents and women as passive objects in stories. Yee’s analysis is comprehensive and persuasive, but I will argue that “Tifa’s Theme” can also be heard to function somewhat differently as sounding nostalgia and memory. This is important partly because part of Yee’s argument, building on the work of Rebecca Fülöp on similar tendencies in film, suggests that these clichés work to deny their characters of interior life.¹⁵ “Tifa’s Theme,” in its musical features, can works as a sounding emblem of interiority, as the musical accompaniment for the first act of remembering in FF7.

“Tifa’s Theme” appears early in FF7, as the player leads Cloud to Sector 7 after the successful bombing mission that opens the game, where he reunites with his childhood friend. The location where it begins to play, Tifa’s bar “Seventh Heaven,” is itself notable for its cozy, nostalgic ambience, warmly lit and boasting an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner (this jukebox, as we will see, will become important for Remake). The theme contrasts strongly with the soundtrack up to this point, which largely reflects the impersonal, austere elements of the game’s dystopian setting. In the track “Mako Reactor,” for instance, which plays inside one of Shinra’s power-sucking plants, antiphonic, off-kilter synthesizers churn out a distorted melody, over what sound like the clipping of helicopter wings and a slogging beat, capturing the densely oppressive, metallic atmosphere of Midgar. “Tifa’s Theme,” by contrast, is songful and inviting. The contour of the B section’s melody, probably the most distinctive motivic element of “Tifa’s Theme,” suggests both reticence and gradual revelation, as the melody doubles back on itself after each ascent (Example 2). Its arpeggiated chords and melody unfold slowly, suggesting quiet and intimate disclosure, and harmonization of the melody in parallel sixths and thirds makes it especially warm, giving it a personal quality that is bound to draw a player’s attention the first time it plays.

“Tifa’s Theme” plays as Cloud and Tifa recount a moment they spent together years ago, just before Cloud left their hometown in hopes of becoming a hero. The scene is one of the game’s more iconic, despite (or, perhaps, because of) its generic nature, which veers predictably into the damsel-in-distress trope, as a young Tifa extracts a promise from Cloud to be saved just once. But the scene and its music are also narratively significant because they mark the first time that the game leaps out of its chronological frame, making it the first of the game’s many flights of memory. As the flashback begins, the screen changes from an overhead shot of Tifa and Cloud talking in her bar, to a shot of their younger selves, backset against a night sky. Adult Cloud and Tifa remain in the frame as the narration begins, literally watching it with us (Figure 1). The script makes this explicit as Tifa says to Cloud (and the player), at the beginning of the flashback: “Look, the well.”

This is a confusing imperative, but it is given musical credence. The memory’s transition from the present and back is made seamless by “Tifa’s Theme,” which continues to play before, during, and after this scene. This is, in fact, unusual in the game this way—most flashbacks involve more musical cues, marking the past as a different place. Here, though, in this critical first instance of memory, the music’s continuity integrates the past into the present, marking this memory a space to which we (and the characters) can escape instantly. The music continues after the flashback ends, as the player grows more familiar with the area and learns more about the world. The effect is that the memory seems to linger, coloring the world in its present and offering depth, suggesting (but, crucially, not fully disclosing) an emotional beyond to these characters that persists into the game’s present.

“Aerith’s Theme,” another beloved track from FF7, operates in a more complex way, involving several layers of musical and narrative memory. “Aerith’s Theme” reorchestrates and thereby recalls an earlier track, “Flowers Blooming in the Church.” This track, even more than “Tifa’s Theme,” contrasts with the musical world of Midgar. “Flowers Blooming in the Church” first plays during their meeting, as Cloud crashes through a church roof and into the improbable safety of Aerith’s flowerbed. The track becomes closely associated with Aerith in her conversations with Cloud during the first part of the game, and plays in the locations most closely associated with her: the church and her home. Its sparse texture, with only three discreet instrumental sounds, repetitive accompaniment, and slow harmonic rhythm, offers unparalleled tranquility, as much as Aerith’s character in writing and design seems to offer respite from the gloom of the slums (Example 3). It is, despite its frequent appearances, never interrupted by battles—this music signifies safety, lending it a special significance and Aerith herself an implicit power. Musically, the track stages a dialogue between flute and clarinet, low and high voices, against a backdrop of soft vibraphone dyads, suggesting the dialogue of these two characters as they get to know each other. In a detail perhaps too perfect to be coincidental, the panning of the chords from left to right even reflects the light streaming in through the church windows where Cloud and Aerith first meet (Figure 2).

The soundtrack’s insistent return to “Flowers Blooming in the Church” allows for a wonderful payoff. After Aerith is kidnapped, initiating the invasion of Shinra HQ that will trigger the concluding events of the first part of the game (referred to in my introduction), the player learns of Aerith’s unusual childhood from her adoptive mother, Elmyra. The last of an ancient race with access to magical powers, we witness important scenes from their life together, as Elmyra narrates them: the death of Aerith’s birthmother, Aerith’s uncanny presentiment of her husband’s own death, and Shinra’s repeated hassling of her as she grew up. Her story is accompanied, start to finish, by “Aerith’s Theme.” This track shares its melody with “Flowers Blooming in the Church,” but the melody is reharmonized and reorchestrated—in an etymological sense, remembered. It would go beyond my purposes to analyze how this itself rehearses a commemoration later in the game, as this music plays after Aerith’s death. What is important here is that because this track remembers another, as Elmyra tells her story, we, too, are made to musically feel the loss that Elmyra describes.

I would argue that it is important not to take theme labeling too literally, as characters’ musical identities and associations are not reducible to their themes. As Matthew Bribritzer-Stull observes, leitmotifs are by nature developmental, and in FF7 as in other works that deploy this technique, they develop alongside characters.¹⁶ This is especially the case with Aerith, whose theme only appears when she herself is absent—when she appears as a participating character on screen in the diegetic present, her music is “Flowers Blooming in the Church.” This might help explain Yee’s observation that “Aerith’s Theme” seems somewhat exceptional among female character themes for its use of brass: “Aerith’s Theme” seems less a theme of Aerith than a theme for Aerith.¹⁷ The essential fact, for my purposes, is that “Aerith’s Theme” marks an absence at each of its appearances—that is, it is already the sound of memory in its first appearance in Elmyra’s narrative. Musically, “Aerith’s Theme” at once amplifies and isolates “Flowers Blooming in the Church”—the music is no longer a dialogue of two instruments, but instead an orchestral outpouring, a lone, yearnful commemoration.

As in “Tifa’s Theme,” this episode suggests that the past, as it is presented in the game, is an accessible space. Unlike “Tifa’s Theme,” however, where the music continues to saturate the present after the memory ends, “Aerith’s Theme” is associated from its very first appearance with loss. Music allows us to remember with these characters, such that the game is nostalgic on its first playthrough. At this same time, this memory is, like the rest of the game, ultimately impossible: we are brought so close to the world, that its separation from us becomes all the more pointed, creating intense nostalgia, as we end up longing for a past that is not ours and places we could not possibly visit.

There is one episode that no study of memory in and about FF7 can ignore. When I returned to FF7 on my aforementioned playthrough some years ago now, I approached it analytically and somewhat skeptically. It seems unlikely I will be taken in as I was during my first, obsessive playthroughs. But contrary to my disillusioned expectations, I am surprised by how quickly and fully I am drawn into the game. This is especially pronounced at one moment, where I forget that I am studying or even playing a game entirely and placed into the role of a naïve player: the extensive, half-hour long flashback scene, soon after the party leaves Midgar and sets off into the world, during which Cloud recounts his time working with Sephiroth in his hometown, and how he watched him slide into madness and violence. This scene, essentially an extended act of narration, is one of the more celebrated in the game, not least for its fully-fledged introduction of Sephiroth. But returning to this scene, one important element in its success becomes clear: it lets the player play a memory.

There are several substantial interruptions to this playable flashback, which move from Nibelheim, where the story takes place, back to the scene in Kalm, where Cloud is telling the story to his friends. These reassertions of the diegetic present are musically unscored, and the silence, in comparison to the noisy, dramatic world of Cloud’s story, is incredibly striking: action is in the past, while the present is (as the town’s name bluntly indicates) calm. These transitions back to the present are usually prefaced by dialogic interjections from Cloud’s friends. Their comments give way in the course of the narration, and the final 12 minutes proceed without any intrusion from Cloud’s audience. The silence of Cloud’s friends mirrors and reinforces a process of increased engrossment from the player, as the story escalates with Sephiroth’s final descent into murderous madness. This creates an effective shock when we are plunged back into the diegetic present at the fairly abrupt conclusion of Cloud’s story. In this sequence, music, sound, and story are artfully woven together to create a playable memory.

In a study of temporality in Final Fantasy IV, Julianne Grasso points out the odd fact that the same urgent battle music will play during all battles, signaling danger even when the player has levelled up their character far beyond the point where low-level enemies are threats.¹⁸ In a similar way, FF7’s normal battle theme, by now a familiar disruptive presence to the player, plays whenever Cloud and Sephiroth encounter enemies during this flashback.¹⁹ The player inputs elements of action, further establishing this narrative past as a present (though their efforts are exaggeratedly inconsequential alongside the awesomely powerful AI-controlled Sephiroth). One can even open the menu screen to see an image of a slightly younger, rounder-faced Cloud, looking straight into the camera with a kind of unabashed naivety. Though the player can change almost nothing in the menu, the very sounds of this ludic interface, its familiar beeps, make Cloud’s story something we experience as viscerally present, smoothing over the divide between past and present in the game.

It is not important, for my argument, that the player’s inputs do not affect battles or the direction of the story—indeed, the alignment of the player’s semi-free actions with Cloud’s story is critical to the effect of this memory, in making it the player’s own. Alec Nunes observes in a discussion of musical performance in Nintendo’s The Ocarina of Time that musical performance in that game occurs “in a space between the input of players and Link’s musical performance in the virtual world.”²⁰ Similarly, Cloud’s story emerges at the threshold between player actions and Cloud’s virtual story. We are made at once Cloud and his audience, receiving his story from him while enacting it from his perspective. Most critically, the flashback extends the scope of the game massively, opening up the past as a space to which we have direct access. As Cloud’s story finally ends and we are plunged back into the quiet present, this past is also revealed as a future destination, a place to which we will travel. By the time the party reaches Nibelheim in the diegetic present of the game’s story, it is already a place of myth, and arriving there for the first time is, as often in this memorable game, revisiting. The structure of the game, with this key incident early on, is such that in playing it we are returning to the past.

And, indeed, the game returns to this scene several times—and with good reason, as details in Cloud’s story do not make sense: why is his childhood friend Tifa completely unfazed to see him in this memory? Why does he vaguely say his mother “died a few days later,” seemingly unconnected from Sephiroth’s burning of the town? This story turns out to be a lie—at least, in a key detail: Cloud was not telling it entirely from his perspective. He was one of the uniformed, thereby faceless, Shinra soldiers, an NPC portrayed as without character. Tifa did not know he was there and was not speaking to him. Brilliantly, in the original version of this story, as Cloud tells it to his friends in Kalm, Sephiroth suggests that one of these two identical characters is not worth looking for after one of them disappears in a fall. Whether this abandonment is a despairing projection of Cloud’s insecurity or an indication of Cloud’s real insignificance is an ambiguity the player may ponder.

Writing about Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Carolyn Abbate makes the compelling point that Wagner’s music, rather than the source of transcendent truth, is often the source of misinformation. In various scenes in the Ring, music seems to speak not as a narrating voice but with the characters on stage, supporting their limited perspective or even seemingly endorsing their skewed take on events.²¹ Something similar happens in FF7, as the sound and music of the game lie to the player along with Cloud as they vouch for the veracity of his story. One might read Cloud’s lie as a metaphor for memory in games. Just as the game promises to immerse us in its depths more than ever before, when even the story’s past opens up as an accessible space, the game hides something critical from us. In Cloud’s story, FF7 does practically everything it can to offer what Gordon Calleja calls “immersion as transportation,” granting the player space to explore the game’s diegetic past.²² At this transportive, immersive moment, the ways the game (inevitably) fails at immersion, at keeping its players longing, are ultimately what make it compelling and worth revisiting.

This is what makes the Remake such an interesting, paradoxical project: in seeming to grant its players the wish to dwell in the game, it risks undercutting the nostalgic longing that makes FF7 desirable to its players in the first place. Remake responds in part by making this a thematic issue in its story, drawing attention to the nature of retelling and remembering—not least, in its music. I will conclude by turning to musical memory in this game, examining how it uses music in different ways from the original but to similar effect, registering the nostalgia of its players and producing it anew.

As indicated earlier, children have a far stronger presence in Remake than they do in the original. In FF7, there are only a few children amid the large cast of characters, and AVALANCHE-leader Barret’s adoptive daughter, Marlene, is the only child character who appears in the section of the game that Remake remakes. Among the many additional characters in the newer game, a disproportionate number are children: alongside Marlene, we have her musical friend Betty, the mature and streetwise Oates, the quirky merchant Moggie, the whack-a-box facilitator Sarah, and a whole coterie of orphans for whom Aerith acts as a kind caretaker—a role, notably, she did not have in the original. This skews the world heavily towards the young, reflecting that to play to Remake—for a certain part of its target demographic, at least—is to return to the past.

The musical themes that have been discussed here are all reworked within Remake, in both its diegetic and non-diegetic music. The non-diegetic music of the game is remarkable for the extent to which the functions of these themes are varied, mirroring the way that Remake itself reinterprets and reworks the game’s story. The “Main Theme” appears far earlier in Remake than it does in the original, playing as Cloud first reaches the crowded Sector 7 slums of Midgar. This music is, by definition, practically the iconic track of FF7, and shifting the music to this point in the game seems to acknowledge this space, prior to the collapse of the plate, as one of the most nostalgic in the game. In one way, the theme functions similarly to how it does in FF7. In both games, it serves as musical commentary on the vastness of the unexplored territory: in the older game, the “Main Theme” first accompanies players as they venture into an unfamiliar, open landscape, while in Remake, it plays as they walk through the vastly reworked and expanded town within Midgar. But in another, more immediate way, the theme is deeply nostalgic and familiar, recognizable to even casual players of FF7 for its prominence in the game, making it a potent symbol of return. The “Main Theme” thus paradoxically functions as a familiar sound for the sensation of a new experience. Deploying it early in the game reflects that Remake allows access to a space that is at once familiar and new.

Variations on “Aerith’s Theme” appear at many points throughout Remake, generally blurring the clear distinction FF7 makes between “Flowers Blooming in the Church” and “Aerith’s Theme.” Her associated music, more than the other pieces examined here, generally functions similarly to how it does in FF7. Early in the game, when Aerith first joins the player’s party, her theme alternates with “Under the Rotting Pizza,” which becomes a standard battle theme for this section of the game, highlighting (as it does in FF7) the safety associated with her music. Her eponymous theme appears during Elmyra’s story in Remake, but it is drastically rearranged, cutting back the dense tutti orchestration and brass, perhaps for the practical reason that a voice actor would have difficulty competing with this track.

“Tifa’s Theme,” on the other hand, presents one of the most significant and meaningful reworkings of any music in Remake. The theme appears in several scenes involving the character throughout the game, including in a sweeping orchestral arrangement during a tearful encounter with Cloud, where it fulfills the kind of romantic potential Yee’s feminist analysis predicts. But another, more interesting variation of “Tifa’s Theme,” “Smash ‘Em, Rip ‘Em,” appears during an earlier episode, as she, Cloud, and Aerith infiltrate the mansion of Don Corneo, a depraved womanizer and crime boss who Tifa correctly believes has information about Shinra’s plans to drop the Sector 7 plate. In this track, which plays as Tifa and Aerith wreak havoc on Corneo’s goons, the undulating phrases of Tifa’s melody and its characteristic move to b♭ appear on piano, above a tapestry of driving ostinatos, heavy electronic drums, and dynamically churning synth-pop sounds (cf. Example 2). The increased tempo and pounding beat give the theme a newly extroverted, energetic character, suggestive of action. Sean Atkinson observes an analogous musical transformation at work in Uematsu’s soundtrack for Final Fantasy IX, when a heroic, martial variant of Princess Garnet’s signature theme “Eye to Eye” plays as she swings off a tower to evade a pursuer.²³ In Remake, “Smash ‘Em, Rip ‘Em” similarly varies Tifa’s theme to underline her agency in the story, as she puts herself at risk to extract information from the Don (though, oddly, the player controls Aerith, not Tifa, as the track plays). Notably, “Tifa’s Theme” does not appear in the original game at this point, despite her prominence in the story at this moment. The music thus manages to be at once nostalgic and gently corrective, turning Tifa into an agent in the story—which, indeed, she is in the original, as well.

These examples, particularly the “Main Theme” and “Tifa’s Theme,” indicate the extent to which Remake’s music emphasizes change, reinterpreting the game broadly even while it promises to satisfy the longing FF7 instantiates. The game’s diegetic use of music presents a still more unusual approach to nostalgia, but one that resembles the original game in some ways, producing a similar kind of nostalgia by different means. Stefan Greenfield-Casas has noted the extent to which Square Enix, more than other major game studios, has used music as a marketing tool, expanding the world of its games through purchasable musical collectibles.²⁴ In Remake, this practice refracts back into the game itself: arrangements of tracks from the original game are represented as in-game commodities, which can be found throughout the world or bought at shops, alongside the classic potions and phoenix downs. Each track has album art, viewable when it is bought or selected in the inventory menu, revealing the commitment to making these tracks resemble real, tangible discs. The first of these jukeboxes appears in Tifa’s bar, which, as we have seen, is the site of the game’s original scene of nostalgia and memory (Figure 3). A darts minigame strategically located next to the jukebox invites the player to linger in earshot of the music, basking in the bar’s cozy ambience. It would be difficult to find a more literal, painstaking fulfillment of Goetz’s “wish to dwell within the game’s inaccessible reaches” than this.²⁵

But for a game that grants its characters remarkable powers—swinging unwieldy swords, casting powerful spells, and all but flying—simply listening to music proves strikingly difficult. The music is playable only from the few jukeboxes scattered in the world, and their sound projects only in the immediate vicinity of the machine. In order to listen to these elaborate tracks in full, one must station Cloud next to the music as it plays, and even there it competes awkwardly with the non-diegetic soundtrack. In a game with a huge budget and years of development, this clumsiness is fully intentional. This difficulty invites the player to engage with this music on a physical level, drawing attention to its materiality. Can Aksoy points out that in Remake, leitmotifs become diegetic in the game and increase player immersion by reminding players of the original experience of playing FF7 and other FF games.²⁶ I would add that the emphatically diegetic quality of these tracks gives the music an implied scarcity, thereby emphasizing its value within the world and to the characters of FF7. Later, in other locations, if the player does stop to listen to the music, the player is rewarded by Cloud, Tifa, and Barrett bobbing in time. The implication, perhaps, is that this music is valued—perhaps nostalgically so—for them, as well. In this, these discs perform the same function that music did in the moments of memory in the original FF7—filling in the affective world of the game, and specifically in making the past a real place for its players. This implied alignment of the player’s past with the past of the world and its characters is especially important in a game that risks sacrificing (by fulfilling) the openness and wonder the original game provides, as the characters in this game are rendered in photorealistic detail.

Remake preserves the nostalgic yearning of its players in another way, as well, by limiting the ability of the player to explore its richly presented world. While FF7 is not, in a sense, more or less linear than Remake, Remake emphasizes story over exploration of its world to a greater extent than the original game. Remake divides the story into 18 discrete “chapters” with descriptive titles, foregrounding narrative presentation, a division that is not made explicit in FF7 (despite the official outlining of the game into four acts in Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega). Its interface intrudes upon players who digress from the storyline rather bluntly with warning signs, telling the player they cannot turn back or exit certain areas.

This linearity coalesces in diegetic figures in the game. At several points in Remake, paths the player might travel are blocked—to this player, initially very tiresomely—by hooded figures that occasionally attack the party and thwart their plans. But these brooding enforcers of linearity allow a wonderful payoff: there are few moments more shocking in the game than when Tifa, accompanied by a heroic orchestral fragment of Aerith’s motive, pulls Aerith out of a swarm of these figures. The symbolism to any player familiar with the original game is obvious: perhaps Aerith can be saved. While this could in part be viewed as a baiting tactic for audiences—will Aerith die or won’t she?—it also self-reflexively calls into question the nature of the story and nostalgia itself, making players ask what, exactly, this game is, and what it means to them. Perhaps it does something that a remake of a game as beloved as FF7 needs to do in order to be successful: call attention to its own limitations and the limitations of retelling, while also highlighting the expressive, even emancipatory possibilities that nostalgia can offer.

FF7’s impact on video game culture extends beyond the existence of Remake, the praise of YouTube comments, or, for that matter, the exegeses of musical analysts. This game’s following testifies not just to its commercial or cultural success (which would, in some sense, be a tautology), but to nostalgic qualities intrinsic to its text. As I have argued here, FF7’s persistent presentation of memory as an accessible space within its story makes the game nostalgic, even on first playthrough. Above all, FF7’s music grants these interior depths and memories tangibility, offering a representation of time analogous to the game’s more obvious achievements in graphically representing 3D space. Remake, while catering to the nostalgic desires of its fans, allows for further reflection on the impossibility of return, offering the compelling paradox of newly experiencing something deeply familiar. In the installment so far, Remake deploys the same music in different ways but to similar effect, using music diegetically in the game so that players’ and characters’ pasts fold onto each other musically.

Remake ends where we began, just as our party leaves Midgar, on the edge of what we know to be the world map. The desire for openness, to have full access to a game, its interior pasts and hidden depths, is ultimately one that FF7 and Remake, in their different ways, both offer and frustrate. Remake’s writers seem to acknowledge that longing in the final minutes of gameplay. When asked what lies beyond the final challenge of the game, Aerith’s answer articulates the same desire for openness that I felt many years ago, and that has caught players’ imaginations for a quarter-century now: “freedom, boundless, terrifying freedom, like a great, never-ending sky.”