An almost certainly incorrect rumor.
So this guy I know emailed me a YouTube link, saying he thought I would find the video interesting. Well, I followed it, and it was one of those videos where someone puts together a music video from video game clips. I thought it was pretty good, but didn’t know what the guy meant, so I did some digging and found out it was from some Japanese game with the weird title Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (I mean, how many fantasy can be “final,” but that’s beside the point.)
Anyway, I found a bunch of clips from it, so it has got to be pretty popular. I don’t have a game system of any sort, so I couldn’t get the game or anything, so I finally watched a bunch of videos made from the “cut scenes” that told a story. Between that, and looking up stuff online, I finally figured out just what must have gotten my friend so excited– the game shows a guy ascending as the Fallen Hero! Someone over there in Japan figured out how someone could ascend and put it in a god damned kids game! Hell, after he’s been gunned down he even winds up being pulled into the sky and his body vanishes! Just like I have heard happens with other ascensions!
What? Oh, the guy who originally sent me the link? Well, when I talked to him he denied that he knew what I was talking about. He claimed that he just thought I would be interested in seeing how far game graphics have come, and that he thought that the facial expressions were really well done. I think someone must have gotten to him.
That’s nothing.
My kid — yeah, I know, me with a kid, right? — my kid’s playing this game about some plumber who gets stuck in this Otherspace made of pipes, and he keeps encountering ambulatory hallucinogenic mushrooms, man-eating plants, and other weird shit.
I’ve been looking around for it, but most people claim it’s just a video game, made quirky by the marriage of English and Japanese cultures. I’ve heard, though, that it’s actually based on a real live Otherspace, with entrances in some of the sewers of major cities. There might be one in Brooklyn, or Tokyo…
What’s more than that, magickal artifacts are really common there, and the currency of the land is fucking gold. How rich and powerful could a duke get by going there?
I wound up getting into the story for Crisis Core, and at some point it occurred to me that, since UA is about people obsessed with their own view of how the world works, someone in the Occult Underground might see the protagonist’s death and his being pulled into the “Lifestream” shortly thereafter as some sort of an Ascension. (That and the game’s plot is a classic telling of someone dying for their values.) Since I figured people in the Occult Underground probably didn’t spend much time sitting around playing video games, I had the image of someone telling a guy he hadn’t seen in a long time about a clip from a fairly recent game, and the guy taking it all the wrong way because, in the meanwhile, he’d gotten obsessed with magick….
Unfortunately for Final Fantasy, integrating game play and storytelling still hasn’t arrived, but with CC:FFVII they got close enough to really annoy me! :-/