Impressions of a Monolith | On Magic's Adaptation of Final Fantasy

I have never played a Final Fantasy game. So I changed that.

Watch the full presentation here

This episode is sponsored by Card Kingdom. Go to cardkingdom.com/studies to pick up all your favorite Final Fantasy cards. From the Commander Variants to the Through the Ages series and an ensemble of sealed products, there are plenty of dazzling centerpieces from this set to add to your collection. Thanks Card Kingdom for the support!

I’m a member of team BASILISK, an esports organization on a mission to inspire scientific research through the study and play of difficult games. I’m honored to welcome the renown and talented Grandmaster Vincent Keymer to the team, our first representitive in competitive chess. Really glad you’re here, Vincent. Thank you BASILISK for the support.

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A Distant Monolith

I have never played a Final Fantasy game.

Actually, to be even more candid, I’ve never been remotely interested in playing a Final Fantasy game. All the windows of possible introduction to the series remained closed to me throughout my childhood – I never owned an NES or a Super Nintendo or even the first Playstation. I was gifted a Game Boy Color in elementary school loaded with Pokémon Blue, and that remained my only exposure to what we’ve now codified as Japanese Role Playing Games. In middle school, I happened upon The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age following the filmic releases in theaters. “This is just like Pokémon!” I said to myself, oblivious to the genre at large, and ignorant to the series that was deeply entwined in the game’s DNA. I loved The Third Age, and in retrospect, it makes me wonder what could have been had I picked up a different set of discs that day at the video rental store.

The Xbox delivered me Halo and Fable, the 360 brought Gears of War and Oblivion and Guitar Hero II. Soon thereafter, I started college and stopped playing video games. Final Fantasy remained out there, a distant world, sibylline and unfamiliar.

When Wizards of the Coast formally announced that Final Fantasy was coming to Magic at GenCon in August, 2023, I thought, “Final Fantasy? Who cares about Final Fantasy?” In the time since, I’ve come to understand that seemingly everyone cares about Final Fantasy, that I was the outlier, that these games are unanimously lauded by adoring fans and stalwart critics alike. Perhaps I was overlooking something special here. In a text convo with my friend Weston, something crystallized:

“watching the 2.5 hr retrospective on every game. do you have a fav?”

“10 is my all time fav. 6 has the best story. 7 for the hype”

“yeah it seems 6 has the biggest fanfare”

“6 is a piece of art canon.”

I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game. Maybe I could change that.

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Where to Begin?

“We were a Nintendo family as a kid, so I’ve only ever played Crystal Chronicles. I’m 29. Do I start from the beginning? Do I play Final Fantasy 1? Like, what do I do? (laughs)” - Eric Halin

That’s the voice of Eric, a viewer of the channel. I invited folks to share their own experiences with these games to help fill me in – memories, confessions, complaints, earworms, whatever came to mind. You’ll be hearing many such snippets throughout this video.

I was in Eric’s shoes at the beginning of this experiment. Final Fantasy, from the outside looking in, appears monolithic, an empire surrounded by an inpenetrable wall. With 16 mainline games and a million spinoffs spanning nearly 40 years of development, plus offshoot manga and direct-to-DVD movies and radio dramas and even a trading card game thrown into the mix, it’s unclear where or how to start. Actually, that reminds me of another game…

Graham Stark, with temperance and insight, responded to my concern: “You can start at any game. They’re all self-contained and don’t require prior knowledge.”

But Graham – accumulating prior knowledge, I simply can’t resist. With some background research, I learned the basics: Final Fantasy is an anthology series, with each game serving as a standalone entry. Recurring themes, such as distrust of the techno-military complex and belief in the unifying power of small-scale rebellion help anchor plot points and deliver dramatic narrative beats. There are gods and crystals and small, rideable ostrich-like creatures called Chocobos. There are colorful settings that decorate sprawling worlds, above which enormous airships glide about. The games’ tone oscillates from lighthearted and silly to dark and severe, with moments of pause and reflection and surprise and joy sprinkled in-between. Love and loss are prominent motifs, too. Mechanically, most of the early games are turn-based with some clever timing twists, while recent entries have pivoted toward real-time combat in line with action game trends at large.

However, more than anything else, the characters and their stories win players over. Final Fantasy’s heart and soul live in its ensemble of rag-tag adventurers who unite together to save the world.

“Vivi’s story in Final Fantasy IX is one of the first things that really got me to think about what it means to be a person back when I first played it as a teenager. And I really love it for that.” - Rasmus Moberg Naver

"One core memory I have is, just, crying my eyes out in the cutscene where G'raha Tia officially joins the Scions of the Seventh Dawn in Final Fantasy XIV.” - Violet Stardust

“I first played Final Fantasy V as a fan translation before it had an official release outside of Japan. And the main character’s name was translated to Butz – B-U-T-Z – instead of Bartz. Final Fantasy V is a great game, and I love the job system, but I will always remember it for Butz.” - Trevor Houts

Right – translation and localization efforts were limited by talent and available memory space on the cartridges in the early years. The first few games were riddled with linguistic quirks and hiccups that have become factoids and in-jokes among the fanbase. Again, this sounds very familiar. The game I chose – Final Fantasy VI – was originally released as Final Fantasy III in the United States. Final Fantasy III – the real Final Fantasy III – was sold exclusively in Japan in 1990, as were II and V. SquareEnix have since organized and re-released these titles in proper numerical order, but video game markets were much different at the turn of the century. For a fledgling software subsidiary, publishing the first game was a huge gamble.

And it took a lot of convincing. The success of Dragon Quest in 1986 proved that RPG’s were in healthy demand in Japan. Using this as leverage, Hironobu Sakaguchi pitched the idea to his skeptical boss, who in turn greenlit the project and allocated development to a small team of five strong. Among them was the young developer Akitoshi Kawatzu, who credits select roleplaying games from the West as their primary source of inspiration. “We were all big fans of Wizardry and Ultima back then. Even though Dragon Quest had come out, it still wasn’t anything comparable to Ultima or Wizardry. That’s the kind of game that Sakaguchi and Hiromichi and Tanaka and I were interested in.” Kawatzu also cited Dungeons and Dragons as the model to follow when designing the game’s battle systems. It seems all roads lead back to D&D, don’t they?

Toward the end of 1987, Final Fantasy was ready for release on the Nintendo Famicom. As the story goes, the game was named “Final” Fantasy because, if it flopped, the company would be forced to close up shop. The truth is that Sakaguchi just wanted a title that started with “F” – he liked the alliteration in Japanese and would’ve settled for other adjectives in the same vein. The first draft “Fighting Fantasy” fell through to avoid trademark conflicts with the RPG gamebooks of the same name. So “Final Fantasy” it became. Needless to say, “final” it was not – Square delivered a massive hit, a sequel came soon thereafter, and the rest is history.

Now, I chose to start at VI, mostly due to the aforementioned endorsement by Weston (calling it “art canon” and all), and partially because I wanted an impression of the series from its early years. It helped that these games were recently remastered and published on the Switch, since I am still without a Super Nintendo, and that top-down, 2-D pixel art will forever appeal to the Pokémon sensibilities deep within me. Nostalgic I remain, not for this game, but for this type of game. Within moments of seeing the title screen and reading the opening text scroll, I was entranced. It had a feeling, a background of melancholy and longing. Based on quick glances of screenshots displaying characters rendered in that endearing, “chibi” style, I was expecting a heavy-handed dose of the bright and fantastic. Instead, I was lead into a cold snowstorm, and a somber walk through “the charred husk of a world, where the power of magic was lost…”

The prevalance of desolation carried through the early scenes and encounters. Roaming mechs patrolled the gray city, toys of the overarching empircal threat. There was a looming unease swirling in an air of worry. It all felt very mature, despite an implied audience of younger people who played the first games. It reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin’s observations about children understanding fantasy stories in a way that some adults resist:

“For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living.” - Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? (1974)

After a few hours, I found a good saving point and turned the game off. But I kept thinking about it.

Meanwhile, Magic was setting up at PAX East in Boston for the debut of their most ambitious set to date. Soon, card previews would begin to trickle in.

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A New Kind of Translation

Jumbo Cactuar is a 1/7 Plant creature for five and two green. When it attacks, it gains +9999/+0 until end of turn with an italicized ability called “10,000 Needles.” This card was previewed on February 18, 2025 during a WeeklyMTG live stream. It was among the first high-profile cards revealed from the upcoming Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy set, and it immediately became a discussion point among Magic fans online. On the one hand, there were those like Gavin and Zakeel in the broadcast who understood the significance of these numbers and chuckled at the sight of them written in a text box. On the other hand, there were those like myself who didn’t get the joke, but recognized this to be, by definition, the strongest creature ever printed. Never before had we seen a power-toughness box reach values remotely close to this.

When games start with 20 life (or 40 at most), Jumbo Cactuar, in Magic terms, effectively one-shots players. If this hits you, you instantly die. When characters have a maximum of 9,999 hit points, Jumbo Cactuar, in Final Fantasy terms, effectively one-shots party members, too. A guarantee of instant death.

This becomes the exercise, a pivoting of cross-comparison between video game and card and back to video game again.

As the team revealed more from the set throughout the presentation, they carefully explained the reference points that guided their decisions in design and invited the audience to follow their logic. Garland, the first boss of Final Fantasy I, returns with a vengeance at the game’s finale as Chaos. His Magic card equivalent is two mana, meaning he shows up early, and has a costly activated ability that transforms him later into a 5/5 flying demon. This is symbolically represented on a double-faced card, a rich mechanic that expresses evolution and change in analog. Emet-Selch, another villain with two vastly different forms, checks for fourteen cards in the graveyard before becoming Hades, Sorcerer of Eld. And why fourteen?

Gavin: “Well, one thing in Final Fantasy XIV is they do a lot of calling out numbers…Final Fantasy has this across the board, and in fourteen there’s a lot fourteens. So, we put fourteen on the card. I told play design – I told casual play design – if we gotta change the fourteen, I’ll understand. But if you suggest thirteen or fifteen, you better have a really good reason for changing it from fourteen (laughs)…”

Summon: Shiva was then shown off, a beautiful elemental from Final Fantasy X and one of Magic’s first ever “Saga Creatures.” Gavin remarked that Play Design tested out a couple of older mechanics in Fading and Vanishing before striking gold with this subtype. Conceptually, these demigod-like entities can be called upon for a brief time in battle – they arrive with flashy animations and deliver game-warping effects, and then they disappear. A temporary visit from an otherworldy force. That same idea can be achieved in Magic by leaning into its phase-based systems. These chapters slowly tick up, triggering an ability as they go, and after the last one resolves, the creature is sacrificed and sent to the graveyard. A temporary visit from an otherworldy force.

As further cards were revealed and subsequently justified in the broadcast, I started to think more about this subgame of translation. I imagined myself a lifelong fan of Final Fantasy with zero knowledge of Magic. In these cards, I would recognize names and characters and maybe minor mechanical details – it makes sense that Garland would fly, for example. The rest of the rules text, though, might seem obscured and strange. I then imagined myself a lifelong fan of Magic with zero knowledge of Final Fantasy – easier to do, because that was me at the start of all this. Here, I would only the recognize the rules text; all else would remain an allusion.

There emerges, then, a third group of players who exist at the center of the overlapping Venn diagram. For them, the entire card is decipherable and understood. Satisfaction is measured by how well the translation reflects the rules and reasoning of each game’s systems individually and when combined. Templating the summons as saga creatures is an achievement because, in doing so, the card becomes greater than the sum of its references in a surprising new form. Clever solves like this and hidden easter eggs like Emet-Selch checking for fourteen cards provide a-ha! moments and huge payoffs to this much smaller in-group, while the greater unfamiliar in the other two camps are left scratching their heads. The central challenge, then, is to appease both parties at their base and maybe, just maybe, create a sense of wonder about the source material on the other side.

My campaign was moving along well. After climbing Mt. Kolts and encountering my first miniboss in Vargas, I was swiftly dispatched and given my first ever “Your party was defeated” end screen. It felt like a rite of passage.

A few hours later, I found myself on board a phantom train filled with ghosts. “We need to get off!” insisted my party members as we moved about the cabins. The encroaching dead were relentless and unforgiving, and before long, we were in battle with the train itself. I knew these games to be whimsical, but I didn’t expect to be throwing blows with a moving vehicle. Less did I anticipate the scene that followed, a sobering moment between Cyan and his family, and the game’s first real punch to the gut. I was beginning to understand what people meant when they talked about Final Fantasy.

Just as well, I was recognizing more and more of the cards coming across my feed.

Locke, Treasure Hunter was given the subtype Rogue – remember, he is not a thief. Edgar, Master Machinist is pictured here with the auto-crossbow in hand, my favorite of his early game weapons. Banon and Gau and Celes are fully realized renders of their low-res sprites, while Search for the Frozen Esper remains forever preserved in pixels. The jester-menace Kefka and his haunting tower is awash in watercolors. I recognized this painting style from browsing the various box arts and marketing materials. The name sounded familiar, too – wasn’t there a Liliana that everyone adored with an illustration by the same artist? Who is this Yoshitaka Amano?

Well, that’s a bit like asking “what is Final Fantasy?” isn’t it?

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Two Titans

Yoshitaka Amano is a living legend. He has worked on Final Fantasy since the beginning, providing character designs and concept art that helped define and expand the games’ settings beyond the screens. His style is described as wispy and layered and dynamic. Saturated colors provide intense contrast against the often-used blank white backgrounds. Faces are stoic. Clothing is ornamental. Subjects are shrouded in mystique. Much like the opening of Final Fantasy VI, Amano’s illustrations evoke a hidden darkness, a disquietude. They are discriminating and sensitive. His visions are not fairy tales – they are portraits of broken places and people who suffer quietly within them. They are beautiful, but full of pain, just as life is.

Amano, at 73 years old, provided four new illustrations on two, double-faced cards for this set. Terra, Magical Adept becomes an Esper, and Kefka the Court Mage becomes the Ruler of Ruin. 20 other cards depict his work through the ages, most of them corresponding to the first six games. The quality of these paintings is self-evident; they are all evocative of a legacy and emblematic of the stories they represent. More than that, they are vivid depictions of the imagination in its purest form. I find myself moved by these images, even without context, even without personal experience with their sources. In them I sense a tremendous sadness, a very human gloom.

Over time, Yoshitaka Amano has become synonymous with Final Fantasy. But he is not alone in this assocation.

Zakeel: “Our next card, in my opinion, is one of the most iconic characters in video game history. He has brought excitement, joy, and terror to millions of fans around the world. Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor and a privilege to introduce to you, illustrated by none other than Tetsuya Nomura, Sephiroth.”

If Amano’s paintings tend toward the morose, Nomura’s, in contrast, embrace the valiant and heroic. His character designs uphold the conventions found in traditional anime: prominent eyes, sharp and aggressive hairstyles, a bent toward the fashionable. Signature accents, as seen on Lulu and Squall, include excessive belts and buckles and black leather. There are lots of vests, too. Nomura’s characters mark a significant departure from the medieval roots of the early games: these are modern people with contemporary costuming. With some luck and creativity, you can cosplay someone like Yuffie or Tidus with a decent wardrobe and a quick trip to the thrift store.

Nomura considered Amano a role model when he joined Square in 1991. His internal ascension was rapid: successful early character concepts included Setzer the gambler and Shadow the mysterious assassin, both of whom appeared in Final Fantasy VI. Within three years, he was promoted to lead character designer for the seventh installment of the series. His task, at the beginning, was to deliver Sakaguchi a hero, a heroine, and a mirror nemesis as their foil. Drawing influence from the rivalry between two legendary swordsmen from the early Edo, Nomura presented Square with Cloud Strife, Aerith Gainsborough, and Sephiroth.

Sephiroth. Even a total outsider like myself could recognize that name.

Final Fantasy VII released on Playstation in Japan on January 31st, 1997. It was a watershed moment for the series, and the beginning of the game’s transcendence into the zeitgeist of popular culture.

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The Breakthrough

“It was 2002 I think. We were a group of four kids, 10-years old age in Colombia, we had no idea how to speak English, but we got a four-disc edition of Final Fantasy VII in English. And we got together every single day to play it until we finished it. We were stunned by the visuals, but we couldn’t understand a single word. I got to understand this story now that I’m old, but I remember that time of my life fondly and sharing that time with my friends.” - Rogger Vasquez

Without hyperbole, Final Fantasy VII is the singular most important game in the series, the one against which all others are measured, the before and after event. When it released in Japan, the game sold two million copies in three days. Backed by a worldwide $40 million ad campaign and a trailer that played everywhere from Saturday Night Live to The Simpsons and even in theaters before film screenings, SquareEnix was bullish on bringing this game to the North American mainstream by any means necessary. By September of 1997, distributors in the US were breaking street dates to satisfy demand. Fervor was widespread, and word of mouth only perpetuated the momentum. As an exclamation point to an already bold introduction, the game shipped on multiple discs - 3 on the Playstation and 4 on the PC port. This was physical proof of its significance – it demanded your attention and your commitment.

Two decades later, after years of fielding fan requests, the game was remastered and released to even higher levels of anticipation and excitement than before. Another trailer – this time on YouTube – dominated metrics and became the de facto talking point of E3 that summer. At the precipice of its publication in March of 2020, Final Fantasy VII: Remake felt less like a rerelease and more like another installment in the mainline series. Its gravity was supermassive, its pull irresistible.

In the time between the original release and the remake, the characters and their stories had escaped the bounds of the game and become deified as figureheads of a subculture. Plot events that were once major twists had entered the vernacular of gaming circles. They were trivial facts perpetuated in the mimetic, like the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. The most shocking moment of the story, when Sephiroth kills Aerith at the end of the first disc, cannot be spoiled – it is now the premise, the point of departure. You are expected to know this happens before you begin the game. Even the original trailer left no room for misinterpretation. This murder was Tetsuya Nomura’s idea, a means to raise the stakes and signal to the player that nobody was safe.

“When I was ten, I found my older brother’s PC copy of Final Fantasy VII, which had four discs. And though the family only had a Macintosh, you could actually view the cutscenes on the individual discs because of how the Mac would load PC discs. One of the very first cutscenes that I watched was Sephiroth descending from the sky and stabbing Aerith through the stomach.” - Benjamin Easter

Of the 16 mainline games represented across the card file, Final Fantasy VII appears at the highest quantity with 131 cards, or 210 when including alternate art and frame treatments. VII is also represented more concretely in one of the four, preconstructed Commander decks, with VI, X, and XIV making up the other three. Writer Paige Smith has produced an invaluable series of articles that trace every storybeat in chronological order of these games benchmarked by their corresponding cards. Of all the superfans that exist, she is at the epicenter of that Venn diagram. Nobody has been more thrilled than Paige to see Magic’s interpretation of Final Fantasy come to fruition.

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A Night at the Opera

As the PAX East panel wrapped up, I received a voice memo from my good friend Ken that had me double-backing through the town of Zozo in an effort to solve a series of riddles involving broken clocks.

“Final Fantasy VI. Looking for the damn chainsaw.” - Ken Baumann

Soon thereafter, I walked to the southern tip of Jidoor and stepped into the opera house. Here, the game slowed down, a group of performers took center stage, and something magical happened.

As the music swelled and the orchestra played and the dancers circled and swayed, I realized in full color why people fell in love with Final Fantasy.

In a brilliant case study of Final Fantasy VI, author and musician Sebastian Deken explores the relationship between the game’s score composed by Nobuo Uematsu and the characterization of its cast. Deken opens the book with a specific callout to the opera scene, noting:

“The music from Final Fantasy VI (1994) sits high in today’s large, diverse pantheon of video game soundtracks, and for good reason. It effortlessly quilts disparate styles and genres to create one world from many. It’s accessible, quirky, and affecting. The game’s iconic opera scene – an unforgettable pinpoint in the timeline of game history – stays with players in a way that few other scenes manage.” (3)

“I think one of my favorite moments in all of gaming, not just Final Fantasy, is probably Final Fantasy VI’s opera sequence. It’s just beautiful music and wonderful action set piece and I think playing it for the first time really just set something up in my brain. It’s really changed the way I think about video games and the experiences I can have with them.” - Cameron Schow

In a later chapter, Deken dissects the layered, meta-storytelling within the opera, and how the various love triangles and storylines of the playable characters are mirrored in the actors and the plot unfolding on stage. I mean, this sequence gets really articulate. Some have made the argument that Final Fantasy VI is, at the highest level, an opera itself, as it utilizes so many of the same tropes that define the art form – quippy character introductions that briefly fill in backstories, musical motifs, archetyping, and even the quirky epilogue, which frames the characters as actors in the play that is the game. Deken then focuses on the most memorable moment of the performance in Celes’ aria and the uncanny comfort of its synthesized voicing.

“The realness of Celes’s voice is proportional to her appearance. It sounds as much like a human voice as Celes’s white-dressed character sprite looks like a real life opera diva…We know it’s not real, but we hear it as such because of its context…A truer or falser voice might jar us out of our semiotic groove, calling attention to itself as more or less real than other elements of the game–and thereby shattering the dramatic illusion in which we’ve chosen to immerse ourselves.” (164-165)

This song has been performed around the world by touring orchestras and classically-trained singers. Like Cloud and Sephiroth, it has found home in music circles beyond its original context. That’s true of countless pieces from Final Fantasy’s score. So many of the voice memos I received from fans reference the preludes, battle songs, and victory fanfare that compose the in-game soundtracks. If one thing is true, Final Fantasy’s music is definitively engrained in the collective memory of its players.

“I have not touched Final Fantasy X in, I believe, 23 years, but to this day I still find myself humming the hymns of the fates. You know, the – (hums) – like randomly in the shower, or when I’m doing chores through the apartment. It’s still my favorite Final Fantasy – I know ten is probably not the most popular one – but that track stuck with me to this very day.” - Roberto Moser

“Outside of Magic: the Gathering and outside of Final Fantasy and outside of everything else that I do, I also play bass guitar. My confession is that I actually bought my bass guitar that I play now specifically to play songs from Final Fantasy on a five string bass guitar. I don’t know how to admit that to any of my friends.” - Gabriella Agathon

Of all the successful ways that play design and creative can capture the essence of Final Fantasy, it is a rather steep challenge to translate the feelings embedded in the game’s music onto a Magic card. Trading cards are soundless. Magic, the brand, is just as well without a theme song or an auditory identity, or even a strong vehicle to develop such assets. Even with all the accompanying digital clients and high-profile presentations and myriad trailers for upcoming sets, I’ve always wondered why Wizards has never attempted to create a signature theme song for their game. I think a short jingle could offer a meaningful mnemonic and point of communion for players, another axis to bind us together.

Equally difficult for the design team was moving beyond the superficial reference. It’s one thing to put Tifa on a Magic card, give her the legendary creature subtype, and fill out a relevant ability that reflects her character traits. It’s another thing entirely to reduce decades’-worth of collective mythmaking to a few lines of text on a single card. How do you tell the story of these characters when their history is as deep as the games that contain them?

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Icebergs in the Arctic

In July 2005, a high notorious monster named Absolute Virtue was patched into Final Fantasy XI’s Chains of Promathia expansion. Designed to be a nigh-unbeatable endgame boss catered to the MMO’s most hardcore of grinders, AV instead became an infamous point of tension between the community and the stewards of the game. In the five years following its first appearance, only a few linkshells from a handful of servers ever experienced victory against the boss. In response, SquareEnix would either patch its stats or nerf the classes that made their attempts successful. Among the most memorable of tries was in March 2006, when, following 2 hours of direct engagement within a 30-hour super-session, Absolute Virtue cast the most back-breaking Benediction of all time, resetting its health and demoralizing the party pitted against it. Later that night, LimitBreak’s Auronku wrote “I truly, truly believe that this mob was not meant to be killed by anyone at this point in the game. Thanks for all the support, but we’re all very tired as you can imagine.”

This screenshot from the game chat has become emblematic of the collective distrust toward the developers of Final Fantasy XI during this era. It’s also a badge of honor, the hard proof of the tenacity to attempt the impossible. Anybody who played EverQuest in the early years may recall a similar story involving The Sleeper, a dragon that was intentionally programmed to be undefeatable, and Sony Online Entertainment despawning it in a moment of panic when players banded together to try.

Absolute Virtue’s Magic card is a sizeable threat that will certainly win games (and likely create a lot of confusion about the rules in the process), but it doesn’t really convey the years and years of history that belongs to Final Fantasy XI’s legacy. Even my short description glosses over a ton of the details that make that history so rich. As the final batch of cards were previewed, I started to pick up on more and more examples of similar stories, cards that were tiny snapshots removed from their greater context, like icebergs emerging from the arctic.

Vivi is a perfect touchpoint of this feeling – everyone speaks about him with such high esteem, how he holds up a mirror to identity and questions what it means to be alive. He’s far and away the most recognizable party member of Final Fantasy IX, which, based on my impressions, is the black sheep of the series. As a character, he remains distant and unfamiliar to me, but as a Magic card, he has become a preeminent, multi-format all-star. Vivi has the potential to create a stark divide between those who hold him beloved in the story and those who must play against him at the card shop. By virtue of his overpowered stats, he may become a villain in his own right, a kill-on-sight inducer of salt and grief. What a conflict this may create, an icon of opposing reputations.

Thancred Waters also hails from FF IX. Without stumbling upon this post by Aero, I may have never known that he’s the source of an all-time meme.

All I know about Knights of the Round comes from this voice memo from TheProxyGuy.

“Knights of the Round takes too goddamn long to cast.” - TheProxyGuy

Eight mana and five chapters: the math checks out.

One of the deepest chase cards of the set, a serialized Golden Chocobo, is numbered out of 77. I didn’t understand this reference until I rewatched the PAX vod – 77 because the Chocobo races are a celebrated minigame in Final Fantasy VII. I should’ve guessed. The other four colors – yellow, pink, green, and blue – appear at ascending rarities in Collector Boosters. The Black Chocobo, printed exclusively in Japanese, was a surprise gift from the Magic team to Tetsuya Nomura. As the fastest of the bunch, it was his favorite to race in the game.

The closing segment from the panel featured voice actor Ben Starr conducting the audience to count to 16 while the many iterations of Cid, Timeless Artificer flashed on screen. The gimmick here is that Cid is the only recurring character across the series, but his in-game role and characteristics change with every installment. Sometimes he’s villainous, other times he’s an ally, occasionally he joins your party to battle alongside you. While his appearance and allegiance varies, he consistently presents himself as a scientist or engineer, and often connects you to an airship that provides the game’s version of fast travel.

And the list of references continue down the card file: the selfie in Prompto Argentum, the love scene in Rhystic Study, Tidus’ forced laugh in Inspiring Call, Phoenix Down’s second ability of exiling undead – a techy, alternate use case for the item of which I was totally unaware while playing. Triple Triad is a card-based minigame in Final Fantasy VIII, and now it’s a card-based minigame in the card game based on the card-based minigame. Secret Rendezvous – I think – is a scene from a romantic date night with a party member of your choice, but all the Reddit responses hint at another inside joke about Cloud and Barret being the canonical outcome. Gavin keeps bringing up Commune with Beavers in all his presentations – I think the flavor text is the punchline here? There are Buttz and Boko, I mean Bartz and Boko, and A Realm Reborn, which marked a moment of mass destruction of the continent of Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV, the series’ second MMORPG, and the end of the original game. This was not an intended event – Final Fantasy XIV was such a critical failure that SquareEnix destroyed their own game and rereleased version 2.0 to win back fans, a totally new game built on a different engine and revamped servers.

And speaking of blowing up the world –

“I’ve played a lot of roleplaying games where a world-ending threat is implied. I remember the first time that I played Final Fantasy VI, I was so impressed that they actually had the courage to make the world end and let you try to rebuild it. That always stuck out to me as far as why I think Final Fantasy VI is a one-of-a-kind game.” - J N

After navigating the fleshy terrain of the floating continent and facing the Ultima Weapon, my party witnessed Kefka assassinate his higher-up, disturb the balanced Triad and destroy the earth beneath him. His murderous rampage left my party scattered across a world in ruin. As Celes washed up on the beach of Solitary Island, the path forward began with the slow and gentle step of tending to her surrogate and bed-ridden grandfather. To rebuild would take time and patience.

And rebuild I did. Over the next two weeks, I moved through the second half of the game, a remarkable experience just as rich and complex as the first, fit with slaying dragons and calming nightmares and endearing more and more to this unlikely troupe of heroes. Joining the crew along the way was a cavebound yeti and a mimicking mime, plus a bouncy moogle who attacked through interpretive dance. Every time I thought I had this game figured out, it presented yet another surprise, another secret, another reward, another locale, and another moment to never forget.

Final Fantasy VI is not at all a story about revenge. But as I climbed to the top of Kefka’s Tower, and pummeled my way through the gauntlet of mini-bosses en route to the deranged harlequin himself, the feeling certainly crossed my mind. It was time to kill a clown.

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The Sleeping Giant

On May 10, 2025, my friend David posted this image with a caption that I’ll loosely translate: “Without ever having played Final Fantasy, the new Magic collection feels like this.” On the left is P’oku, Lux SOLDIER-2, on the right is his transformed side, Luciferis, God of Perpetual Darkness, a 7/10 God Avatar Elder SOLDIER-8 with a slew of keywords and cheesy flavor text threatening the end of the world. I’ve thought about this image every day while working on this project. It so perfectly captures the feeling of being on the Magic side of this conversation, and now with some context, it speaks just as well to the over-the-top dramatics that the Final Fantasy side routinely provides. Funnily enough, I found more than a couple of cards in the file that it resembles almost verbatim. In parody lies a truth unspoken.

I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game. Actually, to be even more candid, I’ve never been remotely interested in playing a Final Fantasy game. And I never wanted Final Fantasy to be involved in Magic. I didn’t want to care about this crossover – I wanted to ignore it, to wish it unwell, to separate it from the signal and treat it as noise. But as the marketing tour kicked into full gear, a familiar face appeared over and over again on broadcasts and stages across the world, and I saw a light shining in the eyes of an old friend.

Blake: “Zakeel, who was on the video, he’s on your team, right Heggen?”

Mark: “Yeah, Zakeel I get to work with every day. It’s funny, I was remembering back, when we first hired him years ago, I asked him, blue sky, what’s your dream project now that you’re a Wizard? It’s Final Fantasy, my man.”

Zakeel: “Not to get too romantic, it is very emotional to see many of these decks, specifically the Final Fantasy X one for me.”

Watching Zakeel celebrate the collective work of his team had me put my pride aside, or rather, allowed me to refocus it. Through the countless emails and calls and in-person meetings with SquareEnix spanning five years, it was clear that only passion – real passion – would ever get them to the finish line. Zakeel wasn’t feigning enthusiasm about how special these games were. There was something special here. I believed him.

And the voice memos reinforced the sentiment. And then I started playing the game. And I began my research, and I followed the leads from friends in my social circles, and I witnessed everyone, everyone, getting excited about the upcoming Final Fantasy cards, and sharing their stories, and opening up their hearts. The Final Fantasy and Magic subreddits were full of fan art and anecdotes and thinkpieces and game guides. There were speculations and memes and laments and tattoos – I sat down to dinner with my buddy Kirk who taught me how to play Magic a long time ago, and only then realized that his entire right arm was dedicated to Final Fantasy. “These games are works of art,” he told me. I believed him.

I got to the top of the tower and killed a cruel god. I watched him disappear into the same light he weaponized, and then I soared over the glowing land restored in jubilance of his demise.

Final Fantasy has nearly 40 years of stories and histories remembered and perpetuated by a community of people who care. And so does Magic: the Gathering. The Venn diagram between the games and their cult followings is almost a perfect circle. Deken’s book describes the totality of Final Fantasy, but it reads so familiar to me on this side of the Rubicon:

“…Fantasy-based vampires, werewolves, and unicorns exist alongside reality-based ninjas, pirates, and ankylosaurs. Global cultural and mythological elements are blended together with such nonchalance that you might not even realize it’s happening. Chimeras and Medusas are borrowed from Greek mythology, golems from Jewish folklore, manticores from Persian legend – you get the idea. This great potpourri of the fantastic and mythological is salted with science fiction and finished off with a dash of reality: When you’re not beating back nagas, gargoyles, and robots, you’re squashing spiders, cobras, and lobsters. This is the DNA of the FF series: fantasy in drag as science fiction, ancient cosplaying as contemporary, fantastic and familiar all at once.” (24-25)

Setting all academic criticism and cultural insights aside, I learned more than anything else that these games mean a lot to people. And that means a lot to me.

Sometimes, it feels like you find something exactly when you should. I wonder if this game would have moved me the same way if I played it as a kid. Maybe so. Art tends to awaken that which is dormant within you, and the sleeping giant takes many forms throughout your life. It’s funny, in retrospect, to think how close I was to one world while living fully immersed in another. Even stranger to consider that the common ground shared between these two monoliths is a Magic set of all things.

Maybe I’ll play Final Fantasy X next – Weston speaks highly of Blitzball, but I’ve heard mixed reviews. And hey, would you look at that: another goofy translation.

---

Foil Armor

“My partnership continues this year with Foil Armor by Integra Products, the safest and most effective way to flatten your curled cards. Holographic trading cards warp due to differences in humidity between where they were manufactured and where they are now. A stack of heavy books won’t fix that, but these two-way humidity control packs do – they’ve been specifically engineered to reset convex and concave cards. Final Fantasy is aiming to be the most collectible Magic set of the recent era– keep your foils in tip-top shape so they look good and hold their value in the years to come. Go to flattenmycards.com and purchase some 8-gram Foil Armor packs for individual use and some bigger, 33-gram packs for long-term storage. Use code “STUDIES” at checkout for 15% off. Thanks Foil Armor for the support!"

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Anecdote Transmissions

So many folks shared their Final Fantasy stories with me through 30-second voice recordings on their phones. I’d like to end this video by playing a select few more of those messages for you here. Like I said before, these offered tiny windows into highly personal experiences. I found them moving and delightful, and they’ll certainly be relatable to those who played the games. Thank you for sending these in – they made this project all the richer.

“One of the biggest triggers for me to remember Final Fantasy is actually the song ‘Unwritten’ by Natasha Bedingfield. I remember being a teen figuring out how to play Game Boy games on the computer. And playing this game Final Fantasy: Tactics all day. And the song Natasha Bedingfield’s ‘Unwritten’ was just playing in the background, that was just what was on the radio. And so now every time I hear that song, I have to think of Sniper Moogles and Final Fantasy.” - Georg Wang

“My fondest Final Fantasy memory was watching my brother play Final Fantasy IX when I was a kid. My favorite movie at the time was The Emperor’s New Groove, and my brother is an actor, so he would voice all of the characters. And he would do a Patrick Warburton impression for Steiner, which has stuck with me to this day.” - Timothy Motz

“My brother and I aren’t that close. He’s a bit older, just enough that we kinda grew up in separate worlds. But Final Fantasy IX brought us together. We both connected deeply with Vivi. There’s something about his innocence, and the way that he quietly grappled with questions of existence. We never really talked about that stuff out loud, but through Vivi, we understood each other. Now, he’s more than just a character – he feels like us.” - Stephen Malfavon

“When I was young, I had never played any RPG more complicated than Pokémon. I started playing Final Fantasy VII with some friends just passing the controller between us for hours as we explored Midgar. When we finally escaped from that city, and I saw Cloud standing there on the world map, bigger than the town that we had just escaped from, the unfathomable scope of the game laid out before us, I remember thinking ‘oh my god. This is going to be the greatest video game I’ve ever played.’” - Josh Sands

“In the original 1997 release of Final Fantasy VII, there is a mistranslation in the Midgar slums when you talk to a sick person where Aeris says, ‘this guy are sick.’ 28 years later, my friends and I still say ‘this guy are sick’ to each other as a joke.” - Kyle

“When I was a little kid, my older brother gave me for Christmas one year Final Fantasy VII, it had just come out. I had never played an RPG before and I was instantly consumed by it…So I played that game for months, for months, I was obsessed with it. Until the Spring of that year, my brother and I got into a fight. If you’ll remember, back then, really long games came on multiple discs, and I was at the very end of the third disc, and my brother threatened to snap it right in front of me. Of course, I was trying to big and tough, and I said ‘I don’t care if you snap it, it doesn’t matter to me,’ and he snapped it clean in half. And I’ll never forget, it was like my heart breaking right in front of me.” - David Pemberton

“So I told my buddy ‘yeah, I playing through number IV, I’m having a really good time with it.’ And he says, ‘oh yeah, I really like that one. It is kind of a buzzkill that the bard’s healing spells consumes your potions, though.’ And I said, ‘what?!’ and I looked in my inventory, and sure enough, they were missing. And then I stopped playing that game.” - Stav Gold

“Back in the early days of Final Fantasy XIV, my friends had a hazing ritual for the very first eight-player group boss called Cape Westwind. We’d come up with a bunch of hard mechanics, including having to use the roleplay sit command to dodge an attack. In reality, the boss dies in ten seconds with no mechanics. My friends did it to me, and I did it to my friends after. But now the boss isn’t in the game anymore. It’s kind of sad.” - Kyle Templeton

“I’ve only played Final Fantasy XIV but, while hunting legendary fish in this game, I kept running into the same player. We barely talked, but we just kept seeing each other at fishing holes and I felt a really strong sense of kinship with that complete stranger. It’s been a while now, but I stil hope to see them when the next legendary fish get added back at it again.” - Théo Kunetz

“My brother asked for SOCOM US Navy Seals and Final Fantasy X-2 for Christmas one year. But, of course, by the time Christmas came around he lost interest in Final Fantasy, and he told us ‘I hope you guys didn’t get me that girl game.’ Which of course we did. So he never played it, but I played it endlessly. And um, I am gay now.” - Peter Karambelas

Had to save the best for last, of course. Thanks so much for watching. Now go play Final Fantasy VI!

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Sources

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