In 2012, speaking about their 2008 film Speed Racer, directors Lana and Lily Wachowski likened the grammatical possibilities of digital editing—especially with regards to how it interfaces with computer-generated imagery––to the prose of James Joyce. They posited that filmmakers could use modern editing tools to construct a sort of unmoored visual slipstream, eschewing traditional, more staccato rhythms in favor of something openly psychological and free-associative.
Around that same time, Ian McKellan famously broke down on the set of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Surrounded by green screens and tasked with speaking to little paper cutouts of his fellow performers’ faces, he put his head in his hands, wept, and said that this was not why he became an actor.
If we imagine that these represent two extreme ends of a spectrum, the Final Fantasy movies probably land at various points between. Haphazard and hollow, they’re not nearly as enjoyable to watch as they are to think about—as digital art(?) objects, and as inflection points in the ever-expanding Final Fantasy project. The first, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was a bombastic, uneven attempt to take the franchise multimedia; the second, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (2005), endeavored—quite clumsily—to deepen the world and story of Final Fantasy VII; the third and most recent, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016), directly complemented Final Fantasy XV, depicting events conspicuously excised from the game as a result of an upended development timeline.
“A fantasy based on reality.” This tagline accompanied promotional material for Final Fantasy XV as far back as 2007, when it was still being developed under the title Final Fantasy Versus XIII. In context, it referred to the game’s distinct blend of urban and high fantasy aesthetics, though it could just as easily have been describing the visual identity of Final Fantasy as a whole, which had for years at that point been trending toward stylized realism. It’s no accident that Versus XIII’s announcement trailer advertised the involvement of Advent Children staff: both that movie and The Spirits Within were distinguished by their cutting-edge photorealistic animation, and Versus XIII’s commitment to a comparable level of detail was one of the few foundational elements that carried over all the way to its eventual release as XV in November 2016. Several months prior, as part of the game’s disproportionately large marketing rollout, came Kingsglaive, helmed by Advent Children co-director Takeshi Nozue.
As a movie, Kingsglaive is almost entirely unremarkable. It’s a humorless, overlong political potboiler whose scant interesting ideas are all transposed directly from Final Fantasy XV. It stars Aaron Paul as guy 1, Liam Mulvey as guy 2, and Sean Bean as Regis Lucis Caelum CXIII. Peace talks between two warring countries go awry and there’s a lot of discussion about how true power is earned and not all miracles are made with magic. Guy 1 sacrifices himself at the end to kill a huge evil motherfucker with a sword while guy 2 spirits a princess away to safety in his 2015 Audi R8.
The question of how seriously to take videogames—and their stories—is one I contend with often. What standards should we be holding such a nascent medium to, especially when its growing pains are so acutely pronounced? Is its immaturity the fault of developers for not aspiring to more, or of gamers for treating pablum as high art? Or maybe the pablum is high art, and we just need to swap out one thinking cap for another?
A project like Kingsglaive lays these uncertainties bare. The film’s laboriously sober tone and techno-fetishistic attention to detail read more as puffed-up pleas for artistic validity than they do as thoughtful aesthetic choices. For videogames and videogame media, realism—in all its forms—is too often conflated with progress: the more convincingly something can present itself as a reproduction of reality (just, you know, with radial weapon menus), the more legitimate it is as a form of expression.
Yet the harder Kingsglaive tries, the emptier it feels. Its action sequences, arguably the main attraction, are composed not with a cartoonist’s eye for the abstract but with virtual approximations of queasy, hyperactive shaky cam. It’s a disheartening failure of imagination that Nozue’s best attempt at “grounded” direction more or less amounts to tepid Paul Greengrass mimicry; more disheartening still are the film’s lifeless character models, which pass muster in stills but in motion continually reminded me of the dead-eyed CGI sex dolls in Olivier Assayas’ 2002 cyber-horror-thriller Demonlover. There is no exaggeration, no vitality in these faces. They look like what they are: digital marionettes of fashion models being jerked around by a computer desperate to prove itself to you.
Turns out, when you take the videogame out of the videogame, you’re left with nothing.
Over the years I’ve only become more assured in my stance that Final Fantasy XV is, basically, good. Crude and unfinished, yes, occasionally puerile, of course, but for all its lumpiness a consistently affecting, charming thing. If Kingsglaive is a glimpse at what sort of shape XV’s much-marketed “darker tone” was meant to take, it’s quite possible that the game is only good in spite of itself, considering how often it undercuts all that with a bunch of goofy bullshit. XV is not cinema, it’s not literature, and it certainly isn’t real life. It’s a game about eating ham sandwiches and pressing B to fight goblins with your hot boyfriends. It’s a game that, maybe by complete accident, doesn’t aspire to be anything else.
And it doesn’t have to. XV works because you can interact with it. For every limp cinematic gesture the game throws at the wall there are more than a handful of compelling wrinkles in its gameplay. Ignis Scientia going blind is, in a vacuum, just another plot beat; the subsequent dungeon spiking dramatically in difficulty because he can no longer reliably fight at your side is the sort of crunchy narrative design that modern releases of this pedigree are frequently all too happy to flatten (exhibit A: the unbearably glossy Final Fantasy XVI). Even XV’s oft-maligned late chapters, where the open world narrows into a strand of spaghetti and players are forced to arduously fight through hordes of identical enemies using only one character, are uniquely ballsy in their incongruity, and successfully impart a gnawing sense of physical and psychological isolation. Sure, “it sucks on purpose” is one of the cheapest tricks in the book, but I also can’t deny that something sucking on purpose is way more interesting than it sucking on accident.
We should always demand more, of course. Resigning ourselves to schlock (even good schlock, which is, for better or worse, in abundance) is insufficient. There’s no reason why this medium can’t aim higher, no reason why it can’t, in theory, produce great works of art. But there’s also no reason for it to be bound up in dull, outmoded notions of respectability. The best videogames are, profoundly, videogames, impressionist interactive objects that approach reality as something to dismantle, not emulate. The form’s crowning achievement won’t be a vain attempt to produce a playable simulacrum of our world; it will be something radically, unreservedly new. Technology will be its canvas, not its paintbrush.
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Cole Kronman is a film and game critic