Play it Again, Sam
There’s a tendency I have to refresh myself on a story before experiencing the latest iteration in a franchise. When it comes to film, this might look like watching Iron Man 1 & 2 before the third came out. Of course, with something as increasingly complex as the MCU, it often meant not only the immediately preceding films for a given character, but also anything else that might be related. So before watching the aforementioned Iron Man 3, I also wanted to watch the first Avengers movie. Not terribly involved, but by the time you get to Avengers: Endgame, that’s a lot of films to watch again. So choices are made to maybe watch just the previous Avengers films, Civil War, and maybe some other personal favorites as well like Thor: Ragnarok. It also means that, while I enjoy Endgame quite a bit and think it’s a solid ending to the Infinity Saga, I don’t think I’ve watched it more than once because it’d mean going back and watching everything else that came before it.
Imagine, then, how this applies to video games.
One of my favorite series is Halo. I’ve played the first game a few times just because I like it so much, and then again because of the Anniversary release with the improved graphics. And then again each time there’s a new game in the series because I go back to the beginning and play through Master Chief’s story from the beginning all over again. At this point I don’t even know how many times I’ve played the first game, let alone each subsequent title. There are six games that feature Master Chief now, and each game is around 8-10 hours long, so that’s a lot of time spent playing Halo. I don’t need to remind myself of the plot of Halo anymore, so it’d be easy enough to skip that 17th replay, or whatever it is. But it’s kind of like comfort food at this point – something I know I’ll enjoy enough that it’s worth going back to again and again even though I don’t get anything new from it.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – the second part of the remake of Final Fantasy 7 – is out today. And so, of course, I’ve replayed FF7 Remake. I will say that part of that is because I never played the Intergrade DLC that came out for the game, so part of it is catching up on something I’ve missed. But the larger part of it is certainly that I’m refreshing myself on a game and story that I’m not all that familiar with. I didn’t play the 1997 original game. I’m familiar-ish with the story because it’s one of the most well-regarded games of all time, but it’s also a 50-ish hour game that I only ever learned the highlights of second-hand. Remake is only a portion of that game, but it’s also been expanded and adjusted enough that it still ran somewhere around 35 hours to get through. That’s a lot of stuff to recall. Sure, there are explainers and other mechanisms available to catch up on important story beats, but when the game itself is enjoyable enough, why not just play it again?
If the Final Fantasy games were each connected to each other, this replaying of games would be unsustainable. There are sixteen mainline games now, with who knows how many tie-ins and spin-offs. And being that they’re all big RPGs, that would be hundreds if not thousands of hours to get through.
Recognizing that this pattern exists and understanding it aren’t exactly the same thing though. Sure, there’s some rationale behind wanting to refresh my memory on something that maybe I’m not familiar with. And enjoying something more than once simply because it’s enjoyable makes sense – it's the foundation for the whole home video market, after all. So I don’t think there’s some deep dark motivation behind this impulse to re-experience stories over and over again.
Then again, maybe it’s simply a measure of how invested I am in a world. After all, I just recently watched The Marvels without going back to rewatch anything, so clearly I’m not very invested in those characters, and since the MCU as a whole can change, consequence-free, at the drop of a hat since Multiverse of Madness, the world itself has lost some of its gravitas.
In real life, there’s pretty much always a preceding cause to things. Today is built on innumerable yesterdays, and all of the things that those yesterdays contained, much of it seemingly disconnected or even random. History being as extensive and wildly complex as it is, there’s the same tendency to catch up only on specific, seemingly relevant parts when looking toward the future. Knowing that the “history” of a game is more limited, and more intentional, whether that’s the single preceding game or a series of five, makes becoming a historian of that world more manageable, and rewarding. But there’s also a sense of a more personal connection between the developer of the game and the player than there is as a person looks back at history. Knowing that the developer of a game is excited for the tale they are telling, and creates it for the one who’s experiencing it is pretty cool. There’s a sense of purposefulness, and a shared passion for what’s going on that is largely absent when viewing the events of history that don’t appear to have any kind of connection to one another.
If I had to extract some larger meaning from this tendency to play through games I’ve already completed to prepare for the next entry in a franchise, it might be that my positive experiences in the past and high expectations for the future drive me to try to make sure I don’t miss any little part that builds on what’s come before. It might be that I’m trying to re-experience the intention and purpose that goes into telling a story. Much of what’s come before probably isn’t directly relevant, but finding those things that are is often a treat. It tells the player that the developer – the folks telling the story to begin with – is as invested as they are, that there is a purpose behind the choices made. And so going back through a story we already know might be a way to express appreciation for what’s come before as much as excitement for what comes next. It might be a way of looking for purpose in our entertainment.
Of course, it could also be as simple as we like to experience things more than once when we enjoy them.