The summer before I entered middle school, my brother and I sat down to play a video game. We didn’t know what we were getting into. To this day, I still believe that Final Fantasy XII is the best game ever made. I’m not an avid gamer, but Final Fantasy XII is different.
Final Fantasy XII unfolds like a good novel—it’s a literary epic. Not only is the game well-written, but the music is sublime (symphony orchestras have played the soundtrack). The story tackles themes like love, death, loss, conservation, sacrifice, and hope. The writers trusted the intelligence of the game players, and the tale is not told linearly. There are plots, side-plots, and flashbacks. We learn about the protagonist, Cloud just as we learn about Gatsby in the Great Gatsby—in bits and pieces and sometimes not at all.
Final Fantasy XII is so much more than a video game, it’s a meditation on the human condition. It draws its themes from mythology and literature. There are genetic experiments and monstrous births, reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There’s a tragic love story, invoking Dante’s Divine Comedy and a little Romeo and Juliet for good measure. There’s intricate-world building. You can drive a submarine, blow up a power plant, gamble your days away at the casino, and even get into breeding birds (the chocobo, for the uninitiated, is a special Final Fantasy XII bird that can be ridden like a horse). There are games within games, invoking every type of video game imaginable, from role playing games, car racing games, war tactics games, and more. In this way, Final Fantasy XII is much like Dante’s Divine Comedy, more an encyclopedia of knowledge about game making and game playing at the point of its creation, in the same way that the Divine Comedy was an encyclopedia of medieval learning at the point of its writing. Every mode of game-playing is explored and exploited.
There’s even a lesson in Mendelian genetics.
Breeding chocobos was my favorite pastime in the game.
I know a lot about breeding chocobos. I spent an entire summer doing it. You start with plain yellow chocobos and, if you are patient, diligent, and if you listen to everything Chocobo Bill has to say, you’ll end up with a coveted gold chocobo, the most amazing of all the chocobos—not only for its bright shimmering hue, but also for its ability to move freely throughout the entire Final Fantasy XII world, allowing you to receive special powers that prove incredibly useful when trying to defeat the boss of the game, the notorious Sephiroth.
Or course, the game doesn’t tell you this.
You can defeat Sephiroth without getting a gold chocobo. But like many things in life, it’s the detours and side-projects that often form us, inform us and change us forever. It’s the wrong bus we took without which we wouldn’t have met him. The night you choose that seat at the bar. The day you bought the surf board on a whim. The side project at work that somehow becomes your career. These small atomic shifts that become the flapping wings of the butterfly that somehow define the greater storms and doldrums of our lives.
The video game ended up consuming my entire summer. I still remember sitting on the bedroom floor, a bowl of strawberries to my right (my favorite childhood snack) and a bottle of coke to my left—all the nutrients I’d need to save the planet. Most importantly, I was a chocobo breeder, and an expert one at that. We didn’t have access to the Internet in those days. Everything I learned about chocobo breeding I had to learn from Chocobo Bill, from racing chocobos at the casino, and from trial and error.
Breeding chocobos brings us back to a world before Google. A world where you had to talk to other people to learn things, a world where it was still possible to get lost, where a quick search couldn’t always reliably bring you back home. There was no Google maps. There was just intuition, your inner sense of direction, and other people.
The key thing to know about chocobo breeding is that it takes time. In order to afford it, you’ll need to beat a lot of monsters. The monsters are not easy to find. You need to venture out into the forest, looking for fights. Some monsters have rare nuts. If you are patient and learn how to breed the right chocobos, you’ll end up with a golden chocobo, the ultimate prize.
I still remember the day I finally bred my gold chocobo. It was better than beating Sephiroth, the final boss of the game (I defeated him quickly thanks to all the strength I had gained while trying to breed chocobos). But of all the tasks in the game, successfully breeding a gold chocobo was best of all.
I think there’s a lesson here.
I’m not going to tell you how to breed chocobos. The right way is the hard way. Don’t take the shortcut. Talk to Chocobo Bill. Look for rare nuts. Go in search of strange monsters. Make mistakes. Have fun.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.