Abstract

The Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) series Final Fantasy series undergoes an almost identical aesthetic evolution to that of narrative silent film. Through an exhaustive formal analysis of the first four games in the JRPG series and a comparison to the development of the language of the film medium, this thesis aims to expose these common evolutionary threads and offer some insight into why these temporally and medially disparate objects develop in such similar fashions. Simultaneously, the thesis serves as a methodological template for how videogames could be studied from a film studies perspective. By focusing on an empirically-based case study approach (inspired by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s volume Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies), the study aims to demonstrate the value in moving away from the large all-encompassing Grand Theories that dominate most film studies discussions. Due to the form of the medium that is constantly in flux (based on unpredictable player interactivity and an infinitely wide genre spectrum) an all-encompassing theory cannot define the medium as a whole, and can only be developed through a specificity (isolated case studies) over generality (Grand Theory) approach. The study also takes into consideration similar efforts of translating film studies methods into studying videogames. For the majority of its lifespan the Final Fantasy series set the standard for storytelling in its genre and influenced the industry as a whole. A thorough analysis of the series should be considered a crucial step in eventually understanding the video game medium and should prove useful in any peripheral studies of a similar nature.