Thoughts on the Final Fantasy 7 remake and the Journey to Punchalla

I played Final Fantasy 7 twenty years ago or maybe even more. Do I care enough about these characters and story to return to it for a remake? Honestly, I remember Final Fantasy 6 (3 originally in the US) better and would play a full 3D remake of that before touching Final Fantasy 7. All the characters in 6 had a cool gameplay gimmick. I never mastered Sabin's martial arts attacks (UP and B or something) but he would definitely be in my party.

For those of you who don't know me well, I play video games these days almost exclusively to punch and kick things with virtual fists and feet. Sure, give me an engaging story, an open world, beautiful sky boxes, but I need to be able to throw some artful moves at the bad guys. Forget your guns, swords, and whatever else. These imaginary hands should be deadly weapons.

Speaking of replacing your hands with deadly weapons, I did play Cyberpunk 2077 recently. I highly recommend it, if only for the joy that I had in ignoring Keanu trying to get me to do things and going out into Night City to punch bad guys as a pseudo-superhero. Though my heroic escapades were almost cut short when I got the "gorilla arms." These cybernetic appendages were apparently pre-programmed to snap the neck of anyone who comes within 3 feet of me (just like that Key & Peele sketch). But I was able to save the super-heroic reputation of my Night City vigilante by installing a simple mod (in my eyes of all places) that made all my attacks non-lethal. Boom. Problem solved. Punch ON!

I've searched far and wide for games that let me be a martial-arts master and fight criminals, or even better yet, aliens on far away worlds, or demons in mythic times. I downloaded Lord of the Rings Online because they added a "brawler" class recently. Completely Uncanonical. "You shall have my bow," "and my axe," ... "and my fists hur hur." I picture Gandalf recoiling in horror. But could it be fun to punch orcs for a while? The answer is no; the graphics are just way too outdated at this point. If I'm going to punch pixels, they need to be pretty.

I considered some of the Korean MMOs that feature a lot of cool martial arts classes and animations. Could I put up with the infamous grinding and pay-to-win microtransactions to throw down some sweet magical science? Not really. One game had a shady anti-cheat install, and another enforced PVP after you reach the endgame. So not much joy there.

At this point, I should mention that I don't like PVP in video games. It's not that I'm terrible at it, though I am. I object to it on philosophical grounds. One of the lenses through which we can see political dynamics in the world comes from the game theory conception of the tension between competition vs. cooperation. While it may be the case that competition may win out in certain circumstances, cooperation is the real key to success in most endeavors in the realms of society and politics. For this reason, I find games that force competition to be philosophically distasteful.

One could argue that my desire for hand-to-hand combat is a quintessential manifestation of the spirit of classic mano-a-mano competition. However, I see it as originating more from the spirit of Kung Fu; my desire is to master an artform in all its aspects and have every movement be a part of that art. It is not merely to win out over my competitor, opponent, enemy, or other. If my drive was of a purely competitive spirit, I would be pulled towards the path of least resistance. I would then say, give me the club, the blade, the gun, whatever lets me win, regardless of the mastery or art involved. But that's just not who I am. In short, I don’t like PVP in most games, and it's most assuredly not because I always lose in PVP. As I've explained extensively, it's because of deeply held philosophical and spiritual objections. I'm glad we all understand that.

I played World of Warcraft PVE through the last few expansions primarily because of the monk class. I get to run around and punch things. But even this has lost its luster. There's really only one sub-class I enjoy and now you're forced to use staff weapons again. And even though you can punch without using the staff, it's always there on your back, taunting you, saying, "you may think you're punching and kicking, but deep down in your heart of hearts, you know that most of your stat power is coming from me." I hate that staff and what it's made me become. I tried hiding it with a butterfly backpack, but it sticks out just enough to laugh at me.

I did enjoy my stint in medieval England in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It took a while for them to add weaponized gloves that let me punch things with Odin's? Thor's? lightning but it certainly raised my enjoyment of the game, even though they were way overpowered. With every encounter, I had to debate whether to sneak around in this sneakiest of sneaky games or just go in and thunderpunch everyone. I like sneaking as much as the next self-taught ninja warrior but those lighting-filled blows are so tempting.

Continuing my spiritual journey to find a sort of Punchalla by punching everything in the universe, I even bought the latest Skyrim money grab - the Anniversary Edition, mainly because it includes some mod that lets you make gloves to punch people. Sadly, there's no new tree of punching skills, and the graphics are still 10 years old so I don't know if I have the endurance to sit through all those conversations for the Xth time.

I am tempted to replay the best DLC though, in which you get to revisit the updated locale of Morrowind and explore weird other-worldly libraries of some Lovecraftian demigod. The best part of Skyrim is ironically not in Skyrim. So, are the punch-punch gloves enough to tempt me to trek all the way across the frozen wilderness of Skyrim to once more set foot on Vvanderfell and punch Dagoth Ur in the face? Now that I think about it, at the time of Skyrim, Dagoth Ur has been dead 100 years? or is it 1000 years? I never remember the Elder Scrolls timeline. Things happened a long time ago, ok? and they don't really matter cause I have dragons to punch. And if they don't break, I will yell at them. 

I am also tempted to pick up classic Morrowind once more. If they released a remake of that with some updated graphics, I would probably jump in. Primarily because of something that my friend Jon once said that's stuck with me these many years. Apparently, the way he "hacked" Morrowind was by making his own fireball spell that had zero range and super high damage. Zero range fireball? That kinda sounds like a fiery... punch. I kick myself for never realizing this back in the glory days of Morrowind. 

I'm currently playing Path of Exile. I return to this overly-bloated ARPG every year or so because there is one item (the Facebreaker or is Facebreakers?) that lets you fight unarmed and I convince myself that this time, and this build, will get me to the endgame and let me kill one of the uber-uber bosses. So, I punch on for a time, testing this ability and that. I get to the endgame and after I die repeatedly, I realize, again, that the game isn't really designed for melee, let alone unarmed combat.

To my horror, I've now picked up a staff in Path of Exile in order to see how far I can get with that. At least, unlike WOW, I'm using the staff to attack. There's no pretense of it being eternally stuck to my back, like some kind of weaponized tumor. But with the staff, the glory of my Facebreaker Marauder in Path of Exile is fading again. I'll be abandoning my builds once more to head out into the video game wilderness.

Do I go back to Destiny 2? You can sort of punch things in that game, but only once in a while, and it's really about shooting things. It wears on me like much of the modern world, stuck in what's popular, what's understood, what's cool, instead of exploring what is really possible and what is weird.

Speaking of Weird, Warframe wants to be everything weird, maybe too much. A kind of MMO/Shooter/Fighter game where the story barely makes sense and all the names are pulled from the dreams and nightmares of an emergent AI overmind. You can punch things in Warframe, even though the fist and feet weapons are a bit underpowered. The thing is it's very grindy and so very opaque. I once, without realizing it, killed a special mob in a normal mission, which, again unbeknownst to me, started to grow into an Uber boss and took over one of the planets of the solar system. Every time I logged in it would taunt me that I could never beat it. I looked up how and it turns out that I would have to find a special combination of mods I didn't know existed, for a weapon I didn't know I had, to try to repeatedly hack the uber-boss and presumably die a lot trying to do it. Also, you get to fly around in space like a giant Gundam mech so there's that on the plus side.

I saw a screenshot once of the dude in Death Stranding punching things. So I downloaded it, but I'm kind of worried I'm not cool enough to play it. I mean it has big Kojima themes all over it. I can just smell the hidden philosophical references and deep thought metaphors. Can I pretend to ignore all that in order to punch a few bad guys? The other thing I know about Death Stranding is that you get a big backpack. I'm not a fan of backpacks. I feel like they throw off your spin kicks even if they can serve to hide your useless-but-mandatory weapons.

I considered playing Red Dead Redemption 2 a few times. Can I make it through the story without ever pulling my gun, just with some good ole Western-style fisticuffs? I already had to shotgun some wolves from the back of a horse so this seems unlikely.

I hear that Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty good. But you only get to play as the most boring character, Starlord. Let me play as Drax at least. He has some moves with those knives. And while knives aren't fists, they're closer to fist than swords. Or Gamora, she's kind of like a space ninja, right? Space ninjas usually slice things with their space swords but at least there's some martial arts involved, right? Just tell me you used a real martial artist for the motion capture at least. Things are getting desperate on the way to Punchalla. 

Maybe the Final Fantasy 7 reboot is worth playing after all? Now that I think about it, one of the characters, Tifa, is a devoted martial arts fighter. Is that enough to keep me entertained? Like I said I don't really remember the story so I doubt it could have been that great. Maybe I unequip every character's weapon and see how long they last against Ultima Weapon? A whole weaponless playthrough? Is that a thing to put on Youtube or Twitch?

I don't know what I'm going to do honestly. So few things bring me real joy in video games anymore. Maybe someday someone will make an open world space opera where future martial artists fight with psychic kung fu against robot ninjas and cyber samurai. Maybe I'll be happy then. But until that day comes, I’ll continue on my road, trying to find that mythical land where every time a child laughs someone throws a punch.