Technical challenges, creative solutions

I'm biased, but I'm a big fan of nonfiction that explores the state of genre fiction. Give me a biography of a science fiction author, histories of the repositories and stores or the films that stick with us any day and I'll be a very happy reader. These works examine the fabric that makes up popular culture, and which work to understand the complicated creative elements that inspire fans, gamers, readers, and viewers that ultimately connect us to one another in our shared passions.

For that reason, I've had Aidan Moher's book Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West on my to-read shelf for far too long: and I'm glad that I finally got to it. It's an in-depth exploration of a genre that I know little about, and having read it, it fills in a little bit of the map of the pop culture world that had been cloudy for me while also reminding me of the power that storytellers wield.

I've known Aidan for years – I was an avid reader of his Hugo Award-winning blog A Dribble of Ink when blogs were ascendant in the SFF ecosystem, and he published a couple of pieces of mine during its run (You should also check out his latest effort, his newsletter Astrolabe) – and I've long admired his enthusiasm for storytelling, epic fantasy fiction, and his obsession with pixelated games of the 1980s and 1990s.

We're of a similar generation and temperament, and where I steered off into the depths of Star Wars fandom during my formative years, he took a different path: epic fantasy and video games, particularly the Japanese titles like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Chronotrigger.

I've never been much of a gamer – the one game I really played during my childhood was Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, before getting a bit more exposure to the gaming world while I was in high school and college – so the entire world of Japanese roleplaying games is something I never experienced and to be honest, the plethora of games and lore that surrounds it has been something of an imposing obstacle.

Fight, Magic, Items isn't exactly a guide to Final Fantasy: I didn't come away from the book with more than the basics of what each of the titles are about, but that's not what this book is designed to do: it's a work that contextualizes how this particular style of gaming went from a niche product produced by very small teams of developers to become a domineering forces in the gaming world. Moher expertly traces through the work of passionate visionaries who wanted to push console hardware to their limits to tell vivid and memorable stories for players around the world, going far beyond the linear stories that were available at the time. By giving players choices and options, they unlocked the ability to do what storytelling can do best: build up their characters, worlds, emotions, and challenges in ways that were previously only really tellable in fat doorstop epic fantasies.

A critical element of this is hardware, and Moher explores how the technological advances between console generations helped developers further realize the potential at their fingertips, but also how the limitations that they frequently butted up against pushed their creative juices. At one point, he recounts how artists, working with limited pixel resolutions, brought characters to life in minute detail – finding ways to make them as expressive as possible and thus better connect to players. As the resolution increased, they found new ways to design and utilize their characters and environments. Another anecdote explored how the PlayStation's improved graphics capabilities allowed for better water effects, prompting one developer to add as many ponds and water scenes as they could get away with.

Those better graphics and capabilities allowed for developers to get closer and closer to producing more elaborate and detailed games, but it also came with pitfalls: as time went on, they had to deal with fandoms that came to each game with certain expectations and demands, prompting them to balance that nostalgia against the adventures and worlds they set out to make. Moher does his research, dredging up interviews and speaking with other gamers and journalists covering the field to explore that progression and in doing so, explores how this entire industry came to dominate popular culture today, to the point where an entire generation of creators cite these types of stories as being formative to their own stories.

This is where this sort of genre nonfiction excels, and Fight, Magic, Items proves to be a memorable example: Moher uses this book to go beyond recounting chronology and get to the heart of this segment of popular culture. This is an enthusiastic exploration of not just how these stories are produced, but their impact; how their existence has shaped culture and fandom to explain the world that we live in today.

Years ago, in speaking with the late David Hartwell, he recounted that at one point, science fiction fandom was small enough that someone could keep abreast of the entire field: all you had to do was read 30 or so books or magazines each month, and you'd consume the entire output of the field. Science fiction has long since grown past that point; it's become a galaxy of choices, so much so that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

As we retreat to our own familiar fandoms and walled gardens, we miss out on how all of these different strains of genre fiction, whether it's a Star Wars story, installment of Final Fantasy, story in the latest issue of Asimovs', or latest hit novel, interact with one another in a plethora of ways, colliding and combining to inform the shape of pop culture in the present, and guiding the creative impulses of the next generation of artists, creators, fans, and writers.

Fight, Magic, Items is a solid reminder that creative movements are the unique vision of an individual creator's influences and interests, and while they can start out small, through trial and error, hardware limits, language barriers, and industry trends, they can become the next domineering force that entrances the entertainable.

I'm still not likely going to become a Final Fantasy fan after reading this, or go out and start investing my time and money into old consoles and games. But I do have a Super Nintendo Mini, and it does have Final Fantasy III and Secret of Mana on it: this might be the push I need to at least see what I missed out on all those years ago.