Midgar, a dieselpunk utopia where the surroundings determine the individuals

As soon as it launched on the original Playstation, Final Fantasy VII became a cult classic in the West, thanks to its multi-faceted characters and a simple yet incisive beginning: someone is trying to poison the world, and it’s up to the players to stop this from happening. Reiterating the ever-current topic of “Nature vs. Culture”, the authors of the game turn the player into an eco-terrorist fighting against Shinra, a terrible megacorporation – a typical cyberpunk cliché – that, armed with Mako reactors and bad intentions, is poisoning the world on which Midgar, capital city and power base of the company, is built. Eco-terrorist group Avalanche together with former member of SOLDIER Cloud Strife attack one of the reactors, by causing the most devastating destruction that the city has ever experienced. The remake of the game, recently released by Square Enix for the Playstation 4, retrieved the original idea and bettered it by focusing the attention on the relationship between the protagonists and the world that surrounds them, and on certain socio-cultural dynamics that, at least in part, were already relevant in the original chapter.

But what is Midgar, the city where the game is set? Midgar is a dieselpunk utopia joined at the hip with Shinra, which embodies the darkest side of an old world entrenched in bad habits, power games, and convictions. When it comes to defining its external appearance, symbolism is key: Behind its retrofuturistic appearance lies a structure that combines the principle of surveillance at the heart of Bentham’s Panopticon with the subdivision of space in Howard’s Garden Cities. The Shinra Building is the backbone of Midgar, on which grow the muscles, which are the sectors where the inhabitants (including the employees of Shinra) live. The population lives on some gigantic suspended plates built around a massive central column. The only physical and ideal horizon is the Mako reactors. Compared to the technical limitations of the ‘90s version of the game, this remake pays great attention to the setting, making the most of the game system in order to offer (at least apparently) a lively, vibrant city, which reacts to the actions of the protagonist.

In its intrinsic contradictions, Midgar does not fail to remind its inhabitants of all their social disparities, every day (and night) of their lives. In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri wrote: “Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars” in order to describe our intimate need to aim for the sky. In Midgar, just like for the Tower of Babel, being close to the sky is the greatest aspiration of all, and it thus divides the world into two separate categories: those who live “above” and those who live “below” the platform. It is difficult to say who came first, the city or Shinra. To draw a parallel with the real world, Rome’s Grande Raccordo Anulare was designed to surround an expansion of the city that, in the end, was very different from the one that actually occurred in the period in which the GRA was conceived: it ended up being incorporated by the contemporary city that has made urban sprawl its most obvious feature. In Midgar, it is true that the Mako reactors and the transport infrastructure divide the city into specific sectors, but, even then, the infrastructure (even if so impressive) was bypassed, incorporated and transformed by the slums.

The difference between social classes is extremely evident since the very beginning of the game. Sector 8, which is where the reactor explosion occurred, is the centre of the city. Wealth is in the air, from the quality of the street furniture, to the elegant facades and the way in which individuals experience this context. The Avalanche is destroying this habit routine with violence, demolishing with a bomb all the beliefs that Shinra had instilled in the population.
With this image in mind, we could draw another parallel between the Eternal City and Midgar: the now demolished elevated section of the eastern ring road (with its pylons and junctions) is similar to the structure that Cloud and his companions inadvertently blow up at the beginning of the game, as an unexpected expression of their actions. All it takes is a sudden change, and all the problems come out: a collapsing bridge splits the “good” district of the city in two, the cops invade the area and set up roadblocks. The only thing that hasn’t stopped, even though in an unrealistic way, is the steel infrastructure that connects the different sectors: although it wasn’t directly affected by the explosion, it is precisely this infrastructure that will provide the eco-terrorists an escape route.

The history of world entertainment has made the overturning of powers one of its strengths in narrative terms. In Star Wars, a rebellion organized by a group of ragtags helps create a new era in the far far away galaxy. Even in Final Fantasy, the characters who attack Shinra are outsiders: they’re poorly dressed compared to the company’s rigorous collaborators, their behavior is eccentric, and everyone is, in their own way, a pariah of the society in which they live.

Midgar is the embodiment of the theory claiming that the external environment determines the life of individuals. “Everybody walks on the tracks” is a line of the Italian adaptation of the game, juxtaposing the presumed freedom of a man who was removed from his native context with the choice (if it can be defined in this way) of the group to follow the path that destiny has put in front of them. The house of this group fully reflects this concept: Sector 7 slums are a hybridisation between the American Wild West of the late 19th century and the sadly contemporary Brazilian favelas. The houses were built with the scraps of the world “upstairs” and the inhabitants are struggling to make ends meet. The sun does not shine here, so it was replaced by huge lighthouses. You can’t even look at the stars, but the impressive Midgar columns and the part below the platform offer the player an equally breathtaking view.

Where there is poverty there are beasts, and it’s in the slums that you meet the first monsters. Those who are used playing video games know that battles play a key role in the overall gaming experience, and that as soon as you spot a non-human character you can be sure that the situation is going to becoming more interesting. After the first “surface” battles in which the predictability of the military allows you to get the best out of it, by exploiting in Sector 8 a horizontal and vertical urban layout that is reminiscent of the American brick cities of the last century, we move on to the “lawless” dumps, where you’re alone with you white weapon, fighting against unknown and deadly monsters. On the other hand, life here seems more authentic. Maybe because part of the story is set in this area, with several side missions that allow you to wander around, or maybe because being with the “losers” is always more fun, this space beats the shiny city centre hands down. When it comes to the technological objects, two sectors are divided by at least two decades, if compared to the real world. And yet, the apparently more underdeveloped one looks more concrete.

Finally, a middle ground between the two areas is represented by sector 7, the “sky” of the slums mentioned above. Always taking inspiration from American urban design, the designers have recreated the typical low-density suburb. This is where the dream of ordinary people dies – in the homes of all the Shinra workers who have managed to move away from the slums (or haven’t moved there yet) but cannot afford to live in the city centre. It feels like a suffocating “terrible normality”, a place in which you end up living standardized lives that look just like the lots in which the little detached houses are built.

In the immense divide and rule society established by Shinra, in which each sector would ideally be equal to the other (and equally well guarded), the beauty lies in the breaking of that normality, in those splinters of insanity with which it will be impossible not to fall in love during the game.