My JRPG fantasy is fighting for a clean environment

polygon.com:

I think my sick video game fantasy is undoing environmental harm. There is something both appealing and perhaps naive about imagining that we can actually undo the harm of large-scale ecological disasters. And even if the current outlook in real life might be bleak, I have games like Final Fantasy 7 Remakeand PowerWash Simulatorto help me imagine other worlds.

While the two games don’t appear to share much other than their publisher, each is about improving the world and the environment around you, in some sense. In PowerWash Simulator you clean gunk up with a pressurized jet of water. And in Final Fantasy 7 Remake you team up with a band of friends to oppose an evil energy corporation and its ongoing mission to exploit the earth for its resources. Luckily for me — a Final Fantasy 7 and PowerWash Sim freak — PowerWash Simulatoris getting a specialFinal Fantasy 7 Remake DLC that will allow you to clean up various set-pieces from the game.

The collaboration is likely to help promote PowerWash Simulator to the audience of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and vice versa. But the DLC also feels weirdly appropriate, given the way the two games play off of each other.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is set in Midgar, a city run by an energy corporation called Shinra Electric Power Company that exploits the environment for its resources. This extraction hurts some inhabitants of Midgar more than others. As video essayist Jacob Geller so eloquently argues in “The Politics of Final Fantasy 7’s Architecture,” the class dynamics in the city are underlined by its physical architecture. The wealthier professional class literally lives on a giant metal plate that hangs over the slums, leaving the slums to suffer the brunt of the environmental