Epic spatialities: the production of space in Final Fantasy games

When first asked to write about ‘‘vast narratives’’ for this book, I was inclined to discuss the Final Fantasy games as Gesamtkunstwerk : the epic themes, the exhaustive dramatis personae, and the fantastic cosmological preoccupations of the game franchise that seem so rich for such interpretive study. I have taken something of a ‘‘spatial turn,’’ however, that brings me through the question of the epic narrative to the modifier ‘‘vast,’’ which is at the very least a spatial metaphor (mapping time as space, and duration as expanse). Rather than dwell on surface narrative epic aspects that are consistent with other, noncomputational representational practices (particularly anime and manga in the case of Japanese games), I was drawn to the elements of these objects that produced the experience of the vast in a distinctive fashion.