July 2020 – Truth in Games

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been playing through many famous JRPGs I missed in the late 90s that people online insist are the best in the genre. I recently finished playing through Suikoden 2, which is often cited as one of the best JRPGs ever. I wasn’t sure what to expect because the original Suikoden was a bit too simple for my tastes, but now that I’ve finished it I can safely say Suikoden 2 is great (it’s basically a fleshed out version of the good ideas in Suikoden 1). It’s a much more grounded story than most JRPGs, with a focus on politics and military strategy over saving the world. As a result, it lends itself well to discussing the morality of war from a Catholic point of view (so some spoilers below, although less than normal).

The overarching plot of Suikoden 2 is relatively straight forward, with the complexities in the details. The main character and his friend Jowy are part of a youth brigade of the Highland military, which is at war with the neighboring Jowston city states.

After a peace treaty the brigade is about to head home when it is suddenly attacked, resulting in the death of everyone but the main character and Jowy. It turns out the Highland prince, Luca Blight, decided to massacre the brigade and blame Jowston to justify restarting the war. The two friends end up pulled into the war on opposite sides, with the main character leading the Jowston resistance to stop Luca, and Jowy ending up one of Luca’s soldiers to try to stop him from within his army. Most of the drama of the plot comes from these two friends ending up against each other due to the circumstances of the war, but what I want to focus on is the Catholic “Just War” theory and the idea that the ends justify the means.

The Catholic idea of a just war (one that can be morally fought) is in the Catechism on paragraph 2039 (here’s a Catholic Answers link that quotes it: https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-a-just-war). There are four main criteria for a war to be a just war:

The damage done by the aggressor must be lasting, grave and certain.
Other ways of ending the war are impractical or ineffective.
There must be a serious chance at success.
The war must not cause greater evils than those being stopped.

It’s actually pretty tough to meet these conditions. For example, World War 2 is only debatably a just war (the first three points are all met, but the last one is debatable when you consider that all sides had no problem attacking civilians). So what about the war in Suikoden 2? I actually think it meets all four criteria and thus would be a moral war for the main character fight. First, Luca Blight is a monster that enjoys slaughtering the people of Jowston. The first thing he does after restarting the war is murder everyone in nearby villages and burn them to the ground.

Later in the game he sacrifices the entire population of a major city to get some great magic power. It is clear that if Luca has his way everyone in Jowston will be killed, thus the damage of the aggressor is lasting, grave and certain. Trying to end the war through peace treaties also hasn’t worked, as Luca immediately broke the treaty at the start of the game. The third criteria is the least certain. Early in the game, it doesn’t seem like there is a serious chance at success, as each city in Jowston is mainly interested in protecting itself rather than working together to push back Highland. The result is that at the start of the war, it doesn’t appear like Jowston can do more than temporarily hold off Highland. That said, the fact that you do manage to win in the end after reuniting everyone means there was a serious chance at success even if it didn’t seem like it at the start. Finally, the main character’s army doesn’t seem to be causing any more evil than the fighting itself, meeting the final condition. Thus, I’d argue that all four conditions are met and the war in the game is a just war. Now that we’ve discussed the war in the game from the protagonist’s side, let’s look at it from Jowy’s perspective and the idea that the ends justify the means.

Early on in the game, Jowy gets captured by Highland and ends up joining them. His idea is that if he can gain Luca’s trust, he can one day stop him from within. To facilitate this, he assassinates a Jowston leader, starves out a Jowston city to let him capture it, helps Luca assassinate the king and ultimately tricks Luca into falling into a trap and being killed by the main character. After Luca is dead, however, Jowy continues the war instead of stopping it because he believes that the war will inevitably restart unless one of the two countries is completely conquered, forcing the main character to continue fighting. Jowy’s entire mindset after being captured resolves around the ends justifying the means. Specifically, he believes some killing now will ultimately lead to a greater peace in the future. The Catholic Church has always been against the idea that the ends justify the means. It is not ok to do an immoral act so that a greater good may come from it. For an extreme example, consider the idea of paying someone to kill everyone as they walk out of the confessional. If you were to kill someone right out of confession, they would die in a state of grace and thus would ultimately end up in heaven, a greater good than the evil of murdering them, but that clearly is not acceptable. For a more serious and controversial example, look at the use of the atomic bomb in World War 2. The justification of its use has always been that ending the war fast would ultimately save more lives than were lost due to the bomb. In addition, you can argue that ending the war fast prevented the Soviet Union from invading and leading to half the country being suppressed under communist rule for the next 50 years. Both of these are good things, but despite that it is still immoral to kill innocents in a war, let alone hundreds of thousands. This is one of those teachings that can be kind of hard for a modern person to take in, as doing bad acts for the greater good was super common in the 20th century and is super prevalent in our media. So despite Jowy’s good intentions, his actions during the game are ultimately immoral.

So there are some thoughts on Suikoden 2 and the morality of the war in the game from a Catholic point of view. I think of all the PS1 JRPGs I’ve played recently, this one holds up the best so I’d highly recommend playing it if you get the chance (Suikoden 1, while not as good, is short if you want to check it out first). I’ve actually avoided talking about spoilers from the end of the game for once so you’ll still be able to experience most of the plot. If you are looking for a much more grounded take on war, I can’t think of a better JRPG.

Song of the Post-

Battlefield Without Light

Suikoden 2

This song actual reminds me of modern Fire Emblem music, so that’s appropriate

It’s been a while since I’ve had any ideas to write about here. I went through all the initial ideas I had in the first few months and none of the games I was playing at the time gave me any new ones. One game that kept coming to mind was Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (the newest game from the producer who made Xenogears) but I dismissed the idea because the game was so long that I didn’t feel like putting in the time playing it to refresh my memory. However, recently with the rerelease of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 on the Switch, I saw a discussion about Xenoblade Chronicles 2’s localization that mentioned how some references to Christianity were removed. After reading that discussion, I decided that maybe I should finally replay the game after all. Well 100 hours later and I can say that was absolutely the right decision, although not for the reason I initially thought. So today I’m going to talk about religion in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and some Catholic ideas that show up at the very end of the game (so MAJOR SPOILER WARNING to anyone who hasn’t played it or other Xeno games yet).

First off, how close is the religion in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to Catholicism? Honestly, it’s not that close. The religion is pretty clearly inspired by Catholicism visually and in terminology, but in practice it’s your standard generic religion found in any fantasy setting. In the game, the main religion is the Praetorium led by the Praetor (basically the pope). The Praetorium is clearly aesthetically inspired by Catholicism with their characters in vestments and their buildings looking very cathedral-like.

In the main plot, you honestly don’t see any religious practices (they really only show up in some dialog with a few NPCs in the Praetorium), but you do get the sense of the Praetorium’s diplomatic role in the world. At one point, Praetor Amalthus steps in to stop a war between the two major powers, Uraya and Mor Ardain. This is kind of similar to the political role of the pope in the real world when Europe was a Catholic society (think middle ages). It kind of makes sense that we don’t really see any religion in the main story, because Amalthus himself is a nihilist. When you get past his facade he seems to think his role in the world is to wipe out mankind (which he sees as a mistake due to events in his past). The little bit of the religion we do see mentioned in the game is that the creator of the world is known as the Architect who lives in Elysium on the top of the world tree in the center of the world. This is where those localization changes I mentioned come into play- in the original Japanese the Architect is explicitly called the “God of Creation” and Elysium is referred to as “paradise.” There is even a myth at the start of the game about how mankind lived in Elysium with the Architect before being cast out in the past, a pretty explicit reference to the beginning of Genesis. Overall, this religion is pretty standard of fantasy games, where there is a visual inspiration from Catholicism but not a whole lot to the religion itself. That said, when you finally get to the end of the game and meet the Architect the most interesting Catholic ideas (in my opinion anyways) show up.

At the end of the game as you climb the world tree, things take a turn towards the scifi (as you might expect if you have played any of the other Xeno games at this point). It turns out Elysium is a space station at the top of the world tree, which is a bunch of plant life surrounding an ancient orbital elevator. The Architect himself turns out to be a man named Klaus, an old scientist who in trying to create a new universe, accidentally wiped out the existing one.

As a side effect, he had essentially become immortal as long as the power source of his experiment was still around (although it is about to leave and cause him to die due to events in Xenoblade Chronicles 1). In a standard JRPG, this is where you would fight Klaus in order to free the people of the world from his control, like you do with Deus in Xenogears or Zanza in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 but Klaus is different. He tells you how he realized the huge mistake he made and how he set out to try and recreate the world using nanomachines he had made to convert matter from the old world into a new one based on his memories. By recreating the world and suffering through being alone for the millennium it took for this process to take place, he hoped to atone for what he had done. This idea of redemptive suffering is a major Catholic idea, seen all over the place but most obviously in the Passion. This idea of redemptive suffering was in fact what kept the idea of Catholicism in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in the back of my mind all this time. That said, when I played through the game this time, something new stood out to me in the ending that has stuck with me for the past few days- the idea of why I exist.

Throughout the game there are two major characters trying to reach the Architect- Malos, the main antagonist and Pyra, one of the main protagonists. They are both Aegises- basically super powered beings that were the first created by the Architect (and in the sci fi reality, they are supercomputers originally used in Klaus’ experiment that were turned human in the new world). The reason they want to see him is the same- they want to know why they exist and why the Architect created them. The game itself doesn’t have a super concrete answer (it just kind of happened as part of him recreating the world), but discussing the idea got me thinking- what is the Catholic answer to why we exist? I knew that creation was good (from Genesis), but I realized I couldn’t come up with a concrete answer off the top of my head for humanity as a whole or for me as an individual. After going back and researching the answer (thanks again to Bishop Barron and Word on Fire), here’s what I found. Humanity as a whole was made for God to manifest and share his glory and that the act of creation was an act of love (after all, God doesn’t need humanity to exist, but wills us to anyways out of love). On a more individual level, every person has a longing within them to return to Him (hense St. Augustine’s famous “Our hearts are restless until they rest with you”), with the specifics on how different for each person (that’s where you get into talk on things like vocation). When I heard that idea of longing to return to God, I immediately thought of Malos and Pyra and how they are drawn to the Architect despite not really knowing why and in their own individual ways. I honestly can’t think of any game that shows the Catholic idea of why we exist better, because in most games the creator is villainous. It really is cool seeing something different like this game that does a good job of showing an idea even if the developers may not have intended it that way.

So there are some Catholic ideas in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I thought it was super cool how the first time I played the game I didn’t really focus on the idea of the purpose of my life but this time around I did. I’ve since realized that I first finished the game in January 2018, but originally started thinking about the purpose of my life and why I exist around February 2018 (just missed it the first time lol). It’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot the past two years, so wanting to know why you exist was super relatable this time around and has been on my mind since I finished the game a few days ago. The result is that I’ve written a much different post that I first imagined when I started planning this a month ago. I guess it’s just one of those cool times where you have a plan, but God ends up leading you in a completely different but much better direction.

Song of the Post-

Drifting Souls

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

The lyrics of this song made way more sense to me this time around

Month: July 2020

Suikoden 2 and the Morality of War

Xenoblade Chronicles 2