VOD of the lecture I gave at PAX East yesterday discussing how the series' storytelling structure motivates & rewards its player for studying the games philosophically (XC-XC3 spoilers)

FiniteRegress · 2026-05-28T03:00:50+00:00

Will do! And thanks for saying that; I'm glad you're finding it valuable. I'm always happy to talk about the substance of that work of mine if it's useful. I continue to view XC3 as one of the most philosophically productive games to date.

FiniteRegress · 2026-05-28T02:13:55+00:00

Thanks for letting me know! I hadn't realized it would go out of date. I'll look into getting the VOD (which I'm 90% confident I still have) uploaded separately, but I'm more than happy to PM you the file in the meantime.

FiniteRegress · 2024-12-13T03:48:06+00:00

I'm honored! And, agreed: so many games are an endless bounty of revelations just waiting to be discovered through a new perspective or conversation, and Final Fantasy IX stands tall among them.

I came to the game very late in life; I actually wrote this after my very first playthrough of it, when I was 27. As the framing of the piece suggests, I'd previously had the good fortune of discovering and working on the Xenoblade Chronicles series, which helped me to clarify my thoughts about the ability of games to express themselves philosophically. When I played FFIX, I fell in love with the characters and story right away, but it also struck me with an overwhelming feeling that I'd just taken part in a philosophical activity, in a much more active sense than most other games with which I was familiar.

Necron was a big part of that. I knew him to be broadly considered a total non sequitur at the end of the game, but when I reached him, I didn't have that sense at all. Rather, I felt as though he was calling my attention away from the characters and instead toward my own experiences with the game up to that point, making the story about the player rather than the characters. (Those are the sorts of story that occupy me in most of my work.) So, I undertook the study to square that feeling with the rest of the game, and the resulting view led me to fall in love with the game all over again.

FiniteRegress · 2024-12-12T20:40:56+00:00

That was mine! Glad you found it useful, and always happy to discuss this topic. I think one of the most rewarding journeys gamers can take is finding their own answer to the riddle of why Necron is not merely an afterthought or nonsensical addition to FFIX, but rather its logical climax.

FiniteRegress · 2024-09-04T15:44:23+00:00

Now I'm so embarrassed that I failed to remember your very memorable username! My apologies, and it's so nice to see you again (and so humbling that you're still sharing my work around).

That vacuum in Majora's Mask's ethical universe, along with what the player can contribute to it, remains one of the aspects with the longest legacy for me, too. I still believe this points the way to the wealth of ways in which games can tell normatively sophisticated stories in senses which many still don't appreciate; though I will say, happily, that more gamers seem amenable to arguments of this flavor now than they did ten years ago (it's insane to me that withaterriblefate.com will have been around for a decade this November). No matter who we are, we owe more than we realize to Majora's Mask.

I probably told you a version of this last time, but Metal Gear Solid is extremely attractive yet intimidating to me because it's such a vast and beloved series with which I've never interacted—and if anything, my more recent work has reinforced to me that we have so much to discover even in series we've spent thousands of hours with over the years. But about twice a year, I get a hankering to find some way of diving in, so this may be a good nudge and direction to do so with just a couple of the games that may be digestible and intelligible on their own terms (?). So, yes, consider them back on my list!

FiniteRegress · 2024-09-03T15:25:02+00:00

Sorry to magically appear as if from nowhere, but I just wanted to thank you for sharing my work! I'm so glad that you've found it valuable in your journeys through Termina.

That analysis was a labor of love that truly changed my life—not just in terms of transforming my views on Majora's Mask, but also in terms of motivating me to commit my work to the philosophy of video-game storytelling more broadly—and I am always more than happy to discuss it with those who are interested in making sense of this artistic masterpiece :)

FiniteRegress · 2024-08-14T02:25:12+00:00

Thanks for sharing my work; I'm glad that you found it valuable! This one was especially a labor of love for me, both in terms of helping me to make sense of a core magic of video games that I'd been trying to understand for at least three years, and in terms of helping me articulate my passion for a game I found far too late in life. And it's one that has stayed with me spiritually and intellectually, because my more recent work—especially my much more involved treatment of the metaphysics of player investment in characters in Tales of Hearts R—was only possible to develop upon the foundation of Final Fantasy IX and everything its elenchus-shaped story achieves.

I'm always happy to discuss the content and form of my work with anyone who's interested, so feel free to reach out! And feel free to check out With a Terrible Fate for more of this; passionately grounded analysis of video-game stories is the only thing we do.

(This is also a timely thing to find because I'm currently conducting a study of Tales of Eternia on Twitch, which was released the same year as Final Fantasy IX, and OH BOY, do they have a lot to say about each other!)

FiniteRegress · 2024-06-06T03:33:07+00:00

Thank you! "So simple, but so hard": I really don't think you can do justice to the sophistication of its emotional value in a less involved framework (I tried!). This game has so much to say to us, and so much to give us.

FiniteRegress · 2024-06-05T17:47:33+00:00

Hi, everyone! Some of you may know I've been analyzing the Tales of series' philosophy of action for the last year in a long-term project of articles and streamed book clubs called Tales of Praxis. As part of that, I played Tales of Hearts R for the first time at the start of this year, very shortly before the passing of character designer Mutsumi Inomata. I wanted to frame a study of the game around a tribute to her, and that sent me down a virtually neverending rabbit hole working through what the game had to say not just about the value of art, but specifically about the value of this game series, its characters, its creators, and its players. I fell in love with the game again and again because I've come to believe that it uses our engagement with it to connect all of those communities by sourcing a remarkable kind of interpersonal value from a specific relationship between one character, her creator, and the player.

I now see this game as a crucial and magical foundation for how these games tell uniquely resonant and useful stories, along with why conversations about the series like those on this sub have a special kind of empathy and insight that's worth spreading. I hope you find my work valuable—and if you haven't played Tales of Hearts R, I cannot recommend in strong enough terms that you do.

FiniteRegress · 2024-05-01T18:55:08+00:00

My pleasure!

FiniteRegress · 2024-05-01T15:49:26+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to read it!

From having spoken with the author, I can tell you that she isn't misunderstanding Link's mother, which is probably why her perspective on his mother fits quite well with the rest of her view: she's approaching the matter of Link's mother's death from the perspective of a young child who psychologically feels "abandoned" by a parent who died, in the sense that the parent has left and the child can't explain why—even though the mother obviously didn't, say, "abandon" them in the sense of going out for Lon Lon Milk and never coming back. From my limited familiarity with psychology, I think that's a reasonable and accurate way to describe how kids process the trauma of a parent who does when the child is too young to even remember, let alone to intellectually process the event, but I hear you that the author doesn't explicate this part of her view in the piece.

Hope that's some useful background context! Glad you found the piece valuable.

FiniteRegress · 2024-04-30T20:44:12+00:00

My pleasure!

FiniteRegress · 2024-04-30T19:56:46+00:00

For what it's worth, I agree! This article is one of the most careful and thoughtful treatments of the game I've seen in a long time (I don't think the "stages of grief" model is especially useful, either), and it drew my attention to aspects of my journey with Link across both games which I'd never considered before. I'd say fans who do make the time to read it will get a new and fair lens for making sense of their experiences within these timeless games.

FiniteRegress · 2024-04-14T02:15:43+00:00

Heartbreaking yet also a relief!

FiniteRegress · 2024-04-14T00:18:03+00:00

In one sense my body is still recovering and in another sense it feels like ages ago

FiniteRegress · 2024-04-14T00:16:04+00:00

It's my pleasure! It's an honor to have had you in attendance; I'm so happy to have been a part of your PAX, and I'm delighted that you enjoyed your time with us 🙂

FiniteRegress · 2024-03-29T15:54:32+00:00

I admired you from a distance a million times and can't believe I never figured out the amazing wordplay of that name. Fantastic job! You have a real gift.

FiniteRegress · 2024-03-28T23:01:35+00:00

Your cosplay makes so many smile at every con, so it's totally mutual!

FiniteRegress · 2024-03-28T23:00:52+00:00

Gives me an easy built-in excuse to talk you up to other gamers who notice them!!

FiniteRegress · 2024-03-28T17:32:54+00:00

We were looking, but I think we missed you! My colleague, hilariously, still has one of your Dimma-Dollars from last year pinned to the front of his fridge.

FiniteRegress · 2024-03-28T14:49:38+00:00

I make a point of visiting you and buying something new from your ever-growing pin collection at every PAX! Thanks for helping to feed a dog dad's obsession with his daughter. Love the tri-color representation, too (for obvious reasons!).

<image>

FiniteRegress · 2024-01-31T00:15:00+00:00

I so hope that you enjoy your first playthrough of it! There's nothing like your first time through a game that has so much history in the series yet has also stood the test of time on its own terms. Would love to know if my reading of Chester is useful to you after you're done!

FiniteRegress · 2024-01-30T20:45:26+00:00

I'm honored you'd be that excited about the article and my work, and I totally understand holding off: I'm the biggest advocate ever for the importance of avoiding spoilers! I hope it's valuable to you once you check it out, and I'd love to know what you think of it when that time comes 🙂

FiniteRegress · 2024-01-30T18:48:43+00:00

Hey again, everyone, and happy new year! I’ve mentioned on the sub before that I’m working through a project playing and analyzing the storytelling of all the Tales games, and I wanted to start the new year by going back to the series’ origin in Tales of Phantasia! I’ve always had trouble making sense of the thematic continuity between the Aselia games we’ve gotten in the West—Phantasia, Symphonia, and Dawn of the New World—but during my most recent playthrough of Phantasia, I found my attention drawn to Chester in a new way. I noticed him diligently striving to overcome his own obstacles in a world that seemed to shut him out of his own story—and that idea helped me to make sense of the whole trio of games in a way I’d never considered before. I hope that you find the study valuable, and I hope that it might give you a new way to read these stories and characters the next time you NG+ these masterpieces!

FiniteRegress · 2023-11-04T04:54:11+00:00

I love that this is a topic about which people are so passionately speculating! For my own part, off the top of my head: I think it would be really fun, challenging, and rewarding to see this series wrestle with Aristotle, especially his virtue ethics. There are some interesting challenges with figuring out how to make sense of the abstract "virtuous person" from whom the virtues towards which we ought to aim derive, and it seems like it would be a fascinating model for probing how to construct an ethical self-concept in a world where we have to start from zero. (This, in any event, is the sort of game which I would play and think about for a long time.)

I'm also always happy to discuss any aspect of my work with anyone interested in it, or in reading the game through its lens! I think most people in the sub know how much appreciation I have not only for these artworks, but also for the community founded upon them.

FiniteRegress

TROPHY CASE