I love architecture, and I had already made a couple videos examining how architecture tells stories — both in the real world, and in video games. Here, I decided to put some theory into practice. FFVII Remake takes place in a fictional city stratified by social class. I wrote about how the game uses the architectural concepts of material, light, and space, to wordlessly tell the player the story of the city.

My favorite detail was that the developers used different shades of lighting in different parts of the city. The wealthier districts use blue-white LEDs, while the poor districts use green-tinted lighting that evokes mercury vapor bulbs, an older technology that’s still widely used in Japan, where this game was developed.