CW: Brief mention of sexual assault and prostitution in the game
So, I’ve written about video games a bit. One of my favorite posts that I’ve written (and one that seems to have the most views on here) was about me playing Skyrim and helping discover my gender identity through playing as a female character. I’ve also talked about the possibility of Samus from the Metroid games being trans, and the unfortunate reaction from the gaming community upon hearing this news. Recently, there’s also been a lot of talk about things like Guild Wars II featuring an openly trans character (even if she is just a minor NPC) and this awesome trailer for the new Zelda game featuring Link wearing a dress. It’s been a long time coming, but the gaming industry is finally taking notice of trans people, and queer people as a whole, and is slowly but surely including more positive representations of gender variance in their games. But there was one game that, for me, did all that nearly 20 years ago, and made such an impact on my perception of myself that I am still talking about it today. And that game is Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997, for the original Sony Playstation (remember that old thing?) and it is widely considered one of the most important and influential video games of all time. The Playstation had just been released two years before, and game developers were still testing the waters of what virtual entertainment was capable of in three dimensions. Prior to FFVII, most games had a pretty straightforward story of saving the princess and/or defeating the Big Bad, with little in the way of plot twists or character development. Even the Final Fantasy series, which was already the signature series of Japanese roleplaying games, had generally not expanded beyond a generic Medieval European Fantasy(TM) popularized by games like Dungeons and Dragons decades before. And well, they all looked like this:
Well, Final Fantasy VII did away with all that. I remember popping this into my Sony Playstation and absolutely being blown away from the first ten seconds of the game. Gone were the flat 2D sprites of yesteryear, replaced with jaw-dropping full motion video and gorgeous backgrounds that looked just like the set of a modern day action movie. No longer were you a knight or a mage in a wannabe Tolkien story; this game had you as a super-soldier named Cloud fighting an evil corporation in a sci-fi dystopia not unlike the world of 1984 or The Hunger Games. And oh my god, the characters! They actually had memorable personalities, that grew and developed over the course of the story! They had dialogue that went beyond mere exposition and revealed a lot about their own lives and the role they played in the world they lived in! I honestly think that this game had a similar effect on how we perceive our entertainment as The Wizard of Oz or Star Wars did to movies: once you got a true sense of what was going on, you knew nothing would ever be the same again.
Needless to say, this game was like crack to my childhood brain. I remember spending hours down in my parents living room playing it, practically wearing out our old 1970’s TV and giving myself eyestrain headaches as I got immersed in a fantasy game unlike anything I had ever seen. Pretty soon, I was spending my math classes doodling Buster Swords in my notebook and eagerly awaiting the end of the day so I would have time to go home and play. And as I slogged through the truly epic mindfuck of a game, involving everything from ancient aliens who caused the genocide of a civilization to the death of a major character (whose last scene was probably the only part of a video game ever to make me cry), there was one plot element that really stood out for me. I don’t think the game developers even thought much of it, and probably used it to play for laughs, but the crossdressing scene of this game lit a fire inside me and helped me come just a bit closer to accepting my identity as a trans woman.
For those who haven’t played the game or are maybe forgetting a comparatively minor plot element in a game that was released the same year the Spice Girls were at the top of the pop charts, I’ll recap. Fairly early in the game, there’s a scene where Cloud, the protagonist, has to break into this guy called Don Corneo’s house in order to rescue his childhood friend Tifa. Now, Don Corneo is, in no uncertain terms, a complete sleazeball. He runs a brothel in the local slum and every night, he picks one of his most beautiful prostitutes to sleep with him for a not insignificant lump of cash. (Lovely thing to see as a kid!) Cloud, as a male, can’t get in, but his fellow party member Aerith comes up with the ingenious solution of dressing him up as a woman to help rescue Tifa. (Why Aerith can’t just go in and rescue Tifa herself, or how Tifa could get captured in the first place considering she can kill a dragon with her fists is beyond me.)
So you have to go through the city and do various mini games to get everything to turn Cloud into “Miss Cloud”. There’s one part where you have to do more squats than a couple meatheads at the gym to get the best wig, and another incredibly disturbing scene where you unwillingly end up in a hot tub with a bunch of shirtless dudes in order to get some silky lingerie (it’s strongly implied that these are predatory gay men committing some form of sexual assault). If you get everything that’s required in the game, then not only do you get access to Don Corneo’s fuck lair, but he even chooses Cloud as the most beautiful woman over Aerith and Tifa!
Although I wasn’t entirely sure of why at the time, I loved this scene. I loved it so much that after beating Final Fantasy VII, I would literally play the game over and over again just to get to this scene and then stop almost immediately after. It was a little piece of forbidden fun: since I was never allowed to play with Barbies or other girlish toys growing up, I reveled in the opportunity to express my feminine side in a traditionally “masculine” piece of entertainment. I loved the idea of this tough soldier wielding a gigantic sword suddenly slipping into a purple dress and blowing everyone away. And of course, I loved imagining myself in Cloud’s position, dressing up “just one time” and just looking absolutely gorgeous while doing it. Eventually, that idea, of wearing a beautiful purple dress and dropping jaws everywhere I went, became less of a *final* fantasy and more of a reality.
So, is FFVII supposed to be a revelatory piece of entertainment, a beacon of hope for trans gamers on their path to acceptance in the world at large? Well, not exactly. As iconic as this part of the game is, it is only one scene, and it’s mostly played for laughs. Cloud is obviously uncomfortable with his predicament the entire time, and the scene involving the shirtless guys is all sorts of problematic (god, I hate that word). And sadly, there’s a lot of other very un-PC missteps the game makes, such as having the only black guy speak entirely in curse words and sport a Mr. T-esque mohawk.
But despite all the awkward implications and not really representing crossdressers or trans people in the best light, I still think this scene was a really big deal. It was the first time I had ever seen crossdressing in a video game, and hell, one of the few times it wasn’t portrayed in an entirely negative light either. Plus, there is something so different between seeing someone present as a gender other than the one they were assigned at brith and actually doing it yourself, even if you’re only doing it with a plastic controller.
As some of you may know, Square Enix has recently announced a remake of FFVII for the Playstation 4, with completely overhauled audio and visuals. We’ve only seen a couple snippets from the game, but so far it looks absolutely incredible. The game was and is great, but many elements of it haven’t aged well, and it will be great to see a classic get updated for modern technology. Thankfully, director Tetsuya Nomura has said he plans to leave the crossdressing scene in the game. I hope that this time around, the developers will use this opportunity to make the scene not only more eye-catching and sexy (come on, who doesn’t want to see Miss Cloud in HD), but more inclusive and accepting as well. Let’s not see it played as much for laughs, and have it make a real statement about how fluid gender can be and how there is nothing wrong with an ex-SOLDIER wearing a dress. Hopefully this remake will inspire a new generation of trans gamers in the same way it lit a fire in me, almost 20 years ago.
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