way, are a continuation of the oral tradition, but rather that its residues, in terms both
of narrative and character types, and of performative, improvisatory rhetorics, might
appear in games as what Ong describes as the ‘secondary orality’ of high-technology
societies - an evolution of the oral mindset in ways dependent on literate and
technologically-mediated culture.
Of course, this is an extremely broad historical take. In the more recent history of
popular narrative as mass-mediated discourse, we can locate Cloud in a tradition of
comic-strip heroes, specifically Japanese in this case, but belonging to a wider global
tradition of popular media with its roots in the American comicstrips of the early 20th
century, which created superheroes with dual identities which explored the banality
and anomie of urban life while projecting a flipside fantasy in costumes which were
the polar opposites of the suits worn by Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, and in bodies
with Renaissance musculatures offering aspirational ideals to those who in real life
sported only the skinny frame of Peter Parker. (Perhaps the latter day descendant of
the comicstrip superhero as RPG avatar has no need for the dual identity, the player
providing the everyday alter ego?). The postwar manga comicstrip superheroes, and
their moving image descendants in anime and live action television and film, were
directly influenced by the US tradition, borrowing the structures of aggrandised heroic
powers and bodies, as well as dual identities; but adding specifically Japanese motifs
such as martial arts skills and weapons, enemies composed of monsters and atomic
power plants, and eventually superhero teams (see Allison, 2000). It is from this
tradition that the Final Fantasy designers descend: Final Fantasy 7 saw the arrival of a
new designer from a popular mainstream manga tradition, Tetsuo Nomura.