My Game Done Me Wrong

Get the Hell Out Of Dodge

And inevitably, I do. After suffering hours of Midgar's invisible, malingering wound, I want to throw down my controller and play something else - something less masochistic and soul-deadening, a game that doesn't resemble a boot stamping a human face, forever. But while I always want to give up, I never do. It's partly that I know something that the glum residents of the city do not: that there are better times ahead. But there is something else that keeps me going. Even at its darkest, there are tiny glimpses of light - hints that there may be a world out there untouched by the terrible reign of the city.

After a mission gone wrong, I take refuge in an old, decaying church. Though almost all of Midgar is too toxic to support life beyond rats and cockroaches, the sanctuary is filled with flowers. The girl who tends them describes it as a holy place. Perhaps they grow there because it is sacred, or maybe it is sacred because anything can grow there at all. In either case, I'm reminded of a few words of George Carlin's: "I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so effin' heroic." In such a dire place, even to survive requires a sort of heroism. Yes, the city consumes everything and heaps itself atop the rubble. Yes, my friends and allies are dead. But even at its harshest, even against all odds, life persists. It comes down to two choices: I can quit, turn off the game, and become one more casualty of the city. Or I can get the hell out of Dodge.

And somehow - impossibly, miraculously - I always do. A daring rescue and escape becomes a roadside firefight, which ends when I literally run out of road. Midgar's border ends in a sheer cliff, like the end of the world. And in its way, it is: I climb down, exiting one world and entering another - one with sunlight, with ground beneath your feet and without crumbling walls. Once I'm out, the game's perspective changes. Standing in the overworld map, Midgar is dwarfed, becoming a city in miniature beside my enormous sprite. It's at this point that I wouldn't trade those lousy first few hours for anything. Liberated from that miserable place, my trials suddenly have purpose. Here is that world worth saving, and here is that game I love. All that doubt and despair give way to something new entirely: the possibility of hope, and the wondrous sensation of freedom. After all, if I can survive the city, I can survive anything. In the meantime, the world theme has never sounded so sweet.

Brendan Main hails from the frosty reaches of Canada, where the closest thing we have to a crumbling, dystopian metropolis is Toronto. When not climbing the C.N. Tower one flight of stairs at a time, he blogs at www.kingandrook.com.