Religious Experience in Journey and Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X (abbreviated to FFX) is a high-budget game in one of the longest running and perhaps the most famous Japanese role playing series (Squaresoft, 2001). It has a huge cast (and a bigger development team) who drive a story epic in scale. Contrast this with Journey, the wordless story of just one character’s path towards a mountain, created by a team of only thirteen members within a newer American studio (thatgamecompany, 2012). Although these games seem and undeniably are different, there is a key thread, one held more broadly in common with much of human history. These two games, albeit in divergent fashions and with thusly divergent results, both explore important aspects of religion, an ever-elusive and yet ever-pervasive element of society. As an abridgement of a longer, humanistically-oriented work (Caldwell, 2013), the following analysis focuses on the application of close “reading” techniques to gameplay in order to interpret how FFX and Journey recontextualize ritual actions, construct and maintain sacred space, and (although explored to a limited extent here) situate the goals of religious narrative and in so doing can transmit some of the emotional and social experiences of religion.