Jenova Chen – the designer of indie classics such as Flower and Journey – was partly inspired to begin making games in the first place after shedding a few tears over Final Fantasy 10, and who can blame him with a love story that tragic?
Final Fantasy is a series stuffed with emotional moments and scenes that feel like someone’s squeezing onion juice over your eyes, but Final Fantasy 10 still features one of the strongest tearjerker endings in the entire franchise (and in all of gaming, according to Japanese gamers.) Tears generated by the game are so powerful, in fact, that they inadvertently led to the creation of a stone cold PS3 classic.
“If you look at the history of many of the movie makers, like Peter Jackson, why does he want to make films? His dad took him to watch King Kong when he was really young, and when he saw this giant ape climbing the Empire State Building, that was a really shocking experience,” Chen explains in an interview with Edge Magazine. “Many artists decide to become artists because they were really shocked to their core when they saw something emotionally impactful.”
For the founder and CEO of thatgamecompany, weeping at games isn’t an unfamiliar experience, but one memory that sticks out to Chen happened while going through Tidus and Yuna’s fight against a repeating, apocalyptic threat. “One day I woke up and I went to wash my face, and I thought about a character in that story, and I suddenly started to cry. I was thinking about what happened to that person. He made a sacrifice for the group. I was just moved by the act – it’s so beautiful and it’s so melancholy that I was crying.”
“At film school, we say, with a mediocre film, when the film is over, everybody leaves the theatre talking to each other, smiling,” he goes on. “When you have a really impactful film, everybody leaving the theatre is quiet. Their mind is totally blown away. That was me… And that’s why I think a great piece of art usually gives me a new perspective on life, and it changes how I live my life. That’s what made me realise I probably wanted to become an artist.”