Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake play host to the two biggest video game cities of 2020: Night City and Midgar respectively. These fictional metropolises each have their own unique charms and horrors, but Cyberpunk and Final Fantasy 7 draw on a similar, complex pedigree of influences that are intrinsic to their common ethos.
Both Cyberpunk and Remake begin on a similar note and share a certain rebellious anti-corporate sentiment. Even though one title relies on cybernetics and the other upon magic, both titles can comfortably be considered works of punk fiction. And the key ingredient that enables that genre is their setting. The two games have more in common than Cyberpunk has in common with CD Projekt Red’s prior open-world game, The Witcher 3.
Crime is an obvious ingredient in Cyberpunk, but it also factors into Final Fantasy 7, with slums that must be policed by mercenaries and gangs. The gang-ridden megacity is a trope that appears in many crime-oriented games, and its inspirations stretch all the way back to the early days of the industrial revolution. But most modern and futuristic crime-ridden cities in fiction, from Blade Runner‘s grim vision of Los Angeles to Batman’s supervillain-saturated Gotham, share a hugely influential template drawn from a specific time and place in history.
In the mid-1970s, New York City could be a genuinely dangerous place to live and visit. Street crime was on the rise, exacerbated by a prolonged police union’s strike. The city was gripped with fear over the Son of Sam serial murders in the summer of 1976. And when the city was hit with a catastrophic, day-long power outage one year later, everything came to a head. Riots, looting, and arson erupted across the boroughs. The result was a world that looked more like Batman’s Arkham City than the New York of today. That single summer provided the basis for 80s films like The Warriors, Escape from New York, and their influence, in turn, can be seen in early works of cyberpunk.
Blade Runner‘s take on LA, and the megacities described in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, were both shaped by NYC in the 1970s yet it still remains a vital touchstone for contemporary games like Cyberpunk, Final Fantasy 7, and Microsoft’s newly announced cyberpunk game, The Last Night. And those crime-ridden fictional locales played a major role in switching the sci-fi paradigm from the optimistic futures of the 50s and 60s to something grim and dark.
There’s another crucial ingredient in this cocktail. Gibson’s early cyberpunk writings thoroughly explored the idea of the megacorp; multinational companies with unchecked power that are too big for the government to police. Between the gangs and the unchecked capitalist superpowers, one can easily see how other creatives would come up with locales like Midgar, ruled by the tyrannical and at times comically evil Shinra Electric Company, and Night City, under the thrall of the ethically bankrupt Militech and Arasaka.
Both Night City’s vision of our future and Midgar’s futuristic world have an oddly dated quality to them. For all their musings about urban decay and dystopian corporations, both worlds are technologically optimistic, featuring advanced cybernetic prosthetics, gravity-defying vehicles and robotics, and more metal architecture than practicality would ever permit.
Much of this techno-optimism was drawn from the neon-lit soaked streets of Tokyo and Osaka. In the 80s and 90s, Japan was fetishized as a bright vision of a global future that never really came to pass, much like Gibson and Ghost in the Shell‘s early conceptions of cyberspace, and their speculated political trajectories shaped by Cold War paranoia. Both Cyberpunk and Final Fantasy 7 express nostalgia for this imagined futures that never came to pass. Kanji rendered in neon and video screens has become visual shorthand for future-punk, be it cybernetic or magical.
Despite these commonalities, both cities have their own feel, and tell very different stories. Ultimately, this distinction boils down to presentation more than themes and appearance.
Night City is, from its graphical renderings to its mechanics, the more realistic city. Players are free to take V where they will and make choices that blaze their own personalized narrative, right down to choosing one of three distinct life paths. They can buy vehicles, change the radio stations on said vehicles, interact with street vendors and passersby, and flee law enforcement after breaking the city’s laws. That kind of freedom and accountability for choices are absent from Final Fantasy 7. Its pacing is more restrictive; its framework more artificial. As a result, Night City is the more immersive playground for protagonist-driven roleplaying.
Final Fantasy 7 gives players a guided tour of Midgar. There are points in the story, like Remake’s stellar Wall Market sequence, when Cloud and his allies are free to roam parts of the city to their hearts’ content. There are just as many areas that players can only visit once via linear progression, and while there are radios playing tunes from the world of Gaia, and talking heads on television screens decrying the evils of Avalanche, Midgar lacks the same, ever-present media ecosystem that pervades Night City.
That is not to say Remake is inherently inferior, however. What Midgar lacks in freedom and immersion, it makes up for with curation and ensemble characterization. Shinra’s board of directors are less logical and more explicitly evil than the ever-pragmatic Arasaka and Militech, but that seemingly reductive presentation is calculated to ensure players absolutely hate Shinra. Similarly, your party members in Final Fantasy 7 are shown in a more authorial fashion; again, fewer choices, but a more focused, calibrated experience to precisely affect the way players perceive those characters. The way hither-to-anonymous fixers contact you in Night City feels legit for that game’s framework, but there is less time devoted to developing the game’s larger cast.
Again, there are too many weird and wonderful influences to comprehensively chart what makes Midgar and Night City what they are. The now-demolished Kowloon Walled City, the telegraph-savvy street gangs of Victorian London, and countless other works of fiction all come into play. But that heritage of bricolage is what makes both cities such striking destinations for storytelling and gameplay. And the games’ distinct presentations demonstrate just how versatile a similar setting can be.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake is available now for PlayStation 4. Cyberpunk 2077 is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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