Echoes Rebounding Across the Pacific: The Formation of Blackness in Final Fantasy VII and its Fandom

During the mid-1990s, video games transitioned from 2D to 3D, and, in the process, took on more filmic properties that encouraged their developers to turn to cinema for inspiration. While films helped designers achieve momentous innovation in gameplay mechanics and graphics, they simultaneously introduced problematic tropes into video games that have haunted cinema since its conception. Indeed, what were once considered to be classic movies like Gone with the Wind are being reanalyzed for their Black stereotypes, and video games deserve the same treatment because of their close relationship with film and their destructive real-life consequences for people of color. By centering the paper around Final Fantasy VII (1997), a groundbreaking game held in as high regard by gamers as Citizen Kane is by cinephiles, the process of the representation of its Black characters is revealed and points to a widespread issue of stereotyping that is still present in the gaming industry today. Additionally, using Final Fantasy VII as a case study demonstrates the osmotic cultural relationship between Japan and America that amplifies these stereotypes during the tumultuous process of translation and localization. The intertwined histories of racism in both countries suggest that the Black stereotypes in Final Fantasy VII are not strictly the blame of one country, and points to the need for developers on both sides of the Pacific to include Black voices and creators in their practices. Finally, because games such as Final Fantasy VII are still recognized as Japanese products by gamers in the West, some of these players indulge in a campy appreciation of the stereotypes that results in their recirculation in fandoms. Indeed, these gamers believe these stereotypes are solely the result of Japanese ignorance, and so they dissociate them from the systemic racism in their own home countries. Thus, they effectively scapegoat the ‘Other’ to freely laugh at characters that turn just Black anger into a punchline.