The power of nostalgia

I am fully aware that much of my critical distance gets completely obliterated by nostalgia. I have a deeply nostalgic personality, which is both rewarding and dangerous. So much of what I like is wrapped up in the old; so much of what I consider "good" is informed by the tenets of a long-gone time. I often stop to question whether this is a phenomenon that will continue indefinitely, and whether any current time frame will be something that I'm nostalgic for – but, well, I think I already know the answer to that.

It's a difficult proposition, to remove those blinders to the failures of the past. I, for instance, am completely and totally in love with everything from the 80s and 90s (hence my deep fascination with the games from that time period), and even when I consider those decades in a more broad sense (i.e., fashion, art, music, etc.), there is a hefty dose of embarrassment that I'm willing to forget far too easily. So every time I wax nostalgic over the Super Nintendo or a Tears for Fears song, I am consciously forgetting the rise of Limp Bizkit, the influence of the shoulder-pad as a fashion statement, or the fact that Don Henley was considered a sex symbol.

Yet even these blips do little to dissuade me from my overwhelming longing for these times past. What would have been seen as a major problem at the time is now little more than a cultural idiosyncracy, a lovable foible that has woven itself inextricably to my vision of the past. It should be pointed out that this is entirely based on some ephemeral, personal concept of what these decades meant, coloured entirely by my age. My nostalgia for the trash-culture aspects of the 90s are somewhat understandable, considering that I was just forming my identity as a teenager in the latter parts of that decade, but who knows where the hell my 80s fetishization came from – I mean, I only lived in the 80s for four years, meaning that any idea I have of that decade has been filtered through a similarly-fetishized version of the 80s as propagated by the media of today.

I would say that most people probably find themselves most nostalgic for good times in their lives, and I can see this to some degree. 2006 and 2007 were some of the greatest years of my life – I moved out on my own and finished university, and everything about that time seems Right and Good in my mind. Clearly, there were times when that wasn't the case, of course. But the difference here is that I have little wish to return to those years right now – it's too recent, and I can't separate my current situation in a cultural landscape from that time. Heck, most of the music I listen to is still from 2006.

In my mind, the 2000s, whether they deserve this treatment or not, were comprised of a pervading darkness, a self-seriousness that is now being turned on its head in garish and stupid ways in pop music, and celebrated wholeheartedly by video games. Even though this is a broad generalization, it's still the way I feel, and because of my unabashed nostalgic nature, I can't feel anything resembling nostalgia for this fucked up decade.

What I can do, though, is attempt to recreate the good times of my childhood in a "cultural artifact" sense by relentlessly engaging with the "best" texts of that era, even if I only had a cursory experience with them during my actual childhood. If I did play the things that I actually played as a child, this would mean a lot of playthroughs of the NES game Base Wars, which would undoubtedly make me nostalgic enough to love it again, but would almost certainly be ruined by my attempts at critical distance these days.

Instead, I find myself playing through the entire Final Fantasy catalog, and the SNES and PSX installments have found me feeling especially wistful. Hell, I had never played a single Final Fantasy game until last year. But it connects me to a long gone time, and makes me feel, for a moment at least, like the person I actually am rather than the person I've likely constructed.

This is obviously a dangerous feeling if indulged too frequently. Nostalgia is taken from the Greek and translates loosely to "home ache," meaning there is some pain involved with extensive nostalgia. This is absolutely the truth. Much like how elegy is essentially an empty form (we can't bring the dead back to life through art, after all), nostalgia too is basically meaningless, as we attempt to recreate some idealized past through art. All life is created from the accessing of memories, true, but it's also something we can never really attain. It's a painful thing to realize.

Stephen Keating is probably right in his assessment that Final Fantasy VII is a cliched mess that has deleteriously impacted the development of video games, but my nostalgia says otherwise, and those are difficult feelings to overcome. I still struggle with it to this day, and as a commenter on entertainment media, the fact that video games (especially of the Nintendo variety) play so heartily into this feeling is a difficult thing to deal with. Mario may head out to space and travel around mind-bending gravity wells, but the fact that it's Mario at all (a central figure in my childhood) means that he's automatically left off the hook. I mean, I know that I have taste enough to decide when something is good or bad, but we can't deny the power of nostalgia in those assessments.

I'm acknowledging it up front then, and this is something that too few critics do. I may be trying to recreate a bygone era by playing old video games, and I may be resistant to the (what I still contend are awful) changes that the modern era has brought to games. But isn't that better than having no connection to the past at all? Isn't that better than the cheap and misguided nostalgia for things like the Twisted Metal series, which is being used as a selling point for something that wasn't all that good to begin with (though if you're nostalgic for Twisted Metal, I guess all it is is that your upbringing was very different from mine)? I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want to acknowledge my deep nostalgia for critical purposes, and not for self-reflexive (and consequently in too much games journalism, self-perpetuating) "nostalgia for nostalgia's" sake, something that pervades any discourse about "classic" games ("you want to criticize Game A? Well too bad! Everyone who played that game at the right time has fond memories of Game A – ergo, Game A is perfect.") (OK, that aside was snarky and I basically use the same logic to defend my Holy Trinity of favourite video games: Chrono Trigger, Loom and Ocarina of Time, but, well, FUCK YOU BUDDY THEY'RE MY MEMORIES AND YOU CAN'T TOUCH THEM).

Looking back on my review of Final Fantasy VII, then, I realize that I was probably pretty lenient on that game because of my fond memories of playing emulated SNES JRPGs in my early teens, but the fact that the game produces such an ache in me when I even think about it is something that can't or shouldn't be denied, critical distance be damned. To deny those feelings would be to do an injustice to the things the game does well that maybe it doesn't even mean to. My journey through all of the main series Zelda and Final Fantasy games, then, are clearly influenced by nostalgia, but I don't think that's a reason to consider such a journey invalid. As game critics, we would be remiss not to address those feelings – as long as we don't let them overtake us.