Summary
TheFinal Fantasyseries is known for its idyllic worlds, evocative scores, and good times between friends who stick with each other to the end, or at least, many of them are. While there are some locations in the semi-connected universe that would make the ideal retirement spots for dream vacations, there are other spots that are less pristine, more dangerous, spoiled, and downright depressing.
For some of these worlds, it isn’t all that bad, at least not for those willing to risk their lives fending off monsters from their loved ones. However, whilehomeownership might be an unbelievable (and unachievable) dreamtoday in the real world, owning keys to a property in certainFinal Fantasyworlds could easily be considered a fate worse than death.
Life in Spira isn’t so bad. There are beautiful beaches, entertainment in the form of regular underwater soccer games, and free funeral rites. And there are a lot of funerals. At any given moment, from any place on the face of the planet, an angry, technology-hating Godzilla can show up out of nowhere and turn a tidy beachside town into a tumble of twigs.
Whether it be death by a tsunami, Sinspawn, or extremely painful gravity magic, Sin eventually comes to every place in Spira in its attempt to keep the civilizations of the world low-tech. Not even those inland can protect themselves, as Sin has the ability to manipulate gravity and can fly over to crush anyone who defies it.
While living in a semi-magical, semi-modern setting looks nice enough, there’s a dark side to Eos, quite literally. When night arrives, Daemons spawn. Anyone nicked by them becomes an evil mist before then turning into a Daemon. Why? Well, Eos is terminally afflicted by the Starscourge, a plague of microscopic beings in the sky that eat light before it reaches the ground. This makes nights longer and longer, turning out stronger, angrier monsters.
Since anyone who becomes a Daemon is barred from the afterlife, it’s pretty clear that the gods of the world aren’t on humanity’s side. The only people with the right gods-given bloodline who can hold off the Starscourge from eating the remaining light (therefore preventing a world of eternal darkness with violent monsters roaming a blind, dead world) are called Oracles, and of course, there’s onlyone of them left.
The world ofFinal Fantasy 16is hostile, evil, and just downright unpleasant to be in. And that’s before even getting to the monsters. In Valisthea, magical power sources known as the Mother Crystals are mined and exploited for profit. Those who can perform magic naturally, the Bearers, are subjugated, dehumanized, and exploited for their powers until their bodies are turned to stone. Maddeningly, for anyone with eyes and empathy, everybody is just okay with it. On the upside, they do have some nice castles.
Since the Mother Crystals are mined andsold off for short-term profit, making even the most basic sustenances of life (like growing crops) impossible, a magical drought called the Blight threatens to drag the already insufferable people and nations into war while also making the lives of the living-battery Bearers even more, well, unbearable.
Everything between the four corners of the crystal-cursed world of Orience is war, death, and forgetting. The four crystals of their world both empower their given nation and enslave its people (turning them into l’Cie), mostly in service of committing atrocities against other nations. Across the globe, children are trained to be soldiers and sent off to be butchered and forgotten. But being forgotten after death isn’t just a product of Type-0’s cold and uncaring society.
Those under the crystal’s influence are cursed to forget their dead loved ones over time, presumably so that they do not let regret distract them from their service to the crystals. As a bonus, they live long lives but also lose their emotions and humanity, regardless of whether they complete their missions. The most chilling thing potential homeowners should know is that this dystopic world is ina cyclical time loopand has been reset an uncountable number of times.
Shattered continents, boiled oceans, and scorched soil: it’s not called the “World of Ruin” for nothing. By the end ofFinal Fantasy 6, even with the mad clown god of magic, Kefka, defeated, the planet doesn’t exactly look scenic or even habitable, for that matter. With the World of Balance permanently tipped over, it’s hard to see how anybody could have hope of survival, let alone hope for the future.
While a few friendly faces survived, most of them tend to be monsters looking for a scrap. It goes without saying that the former World of Balance wouldn’t really make a great place to purchase a house and raise kids, especially since most of the houses in the world were obliterated due to the magical apocalypse or random “light of judgment” attacks, courtesy of one of the mostclownishly-evil villains inFFhistory, Kefka.
Although the latter half of the games in the series have been dark, perhaps the darkest entry of them all can be found somewhere in theFinal Fantasy 13trilogy. Beginning with13itself, Lightning and the rest of the heroes find themselves both despised by the population and enslaved by crystal overlords to perform some kind of task, lest they be turned into immortal, mindless zombies.
The kicker is that their goals aren’t really clear, as they are given through vague, dreamlike visions. And even if they complete their tasks within their time limit, they’ll instead be turned into crystals,effectively killing them anyway. Just the chances of that happening to a random passerby should be enough to steer anyone away from moving to Pulse or Cocoon.
500 years after Lightning nopes out on Gran Pulse after almost ending the world and failing to protect the goddess of life inFinal Fantasy 13-2, Etro, she awakens just in time to watch the end of all things. Due to Etro’s passing (which may or may not have been the heroes' fault), an entity known as Chaos enters the world, destroying what was left of the already dystopian worlds of Cocoon and Pulse. This fragment of the old world has, for the last 200 years, seen no new children born and a shrinking but immortal population.
The world is divided into four: those who worship a false god, those who manically party to forget, a place of ruins that remain untouched, and an unkept wilderness covering old memories. Lightning is tasked (no slave crystals this time, though) with herding lost souls for disposal to begin the creation of a new world (hopefully one without crystals and their overly-convoluted parlance). Nova Chrysalia might be the most obviousmetaphor for depressionin all of video games. There is no good reason for anyone to ever want to put a down payment on a house there, especially considering its fate.
