Dante and Video Game Adaptations: An Analysis of Dantean Elements in Dante’s Inferno, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII

Alexander Schmid, Louisiana State University

1. Introduction and Scope

Dante’s Divine Comedy has had a golden age in representation across TV, movies, and video games since near the end of the last millennium. In films, the Hollywood movie, Se7en (1995), prominently featured representations of sin adapted from Dante’s work.^[1] In Television, even the HBO series, Westworld (2016-2022), created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, prominently displays allusions to Dante’s work in episode titles like Contrapasso, themes of self-transformation, and even “flash-like” realizations in relation to a maze-puzzle.^[2] Dante’s popularity is growing not only in the visual media, but also in the interactive media. In 2010 there was an adaptation of Dante’s work by Electronic Arts called Dante’s Inferno which featured a scythe-wielding Dante as an action-adventuring crusader who had consigned his “fiancée,” Beatrice, to hell through his seemingly forgotten infidelity to her. Additionally, from both prior and posterior to Dante’s Inferno, Capcom also created a series, Devil May Cry (2001-2019), which features a demon-slaying protagonist named Dante who has a brother named Vergil throughout no fewer than nine iterations. Prior to both these explicit adaptations, however, Dante’s poetry was either used as an influence for, or at least shares many similarities with, two installments of the ground-breaking video game series by Squaresoft: Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Final Fantasy VIII (1999). In this article, I will seek to show not only that Dante’s influence continues to exert itself across time, culture, genre, and medium, but also that each of these video games, particularly the first two compared to the second two, adapt different elements from Dante and are even differing types of adaptations. I will conclude by suggesting that a certain type of adaptation, a bricolage, or mixed pastiche is the actual mode of adapting Dante’s work in both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII.

Though scholarly connections have been made between Dante’s Divine Comedy and Final Fantasy VIII, there have been no studies so far that connect Final Fantasy VII and the Divine Comedy;^[3] this study will seek to add to the literature analyzing Final Fantasy VIII while it will be the first work to connect Final Fantasy VII and Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Final Fantasy VIII, Dante’s influence is felt through the inclusion of infernal Guardian Force characters like Ifrit who casts “Hellfire” and the diabolic-figure, Diablos who uses “gravity” style magic in clear reference to the subterranean location of Dante’s Lucifer. Final Fantasy VII, additionally, includes Ifrit but also—like Final Fantasy VIII—features an amnesiac protagonist who, though initially disoriented, must strike a path through life to figure out who he really is and what his role is within the world in order to save it. Finally, both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII’s protagonists share with Dante’s pilgrim from the Divine Comedy a tropological and ethical desire to understand the nature of their own existences as well as the meaning of human life while confronting the inevitability of death.

In this study, I borrow from Paola Nasti’s, Claudia Rossignoli’s, and Katherine Powlesland’s approach of observing the constant evolution and plurality of exegetical practices, and I too will engage in “methodological osmosis” by including methodological tools from multiple disciplines, particularly when analyzing video games. Like Powlesland specifically, I will borrow from video game criticism and textual literary theory in order to engage with a new lexicon of narrative mechanisms which are rooted in insights from differing disciplines. This essay, thus, will attempt to reverse-engineer video game critical concepts back into textual narrative theory in a way first exemplified by the work of Powlesland while also making a novel contribution to contemporary adaptation theory.^[4]

In addition, I will maintain alongside Carol L. Robinson that video-game narratives are not traditional texts, but are rather cybertexts,^[5] which must be refashioned from their original medium and genre in order to reward a cybertext reader with a transformational experience^[6] similar to reading Dante’s Comedy.^[7] Additionally, I acknowledge alongside Martin Picard that much video game theory has borrowed from film and television studies and has experienced what Henry Jenkins describes as “media convergence.”^[8] Rather than this being an obstacle to my study, the fact that media has converged will make the concepts utilized by TV studies, film studies, and video game studies more relevant to each other rather than more confused, particularly as their vocabularies begin to reflect each other. Finally, though this will not be a major focus of the paper, it should be mentioned that research into pop culture and video games and their relationship to religion has emerged, and that thinkers like Kevin Recher are even now making claims that, “According to many scholars, videogames can no longer be considered as an irrelevant pastime of no pertinence but rather as a place where fears and desires of society are represented and mirrored and therefore also taught.”^[9] The following study will be conducted thus with a seriousness befitting Recher’s admonition: video games are now the subject of serious scholarly study and will be treated accordingly.

Finally, in determining what sort of adaptation each of the following four video games is, I turn to Julie Sanders’ work Adaptation and Appropriation (2006); Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (2006); Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner’s piece “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” (2012) from a book of the same title; Kevin Flanagan’s work “Video Game Adaptation,” (2017) from the larger work The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies; and Tatjana Ristić and Darjan Kubik’s “Video Games and Adaptation: An Introduction,” (2024). The final thinker from whom I will draw, and likely the most influential, is Gérard Genette and his magisterial work, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997).^[10]

2. Clarification of Terms: Appropriation vs Adaptation

The two most influential thinkers in the field of adaptation studies in the twenty-first century, and also two of the thinkers most responsible for defining the difference between appropriation and adaptation, are Julie Sanders and Linda Hutcheon. In her work, Adaptation and Appropriation, Sanders defines the two concepts in relation to each other:

Adaptations and appropriations can vary in how explicitly they state their intertextual purpose. Many of the film, television, or theatre adaptations of canonical works of literature that we look at in this volume openly declare themselves as an interpretation or re-reading of a canonical precursor. Sometimes this will involve a director’s personal vision, and it may or may not involve cultural relocation or updating of some form; sometimes this reinterpretative act will also involve the movement into a new generic mode or context. In appropriations the intertextual relationship may be less explicit, more embedded, but what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s, director’s, or performer’s decision to re-interpret a source text. In this respect, the creative import of the author cannot be as easily dismissed as Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s influential theories of the ‘death of the author’ might suggest.^[11]

Here Sanders defines adaptation as an intertextual practice which offers an interpretation or re-reading of a canonical precursor. This, importantly, may involve a shift into a new “generic mode or context,” like the shift from poetry to video games as a medium. Sanders defines appropriations as potentially less explicit and thus “more embedded” engagements which often have inescapable “political or ethical” commitments which shape the “writer’s, director’s, or performer’s decision to re-interpret a source text.” Though adaptations and appropriations both share in being intertextual interpretations or re-readings of canonical works, appropriations will tend to appropriate elements of a canonical work to privilege a new ethical or political re-reading of a text, or they may simply draw from their respective source texts in a looser way.^[12] Though this practice of appropriating is relatively widespread, none of the four video games in this study appropriates material simply to give a new political or ethical spin, as straightforwardly as the term suggests, but neither does any simply adapt material from its source text without picking and choosing, transforming, reducing, or even expurgating certain aspects of the source material. Each game, though, clearly appropriates elements from Dante’s work in more and less explicit ways. There are thus two additional terms Sanders defines and employs, bricolage and pastiche, which will be useful to our analysis.^[13] Bricolage is:

the term for ‘Do-it-yourself’ (DIY), which helps to explain its application in a literary context to those texts that assemble a ranger of quotations, allusions, and citations from existent works of art. A parallel form in art is the creation of collage by assembling found items to create a new aesthetic object or in music the creative act of ‘sampling.’ This purposeful reassembly of fragments to form a new whole is, undoubtedly, an active element in many of the postmodernist texts explored in the course of this study.^[14]

A work of art which selectively assembles quotations, allusions, or citations from existent works of art in literature in called bricolage. In visual art, assembling pieces of visual art or found items together to create a new whole is called collage. Specifically in the works Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, though they are made of more than simply “found items,” does the notion of bricolage apply due to their “picking and choosing” from both Dante’s work and a large range of transcultural, translinguistic, transmedial, and transtemporal material. To this point, both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII seem to defy conventional categorization into adaptations or appropriations, so both will be considered a hybrid mix (from one medium to another) of both bricolage and pastiche, though without the “derogatory” connotation suggested by Genette’s definition in the footnote above. Sanders defines the pastiche as “a composition made up of fragments pieced together,” but she also adds that this designation is “being applied most often to those works which carry out an extended imitation of the style of a single artist or writer.”^[15] Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, as will be shown, do collect and apply elements from works of art, literature, and mythology into new aesthetic wholes, respectively, but each work follows its own theme and structure without borrowing each essential aspect from Dante’s work either. Both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, since they are much more complicated expressions of art than Dante’s Inferno and Devil May Cry—as will be argued below—must be a hybrid form of adaptation which partakes of elements of both bricolage and pastiche.^[16]

In their work, “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner criticize Sanders’ definitions of adaptation and appropriation as “one of a degree” where adaptation is “more faithful to the original, closer to its source” and an appropriation is “the wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original.”^[17] A more fruitful conceptualization of the relationship, they think, is Linda Hutcheon’s notion that “adapting can be a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interest and talents.”^[18] Nicklas and Lindner prefer this process-based definition of the relationship between adaptation and appropriation because it moves beyond legalistic notions of appropriation and emphasizes the transformative process of adaptation:

In this other aspect of appropriation rests the metabolic quality of adaptation as a creative and metamorphic process: material is broken up to become part of a new living organism. Hence, the terms of adaptation and appropriation – kept so hygienically apart by Sanders – start to merge. They are not two separate processes, but rather appropriation seems to be part of adaptation.^[19]

Though Hutcheon calls adaptation a process of appropriation and Nicklas and Lindner call appropriation a part of adaption, they both prioritize the definition of adaptation in relation to appropriation as a creative process which creates “a new cultural capital.” This suggests that the terms adaptation and appropriation themselves are not so important as the creative and transformative process which they signify. In the present essay, Hutcheon’s and Nicklas and Lindner’s definitions will both be used because it is unclear, particularly in Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, where adaptation ends and appropriation begins, when considering the transmedial transformation of a work of poetry to a contemporary video game. Sanders’ definition, too, will be employed when identifying a work as significantly loosened from its source text, because Nicklas and Lindner are keen to report that some scholars of adaptation studies accept Sanders’ definition while others reject it, showing that the term is not yet entirely codified within the field.^[20]

Kevin Flanagan attempts to add clarity to the discussion of video game adaptations without entering the discussion of the relationship between adaptations and appropriations. Instead, he uses the term “remediation” to suggest that “[w]ith the exception of some abstract art games, most videogames function under the logic of ‘remediation,’ a tendency within digital media to incorporate, contain, reform, and re-establish old media forms for a new cultural moment (Bolter and Grusin 339-46).”^[21] In considering the ways that video games adapt or appropriate material specifically, Flanagan employs Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term “remediation” which specifically reflects “digital media’s” tendency to incorporate, reform, and re-establish “old media” for a “new cultural moment.” This remediation, then, is what each of the four video games analyzed below attempts to do with its source material, though Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII attempt to remediate material from more sources than Dante’s Inferno and Devil May Cry do, effectively rendering them as pastiche-bricolages that remediate a vast amount of material for the purpose of creating a new culturally relevant aesthetic achievement. This also suggests that Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII are more appropriations than they are adaptations, based on Nicklas and Lindner’s definition indicated above, because they focus on the creation of “new cultural capital,” and a move towards something new rather than away from the “original” work of art.

In their 2024 article “Video Games and Adaptation: An Introduction,” Tatjana Ristić and Darjan Kubik agree with Flanagan’s use of the term remediation to describe adaptations between media, and disagree with Henry Jenkins’ narrower definition of adaptation as excluding transmedia storytelling:

Adaptations to a different medium are re-mediations, that is, translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system to another. This is a translation in a very specific sense: as transmutation or transcoding into a new set of conventions as well as signs.^[22]

Additionally, Ristić and Kubik agree with Hutcheon that there are three modes with which to engage digital media: telling (novels), showing (films), and participating either physically or kinesthetically.^[23] We agree with Hutcheon, Ristić and Kubik that the third mode, participating or, in the case of video games, playing, is a new mode of engagement with material that has been translated or transposed from the “telling” or “showing” media. Ristić and Kubik also agree with Flanagan’s classification of four types of relationships between adaptation and video games: adaptation as creation, adaptation as porting, adaptation as localization, and adaptation as “modding”; adaptation as creation, defined here as “representative transmedia properties adapt source materials,” is relevant to our understanding of all four video games analyzed, with little focus being paid here to the additional nuances of porting, localizing, and modding.^[24] Finally, Ristić and Kubik investigate the differing ways in which media can be adapted from telling, showing, or participating into an alternate form. In particular, “Telling-to-Interactive,” is the movement that video game adaptations of Dante’s Divine Comedy have taken. In Ristić and Kubik’s description of how the video game The Witcher drew from the The Witcher novels, we recognize a path for how Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII approached Dante’s Divine Comedy as their source material:

The novel’ [sic] author (Sapowski 2017) mentions a version of the Polish folk tale, in which the protagonist, the shoemaker, is his primary source of inspiration, though not in terms of “salvaging” but rather of “appropriation,” as Hutcheon would put it… The very same freedom in narrative structure was given to the game designers: Sapkowski agreed to let them write entirely original stories using the elements of his tales and he parted ways with his rights to the narrative direction of the games…^[25]

Though Dante was obviously incapable of giving his assent to any of the four adaptations analyzed below, the relationship between each and the source material is closer to how Ristić, Kubik, and Hutcheon describe it in the texts discussed above. For one, each video game, but particularly Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, seems to “salvage” and “appropriate” material in the loose fashion described by Sanders—but without the ethical or political commitments sometimes also appended to the notion of appropriation—while also invoking “freedom in narrative structure” from the source text. This suggests, then, that Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII loosely appropriate and remediate elements from Dante’s Divine Comedy, but that each video game as a whole is a pastiche or bricolage of transmedial elements from works beyond Dante’s and fashioned in a serious mode.^[26] Though the first two, more straightforward, adaptations of Dante’s work act as “Telling-to-narrative” transmedial adaptations themselves, they do so in a much more explicit and forthright way, less suggestive of pastiche or bricolage than the two Final Fantasy games. That said, the first two games, Dante’s Inferno and Devil May Cry, are independent/distant enough from the facts of Dante’s work to be considered appropriations by Sanders’ definition of appropriation as a “more decisive journey away from the informing source into a new cultural product.”^[27]

3. Huizinga’s Foundational Work on Play and Initial Engagements with Dante in Video Games: Setting the Stage

Both medievalists and Dantisti have been trenchantly engaging with video games for over twenty years. As a medievalist working on notions of play and games, the Dutch literary theorist Johann Huizinga offers—in his Homo Ludens—the starting point for all interconnections between medievalists and video games in the same way that J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and Dungeons and Dragons serve as bases for the modern Role-Playing Game (RPG).^[28] To this point, Visceral Games brought out an action-adventure style game across multiple platforms entitled Dante’s Inferno in 2010. Though there are other games that more subtly engage with Dante’s work and the motifs included in the Commedia, the adaptation of Dante from medieval poet uneasy with the task of heroism to strapping twelfth-century crusader wielding a scythe won from Death has warranted comments from prominent literary scholars such Teodolinda Barolini. Though the game Dante’s Inferno was a moderate critical and commercial success, it fared poorly with Dante scholars, who critiqued its altering facts of Dante’s poem: in the adaptation, the story is set in the twelfth century rather than the first year of the fourteenth; Dante is a crusader built like an 1980s American action film hero; and Beatrice is Dante’s fiancée.^[29] Barolini derided the game’s depiction of Beatrice as a damsel in distress.^[30] Unfortunately, however, this criticism has expanded from a specific element of the game Dante’s Inferno to the medium of video games itself. In this essay, I would like to reorient that perception by demonstrating that Dante’s work has been adapted and appropriated with differing degrees of nuance and continues to influence games as they rapidly adapt to the rapidly adapting technology of the times. Just as there are novels with different levels of sophistication, so are there more complex, nuanced, and transformative video games: it just so happens the Dante’s Inferno may not be one of them in the critical perception. This, however, does not preclude other more intellectually engaging games from adapting or paralleling Dante’s work in less obvious ways. To that point, in this study, I will include a brief analysis of the ways in which the most obvious video game adaptations of Dante’s work, Dante’s Inferno and Devil May Cry, appropriate elements of Dante’s work, but I will also consider the ways in which Dante’s work influences, or at least shares clear imagery and themes with, the late 1990s masterpieces of this genre: Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Final Fantasy VIII (1999). In considering these games, I will show that video games can achieve a more trenchant level of engagement with Dante, and that a more trenchant level of scholarship should be dedicated to this important artistic (and literary) medium. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner’s words seem appropriate here, as the subject we are discussing suffers from the malign judgment applied both to video games studies and adaptation studies: “Adaptation is not only often treated with scorn because of its supposed secondariness but also because it regularly runs counter to the ideas of connoisseurs of the original.”^[31]

4. Recent Scholarship on Dante and Video Games: Clear Adaptations of Dante’s Comedy in Video Games:

4.1. Dante’s Inferno

Dante's Inferno was first distributed in 2010 as an action-adventure game developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released for the then-current consoles of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PlayStation Portable in February 2010. The game follows Dante, now reimagined as a tough and powerfully built crusader, who wields a scythe and has had his fiancée, Beatrice, stolen from him by Lucifer. Like in the 1998 movie, What Dreams May Come, Dante must make a journey down into hell in order to save this Beatrice. Also, like in Dante’s poem, this Dante-as-crusader will discover previously undisclosed facts about himself during his journey. His journey thus partakes of the video game motif of “saving the princess from a monster,” as the early iterations of Super Mario first accustomed gamers to,^[32] but it also represents a path of self-discovery. Ultimately, after battling many demons and undead spirits, Dante will confront the fact that it was his own infidelity and unwillingness to be honest with himself that consigned his fiancée Beatrice to Hell. Interestingly, there is a correlate to this concept in Dante’s Purgatorio 30, but the details differ from those in Dante’s Inferno (the video game). In Purgatorio 30, Dante the pilgrim does confront his infidelity to Beatrice, but here, Beatrice is not his wife but rather the second guide on his spiritual quest; allegorically, she is part of the mechanism that allows Dante to achieve his philosophical-theological ideal.^[33] Rather than coming short by literal infidelity to his human spouse, Dante the pilgrim has been unfaithful to the ideals which Beatrice represents. Also, instead of his realizing this in the presence of Lucifer and in the confines of his own mind, it is Beatrice herself that explicitly rebukes Dante in his purgatorial moment of revelation:

Non pur per ovra de le rote magne,

che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine

secondo che le stelle son compagne,

ma per larghezza di grazie divine,

che sì alti vapori hanno a lor piova,

che nostre viste là non van vicine,

questi fu tal ne la sua vita nova

virtüalmente, ch’ogne abito destro

fatto averebbe in lui mirabil prova.

Ma tanto più maligno e più silvestro

si fa ’l terren col mal seme e non cólto,

quant’ elli ha più di buon vigor terrestro.

Alcun tempo il sostenni col mio volto:

mostrando li occhi giovanetti a lui,

meco il menava in dritta parte vòlto.

Sì tosto come in su la soglia fui

di mia seconda etade e mutai vita,

questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.

Quando di carne a spirto era salita,

e bellezza e virtù cresciuta m’era,

fu’ io a lui men cara e men gradita;

e volse i passi suoi per via non vera,

imagini di ben seguendo false,

che nulla promession rendono intera.

Né l’impetrare ispirazion mi valse,

con le quali e in sogno e altrimenti

lo rivocai: sì poco a lui ne calse!

Tanto giù cadde, che tutti argomenti

a la salute sua eran già corti,

fuor che mostrarli le perdute genti.

Per questo visitai l’uscio d’i morti,

e a colui che l’ha qua sù condotto,

li prieghi miei, piangendo, furon porti.

Alto fato di Dio sarebbe rotto,

se Letè si passasse e tal vivanda

fosse gustata sanza alcuno scotto

di pentimento che lagrime spanda» (Purg. 30.109-45)

Though this moment of castigation-revelation occurs in Dante’s Purgatorio and not in Inferno, and Dante is not saving Beatrice or “the princess,” but rather is being excoriated in order to be saved by Beatrice, the theme of having to face one’s self, likely with shame—“Li occhi mi cadder giù nel chiaro fonte; / ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a l’erba, / tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte” (Purg. 30.76-78)—is present in both works. This similarity in broad themes but wide divergence in fact characterizes this particular appropriation of Dante’s work into a video game. Though this game announces its connection to Dante’s Inferno from the title, it more closely resembles Sanders’ definition of appropriation as a “more decisive journey away from the informing source into a new cultural product.”^[34] Let us consider some further diversions from Dante’s work in Dante’s Inferno.

In the video game, the story begins in 1191, and Dante is a crusader under Richard III.^[35] The opening shot is of a selva oscura, and the first lines of Dante’s Inferno are read aloud in English translation, though significantly, the narrator reads, “at the midpoint, on the journey of life,” rather than including the all-encompassing first person plural possessive adjective “nostra” to render the phrase “nostra vita” (our life).^[36] At a fire in the woods, rather than climbing past a leopard, lion, and up to a she-wolf, Dante sews an iconographic image of a large red cross across his chest and abdomen, which makes him a rather fearsome figure. This alone stands in stark contrast with the tremulous Dante the pilgrim in Dante’s Inferno:

Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame

sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza,

e molte genti fé già viver grame,

questa mi porse tanto di gravezza

con la paura ch’uscia di sua vista,

ch’io perdei la speranza de l’altezza. (Inf. 1.49-54)

In their respective opening sequences, Dante the pilgrim and Dante the Crusader—Dante from Dante’s Inferno—show contrasting characteristics. Rather than encountering the she-wolf that, in Dante’s poem, renders Dante the pilgrim so fearful that he abandons all hope of ascending the mountain before him—even before the gate of Hell issues its imperative in Inferno 3.9—Dante the Crusader is depicted sewing a red cross onto his chest, enduring physical pain that mirrors, and indeed equals, the mental, emotional, and bodily suffering he has endured in past battles and will face again in those yet to come. Right from their introductions, therefore, the two Dantes reveal very different natures as characters—one loses hope due to fear (Inf. 1.49-54 and 2.121-126), the other remains resolute in the wake of a dark future—a further mark of the appropriative nature of Dante’s Inferno.

Dante will soon have a fight with Death, whose scythe with a handle of “human vertebrae” Dante will wield after defeating him.^[37] He then approaches the gate of Hell, which is represented as a mounted head which tells the souls “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” (This, incidentally, is a correct English translation of Inferno 3.9). Additionally, Minos is represented as a blind and tailed giant who places souls on a spiked rota fortunae to take them to their proper circle, and Cleopatra and Marc Antony—rather than Paolo and Francesca—occupy a prominent place in the Circle of Lust (Cleopatra is the “boss” of the circle).^[38] Cerberus appears, worm-like and without eyes, pictured more like a hydra than a dog in the Circle of Gluttony. Here, too, Dante, ultimately fights his drunken and gluttonous father, Alighiero. After Dante passes the River Styx, he discovers that his own infidelity to Beatrice with one of the wives of the three-thousand captives from Saladin’s forces, has led to her damnation in Hell. Apparently, she had made a “deal with the devil” to keep Dante safe during his crusade; but if he were to be unfaithful to her, as defined by copulating with another woman, she would forfeit her soul to Lucifer. In the game’s opening scenes, Dante returns home to discover that Beatrice and his lascivious father have been brutally slain, seemingly at the hands of the husband of the woman with whom Dante slept during the Crusade.

Dante then enters the Malebolge and Beatrice explains the significance of each bolgia. In the Malebolge, Dante learns that Beatrice’s brother gave up his own life, like those who would have died for Spartacus, by taking the blame for the killing of the three thousand hostages. Dante confesses his sins to Beatrice over his holy cross, and she is freed from the corruption of evil. An angel then descends to take her soul to Paradise and encourages Dante to continue his journey until the end. It is this—Dante saving Beatrice rather than the opposite, at least in Dante’s Divine Comedy—that Barolini dislikes the most about Dante’s Inferno.^[39]

The Ninth Circle features a flaming pentagram on the ground. Lucifer is bound by gigantic iron chains (the Chains of Judecca), with a glowing representation of the three persons of the trinity on his forehead. Lucifer then tears open his stomach to reveal bowels filled with flames from which his true form emerges: a more human-sized horned demon with stumps where his angelic wings once were, and cloven, satyr-like hooves as feet. Besides the fact that this Lucifer misses the absolute majestic scope of Dante’s Lucifer (Inf. 34.28-33), the most curious change would seem to be the exclusion of the three sinners from Lucifer’s three jaws (Inf. 34.53-69). The Lucifer in Dante’s Inferno does have three faces—in his first, larger form—but he is also not chewing on the two men responsible for the death of Julius Caesar and the one responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Nor is he chewing on any sinner at all. This suggests a difference in both political and religious focus in Dante’s Inferno. Though the game uses Hell as its backdrop, sophisticated notions about unifying the Italian people and about the sticky issue of a celestial being predestined to betray God the Father and a terrestrial being predestined to betray God the Son—Lucifer and Judas, respectively—are left out from the experience. This also suggests a modern commitment to the universality of individual experience and thus to the inexistence of concepts superior to one’s individuality, like political or religious unity.^[40]

With so many differences existing between Dante’s Inferno and Dante’s Inferno, one is tempted to ask alongside Martin Ringot whether this game was meant to be a parody of Dante’s work. Later in the essay, Ringot revises his position, arriving at a more illuminating perspective than his initial characterization of the video game as a parody:

Ce qui frappe, c’est de voir combien le sens littéral peut être maintenu du moment qu’il sert les intérêts du jeu. L’horreur de l’Enfer, les descriptions permettant de créer une situation ludique intéressante, sont respectées assez scrupuleusement. On ne peut pas en dire autant des sens allégorique, moral et anagogique. L’imaginaire de l’Enfer, le double sens de certains discours, la critique des contemporains qui transparaît, les différentes thématiques joueur qu’un discours sur le péché, la corruption et l’horreur de la guerre.^[41]

Ringot suggests that a great deal of meaning from the original poem is maintained at the literal level, but that the other three levels at which Dante’s poem is written (allegorical, tropological, and anagogical) are irremediably lost in the adaptation. The ensuing production is a flatter, less nuanced and universal portrayal of an individual man’s quest to save his wife after committing seemingly unforgivable acts, similar to Kratos in God of War, who, like Hercules, is responsible for the killing of his own family.^[42] Though leaving the literal aspects of Dante’s poem without its allegorical aspects is itself, for Ringot, potentially parodic at first, he indicates that the game takes itself rather seriously and does not intend to have a comic dimension or to disparage the original work, though it may have accomplished these aims unintentionally.^[43] I would add that by Genette’s definitions, a parody is defined as a satirical form of pastiche, whereas a serious pastiche does not seek to satirize or exaggerate its source.^[44]

Brandon Essary takes a different approach to analyzing Dante’s Inferno. Ringot argues that the game flattens the poem’s polysemous complexity into a serious yet overly literal representation of Dante’s work. Essary similarly contends that the game encourages “relatively thoughtless interaction”; nevertheless, he demonstrates that the game can serve as a productive pedagogical tool by showing how it helps illuminate the poem, drawing on a survey of twenty students from Elon University. In fact, one of his students wrote the following in response to a survey question: “I learned more about Dante and his poetry by studying it alongside a video game than I would have learned if we had read the text by itself.”^[45] That said, Essary’s assessment is similar to Ringot’s: despite the skills necessary to progress through the game Dante’s Inferno, he suggests that the game itself may be too “straightforward” and full of “demon-mashing” to convey the narrative complexity of Dante’s poem.^[46] A game that did a better job of using developed characters, a faithful historical-literary period, and appropriate text and imagery is the Assassin’s Creed series, particularly Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, both set in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Italy.^[47]

Lorenzo Servitje draws attention to the representation of Dante himself in Dante’s Inferno as opposed to Dante’s Inferno. He adumbrates the way that, in Dante’s Inferno, Dante is a “figure of tremendous power, strength, and ferocity,” whereas the poem’s Dante is often chastised by Virgil “for his cowardice and reluctance to accept divine justice.”^[48] Additionally, with Dante becoming hyper-masculine, Beatrice becomes “hypersexualized” to feed the “macho characteristics” of “hypersexual desire” and “the need for danger.”^[49] This leads to Beatrice being represented as dependent, submissive, and sexually alluring rather than as the dominating and powerful figure from Dante’s poem. More troubling—a point Servitje draws from Barolini—is that, rather than Beatrice saving Dante, Dante must save Beatrice, completely upending the dynamic between the two characters in Dante’s poem.^[50] This said, Servitje still sees value in Dante’s Inferno: the game uses the symbol of the cross, made of long red fabric with story-details stitched onto Dante’s chest, as a mnemotechnical device reminding Dante of the sins he has committed and prefers to forget. These details show his infidelity to Beatrice in his intercourse with a Muslim prisoner; his massacre of the Muslim prisoners in his care in a fit of rage; and his betrayal of his “brother” Francesco when Dante lets him take the blame. All these acts were done under the premise that the bishop who preached the Crusade had granted Dante absolution of his sins prior to committing them. Hinting at Inferno’s portrayal of Guido da Montefeltro being deceived by Pope Boniface VIII (27.61-129), Servitje sees these moments from Dante’s Inferno as trenchant criticism of the misuses of religion.^[51] Finally, Servitje makes the ironic point that, though Dante’s Inferno itself condemns war and its violent delights in its narrative, it seems also to celebrate, contradictorily, violence through the gameplay mechanics one is required to use to progress in the game.^[52]

Francesco Toniolo alerts us to the fact that many independent and less well-known video games have taken inspiration from Dante’s Commedia, such as Painkiller: Resurrection by HomeGrown Games (2009), Shadows of the Damned by Grasshopper Manufacture (2011), ULTRAKILL by Arsi “Hakita” Patala (2020), the well-known Devil May Cry series (2001-2019), and others.^[53] Additionally, though many games have been inspired by Dante’s work, they largely confine themselves to representing Inferno rather than the other two realms of the afterlife and their respective canticles.^[54] Nevertheless, Toniolo suggests that even though Dante’s influence mostly comes from Inferno, it extends beyond major game developing studios, and inspires independent Italian studios as well as amateur and non-commercial projects. Projects like Dante’s Interno by Borderandry (2020) transform Dante’s journey into a psychoanalytic one into his own mind, a major contrast to the less cerebral and muscle-bound interpretation of Dante’s work that Electronic Arts’ Dante’s Inferno presents.^[55] Finally, Toniolo draws attention to the claim first made by Scott Rogers that Dante’s influence may very well have seeped into the “themes” that many action and RPG games themselves use.^[56] As Toniolo writes, “L’interrogativo che alcuni si pongono è invece decisamente più ambizioso, cioè se Dante abbia influenzato il level design dei videogiochi in generale; o, perlomeno, che abbia avuto un forte impatto sui livelli tematici e sui boss che si possono trovare al loro interno.”^[57] Though Toniolo finds it suggestive that many video game levels are seemingly based on locations in Dante’s hell (forest zone, fire zone, ice zone) and several circles of Dante’s Inferno contain powerful, boss-like figures (the three creatures, Minos, Cerberus, Plutus, the Malebranche, Geryon, Lucifer, etc…), Toniolo remains ambivalent about the possibility of a direct influence from Dante. He suggests, however, that Dante could have affected video game design through intermediaries such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s works and games like Dungeons & Dragons.^[58]

Claudia Rossignoli considers the ways in which Dante’s poetry allows for transmediation as well as cross-genre and transcultural appeal. Like I also do in my “Contrapasso, Violence, and Madness in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Westworld,” Rossignoli considers the continued impact Dante’s work has had on new media, manga, and novels, and Rossignoli adds that Dante’s poetry continues “to contribute to new ‘modes of meaning’” through appropriations of his work.^[59] Like Essary and Ringot’s criticisms of Dante’s Inferno flattening and literalizing Dante’s poetry, so does Rossignoli observe that the protagonist of Dante’s Inferno has “lost any meaningful connection to his literary counterpart” while also including “a strong element of disturbing violence.”^[60] Like Servitje and Barolini, Rossignoli also observes that Dante’s saving Beatrice in Dante’s Inferno inverts what readers are explicitly told—in Inferno 2.52-75 and Purgatorio 30.136-41—about Beatrice’s role in saving Dante.^[61] Thus, Rossignoli concludes, the makers of Dante’s Inferno make the game both less medieval by relieving its protagonist of his larger existential and theological concerns and less modern by “flattening its articulate representation of human relationships,” which makes it irrelevant to “our contemporary understanding of the world.”^[62] Ultimately, Dante’s journey through the afterlife in the Divine Comedy is one of transformation and of the possibility of sharing this transformation after the journey has concluded. In Dante’s Inferno, instead, the capacity for self-transformation and, therefore, collective transformation is missing. The ultimate rationale for Dante’s journey is thus missing from the game that seeks to adapt Dante’s poetry.^[63]

Katherine Powlesland agrees with Rossignoli’s notion that Dante’s Inferno is based on a “more generic ‘medievalised landscape’” of dungeons, caverns, and rockfaces (perhaps in contrast to Rogers and Toniolo), but she adds that the concentric circles and perfect architecture of Dante’s Inferno add to the dopaminergic state characteristic of action-adventure video games.^[64] As Barolini states with regard to ‘the whole point’ of an action-adventure video game, for Powlesland too the goal of a video game is the achievement of a flow state that is so enjoyable that “people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”^[65] Additionally, Powlesland claims that the second reason one might play an action-adventure game like Dante’s Inferno is to accept “invitations to fiero” or the feeling of triumphing over adversity and aiming at the attainment of autonomous agency.^[66] Games can go even further, however, when they attempt to embody actual experience as books like Ludolph’s Vita Christi have attempted to do. This would mean that a reader or player would then be able to enter the perceptual illusion of being embodied at events like the Passion, which would make the learning not only propositional, but experiential. Dante in his poetry attempts to do just this, Powlesland proposes, throughout his journey to the divine,^[67] but do any of the games which adapt Dante’s work do the same? Though Powlesland relegates Dante’s Inferno to the realm of dopaminergic excitements, she also identifies other more successful attempts at adapting Dante to video games, in that they produce a kind of embodiment and experiential learning. In Red and the Deadly Sins, the gameplay encourages differing cognitive skills that are supposed to lead to attaining mental health, empathy, and good judgement, though Powlesland admits that certain non-Commedia inspired text-based adventure games, such as Depression Quest (2013), may be more successful in their “mechanics of participation of the higher executive functions.”^[68] Ultimately, however, Powlesland leaves the question of whether a video game can adapt Dante’s transformational rhetoric for the reader:

The journey is the work of enactment imagination that supports the burnishing of the plastic cognitive skills of attention, perception, and empathy; it is the work of counter-factual reasoning and memory that supports good judgement; and it is the constant reflexive gap-filling that finesses the ability in the individual to make the absent present. The question of whether a digital environment can better render any of the ingenious strategies for inviting embodied simulation that Dante has encoded into the narrative mechanics of the poem, for me, is moot; but is one that would repay interdisciplinary research across the fields of communications theory, literary theory, video game critical theory, neuroaesthetics, and Dante studies.^[69]

We have considered Dante’s Inferno and the scholarship about it. We shall now move on to Devil May Cry.

4.2. Devil May Cry

Capcom’s Devil May Cry series was first developed and distributed in 2001 with its first iteration, Devil May Cry. Since the extraordinary success of the first game, no fewer than four mainline installments have followed (Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, and Devil May Cry 5) as well as games for the mobile phone, such as the 2007-2008 Devil May Cry: Dante X Vergil and the 2020 mobile game Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat (by Yunchang Games). At the time of writing this article, there are five mainline entries to the Devil May Cry series, three mobile games, an HD collection of previously released games called Devil May Cry HD Collection, a shooter-style game released in Japan in 2003 (Devil May Cry: Deadshot), and also a reboot of the 2013 series called DmC: Devil May Cry. Devil May Cry has been successful not only as a video game: like the music of Final Fantasy VII, it has witnessed the release of seven soundtracks. Adi Shankar has recently purchased the rights to produce an animated series for Devil May Cry, while Screen Gems has purchased the rights to make a film. Finally, in 2015 Capcom itself produced a play titled Sengoku Basara vs. Devil May Cry, which ran for eighteen performances at the AiiA 2.5 Theater in Tokyo. By December 31, 2024, the Devil May Cry series of games and adaptations had sold thirty-tree million units worldwide with each installment earning a Capcom Platinum Title for selling over a million units. Though the Devil May Cry series has been so commercially successful, Claudia Rossignoli draws attention to the fact that though Devil May Cry clearly alludes to Dante’s poetry, it is rarely discussed as an adaptation:

Perhaps precisely because of its creative autonomy, the immensely popular Devil May Cry franchise (Capcom, 2001–2019) is rarely discussed in terms of its relationship with Dante’s Comedy though it is clear that the poem constitutes a significant source for its character designs and some of its intricate story lines. Like Dante’s Inferno, the Devil May Cry games (DMC1–5) are hack-and-slash action third-person shooter games in which the protagonist Dante, the half-demon son of the Black Knight Sparda, is a postmodern demon hunter in an infernally dystopian but otherwise recognizably urban reality. Although this character is as distant from the poem’s protagonist as his crusader parallel […], he constitutes a much more successful transmedial experiment across the franchise’s installments. Maintaining some crucial traits of his medieval counterpart, such as his resilience, his self-belief, his assured notion of his core values, this Dante represents a genuinely contemporary and accomplished transmediation of the poem’s pilgrim, even though his personal story may appear very different.^[70]

How else does the series, thus, relate to and adapt Dante’s work? One should first note the name of Devil May Cry’s protagonist, which is Dante, as Rossignoli points out. Dante is a half-demon, sword and gun wielding, mercenary, the son of a powerful demon named Sparda and of a human woman named Eva. He also has a brother named Vergil, with whom he has a serious sibling and pugilistic rivalry. Though it is often noted that Dante the poet felt a certain rivalry with Vergil the poet, Vergil serves more as a guide than a direct competitor for Dante the pilgrim throughout Inferno and Purgatorio. For example, in the first canto of Inferno, Dante describes Virgil as his master (maestro) and author (autore), suggesting a paternal—rather than fraternal—relationship between the two:

«Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte

che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?»,

rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte.

«O de li altri poeti onore e lume

vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore

che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore;

tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi

lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore.» (Inf. 1.79-87)

Additionally, Devil May Cry’s Dante also finds himself confronting hell and hellish monsters, but unlike the character in the poem, who wishes to learn from them and move on (sometimes urged to do so by Virgil, like in Inf. 30.130-141), he must enter into combat with various demons, and even his own brother Vergil, to progress through hell and defeat the lord of hell, Mundus. Additionally, the series successfully adapts several characters from Dante’s Comedy and includes them in the game: Vergil, Dante’s twin brother (Virgil), Trish (short for Beatrice), Lucia (St. Lucy), Geryon, and Cerberus.^[71] Though these elements clearly derive from Dante’s work, the Devil May Cry series is more of a loose adaptation à la Sanders and, in Hutcheon’s terms, appropriates by means of “salvaging” elements from Dante’s work, rather than offering a prolonged and consistent thematic or structural portrayal of Dante’s work vividly re-imagined in all its transmedial glory.

Finally, Rossignoli makes the point that game design has come a long way since 2010 and that Dante scholars and video game scholars should consider games that experiment in producing a “higher consciousness,” such as the highly experimental Chain World (2011) or the magnificent and poignant Journey (2012), which features a quest towards an ever looming mountain in the distance.^[72] Rossignoli concludes with the following considerations for what would make an interactive adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy special like Dante’s work:

In fact, while Dante is indeed a defined and identifiable character, the concerns he has and the questions he tries to answer in his poem are universal and have a valid ethical relevance in themselves, even if we disregard the Judeo-Christian framework within which they were formulated. They are about accepting responsibility for our society, about understanding what we can do, cooperatively as well as individually, to improve our collective well-being. They force us to reflect on how we can assert our identity through conscious choices without delegating our responsibilities or subjugating others. A game attempting to mirror these concerns will allow players to carry ethical experiences across realms and through the permeability of the ludic circle (Castranova, 2005; Nieuwdorp, 2005), recreating the poem’s moral self-questioning and upholding the ethical project from which Dante’s text derives. This would be a “game for change” that would use “the expressive power of video game (Bogost, 2007)” to propose a persuasive framework for challenging assumptions and behaviors, with enough beauty and energy to afford a new level of authentic “incorporation (see Calleja, 2011)” and “creative capability (McGonigal, 2012).”^[73]

In what follows, I contend that both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII are games which ask questions about personal and social responsibility, feature moral and epistemic transformations, develop unique and philosophically interesting cosmologies, and focus on identity and the effect one’s conscious choices have on oneself, one’s friends, and the world itself.

5. Dante in Video Games with More Obscure and Impressionistic Adaptations: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII

5.1. Dante in Final Fantasy VII

The Squaresoft game (now Square Enix) Final Fantasy VII was the first iteration of the Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) series on Sony’s PlayStation, after a longtime partnership with Nintendo. Due to the constraints of cartridge technology compared to compact discs (CDs), Squaresoft sought to make a pathbreaking game on the console utilizing state of the art storage software. In preparation for its release, Squaresoft even produced three thirty-second commercial trailers, presenting the game as something as exciting as a major blockbuster film. Though this game has not been identified as connected to or adapting Dante’s Divine Comedy before, I will show several powerful parallels that will hopefully start a scholarly conversation on the relationship between Final Fantasy VII and the Divine Comedy and on the kind of adaptation or appropriation it entails.

First, Final Fantasy VII begins in media res with an amnesiac protagonist scaling the mountain-like dystopian and steampunk locale of a “Mako Reactor,” itself reminiscent of a power plant. The colors of the reactor and the surrounding city of Midgar, named after the Norse realm, are dark and gloomy. In fact, the level where the action of the game takes place is beneath a plate on which the upper-class lives. One thus begins the game not in a dark and natural selva oscura (Inf. 2.1-3 and 40-42), but in an even more dystopian, cyber-punk, and technological forest—a forest of man’s own making with a self-imposed darkness.

This initial setting is itself an urban and dystopian representation of Dante’s hell. As mentioned above, the city of Midgar is stratified and circular in design. It contains multiple levels on which denizens live and is split into seven “sectors,” each receiving electricity from a Mako Reactor, which itself synthesizes the earth’s life-force into energy for the city. This connects the denizens of Midgar to the citizens of the infernal city (la città dolente) of Dis:

Questa palude che ’l gran puzzo spira

cigne dintorno la città dolente,

u’ non potemo intrare omai sanz’ ira. (Inf. 9.31-33)

Just as the plate above Cloud and his fellow party-members blots out the sun, making the surroundings dim and oscur[i], so does the subterranean nature of the second-class Midgar residents suggest that they live beneath the earth in a place like Dante’s hell (see Figure 1 for a representation of the infernal circle of Midgar). Similarly to Dante’s Hell, where philosophical actuality and the possibility of change (represented by hope) is not permitted, the brutal poverty and lack of social mobility in Midgar’s “slums” represent the parallel stasis and stagnant nature of existence.

Beyond the initial city of Midgar, Final Fantasy VII features a cornucopia of infernal symbols, some of which are distinctly Dantean. The major antagonist in the game is Sephiroth, whose name is a corruption of the Kabbalistic notion of the ten spheres on the Tree of Life. In some ways the antagonist of Final Fantasy VII is even more difficult to conceive of than the giant prince of darkness lurking at the bottom of Dante’s Hell. However, Final Fantasy VII incorporates several distinct visual motifs that can be traced to Dante’s depiction of Lucifer, particularly in its representation of his figure and punishment. For instance, Sephiroth is himself a former top SOLDIER, drawn from the best, most elite, unit in the world of Final Fantasy VII. He is known to be smarter, stronger, faster, and even taller and better looking than any other man; he shares this affinity for perfection with Lucifer, whom Dante describes with an ironic simile by suggesting that if Lucifer is now as ugly as he once was beautiful, he must have been the most beautiful creature in existence:

S’el fu sì bel com’ elli è ora brutto,

e contra ’l suo fattore alzò le ciglia,

ben dee da lui procedere ogne lutto.

Oh quanto parve a me gran maraviglia

quand’ io vidi tre facce a la sua testa! (Inf. 34.34-38)

Additionally, just as Dante the pilgrim is closer in size to the giants than the latter are to the arms of Lucifer (Inf. 34. 28-33), so is the scale of Sephiroth’s power far beyond that of the protagonist, Cloud, as indicated in a flashback where the two fight against each other: Cloud is level 1, Sephiroth is level 50; the player has 140 hit points (HP), Sephiroth has 3264;^[74] Sephiroth’s magic points are 529, Cloud’s are 10; Sephiroth deals over 3,000 hit points of damage with his attack, whereas Cloud deals closer to 14; and Sephiroth takes zero damage when attacked, showcasing his superiority in class over Cloud.^[75] According to these figures, Sephiroth is around fifty to two-hundred times stronger than Cloud based on HP, MP, or the ability to deal damage during the flashback. Like Lucifer, Sephiroth too is cast down into the bowels of the earth: Lucifer creates the spiraling vortex of subterranean hell (itself curiously still fashioned as an ordered space due to Lucifer’s very intricate fall). Like in Lucifer’s case, too, when Sephiroth’s body is first displayed again in a cave-like area, encased in Mako/materia (the crystallized life-blood of the planet), he is represented as naked from the waist up, but corrupted and undefined below the waist, as if part of his body had withered away, similarly to how Lucifer is himself encased in ice beneath his waist:

appigliò sé a le vellute coste;

di vello in vello giù discese poscia

tra ’l folto pelo e le gelate croste.

Quando noi fummo là dove la coscia

si volge, a punto in sul grosso de l’anche,

lo duca, con fatica e con angoscia,

volse la testa ov’ elli avea le zanche,

e aggrappossi al pel com’ om che sale,

sì che ’n inferno i’ credea tornar anche. (Inf. 34. 73-81)

Though Sephiroth is encased in materia (as displayed in Figure 2) and Lucifer in ice generated from the flapping of his wings and consequent freezing of his tears (as displayed in Figure 3), both are rendered physically incomplete and immobile by the circumstances in which they find themselves due to their own choices. Both, also, are capable of extending their wills beyond their bodies: Lucifer by means of the winds of his wings (and perhaps the continuing resonant effects from his prototypical fall); and Sephiroth by extending his will to any creature which has “Jenova Cells” injected into them.^[76] Additionally, in Sephiroth’s final form—the final “boss” of the game in Final Fantasy VII—he takes on the form of “Safer Sephiroth”—a Japanese attempt at translating “Seraph Sephiroth”—where he has a single right wing where his arm once was and has a giant vertical halo behind him (as displayed in Figure 5).

In the battle against Safer Sephiroth, the famous song, “One-Winged Angel” by Nobuo Uematsu plays throughout the battle’s duration. Finally, to get to this battle, which is a three-part battle (Jenova Synthesis, Bizarro Sephiroth, and Safer Sephiroth), one must take a spiraling path down into the bowels of the earth (as shown in Figure 6), from the Northern Crater area (an area indented by an extraterrestrial force, like Lucifer in Dante’s Inferno). This descent is foreshadowed in the hell-like and tomb-like Shinra Mansion in Nibelheim (as shown in Figure 4), which features a spiral descent into the bowels of an ominous lab, used for human experimentation, and a dark library, full of the lab reports and research conducted by Shinra (including information on its human experimentation and use of extraterrestrial DNA to artificially empower their SOLDIERS). The spiral then functions as a physical representation of the spiraling of Shinra’s moral compass just as it is a conscious allusion to the spiraling descent leftwards Dante makes in Inferno.^[77]

After the battle with Safer Sephiroth, Cloud is sucked down a vortex into his own mind where he is greeted by Sephiroth, naked from the waist up (as shown in Figure 7). This representation shows that the true root of Cloud’s problems, and perhaps the world’s problems, lies within himself. The physically immobilized Sephiroth within Cloud’s mind is himself a representation of the physically immobilized Satan in the depths of Dante’s Inferno. Just as both are buried within their respective spaces, so do both enact their will on earth by means of non-physical extension: Sephiroth by existing within Cloud’s mind, torturing and influencing him from there; and Lucifer by sending his glacial winds out from hell.

Finally, Final Fantasy VII features a character, Aerith Gainsborough, who is deeply reminiscent of Dante’s Beatrice.^[78] For one, both die young: Beatrice at twenty-five and Aerith at twenty-two, though Aerith is cutdown by the game’s antagonist, Sephiroth. The initial meeting place of Cloud and Aerith, too, is a parallel to where Dante first re-meets Beatrice in Terrestrial Paradise in canto 30 of Dante’s Purgatorio. After Cloud has fought in a Mako Reactor, he falls from the industrialized locations where the battle took place through the roof of a church onto a soft ground that appears to be a garden growing in the church stewarded by Aerith, a garden seemingly full of yellow and white lilies (as shown in Figure 8).^[79] Though she may just as well appear to be here a correlate to Matelda, the steward of Earthly Paradise, one additional feature of Aerith connects her to Beatrice. Just as Dante looks to Virgil and declares, “conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma” (I recognize the signs of the ancient flame) in Purg. 30.48—feeling his “ancient” desire for Beatrice surge within him upon seeing her again—so Aerith belongs to a people in Final Fantasy VII known as “the Ancients.” Aerith thus becomes Cloud’s “ancient” love interest, a love awakened only to be taken from him too soon, at the age of twenty-two.^[80]

We should borrow one final connection not from Final Fantasy VII but rather from its later companion movie, Final Fantasy Advent Children (2005), a later film made to complement and extend the story of Final Fantasy VII by showcasing events that take place two years after its main story line. One moment, however, from Final Fantasy Advent Children is relevant for our analysis.^[81] Under the sphere of the moon, and on his way through a curiously petrified forest (see Figure 9), where he will encounter three enemies (Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo),^[82] Cloud is pulled into a scene within his own mind as he motorcycles through a petrified forest on the way to The Forgotten City built by the Ancients. In this scene, he is showered by light—there are flowers beneath his feet (see Figure 10)—and stands back-to-back with Aerith. She asks why he came and in truly purgatorial fashion he responds: “I think… I wanna be forgiven… More than anything.”^[83] Though she does not viciously admonish Cloud, the location where they meet is deeply suggestive of the Earthly Paradise where Dante meets Beatrice after her own demise. Just as Dante meets Beatrice in a garden in the afterlife, so does Cloud meet Aerith in a garden that is, perhaps, within his own mind but certainly containing the deceased Aerith. She, too, shows up there to guide Cloud, but unlike Beatrice, her influence will be a brief exchange that ends as soon as Cloud turns around to see her, like Orpheus with Eurydice.

Figure 9. The Petrified Forest Surrounding the “Forgotten City” (source: https://www.uffsite.net/ff7ac/locations.php).

Figure 10. Cloud and Aerith standing back-to-back in a garden in Cloud’s mind after Aerith’s death (source: https://gamerant.com/final-fantasy-7-rebirth-aerith-tifa-story-roles-changes/).

5.2. Dante in Final Fantasy VIII

Until recently, there had been no work done comparing Final Fantasy VIII and Dante’s Commedia. Then, in 2021, Kanak Gupta wrote his master’s thesis at Harvard University on Final Fantasy VIII and its literary connections to Homer’s Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his thesis, Gupta makes several remarkable suggestions, which I will include and evaluate below.^[84]

First, Gupta makes the connection between the three canticles of Dante’s Commedia and the three major continents on the unnamed world of Final Fantasy VIII. I would add that each continent features a prominent civilization: the highly technologically accomplished Esthar Nation on the Eastern Continent, the militarily powerful and imperialist Galbadia Nation on the Western Continent, and the now destroyed Centra Civilization from the Southern Continent. Additionally, there are two islands diametrically opposed in the Eastern and Western locations, suggestively called “Island Closest to Hell” and “Island Closest to Heaven,” respectively. The Island Closest to Hell lies near the capital of the imperialist state of Galbadia and in close proximity to the screwdriver-shaped D-District Prison, which spirals deep into the ground. Its subterranean design renders escape virtually impossible and recalls the concentric underground circles of Dante’s Inferno.^[85]

During the game, Squall also has two guides and perhaps a third, just as Dante is first guided by Virgil, then Beatrice, and finally Bernard. The protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII, Squall Leonhart, is first guided by his teacher and field-instructor Quistis Trepe, whose name, Gupta notes, is reminiscent of “quest.^[86] Though Gupta inverts the position of Quistis and Cid, Squall’s second guide is Cid Kramer, the headmaster of Balamb Garden, where Squall has been trained since he was a young boy. Interestingly, in a way similar to Virgil’s crowning and mitering of Dante as ruler over his own mind and will and thus being free to choose his own destiny, Squall becomes the leader of Balamb Garden, where he was first trained and then employed as a mercenary in the elite SeeD unit. Just as Dante attains a form of self-mastery in the Earthly Paradise, so does Squall attain leadership based on his own transformation of the Garden he calls home.^[87] Squall then does not have a third guide because he has attained self-mastery in his own quest, which does not require the interventions of teachers of speculative wisdom, like Beatrice and Bernard.

Additionally, there is a connection between Dante’s veneration and idealization (and “angelization”) of Beatrice and Final Fantasy VIII’s representation of Rinoa Heartilly, Squall’s love interest in the game.^[88] Rinoa is an exceptionally rich character: she is at odds politically with her father, fights for a resistance movement to ensure the freedom of a people not her own, inherits the power of the god of the world, Hyne, and becomes a powerful sorceress near the end of the game. She is also the object of Squall’s affections during the course of the game, though largely at her own prompting. Rinoa’s base stats, Gupta remarks, are the highest base statistics of any character in the game, including the protagonist. She also is figured wearing a blue dress with two white angel wings on the back. Though Rinoa does not die during the game, there is a long episode during which she is in a coma and cannot be chosen for one’s team. Though she does not suffer a young death like Beatrice—Aerith’s fate in Final Fantasy VII—there is the same fear in Final Fantasy VIII that a young, beatific and angelic lady will depart too soon.

Gupta suggests—in one of the least persuasive parts of his argument—that Final Fantasy VIII includes a representative characterization of each of the seven deadly sins from Dante’s Purgatorio. In this scheme, a figure like Adel, with her desire to dominate and expand her empire with technology and magic, would represent wrath.^[89] A character like Seifer, the rival and deluded knight of the sorceress and antagonist, Ultimecia—who fights for his “dream”—represents envy, particularly as he watches his former rival ride by in triumph as leader of Garden and guest of honor at a magnificent party at their former shared home on Balamb Garden.^[90]

There is a character, Laguna Loire, who—like Dante himself—serves in the military, becomes a writer, and then gets into politics at the expense of his own family.^[91] This character, who turns out to be Squall’s father, first figures as a Galbadian Soldier from seventeen years before. He then becomes, or at least wishes to become, a journalist who travels the world. Finally, he becomes the President of Esthar after helping capture and contain Adel’s power. Unlike Dante, Laguna is a successful leader who never runs out of power; like Dante, however, Laguna misses his son’s birth and his wife’s death because of his political activity. Though Dante did not miss the birth of his son and his wife, Gemma Donati, outlived him, he did suffer many personal misfortunes due to his exile.

Additionally, just as Dante is shown a vision of the afterlife for his own salvation from a life of perdition, so is Squall shown select episodes from his father’s past that will prevent him from making the same mistakes. Both Squall and Dante the pilgrim, therefore, go on visionary quests that facilitate their transformation. Both characters are given the task of transforming, not to affect the past, but to affect the present and the future by becoming characters capable of ethical, free, and responsible decision-making. Though Squall does not additionally reach the heights of Paradise to attain great metaphysical wisdom, he makes it to outer space where he receives a very different answer to the question of, “what causes the dark spots on the moon?” (Par. 2.58-60) And just as Beatrice initiates Dante’s quest by sending Virgil to his aid, so is Squall sent into the past by his so-called “big sister” Ellone, who wants him to learn from the past.

Like the protagonist in Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII’s protagonist, Squall Leonhart, is also amnesiac. Though Squall’s amnesia stems from the brain capacity certain summoning magic requires—which leads to amnesia as a side-effect—and Cloud Strife’s amnesia in Final Fantasy VII originates from repression caused by battle-induced trauma, both characters begin their quests without knowing “who they really are.” Thus, the two protagonists are like Dante the pilgrim, who stumbles through a dark forest, colliding with unseen dangers and unable to tell up from down. Though Final Fantasy VII also included an antagonist reminiscent of Dante’s representation of Satan, Final Fantasy VIII’s primary antagonist, a sorceress named Ultimecia, tries to “compress time” so that past, present, and future all compress into a single endless moment.^[92] Ultimecia attempts to create an environment strikingly similar to Dante’s Inferno, one in which time cannot move forward and change cannot exist. In both realms, hope cannot exist, because without a future, there is no capacity for improvement from one moment to the next.

Finally, two creatures that can be summoned in battle are the “Guardian Forces” Diablos and Ifrit.^[93] These infernally inspired monsters appear in other installments of the Final Fantasy series (Final Fantasy VI, VIII, IX, and XII for Diablos), with Ifrit featuring in nearly all the Final Fantasy installments. Instead of undermining the uniqueness of Final Fantasy VIII’s portrayal of figures derived from Dante’s Inferno, this observation strengthens the argument that the series cultivates an ongoing focus on Dantean themes. Diablos, for example, uses gravity magic: a kind of gravity similar to the force entrapping Dante’s Satan inertly in the center of the earth (in conjunction with his own frozen tears). Ifrit is the first Guardian Force one learns to summon and “junctions” to one’s mind in FFVIII, and the attack he uses is conspicuously called “Hellfire.”^[94] One should also add that Ifrit appears as a large, bestial but ultimately anthropomorphic figure with clawed hands and feet and horns atop his head. Although Ifrit lacks wings and is directly borrowed from Islamic theology, his fiery, demonic appearance—along with his signature attack, “Hellfire”—strongly connects him to the imagery of a Christian Hell as well.

In light of the many connections indicated above, I believe I have demonstrated that both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII can be interpreted as a mix of pastiche and bricolage informed by Dante’s Divine Comedy, even though they do not exclusively appropriate material from Dante’s poem, but rather draw from a variety of media, linguistic traditions, and mythologies. An interesting extension of this study would be a critical catalogue of all the differing media alluded to and incorporated into Final Fantasy VII and VIII.

6. Conclusion

This study was conducted to bring innovative insight into the multidisciplinary fields of Dante Studies and Video Game Studies. It has considered the impact that Dante has had on digital media, television, video games and interactive media, and popular culture at large. More specifically, this study focused on elements of Dante’s thought in games that clearly allude to his work, a well as on two other games whose potential allusions are more subtle. As Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII were developed by a Japanese company drawing upon Western mythic and theological traditions, each game exhibits recurring images, themes, and psychological states that point toward a Dantean influence. I believe that the use of spirals and the representation of Sephiroth—first encased in Mako and then appearing as a “One-Winged Angel”—are direct allusions to Dante’s representation of the Fallen Angel. In Final Fantasy VIII, I observe that the attempt to compress time is an attempt to produce an ontological space equivalent to that of Dante’s Inferno.^[95] Though this preliminary study has focused on four games incorporating allusions from Dante’s work, these are by no means exhaustive as representations of Dante’s influence. In particular, the Undertale (2015), Demon’s Souls (2009), and Blizzard’s famous Diablo series (now on its fourth installment) all remain to be analyzed. In addition, Journey (2012), which Janet Murray describes as “oddly spiritual,” deserves a study connecting its “fanciful landscapes,” gameplay, and lack of narrative to Dante’s Purgatorio and the climbing of Mount Purgatory.^[96] Finally, I intend to produce another study based on Dante’s Divine Comedy and Final Fantasy IX (2000). As Dante scholars know well, Dante employs numerology and number symbolism in his work. The number nine carries symbolic resonance for Dante, at least from his first meeting with Beatrice Portinari—he was nine. Final Fantasy IX, from its very serial number and title—features powerful symbolism related to the number nine which will be part of my future analysis.^[97]

As a final addendum, just days after this study was completed, on 19 August 2025, at Gamescon 2025, the Italian independent video game company Jyamma Games released, on their website and YouTube channel, a one-minute and thirty-three second trailer. In this short preview, a sword wielding Dante—his mouth sewn shut—fights an anthropomorphized and mechanized wolf in a dark wood after the first three lines of the poem in Italian are prominently displayed to the sounds of monastic chanting.^[98] Though the game is titled La Divina Commedia, the limited action shown in the trailer would suggest that this adaptation of Dante’s work would draw more from EA’s Dante’s Inferno than from more substantive games (such as Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII).

1. The author wishes to thank his anonymous reviewers for their feedback as well the whole editorial team at Bibliotheca Dantesca. ↑

2. See Arielle Saiber, “Dante in American Science Fiction,” in Dante Alive, ed. Francesco Ciabattoni and Simone Marchesi (New York: Routledge, 2023), 159. ↑

3. Interestingly, however, a blogger and writer, Drew Mackie, has made a connection between Dante’s Malebranche from Inferno 21-22 and Final Fantasy IV’s five enemies whose names would seem to derive from Dante’s work: Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Rubicante, and Barbariccia. Calcabrina is included in the Comments section. See Drew Mackey, “Final Fantasy IV’s Elemental Fiends’ Name Meaning,” Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, September 7, 2025, par. 1, accessed 15 December, 2025 (https://www.thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com/blog/final-fantasy-iv-elemental-fiends-name-meaning). ↑

4. Katherine Powlesland, Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Cambridge: Legenda, 2022), 5. ↑

5. See Carol L. Robinson, “An Introduction to Medievalist Video Games,” in Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology Old and New, ed. C. L. Robinson and K. Fugelso (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 123-24. ↑

6. Eva D. Papiasvili’s psychoanalytic method of reading Dante’s Divine Comedy argues, I believe accurately, that Dante’s journey is “a complicated self-transforming journey, accessing the most remote parts of the psyche” and that “various aspects of the transformative process become apparent and understandable… [and] include regression and conflict in the service of growth and expansion, the (re)building of psychic structure, internalization, symbolization, and representation, and others” and that “Dante’s Divine Comedy describes a soul-healing transformative journey through a hierarchical internal world, projected into the transcendental dimension of the afterlife (“Continued relevance of Dante Alighieri’s Comedy that transformed the soul and the culture,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 29, no. 1 [2019]: 39-49 [39]). Dante’s journey is also “the troubled soul’s process of transformation from a state of chaos and confusion towards insight and understanding” (“Continued relevance,” [40]). If one then pairs Papiasvili’s conception of the transformative power of Dante’s journey with his inability (Inf. 32.1-9), like Sigmund Freud, to express an “inner ideal” by means of “oblique words” one can intelligently hypothesize that the medium of the video game, which utilizes images, words, and participation may-well allow an author to express their thoughts in a clearer and potentially more amenable way to transformation (“Continued relevance,” 4). ↑

7. In this article, I use the term “Cybertext” consistently with how Espen J. Aarseth defined the term in his seminal work of the same name (Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 22): “Cybertext, as now should be clear, is the wide range (or perspective) of possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as various kinds of literary communication systems where the functional differences among the mechanical parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process. Each type of text can be position in this multidimensional field according to its functional capabilities, as we shall see in Chapter 3. As a theoretical perspective, cybertext shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse between the various part(icipant)s in the textual machine. In doing so, it relocates attention to some traditionally remote parts of the textual galaxy, while leaving most of the luminous clusters in the central areas alone. This should not be seen as a call for a renegotiation of “literary” values, since most of the texts drawn attention to here are not well suited for entry into the competition for literary canonization.” ↑

8. In his landmark work, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Henry Jenkins defines the term convergence in the following way: “By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want, Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about” (2-3). In slight contrast to Jenkins’ theory of convergence, Aarseth offers a more pragmatic-organic explanation for why differing types of media may adopt each other’s concepts fruitfully (Cybertext, 22-23): “The rules of that game could no doubt change, but the present work is not (consciously, at least) an effort to contribute to the hegemonic worship of ‘great texts.’ The reason for this is pragmatic rather than ethical: a search for traditional literary values in texts that are neither intended nor structured as literature will only obscure the unique aspects of these texts and transform a formal investigation into an apologetic crusade. If these texts redefine literature by expanding our notion of it—and I believe that they do—then they must also redefine what is literary, and therefore they cannot be measured by an old, unmodified aesthetics. I do not believe it is possible to avoid the influence from literary theory’s ordinary business, but we should at least try to be aware of its strong magnetic field as we approach the white spaces—the current final frontiers—of textuality.” See also Martin Picard, “Video Games and Their Relationship with Other Media,” in The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond, ed. M. J. P. Wolf (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 293-300 (294). ↑

9. Kevin Recher, “Game Over... and then? The Representation of Death and the Afterlife in Videogames,” Disputatio philosophica 17, no. 1 (2015): 81-88 (81). ↑

10. See Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006); Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner, “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” in Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 1-13; Kevin M. Flanagan, “Videogame Adaptation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 442-457; Tatjana Ristić and Darjan Kubik, “Video Games and Adaptation: An Introduction,” in Videogame Sciences and Arts, ed. Liliana Vale Costa, Nelson Zagalo, Ana Isabel Veloso, Esteban Clua, Sylvester Arnab, Mário Vairinhos, and Diogo Gomes (Cham, CH: Springer, 2023), 187-201; and Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). ↑

11. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 2-3; my italics. ↑

12. Sanders (Adaptation and Appropriation, 26) later gives a more robust definition of adaptation vs appropriation which focuses on the fact that appropriations do not always clearly signal their relationship to a hypotext as clearly as adaptations (like the so-called “pastiche contract” of Genette [Palimpsests, 86]): “An adaptation signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original; a cinematic version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, although clearly reinterpreted by the collaborative efforts of director, scriptwriter, actors, and the generic demands of the movement from stage drama to film, remains ostensibly Hamlet, a specific version, albeit achieved in alternative temporal and generic modes, of that seminal cultural text. On the other hand, appropriation frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain. This may or may not involve a generic shift, and it may still require the intellectual juxtaposition of (at least) one text against another that we have suggested in central to the reading and spectating experience of adaptations. But the appropriated texts are not always as clearly signalled or acknowledged as in the adaptive process. They may occur in a far less straightforward context than is evident in making a film version of a canonical play.” In conjunction with this definition of appropriation, FFVII and FFVIII are not mere versions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but they do involve a generic and modal shift from medieval poetry to contemporary video games, and both games certainly take a “more decisive journey away from the informing source into a new cultural product.” ↑

13. Both these concepts, but particularly pastiche, are given wide consideration by Genette in his Palimpsests: Chs. 18-22 for pastiches and Ch. 80 for bricolage. He defines bricolage in the following helpful way (Palimpsests, 398): “Hypertextuality, in its own way, pertains to tinkering. This term [in French, bricolage] generally carries derogatory connotations but has been given some credentials by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analyses. I shall not dwell on the matter. Let me simply say that the art of “making new things out of old” has the merit, at least, of generating more complex and more savory objects than those that are “made on purpose”; a new function is superimposed upon and interwoven with an older structure, and the dissonance between these two concurrent elements imparts its flavor to the resulting whole.” ↑

14. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 4. ↑

15. Ibid., 5. ↑

16. This notion of pastiche accords well with Gérard Genette’s contrast between parody and pastiche using functional criteria (Palimpsests, 85): “… a more comprehensive pictures emerges which regroups under the term parody the three forms whose function is satirical (strict parody, travesty, caricatural imitations), leaving pure pastiche alone in its category, understood a contrario as an imitation without satirical function… This commonly accepted distribution responds, consciously or unconsciously, to a function criterion, since parody inevitably connotes satire and irony, and pastiche, by contrast, appears as a more neutral and a more technical term.” One notes here that a pastiche may “imitate without a satirical function,” in a way that a parody may not. Since Final Fantasy VII and VIII integrate and imitate elements of the style, content, and form of other works of art in order to augment and add to depth to its own aesthetic value, FFVII and FFVIII cannot be seen as parodically transforming the content of their source texts. I must also add that in this qualified use of the term pastiche, FFVII and FFVIII imitate their material in a serious mode, like Genette’s idea of a forgery, rather than in a traditionally playful mode, like normal pastiches. ↑

17. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner, “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” 5. ↑

18. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 18. ↑

19. Nicklas and Lindner, “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” 6. ↑

20. Ibid., 6: “In the context of the studies collected here, Sanders’s definition is at times accepted and at other times contested. Generally, however, we wish to point to the undercurrent of all the contributions which puts specific emphasis on the direction in which appropriation works. Particularly cultural appropriation implies a move towards the new version rather than a move away from the ‘original.’ The process of adaptation as appropriation, thus, tends to be characterized in this context as the creation of new cultural capital.” ↑

21. Flanagan, “Videogame Adaptation,” 441. The text referenced in the citation is Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4, no. 3 (1996): 311–58. ↑

22. Tatjana Ristić and Darjan Kubik, “Video Games and Adaptation,” 188. ↑

23. Ibid., 189-90. ↑

24. Ibid., 190-91. ↑

25. Ibid., 196. The reference in the citation is to Robert Purchese, “Meeting Andrzej Sapkowski, the writer who created The Witcher: Does he really hate games?,” Eurogamer, 25 March, 2017, accessed 15 December, 2025, https://www.eurogamer.net/meeting-andrzej-sapkowski-the-writer-who-created-the-witcher. ↑

26. Genette here identifies three modes of imitation (Palimpsests, 87): “This is proof—if such be needed—that serious imitation is not a purely theoretical hypothesis and that therefore imitation does function in the three modes: playful, satirical, and serious.” ↑

27. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 26. ↑

28. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014), 1. ↑

29. See Katherine Powlesland, “Dante and Video Games: The Unrealised Potential of the Virtual Commedia,” Italian Studies 77, no. 2 (2022): 146-56 (146). ↑

30. See Teodolinda Barolini, “Expert View,” Entertainment Weekly, February 2, 2010, 79. See also Lorenzo Servitje, “Digital Mortification of Literary Flesh: Computational Logistics and Violences of Remediation in Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno,” Games and Culture 9, no. 5 (2014): 368-88 (370). ↑

31. Nicklas and Lindner, “Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation,” 2. ↑

32. See Francesco Toniolo, “Dante, i videogiochi indie e i mondi videoludici,” KEPOS 3, no. 2 (2021): 300-325 (301), accessed 15 December, 2025 (http://www.keposrivista.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/14_Toniolo_def.pdf). ↑

33. See Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 42: “But the advent of Beatrice is not merely advent of light. By such grace as she (in allegory) is, man's whole nature is transformed, elevated above the limits of what is natural to man. A trasumanar takes place, not in the intellect alone but also in the will. A new orientation of the inner man prevails, itinerariun mentis ‘turns’ and moves in a new way. Through sanctifying grace, the soul is uplifted and turned toward God as to its special object of beatitude. By such grace alone do we become the ‘adopted sons of God’.” ↑

34. Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 26. ↑

35. See Claudia Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife: Dante’s Otherworlds in the Gaming Age,” Games and Culture 15, no. 7 (2019): 825-49 (831). ↑

36. See Brandon K. Essary, “Dante’s Inferno, Video Games, and Pop Pedagogy,” Parole Rubate 10, no. 20 (2019): 59-82 (61). ↑

37. See Servitje, “Digital Mortification,” 374. ↑

38. For the concept of the “boss,” see Toniolo, “Dante,” 8-10. ↑

39. See Barolini, “Expert View,” 79. ↑

40. See Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (New York: Routledge, 2012), 55: “As Flanagan has noted, the study of traditional games has “lagged behind” other areas of study in current scholarly interest in popular culture. But as Flanagan argues, ‘games are legitimate forms of media, human expression, and cultural importance,’ and deserve as much attention as film, literature or visual art. Further, ‘the ways games reflect the norms and beliefs of their surrounding cultures [are] essential to understanding both games themselves and the insights they may provide to human experience.’ Flanagan dubs this the ‘playculture approach to media’.” ↑

41. Martin Ringot, “Le jeu vidéo Dante’s Inferno est-il une parodie?,” Cahiers d’études romanes 40 (2020): 255-72 (265). ↑

42. See Levente Nyíri, “The Evolution of the Character of Kratos in the God of War Series,” in Studies for the future: Student contributions under the National Talent Program at the English and American Studies Scientific Students’ Association of the Eszterházy Károly Catholic University (Eger: Eszterházy Károly Katolikus Egyetem Líceum Kiadó, 2022), 79-93 (87). ↑

43. See Ringot, “Le jeu,” 266-67. ↑

44. See Gennette, Palimpsests, 24, 89. ↑

45. Essary, “Dante’s Inferno,” 65. ↑

46. Ibid., 67. ↑

47. Ibid., 68. ↑

48. Servitje, “Digital Mortification,” 373. ↑

49. Ibid., 374. ↑

50. Ibid., 374. ↑

51. Ibid., 377-79. ↑

52. Ibid., 383. ↑

53. See Toniolo, “Dante,” 3. ↑

54. Ibid., 3. ↑

55. Ibid., 5-6. ↑

56. See Scott Rogers, “Hell, Hyperboria, and Disneyland,” in Level Design: Processes and Experiences, ed. Christopher W. Totten (Boca Raton, FL: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2017), 106-7. ↑

57. Toniolo, “Dante,” 8. ↑

58. Ibid., 12. ↑

59. Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife,” 826. And see also Alexander Eliot Schmid, “Contrapasso, Violence, and Madness in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Westworld,” Humanities 13, no. 109 (2024): 1-17 (2-7). ↑

60. Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife,” 832, 834. ↑

61. Ibid., 834. ↑

62. Ibid., 835. ↑

63. Ibid., 835. ↑

64. Powlesland, “Dante,” 147-48. ↑

65. Ibid., 148. ↑

66. Ibid., 148. ↑

67. Ibid., 150-51. ↑

68. Ibid., 154-55. ↑

69. Ibid., 156. ↑

70. Rossignoli, “Playing the Afterlife,” 839. ↑

71. Ibid., 839. ↑

72. Ibid., 843-44. ↑

73. Ibid., 844. The texts referenced are: Edward Castranova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Eva Nieuwdorp, “The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle,” in Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play (Vancouver: Digital Games Research Association, 2005), https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/188/188; Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 169; and Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 296–354. ↑

74. See Jegged.com, “Characters: Sephiroth,” accessed December 8, 2025 (https://jegged.com/Games/Final-Fantasy-VII/Characters/Sephiroth.html). ↑

75. See Final Fantasy Wiki, “Sephiroth,” n. d., accessed December 5, 2025 (https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sephiroth_(Final_Fantasy_VII_party_member). ↑

76. See Final Fantasy Wiki, “Sephiroth,” n. d., accessed October 25, 2025. https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sephiroth, par. 3. ↑

77. See Pekka Kuusisto, “The Daring Spiral from Mezzo to Sanza Mezzo,” Journal of Italian Studies / Rivista di Studi Italiani 39, no. 3 (2021): 63-79 (68): “Whereas for Virgil, the curving spiral is a relatively orderly if at times demanding pathway, from the pilgrim’s perspective, it is an abyss (abisso, Inf. 4.24) that draws him into a bottomless vortex of chaotic swirls in every sensory line.” ↑

78. Although, the character’s name was originally spelled Aeris in the American version of the game, this is based on the transliteration of the word エアリス(earisu) from Japanese, itself similar to the word “earth” in English. Since there is no “th” sound in Japanese, her name was phonetically mistranslated to Aeris rather than Aerith, which is what Square-Enix would later rename the character in Crisis Core, Advent Children, Kingdom Hearts II, and the steam version of Final Fantasy VII. See Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi, The Legend of Final Fantasy VII: Creation - Universe - Decryption (Toulouse, Third Éditions, 2019), 14-15 (note). ↑

79. Aerith is explicitly connected to lilies just as Beatrice is when the angels cry out “Manibus, oh date lilia plenis,” at her arrival in Purgatorio 30.21. See Final Fantasy Wiki, “Flowers,” n. d., section 1.3 (Final Fantasy VII), par. 2: “The flowers in Aerith’s church have since featured in Crisis Core, Advent Children and Final Fantasy VII Remake in a larger role, as these are the flowers that Aerith carries to sell in the latter, whereas she did not have any yellow flowers in her basket in the original. The yellow flowers resemble real world Lilium genus of flowers (true lilies), important in culture and literature in much of the world.” Accessed October 25, 2025 (https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Flower_(symbolism)#Final_Fantasy_VII). ↑

80. See Final Fantasy Wiki, “Aerith Gainsborough,” n. d., “Biographical Information,” accessed October 25, 2025, https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Aerith_Gainsborough. ↑

81. I here allowed myself to cite a single instance from Final Fantasy Advent Children because it constitutes a continuation of Final Fantasy VII’s original story. Though many additional games related to Final Fantasy VII have been released since Final Fantasy VII, it would require another essay to describe the ways in which each game further develops and alters the story and underlying mythology of Final Fantasy VII. As of now, the spin-off games released post-Final Fantasy VII are: (1) Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII (2004), (2) Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006) (3) Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (2007) (4) Final Fantasy VII G-Bike (2014), (5) Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier (2021), (6) Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis (2023), (7) Final Fantasy VII Remake/ Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (2020 and 2021, respectively) (8) Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024). A third part of the new Final Fantasy VII trilogy, and ninth additional Final Fantasy VII game, is planned to be released in 2027. See Taylor Lyles, “Square Enix Hoping to Release Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trilogy’s Finale by 2027,” IGN, April 12, 2024, accessed 15 December, 2025 (https://www.ign.com/articles/square-enix-hoping-to-release-final-fantasy-7-remake-trilogys-finale-by-2027). For additional information related to Final Fantasy VII Remake and its relationship to Final Fantasy VII’s larger mythos, fan culture, see Zlatko Bukač and Mario Katić, “A Legend From Before You Were Born: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture,” Games and Culture 19, no. 8 (2023): 1055-70. ↑

82. Provocatively, these three remnants are themselves “parts” of Sephiroth, similarly to the way the three beasts which impede Dane the pilgrim’s path are each parts of sin, themselves part of the evil which Lucifer represents in its totality. ↑

83. Tetsuya Nomura, dir., Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005-2006), DVD, 33:41-34:39. ↑

84. See Kanak Manav Gupta, “Guardian Forces: A Ludological and Literary Security Analysis of SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy VIII” (Master’s Thesis, Harvard University, Division of Continuing Education, 2021), 56-57. ↑

85. Ibid., 59. ↑

86. Ibid., 50-55. ↑

87. Ibid., 55. ↑

88. Ibid., 50-51. ↑

89. Ibid., 66-67. ↑

90. Ibid., 69-70. ↑

91. Ibid., 102. ↑

92. Ibid., 136. ↑

93. Ibid., 51, 66. ↑

94. Ibid., 81, 175. ↑

95. The notion of the fundamental changelessness in Dante’s hell is more developed in Schmid, “Contrapasso,” 11: “Since Dante’s Inferno is located beneath the earth, within its bowels, and his Paradiso is located far above the Earth (and truly in the Empyrean), the key similarity here is that no soul experiences any change in either canticle: one because they are purely matter and thus have no form to change (‘denied the good of the intellect’), and the other because they are pure intellect and thus have no potential to be further actualized. And Dante’s Purgatorio stands somewhere in-between as both Barolini and Le Goff noted above. Unlike the souls doomed to Hell which are truly without hope, because hope is a function of change in a living life (Inf. 3.9), the souls in Purgatory can hope because their wills can be directed towards positive change or transformation.” Though in the situation described by Dante, the souls may not change due to being deprived of “the good of the intellect” and the ability to strive and transform, Ultimecia wishes to compress all time into one instant in which only one being, her, continues to exist. In such a world, time would no longer continue to flow, and therefore, the possibility for change ceases to exist there too, as change and time are inextricably related in Aristotle’s Physics, 219a30-33: “When, therefore, we perceive the ‘now’ as one, and neither as before and after in a motion nor as the same element but in relation to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, no time is thought to have elapsed.” ↑

96. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 76. ↑

97. For example, Final Fantasy IX features the Knights of Pluto, who include nine members (one remembers too that Pluto’s status as the ninth planet in the solar system was being debated in 1999); the protagonist Zidane employs an attack called “Solution 9”; the age of one of the party members, Vivi, is nine years old; there are nine summons or “eidolons” available to the character Princess Garnett to summon; King Cid, the king of one of the in-game kingdoms, is the ninth regent on his people, and the game itself was released in November in the US, the eleventh month of the year, but named for the ninth. See Nicolas Courcier, Mehdi El Kanafi, Raphaël Lucas, and Fabien Mellado, The Legend of Final Fantasy IX: Creation – Universe – Decryption (Toulouse: Third Éditions, 2021), 15). ↑

98. See “JYAMMA Games Announces ‘La Divina Commedia’, an Epic Dark Fantasy Action-RPG Inspired by the Work of Italian Poet, Dante,” Jyamma Games, August 20, 2025, accessed December 15, 2025 (https://jyammagames.com/la-divina-commedia-announcement/). ↑