T w e n t y S i d e d
We open to the party being brought aboard Ghis’ flagship, the Dreadnought Leviathan. Hilariously, the little transport craft has these two protrusions on the front that look like someone welded two swords to the bumper. I can’t help but imagine this little bumper-car ship ramming dreadnoughts with its teensy little fender blades.
As the party is brought onto the bridge, who should be waiting for them but Amalia! Basch greets her as Majesty, and in response she slaps the taste out of his mouth, because nothing good can ever happen to Basch. Ghis confirms that she is indeed Ashelia B’nargin Dalmasca (*snicker* “B’nargin”), and everyone is shocked but Basch.
Ghis does note that, without any proof of her lineage, she’ll simply be hanged with the rest of the insurgents. Basch pipes up saying that he had a contingency for just such an occasion and that he and he alone knows the location of such proof, an artifact called the Dusk Shard. Which is to say, the Goddess Magicite Vaan has in his pocket. No really, it starts glowing right on cue and he pulls it on out. Does the Empire not frisk prisoners?! This is the second time! Judge Ghis finally gets the hint and yoinks it out of his hands, exclaiming, “Well shit, that cleared up quicker than I thought it would.”
Vaan demonstrates his trademark lack of self-awareness by demanding “no executions” before he hands over the stone. Ghis mutters to himself about Vayne wanting the stone for some purpose, and they are led away to the brig.
On the way, Basch and Balthier banter about how contrived the previous scene was until their guard escort tries to beat them back behind the fourth wall. I feel you, pal; I actually saw everything that led up to it, and I still don’t believe how convenient that all was. Obviously, Balthier and Basch anticipate the guard’s attack and judo him to the floor, with Balthier stealing his spear. They prepare to fight the remainder, but one of the other guards knocks out his fellows for them. He raises his helm, and look who it is! Captain Vossler York Azelas. Basch jibes that he’s a bit short for a stormtrooper, and Vossler retorts that he’d rather be Lando than Leia, who Basch totally fucking is. Vossler goes on to say that it’s been damn hard enough already taking care of Ashe without Basch and the rest of the clown college that is our party making it worse for him. Basch, sufficiently cowed, welcomes his old comrade to the party and they set off to the brig to liberate Ashe. Ghis said she should be quartered separately, but they left the bridge at the same time, so, like is Ashe already there, even though the party is still just outside the bridge…? Oh well.
Nevertheless, the party reaches the brig, where two minor Judges and their retinue stand guard. The game treats this as a boss fight, but they’re essentially upstatted versions of the same goons you’ve been mowing down across the entire area.
With that taken care of, Vossler opens up Ashe’s cell. She tells him he’s a bit short for a stormtrooper, and he politely informs her they already used that gag. She isn’t quite so pleased to see Basch and tells him to go get bent, but Vossler coaxes her to take good help where she can get it. Once she haughtily storms off, Vossler looks at Basch and rolls his eyes while making a jerking off motion. The whole ship is alerted now that their honored guest has been let out, but the party sets off to steal a ship and escape the dreadnought.
As the party nears the dock, they run into Larsa and Penelo! Penelo and Vaan embrace upon their happy reunion. I disapprove, of course; you’ve got an in with the Solidors, girl, heirs to singular power and fantastic hair. You can fall discreetly back into Vaan’s arms after Larsa is grown up and too busy with affairs of state to pay you any mind at home. Larsa is more concerned with the two famous Dalmascans back from the dead. He urges Ashe and Basch to GTFO as quickly as possible, and to this Ashe asks the very reasonable question, “Why would you want us to escape?”
His answer is hilarious: just to see what happens. This is a major moment in Larsa’s sole hobby of earnestly, naïvely loving and believing in Archades, yet disapproving of and actively hampering its activities at all times and in any way that might momentarily amuse him. In truth, we may well owe much of our recent and future success to Larsa being a master-class troll.
In addition to letting slip two of his state’s most dangerous political liabilities in order to foment drama, he also hands over the manufacted nethicite from earlier to Penelo— “a good luck charm,” he claims. This is funny not just because the thing is essentially bleeding-edge Imperial weaponry, but nethicite in any form is for the rest of the game regarded as uniformly evil technology. He then absconds with Azelas to escape separately from the rest of the party, freeing them both from suspicion.
The thing is, he not only understands— at a glance, it would seem— Vossler’s role as a revolutionary infiltrator, but immediately knows him by name. How?! I’ll grant that there are at least a couple very good reasons the Empire would know of Vossler, but why would frickin’ Larsa have any idea?
While the audience ponders this, the party finds the airship’s hangar guarded by Judge Ghis himself. It would seem that, since they already have the Dusk Shard, they don’t actually need the dangerous, strong-willed princess around anymore, and are more than happy to use any old squinty brunette in a waaaaay-too-short skirt as their politically-convenient puppet queen. Not one to waste time, he flings some sort of spell at the party, only to have it harmlessly absorbed by the nethicite shard. Fancy!
Having wasted most of his MP on that flaccid opener, the party tears into him, and, in defiance of time-tested fantasy traditions, he fights about as well as an elderly man in dubiously-conceived ornamental armor realistically would. Don’t feel bad, Ghis; I was a bit over-leveled. Buy your buddy Bergan a beer, though, he always wipes the floor with my ass.
While Basch is busy swinging Ghis into the wall like a human hammer, note the Judge’s unique choice of weapon. While the generic unnamed Judge enemies stick to sword and board, Judges Magister like Ghis and Gabranth all dual-wield unique weapons. There are a couple understated nods to this ambidextrous affinity I’ll note down the line. In fact, we’ve already seen one of them. Did yooooooouuuuu spot it?
Once the party finishes mauling an elderly serviceman within an inch of his life and stealing a ship to escape back to Bhujerba, the Empire is officially considered “pwnt” and may not pursue the escapees for the rest of the week. At least, that’s my rationalization for five of the Empire’s most wanted criminals (and one sunny peasant girl) returning to wander around the streets of Bhujerba unmolested.
At the airport, a plot point which had been aggravating me terribly finally receives the closure I was starving for: Penelo returns Balthier’s handkerchief to him after having received it during that chance meeting in Rabanastre’s Lowtown. Now, I know that sounds like massive sarcasm, but (and I’m appropriately ashamed to admit this) this seriously bugged the shit out of me. I couldn’t tell if that had just been a gesture to calm her nerves, or a sleight of hand intended to pass something of import along to her before Balthier was thrown in the clink. Nope! Just a hanky. But at least now I’ll be able to sleep again at night.
This is what this fucking game is doing to me. SEND HELP.
Something actually relevant occurs, as well: Ashe thinks Ondore is bad news, but Basch reveals that it had actually been the Marquis’ plan all along to get the party aboard the Leviathan so they could break her out. I’ll ignore the fact that this is the worst plan since Raminas’ assassination. Ondore’s a clever old bastard, maybe he just recognizes player-characters when he sees them. However, this is the sole, solitary line in which the Marquis’ role in Ashe’s liberation is revealed, and if you miss it, his character goes from cunning and sly to conniving and treacherous. That’s important in itself, but really matters when the party immediately runs right back to him: Basch thinks Ashe should meet with him, and Vossler gives his assent— and his endorsement of Basch’s integrity.
This is something the game will struggle with for the long haul: even when characters have a clear motivation or consistent personality— a tall order in itself for FFXII— critically important elements of the narrative may be enclosed in a single, easily-overlooked line. It can be extremely difficult to parse what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense due to a dropped detail, and what doesn’t make sense due to shitty writing. The narrative is unduly dense and hurried at many points and it only takes a handful of these missed or muddled nodes to lose grip on the narrative entirely, and the characterization too often hinges on these stealthy little kernels.
Many are the players who payed fine attention and still found themselves totally lost as to where they were going, what they where doing, why they were doing that, or why anyone on- or off-screen would give a stony shit about it. Once you find yourself in this sort of morass, it’s nearly impossible to climb back out of it, and there’s no resource in-game to find your place again (which makes the inclusion of a detailed glossary for FFXIII’s pathetically threadbare and hackneyed plot all the more insulting in hindsight).
This, in particular, is the source of a great deal of the bitching about the game’s narrative. Apologists of the game contend that if players want to keep up with the turbulent, knotty storytelling, they should just pay extra-careful attention, or refer to a plot guide of some sort.*ahem* These people can climb a wall of dicks. This game was badly in need of editing, and a careful reading of loony fucking nonsense doesn’t magically convert it to something glib and clever.
Once again, I can only point to the game’s distended, tumultuous development cycle. When you spend more than half a decade ripping everything up and stitching it back together again, you’re going to end up with a Frankenstein’s monster. It happened to XII, it happened even worse to XIII, and if you don’t think it’s going to happen to XV*ahem* I will play cards with you anytime. (No Triple Triad, though; I’ve been clean for two years,Four years as of April 2021; I fell off the wagon in 2017, God dammit. thank you very much.)
After recommending Ashe visit the Marquis, Vossler gets the bright idea to try and link up his Rabanastre Revolution with the Bhujerba Belligerents, and heads off to the backroom of that pub to see if his people can fucks with their people. Maybe armwrestle Curly, and learn the epic handshake/dance insurgents require before conducting official business.
Back at the Marquis’ place, Ashe and Ondore (in welcome defiance of my griping above) hash out the backstory once more in a rare, but welcome reiteration of what’s supposed to be happening. Ondore lets out that announcing Ashe’s suicide was Vayne’s idea, and, while he couldn’t understand why he would suggest it at the time, he realizes now that Vayne was trying to make Ondore look like an Imperial collaborator from the still-very-much-alive Ashe’s view.This means Vayne suckered Ondore into wrongly announcing a prominent Dalmascan’s death twice!
In review, I’m not sure if this is supposed to imply that Ondore knew for sure whether or not Ashe was really alive (nor Basch for that matter), or if Vayne was explicitly suggesting Ondore announce Ashe’s death despite the possibility or certainty of Ashe’s survival. I’m open to suasion on this ambiguity, but I think it’s supposed to be the second case. If so, this kind of undercuts Vayne as the consummate schemer;Granted, that card was pretty much off the table after Nalbina why let on she wasn’t really dead before convincing him to announce otherwise? And despite Ondore’s incomprehension, the reasons Vayne would want Ondore’s cooperation are obvious, anyway; it helps bring resistance to an end so he can get on with owning Rabanastre like a big sandy trophy, and (probably not saying this part out loud to the Marquis) if Ashe is believed dead by her own hand, Vayne is freed to quietly kill her like a sewer animal or capture and coerce her later on, free of the political consequences in Rabanastre or abroad that Ashe’s station would demand.
If Bhujerba was neutral at the time of the war, and Ondore really was taken in by the Raminas conspiracy, then why wouldn’t Vayne just lie about Ashe killing herself and ask Ondore to help talk the remaining Dalmascan resistance down, so as to prevent further suffering and loss like the humanitarian Vayne so obviously is? It isn’t unreasonable that Ashe would kill herself, being a young woman who lost her new husband, her father, and her nation in the space of a few days. And, under those circumstances, it’s not at all suspicious that Vayne would want Ondore’s help in closing the war, since this is something that they would both obviously want anyway. Vayne’s flaw wasn’t merely acting shady, it was ever implying that there was any discrepancy to act shady about in the first place.
Yet it seems that, just as with Nalbina, Vayne’s superpower is putting all his chips on crazy bets and staying cool as a cactoid while the wins roll in. After all, his aim of dividing Archadia’s enemies comes perfectly to pass; Ashe and Ondore had never spoken since the war and likewise the anti-Imperial movements of the two regions seem not to have been in communication until this balmy, barmy night. Will Vayne’s luck hold out as the game rolls on? I wonder.
Ashe asks for Ondore’s support in getting Archades pushed out of Dalmasca and herself back on the throne, but Ondore is hesitant; she has, after all, lost the Dusk Shard which would have proven her heritage. He also alludes to the fact that even if she had it, she would still need someone called the Gran Kiltias of Bur-Omisace to vouch for her authenticity. Ondore doesn’t want to risk opening a power vacuum that Ashe can’t fill.
Ondore is moved by the plight of his niece, but can offer no help. With Ashe shuffling off dejectedly, Balthier sits stock upright and exclaims, “Oh, shit! I just remembered my characterization!” and, in return for so graciously rescuing the princess, puts the squeeze on Marquis Ondore for the regal bounty of… room and board. For the night. You canny rogue, you.
Ashe isn’t taking this roadblock lying down, though, and it isn’t long before Vaan finds her trying to start up Balthier’s airship, the Strahl. Luckily for Balthier, Ashe is an even worse thief than he is and the controls of the small ship might as well be the Antikythera Mechanism. Vaan inquires as to what the fuck she thinks she’s doing, and she reveals that she knows the location of the Dawn Shard, yet another antiquated hunk of magicite that she could use to prove her lineage.
How many Proofs of Dalmascan Royal Heritage are lying around in closets and attics? How are there not half a dozen cleaning ladies of various ages and ethnicities claiming Raminas’ blood on account of having tripped over some luminous lagniappe behind the divan?
Ondore’s strangely-mechanical voice breaks into the conversation, but it turns out to be Balthier with some sort of voice changer device he keeps on board the Strahl. I like to think he dropped an assload of gil on it thinking it would come in handy, and it never, ever has, so he likes to show it off whenever and to whomever he can.I also have a feeling Fran has really, really come to hate this fucking thing on long flights. Realizing she probably can’t steal the ship with the owner on board, Ashe makes a daring suggestion: kidnap her!
Hold your fucking horses, game. This is how FFIX kicked off, and it led to an entire first disc in which absolutely fucking nothing happened. Now, I know for a fact that this game has (and will continue to have) completely the opposite problem, but all that means is that you’re on thin enough ice as it is. Taunt me like this one more time, and I will track down Miwa Shoda and just start cracking teeth.
Balthier, cognizant that he had completely forgot he was a sky pirate for about a week there, is in full-on scoundrel mode and asks what’s in it for him. Ashe has a tremendous retort: the Dawn Shard is in the tomb of Raithwall, the ancient Dynast-King himself, and the Shard is just one of countless priceless treasures that could all be his.
(This is an utter fucking lie.)
Balthier champs hard on that particular bit, and Basch enters stage left to insinuate himself as Ashe’s permanent bodyguard. Fran enters with Penelo and asks— probably sarcastically— if Vaan will be joining them, and he answers as though he can’t wait to high-tail it out of Bhujerba. Frankly I think the place is pretty swanky, but I’d never show my face around there either after the shit Vaan pulled, so I’ll give him that one. Penelo, probably still in shock from being kidnapped by burly lizard people and suave Imperial scions in the same day, tags right along. The six permanent members of our party are gathered at last, and the stage is set for adventure.
It’s on that note that the scene shifts to Archades, as Darth Gabranth alights from a shuttle onto a pad near the top of the massive tower at the metropolis’s center.The flanking guards here are wielding Heavy Lances, a weapon which you can acquire for yourself. I’ve actually had one for ages now. I think many of the weapons NPC’s and enemies wield in gameplay, cutscenes and even FMV’s like this one are right from the game’s inventory, but it’s only occasionally that I recognize them. Gabranth enters a many-windowed office where an elderly man in extravagant regal garb sits behind a wide desk: Emperor Gramis Gana Solidor. Gabranth has news for the Emperor: it would seem his son Vayne has been funneling money on the sly into Doctor Cid’s research at Draklor Laboratory for reasons unknown. It would seem this research is also behind the mysterious total annihilation of the Nabradian capital of Nabudis,Whose bright fucking idea was it to name Nabradia, Nalbina, and Nabudis? yet the Judge Magister who led the assault, Judge Zecht, has been missing since the incident and no one remains who can shed any light on the disaster.
Gramis is deeply troubled. He realizes Vayne’s ambitions are getting out from under him. Yet, it is at this moment that he is wracked by a fit of Fatal Videogame Plot Cough™, and he knows the fruit of Vayne’s efforts for good or ill will likely come after his passing. Almost puckishly, Gramis raises the question of succession.
Now, the Archadian Imperium is technically not hereditary. The people elect a Senate, and the Senate elects the Emperor. Yet it would seem that, once elected, the term is lifelong and the next candidate tends always to be an heir of the former, as the Solidor dynasty has reigned for four generations since taking over in a military coup.Vayne actually explains this to Migelo, of all people, near the beginning of the game. The Senate doesn’t trust Vayne as far as they can throw him, which is perfectly understandable, while Gramis fears that Larsa, though pure of heart, is still too young to be a strong leader and that the Senate will pour their energies into manipulating him if he succeeds to the throne.
Gramis diverts the subject somewhat. Landis, the original home nation of Gabranth and Basch, was conquered by Gramis. The old emperor wonders if Gabranth might not still be a bit sore about that, but the Judge Magister responds that his allegiance is to the Empire alone. It is his duty, above all others, to track down and slay his brother, who did not acquiesce and who had for so long been such a thorn in their side. Gramis regards this ruthlessness as a terrible but indispensable trait. Yet he does not want to see Larsa’s heart so hardened, and commands Gabranth to serve as Larsa’s shield.
And he knows that it is from Vayne himself that the greatest danger lies. Above all, he says, he could not bear to see his sons war with one another again. A well-justified sentiment: it was Gramis who commanded his third son, Vayne, to slay his two older brothers for their scheming and treachery.
The Travelog continues next week.
Footnotes:
[1] *ahem*
[2] Four years as of April 2021; I fell off the wagon in 2017, God dammit.
[3] This means Vayne suckered Ondore into wrongly announcing a prominent Dalmascan’s death twice!
[4] Granted, that card was pretty much off the table after Nalbina
[5] I also have a feeling Fran has really, really come to hate this fucking thing on long flights.
[6] The flanking guards here are wielding Heavy Lances, a weapon which you can acquire for yourself. I’ve actually had one for ages now. I think many of the weapons NPC’s and enemies wield in gameplay, cutscenes and even FMV’s like this one are right from the game’s inventory, but it’s only occasionally that I recognize them.
[7] Whose bright fucking idea was it to name Nabradia, Nalbina, and Nabudis?
[8] Vayne actually explains this to Migelo, of all people, near the beginning of the game.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
You know what? I like the part with the Emperor.
Same! It’s the first bit of plot that drew me in.
If they’d stripped out 95% of the judges (all except Basch’s brother), removed the whole evil twin plot and nethicite nonsense, and focused in on the Larsa / Vayne succession conflict it would have been a good game.
In fact, I think Larsa should have been the protagonist.
I forget a lot of the stuff with Larsa. I want to say there was an undercurrent of ‘He is not quite as innocent and helpless as he lets on.’
But, yes, focusing on him more would do only good things for the story.
Also, the more it gets joked about, the more I like the idea of ‘Prince’s lover Penelo quietly advocates for her people.’
Ok, I’m at the point where I’ve stopped understanding what’s going on. It doesn’t help that it seems like there are a lot of names starting with V or B at this point.
I’m sitting here wondering why the guy who just helped them break out Ashe was manipulating the other sympathizer, and remembered that was Vossler. Vayne is that imperial guy from near the beginning. Vaan is the dork that’s here despite no plot relevance.
Yeah, me too. A small part of the problem, I think, is that Rocketeer puts in stuff that didn’t happen as jokes. And the thing is, as ridiculous as these jokes are…some of them seem like they could be true, when presented next to this game’s insane excuse for a plot.
Plus I’m also drowning in names, too. And more than that, the character motivations I think I had down – as stupid as they were – are coming loose too. Balthier is a pirate, except when he’s not because the plot forgets..fine. Fran is just there, because she’s in a skimpy costume. Fine.
And Balthier palmed off that magical stone that he only has because a magic statue gave it to Vaan apropos of nothing to Penelo as he was arrested, except he didn’t, and that handkercheif was pointless.
And then Vaan just hands it over to the imperial authorities like a moron?
I’m sorry, the son of the Emperor not only lets the party go for the lols, but gives a random blonde girl who’s associated with rebels a secret magical weapon that he’s not even supposed to have?
Does he like her?
Is he a secret rebel sympathiser, like Ondore was supposed to be but the writers failed to portray properly?
Does Penelo eventually give up on that dipshit Vaan and hook up with this guy?
My temptation is to shout “Bullshit! Rocketeer made that up!” at half of this – but then again, with this story I genuinely can’t tell…
I think Rocketeer characterized Larsa fairly well here, actually.
Larsa is loyal to the idea of Archades, but can see that some things that Archades is doing don’t match up with his ideal of the Empire. Despite his age, Larsa is pretty damn independent and bold, and I get the feeling that letting the party go is his way of doing something to oppose these actions he disapproves of. Perhaps it’s a feeling of “I don’t quite know what’s going on yet, but I don’t like it, so let’s keep the party free so that we can maybe unravel this mystery.”
In Tactics terms, Larsa is our Ramza. Headstrong morality, while also trusting brothers who don’t deserve it.
…in Final Fantasy 9 terms, he’s Princess Dagger.
Other than Larsa actually literally being a troll and doing what he does as a prank, absolutely everything you’ve said actually happened.
In the actual plot, I think Larsa’s motivation is a victim of Vayne’s machinations (and their lack of sense-making). If I recall correctly, he expresses surprise and concern that Ashe and Basch are alive, and says something to the effect of “I’m not sure why either of you are alive but it tells me that my brother is up to something. You should get out of here while I try to figure this out.” The implication would be that he’s figuring out just how much of a schemer Vayne is (and doesn’t like it), which would be a great impetus for his character to act but since the schemes themselves make no sense, it’s almost impossible for anyone’s reactions to them to make sense.
That’s the part where I laughed. Rocketeer *isn’t* making any if this up. He’s only joking about what’s on screen already because of how unbelievably bizarre it all became. His version is just adding more sense to the nonsense.
One follow-up since I think I may have made the game sound like it makes even more sense than it does…
I’m pretty sure what Larsa actually says is that their being alive is “a thread laid bare” and that he’s releasing them to “pull at that thread and see what it unravels.” So what’s going on here is that the justification in my comment is what I’m pretty sure is the intended justification, but the presentation is such that you can see how The Rocketeer so easily turned that into “Larsa is a troll and letting prisoners go to screw with everybody.”
Well, sure.
The thing is, portraying Larsa as an epic troll is an interpretation of the character. Did the writers intend it? Probably not. But they wrote the complete foundation for it. And since the author is necessarily dead, we can go with that if we please. It makes the game way more interesting.
It is written in the ancient contract, that Penelo will never be allowed to know happiness.
I admit I am beginning to suspect some minor risk in handing the duty of explaining something unfamiliar and complicated to someone that enjoys confusing people.
One thing that’s great is that the grammer here, while tecjhnically correct, is in itself confusing.
Sir, I salute you.
I also am at the point where I don’t understand what’s going on… but I don’t really know that I care?
Most Final Fantasy games have a twist in them where it turns out there’s something more evil behind the thing you were fighting (Golbez isn’t the real threat, it’s Zemus!). The petty concerns about crystals or empire or polluting megacorporations are insignificant next to the existential crisis caused by [the actual end boss]. I’ve not played 12, but if I were, I would be waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the real plot involving magicite and nethicite and the basis of magic in this universe to be unveiled. That plot would, seemingly, render the war plot moot and so all the political intrigue would disappear as we try to stop so-and-so from doing an evil deep magic plot.
I don’t know if there’s a shift in this game that makes all the political machinations irrelevant, but I’m suspecting there is and that would make me irritated that I spent any time trying to figure out what was going on.
Eh… kinda.
There’s this shadowy crystal thing, Venat (another V name!) that has been manipulating people like Cid and Vayne, and the final boss is just Vayne merged with Venat. Maybe I was underwhelmed because I had been doing the optional bosses, and Vayne/Venat would get wrecked by several of the later hunts and optional espers. Just makes it seem less than epic when there are so many wandering monsters that would trash Mr. “I consumed an energy field bigger than my head.”While you’re not wrong, this is more of a series problem or even genre problem than a “this game” problem. Final Fantasy in particular has had stronger-than-the-final-boss superbosses in every game since VII and even retconned them into older installments via various remakes and rereleases (although, oddly enough, not in the recent “Pixel Remaster” Steam releases…I wonder if they discovered that the kind of old-timers who still care about those games also didn’t like that type of thing)
Outside of New Game superbosses, I do generally agree… but FFXII still feels especially egregious. It’s not even the superbosses like Yiazmat, Omega and Zodiark. If it was those plus the harder espers, sure. But there are several hunts that are harder, and I think even a few of the “Rare Game” monsters that are just… random, rare spawns (like the classic FF1 Warmech). There’s enough that these don’t feel like legendary monsters, they just feel like the final boss could be wandering through any given map in the game, turn the corner, and get eaten by a random spawn. It makes the final boss feel weak, especially when it was already less epic than a lot of the final bosses in the series.
Two examples from other franchises: In Shin Megami Tensei IV, there are several optional superbosses, like the fiends, Beelzebub, and Masakado’s Shadow, that are either arguably or definitely harder than the final boss. But you had to go out of your way to fight them (or have really bad luck), and they didn’t detract from the final boss. In Star Ocean III (admittedly, the only one in the franchise I completed), there are a handful of superbosses, that are mostly cameos from other games, and they’re all tucked way out of the way and have good explanation for why they’re so powerful. Contrast with
Vayne/Venatand the enemies that aren’t tucked away in hidden corners, who aren’t out of context problems from other franchises, but are just… some forgettable peasant posted a bounty at the local pub to ask for someone to please take care of this pest. It makes it harder to accept gameplay vs. story segregation where the final boss is concerned, because just playing the game the way it pushes you to will lead to you encountering much stronger enemies, instead of having to ignore the story and go looking for them. In Disgaea, no player is going to stumble upon Baal in the normal course of trying to beat the game; they’re going to have to go looking for him, whereas an FFXII player just doing some random hunts may run into, like, Gilgamesh (still a half joke/half serious character), and if they manage to struggle and beat him… that’s already a tougher fight than the final boss.I’m wondering if people would like a game where the final boss powers up after the player kills various superbosses. Seems like a semi-reasonable solution; if they like fighting superbosses, here, have another one.
Final Fantasy has flirted with this, mainly in the mid-series. In Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, the final boss becomes far, far more challenging if the player has completed all the side content. In Final Fantasy VII, the final and penultimate bosses have their health and statistics modified based on the party’s levels and how they fared against the game’s antepenultimate boss. In Final Fantasy VIII, all encounters are level-scaled. Of course, true cheese in FVIII comes in the form of a minimum-level party with godly junctions, which will never face random encounters and steamroll hilariously underpowered mandatory encounters. The final bosses can still catch you off guard in this situation, as bosses have a minimum level and the last fights’ minimum levels are high enough to present a legit challenge to a strong party unaccustomed to even mild resistance. In FFIX, the final boss has an attack that scales to the player-characters’ levels; the damage can easily outstrip a high-level party’s HP growth and if the boss decides to cast it two or three times in a row, which he often does, you can get fucked over pretty hard.
Offhand, I also remember the boss of Metroid: Zero Mission is significantly more dangerous if the player has achieved full item collection.
Wait, you mean I was rewarded for the way I looked at the unlock screen, contemplated how many hours it would take to get access those last few big, bad, monsters, and despaired? Egad!
I hate when the game rewards you for choosing weakness. Also, still loving the series Rocko!
Lightning Returns (aka FF13-3) kinda does that: on NG+ the final boss you fight is the stronger version if you’ve done the Ultimate Lair and killed the Superboss in there.
The Last Remnant also does this. There are 8 versions of the final boss depending on how many side quests you do.
Never finished FFXII, so I thought ‘Venat’ was just some random name when she showed up in FFXIV.
I had clearly forgotten that that game is made almost entirely of references to other Final Fantasy games, somehow kludged into something that mostly makes sense.
I’ve started condensing a lot of the plot in my head. The party gets arrested and put in sky jail, they need to prove the princess’s identity, they have a magic rock that does so but they lose it because words words words, then they escape and words words words decide to leave town to find a different magic rock that’ll prove the princess’s identity.
It works surprisingly well. Rocketeer keeps saying all these words are important, but given that they’re all nonsense the whole thing parses much better if you just let the details evaporate.
That’s my running MO too!
Interestingly enough halfway through reading i sopetimes need to switch the mental image of a V or B named character but otherwise it works wonders!
Yep, I’m in the same boat. I’ve gotten to the point where my eyes start glazing over as I read and I constantly stop to count how many more paragraphs before I reach the end. Too many names, I can’t follow, I’m not invested, and I blame the game entirely for this situation. I’ll try my best to keep going to the end but…dang I just can’t bring myself to care.
On a completely unrelated note, because of the conversations in these past few articles, I decided to buy Final Fantasy V and give it a try. All I really knew about it was that it was skipped being imported to the US between IV and VI, and has a Job system like III.
I’ve played it for a few hours, and it’s a rather odd duck. I had to go look up some other thoughts online, and confirmed my initial thoughts. It really does feel like IV and V released out of order for reasons both related to story and gameplay.
You will like it, if you liked III. Just make sure you set yourself some limits on your use of the job system, or you will suffer from the freedom disease.
Disease? Some of us like steamrolling half the game with uncontrollable berserker-ninjas.
Voluntary use of Berserker is a sure sign of late-stage freedom disease.
As is throwing elixirs at random people in pots…
The natural reaction of most guys, that I have talked to, to V is, “I just unlocked a bunch of jobs, so I went to kick squirrels for 4 hours so everyone could use every verb. I plan to test which combinations I like the best tomorrow, but the game is really unfun…”.
I feel that’s less “freedom disease” and more “obsessive grinding syndrome”; you didn’t need to grind your characters to level 99 in FFI, or grind your FFVII materia to MASTER as soon as you get them, and you certainly don’t need to max out your FFV jobs unless you’re playing an extended rerelease with postgame superbosses.
And if you’re going to do that, at least wait until the end of the game where you earn XP and [the Job-specific XP I forget the name of] by the truckload for each battle.
FF5 is interesting, its kinda like a minimalist game from a story point of view. Incredibly important things will happen in 20 seconds cut scene. The focus is really more on the job system which is great but that suffer from subsequent game where job system is more interesting (you can only carry over a single ability from jobs to jobs which really limit how much mix and matching you can do, also half the jobs are useless with maybe only one ability from the entire job worth considering). Still its a fun game.
The main thing I took away from FF V’s storytelling was all the nodding heads. Need a character to make an affirmation? Nod. Connection with another character? Nod. Wrap up a scene? Nod. Nod nod nod, nod, nod. I think one scene ends with two characters nodding one after another, walking a few paces, and then nodding again to someone else, before that character nods back.
Boy, I sure am glad FF VI improved sprite variability.
V is a failure as far as the job system is concerned. Through most of the game you can make only eight selection, four jobs and four abilities. And the jobs aren’t exactly a free selection if you’re wanting to level up.
An experienced player can choose the right jobs at the right time to break the game, but for a new player you’re going to want to stick to versatile choices to handle whatever comes your way. Compare to Final Fantasy Tactics or FF7, and you can see how the wide variety of options were throttled having only one equipable ability.
This isn’t to say that FFV isn’t fun. The game isn’t too hard, and most of the jobs are good enough to use, so you can experiment and have fun. And if you create a truly useless character, job points are easy enough to get at the end of the game that you can power up a job or two in a hurry. The story has some nice twists too, and isn’t as incomprehensible as the latter FF’s have become.
I disagree. You can literally pick any 4 out of a hat and have a fun and unique time with the game.
In fact that’s a recurring event.
They do expect you to already know the game, though.
There’s a fun collection of challenge runs on the LP Archive: https://lparchive.org/Final-Fantasy-V-Challenge-Megathread/
The one with the three year old kid is fantastic.
Best thing about that thread is that in the title image, Butz appears to have found the crystal that unlocks the Batman job…
Thank you for pointing that one out. It’s adorable.
Ok, but what’s the point of being able to switch jobs when you’re so limited in mixing and matching? Having played FFTA first, I really don’t like that there’s only one ability that you can assign freely. Except of course mages get to cheat by hiding an entire spellbook behind their ability.
Freelancer gains the stats of every Job you master.
re: Final Fantasy XV –
For those not in on the joke, this was written before that game out and it indeed did turn out to be a far worse case of development hell than XII and XIII. To illustrate, one of my favorite sequences that happens near the middle of the game:
At one point, Gladiolus (one of your party members whose only apparent skillset is “badass bodyguard”) pulls you aside and says he needs to go do something. He won’t tell you what it is, and there’s interactive dialogue, but the game railroads you into saying “yes” without an explanation.
A guest party member joins your party and you realize that this was probably just an excuse to get you down to four people. You do a rather straightforward dungeon and the guest member flies you back to the nearest town in her airship. Fade to black.
Fade back in. You’re now wearing clothes you’ve never seen before, standing in a room you’ve never seen before, talking to a character you’ve never seen before. She says something like “boy, Noctis, I sure am glad you agreed to help clear the monsters out of this factory!” Noctis is the player character.
While fighting your way through the factory, you encounter a big burly dude whose identity is supposed to be a mystery (the factory safety suits are face-obscuring) but is obviously Gladiolus. After he makes his identity known Noctis says something like “Ah, no wonder you’re so far ahead of the other hunters.” These other hunters have not been seen or mentioned. These other hunters will never be seen or mentioned.
Where did Gladiolus go all that time, by the way? I hear it’s answered in the “Episode Gladiolus” DLC.
That… makes me really sad.
Seriously, seeing current Square Enix not able to tell a proper story because they now take a decade to release a new game is heartbreaking for a old SquareSoft fan like me.
I know they are not the only one to do it, but this trend of cutting parts of your game to put it in DLC is one of the things I hate most in current gaming.
FWIW, I know this kind of thing is impossible to prove, but I really do feel like it was less likely “We should break this up into pieces to make MORE MONEY” and more likely “shit, we don’t have time to make this coherent and we have to kick something out the door before we go bankrupt.” Like, most of the gaps in its plot (not holes, gaps) feel less like someone wanted to bait the audience with a mystery and more like some movie reels got lost on the way to the theater. In fact the other major DLCs are meant to flesh out plot twists that were hilariously out of nowhere in the game:
* At one point a major character becomes permanently blinded. This happens offscreen, while you’re fighting a boss, and the circumstances are never explained or even discussed. Just literally “btw I’m blind now”
* At another point one character is revealed to be a super-soldier clone grown by the evil empire! The sum total of discussion around this is: that character showing up to tell the party, the party saying “well, that sucks. We’re still cool though” and then it never comes up again
As Mye mentioned in the other reply, this is the same company whose current flagship MMO has hit both “so terrible they had to shut it down and rewrite it” and “so hyped they had to stop selling it because their servers couldn’t handle all the new players logging in.” It definitely doesn’t feel like, say, Mass Effect 3 opening with a sequence that makes no sense if you didn’t buy all the ME2 DLC
I don’t know, my impression was that it was definitely a money thing. It’s no coincidence that something like this happens once for every piece of DLC planned, and it’s as egregious every time.
FFXV was very money grubbing. They had an entire long boring questline devoted to telling you how great a real life brand of instant noodles were.
It’s an odd thing to say, but it actually feels less intentional in part because there are a lot of other gaps that don’t similarly hint at any kind of profit motive (other than “we can’t afford more development time”). The Italy-inspired city that you barely see. The way an NPC offers you a tutorial on magic more than halfway through the game. The way that the blinded scene also contains a death that feels similarly rushed and is a more important character in the plot as presented. The terrible solo ring section. The car that feels like someone came up with 3/4 of a good fast travel system before giving up and just turning it into Skyrim-style map marker clicking. The “World of Ruin” which you see for like 10 minutes. Several of those things were even fixed in free post-release patches (I actually played the “Royal Edition” which includes all or most of the DLC, but I didn’t play any of the Episodes because I honestly didn’t care enough)
I agree that was all a sign of development hell, but those felt far less deliberate than the character DLC hooks. I don’t think they meant to make a game where half of it was open world and half of it was a linear action game, but I do think they deliberately chose to make a game where each of the main party members disappears for a period of time and comes back and tells you how cool and interesting their adventures are that you can totally buy soon.
Worse, not only did 15 suffer from a nightmarish production cycle, 2/3 of the game story isn’t even in the game! You need to watch a movie and a set of OVA to get most of the story, otherwise massive chunk are missing. Not too mention a bunch of post game DLC (like the aforementioned Episode Gladiolus) which weren’t out when the game released.
15 is so strange in so many ways, one supposedly very important character dies and its supposed to be a tragedy, except that character is in the game less than 2 minutes and never speaks more than 2 lines to the main character. The only good aspect of the game is the camping/roadtrip part, which get unceremoniously dumped about half way in the game. It’s also the only game I can think of where I ended up liking the character more at the start, when you don’t really know anything about them. They all start as friends but as the game goes on all of them turn into massive dramaqueen and by the end I just wanted to be rid of them all.
It’s crazy to think that from 12 to 15, 14 is the game that had the most straightforward development cycle, and that game had to be un-released for a year! 16 seems to be going well, but it remain to be seen.
I’m fully willing to lay most of the blame with the game itself, but I’ve pretty much stopped understanding these posts entirely. Too many names too similar too each other, often dropped with little in the way of introduction. For some reason, Shamus’ Friday posts are a lot easier to grasp. Probably because he zooms out a lot more, so what’s being discussed is broader macro stuff, but who knows? The Rocketeer is definitely funny, but it’s hard to avoid my eyes glazing over as seven similar names are thrown out in a single paragraph. I’d imagine it’s better if you’ve played the game though, even as bad as the game is at explaining its own plot.
I get the impression from reading this that you, dear reader, are getting the same experience as you would playing this game.
Which makes me think that the gameplay must be really something, because this story would make my eyes bleed if I were playing the game itself.
Oh yes, he is. The plot and writing are literally just that way: all over the place and overlapping. If anything, Rocketeer is making it *more* comprehensible.
This is the exact point the game begins to get really bad too. I opened this post thinking, “who was Ghis again?”. And then he’s gone and I feel like his motivation was meant to be important but I didn’t understand it. And that’s how most of the rest of the game will be.
Vayne / Larsa / Gabranth will be understandable, but then you get this parade of allies and mini bosses (Vossler / Rassler, Ghis / whatever the other judges are called) and the game acts like you should know who they are and care about what they do, but you absolutely won’t.
It’s definitely somewhat better playing the game – even if the names are a jumble, actually having faces and voices and – in rare cases – personalities associated with the characters helps make them more memorable than a lengthy list of alarmingly alliterative appellatives.
It’s still dense to the point of impenetrable, but that’s at least a little more bearable when it’s not further condensed into a textual summary.
In a way it’s better and in a way it’s not. I understand there is a very strong instinct to hold what I say in doubt when I simplify a scene as, “The characters make a plan that doesn’t make sense while Ashe puts out her cigarette in Basch’s eye.” You think, “well obviously part of that didn’t happen, this must be a simplification of something larger and more nuanced. Then when you play the game, the scene is 150 seconds of seven characters talking in circuitous allusions to prior events that themselves made no sense at the time because they were themselves alluding to future events that the player still doesn’t understand as of the present scene and will yet still collapse under further scrutiny once the larger picture is finally revealed, then, having discussed this, they will reference all the different plots and players constraining them to the one course of action they believe is open to them, which seems to not serve the purposes they intend for it due to both reasons that should be obvious to them and for larger machinations unveiled later that render the current plans totally misguided.
So then you watch that scene yourself as you play the game, and after sitting in silence for a while, you head on back to the field to chain some monsters and track down a Hunt, and after a couple months you find yourself brushing your teeth, looking into the eyes of your reflection and it hits you: “The characters made a plan that doesn’t make sense.” You feel it in your heart of hearts. You feel both more connected and certain and more confused and frustrated than you ever could have been just taking my own terse-yet-byzantine-yet-flippant appraisal at face value. And beneath that turmoil, something starts to settle and coalesce down in the dregs below, and it whispers to you: “Ashe should have put out that cigarette right in Basch’s eye.”
I guarantee you it’s not much easier by playing. If there’s one tiny bit of praise I can give FFXIII is that it’s not so confusing as XII when it comes to names. All main characters have distinguishable, easy to recognize names and since the plot doesn’t depend so much on political intrigue there’s not a constant brandishing of the names of different nations and cities. That being said, save for “Cocoon” and “Grand Pulse” I have no memory of other place ever being mentioned, so it might just be that they substituted overly complicated samey naming for mundane and forgettable naming.
On the other hand, if you’re playing the game (depending on your schedule, of course) you’re likely to be remembered of these names more often rather than you would by reading them for a few minutes on a weekly basis, so who knows.
I think a lot of the people who liked this game mostly focused on the sidequests (particularly the Monster Hunts) and only interacted with the main plot when they had to.
It’s worth noting that if you’ve played other Final Fantasies this doesn’t follow the usual formula of “complete railroad until somewhere between the midpoint of the game until right before the final boss, then a smattering of sidequests” but instead it’s more like “the game is full of sidequests and they start almost from the drop”. Right after killing that tomato thing in the beginning, there are other hunts that open up immediately. And you can do some with Penelo. Remember a couple of posts ago when the Rocketeer talked about fighting a giant chicken that had nothing to do with the plot instead of rushing off to rescue Penelo? That’s pretty typical.
The Rabanstre sewers have that rat fight in the beginning, then the escape from the palace, yet after you finish said palace escape it will be almost immediately filled with monsters with something like 3x the party’s expected level. So what plot thing happens there later? Nothing, it’s optional sidequests.
The mine we escaped from after the prison break? Never factors into the plot again but there are several optional bosses there. You can actually wander into a passageway full of monsters that you’re clearly not equipped to fight yet, just to tease you with the prospect.
This mine we just rescued Penelo from? It contains multiple optional fights including some that are harder than the game’s final boss. You’ll actually have to pick up multiple keys from sidequests to open it all.
That city that got blown up in the intro cinematic? You can go there. Not will, but can; the location is totally optional.
There’s a long stretch in the middle of the game where a lot of people quit. You have to walk to the imperial capital, which will be a walk from Nalbina Fortress -> Mosphoran Highwaste -> Salikawood -> Phon Coast -> Tchita Uplands -> Archades, and that’s a lot of fighting including some bosses (I’m not expecting you to remember all those locations; I wanted you to know how hard it was)
The thing is, if you’re actually doing all this sidequesting and stuff, then it’s not nearly so monotonous. Aside from the sidequests themselves, there’s a rather useful fast travel system (multiple overlapping fast travel systems depending on how far in the game you are), so there are many points where you can say “okay, I’m going to go fuck off to kill a thunderhorse instead of hacking my way through more shoreline.” You can meet the Hunt Club in the Phon Coast. And when you’re ready to go back to the plot, you can just teleport back. And the real-time battle with gambit system really does make it less tedious to fight your way through places that you’re now overleveled for; if this game had FFX’s combat system I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it.
Not that any of this excuses how obtuse the plot is. In fact if you expect your players to go ignore it, then it’s all the more important that it have clarity and be easier to remember. One amusing thing that I’ve seen in past discussions is that some people would spoiler tag the fact that Gabranth and Basch are twins. Now, you may ask yourself, “Wait, didn’t The Rocketeer already make fun of that? Isn’t that how he’s introduced?” and you’d be right, but some people, after hours upon hours of skinning snakes for wine ingredients and chasing bunnies through packs of hellhounds or slogging their way through a giant dungeon crystal eventually hit a scene of Gabranth saying something like “It’s been awhile…brother” and think it’s a plot reveal because they honestly forgot about him.
But silly as it is, I’ll take it over something offensively bad like Fallout 4 every day of the week.
Write this on my tombstone: I am consistently surprised by just how right I am. And I’m not just talking about predicting FFXV would be a giant mess, ANYONE could have seen that coming.
Rather, after having been away from the game for several years and forgetting a lot of it, again and again I’m surprised to find after watching sections of the game for proofreading purposes that things I had come to assume I had made up were straight from the game, and things I seemed to be exaggerating for effect were right on.
Easiest example: that bumper-sword shuttle is even more adorable than I remember. Go, sword-bumper shuttle! You can do anything if you believe in yourself!
Another is a line from a previous part, when the party returns to Rabanastre after escaping Nalbina. I joke that Vaan realizes the Dusk Shard is probably cursed and he should get rid of it, then realizes he can use it to impress his girlfriend. I assumed that either or both of these were my own projections and that the real dialog was probably something dry like “I should go find Penelo.” But while checking the footage for something unrelated, I laughed when I saw the actual dialog was, “I should probably get rid of this thing.” *beat* “But first I should show it to Penelo, so she knows I got something!” ‘Attaboy, Vaan. Actually, it’s even worse than I remembered: in the line just previous, he asks the Godess Magicite if he can really trust Basch. That’s a doozy if you know where the plot will end up.
And the example that made it most clear to me: There’s a line in the current section of the Travelog where I make fun of Ashe’s microskirt, not for the first or last time. While re-editing this months ago, big softy that I am, I thought, “Am I going too hard on this? I know this is a running gag, did I just lose sight of the reality because I liked this dumb joke too much and wanted to keep the joke running?” So I looked up a picture of Ashe for reference, and her skirt was less than half as long as I remembered it being.
Many minor examples like this, and many more larger ones yet to come.
So I might make plenty of things up, but I’ll never lie to you. You can believe the Travelog one hundred percent.
Trust me.
It’s like the sword version of T-rex arms, you can just imagine it angrily stabbing something as the blades sink deep enough to scratch the paint.
I normally hear about creative types supposedly always hating things they’ve made later- which is clearly a bogus over-generalization. The feeling of coming back to something you wrote after long enough to forget the details and see it again with fresher eyes, and finding that yes, it was just as good a job as you thought, is pretty good. No one can expect to be perfect all the time, but damn if it isn’t nice to feel some pride for the bits that really hold up.
Well, I’ve already ranted about how this thing is worse in FFXIII because that sort of thing isn’t even in an easy-to-miss line and you’re forced to read the codex, so I won’t do it again… even though I technically just did. Crap, why can’t I stop doing that?
Hey, what the hell? Stick to your game. Complaining about XIII is my job.
In all seriousness, though, you do bring an important point. I still remember when FFXIII was planned as a series of games (FF vs XIII, “Fabula Nova Crystallis” and all that junk we kept hearing for years) from the get go rather than just one. None of that came to fruition and while they launched a couple of sequels to the game they clearly weren’t the games they originally planned. I’m sure planning a series of games and ending up with just one hurt the storytelling massively but man, how do they keep screwing this up? You’d think this is the sort of issue they’d run into once, maybe twice, but this has been happening ever since the PS2 era to this day. Hell, it’s not even relegated just to the FF franchise. Squeenix really needs to get its shit together.
To put this in perspective, the original text would have been written around mid-2014. I’m not sure of the precise timeline, but this would have been at most a year after Final Fantasy Versus XIII, announced alongside Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Agito at E3 2006 (the year FFXII released), was rebranded to Final Fantasy XV in 2013, years after Final Fantasy XIII’s release in 2009, with which it was supposed to coincide or closely follow. In 2014, it was announced Tetsuya Nomura’s hands had at long last been gently pried from the helm; don’t know if this was before or after I wrote this part. It would still be two more years before they released it in a shockingly incomplete state in 2016.
Again, not the hardest call to make.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s lost, because I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
The problem is that FF12 doesn’t understand world-building. While they spend a lot of time talking about vaguely-weasely politics, they frequently fail to establish things such as “basic character motivations”. Likewise, much of the rest of the game will be dealing with the dusk and dawn shards and other magical (sorry, “magickal”) intricacies, but it’s all dropped on the player with no context. We, the audience, don’t really understand the nature or importance of the shards or why they are being used in the way they are. These things are basically “The One Ring” for the story, yet it’s never examined or put into a relationship we can understand. And frankly, the politics mostly comes down to “everyone in Archadia* is a massive arse” but the game will NOT shut up when explaining it.
Note that FF14 basically pulled all of these tools out and did the same thing, only far better. It’s even really the same functional setup: evil empire invades and there’s a lot of politics taking place at their home. Heck, they even basically have Vayne 2.0 and he’s freaking wonderful. This is purely a matter of bad storytelling and not an intrinsically bad story. In reality, it’s not that complex and they’re throwing up a cloud of swirling dust to obfuscate.
*I think? I can’t remember any of the factions or nations for more than five minutes.
FF14 definitely does a better job slowly opening up its political stuff – you spend a few levels fighting rats (not in sewers!) or ladybugs and meet the shadowy adversaries gives you enough name recognition you get introduced to the politics, and then get a more direct introduction to the political dynamics in each of the main three good-guy cities with occasional flashes on what Team Bad Guy is doing.
Who the heck is Vayne 2.0? Zenos fits as the heir who gets put in charge of a conquered land (or two), but he’s not exactly a people person, nor given to plotting.
Gaius von Baelsar? He’s out conquering people for their own good, because he believes in the Empire; he’s closer to a grown up Larsa than Vayne, but with less trolling and not a royal.
Basch von Gabranth? He’s the imperial governor of Dalmasca (and that region of the world) and seems to have legitimately been trying to improve things for the people he rules; I’ve not finished the storyline that deals with his people, and he hasn’t been on screen yet (if ever.).
I really like the Gabranth scenes; they’re cutaways to non-player-party Archadean politics, and every scene he’s in front of a different political figure, who ends the scene by declaring they’re happy Gabranth is on their side in all this. It’s establishing some nice intrigue for the one definite villain we have; the party is definitely going to fight Gabranth, since he killed two party members’ families and framed the third for it, but the circumstances of the fight are up in the air.
Alright; this post has Tactics comparisons to make.
This is the first major introduction to the
holy stones— sorry, Day Cycle Shards — that will comprise the majority of the plot from here forward. In Tactics, the stones were interesting; they had an obvious evil use, an unobvious noble use, and a purely symbolic use, and people were gathering them for all three*. Here, the Shards are pretty boring; they’re proof of Ashe’s bloodline, and they do one thing that the Empire wants them for.The reference to getting a lookalike to hold the Shard and play princess is funny because Tactics has an entire scene explaining that the princess was actually a fake because the real princess died in infancy. And then Tactics never brings it up again and it has no relevance to later events. It’s a pretty clear “the writers are still on the clock dammit write another twist” scene.
Judge Ghis is defeated here, but survives. This was a recurring problem in Tactics, where defeated named enemies would literally teleport away, to return later and be arbitrarily killed in the next fight. 12 avoids this; Ghis is one of the few villains who survives their initial encounter with the party. The downside is that means we barely ever meet any major villains outside of Gabranth’s cutaways, and most of the game feels stakes-less.
*(and without consuming the plot. The bad guys don’t want them because they’ll provide any military advantage, they want them because they’re necessary to bring in another helldemon conspirator, who will proceed to play cloak and dagger just like if they weren’t ten foot tall goat demons. The plot is still the conspiracy and the stones are mostly an excuse to have bossfights.)
…oh right.
Vaan handing over the plot coupon on Ghis’ word is really, really dumb. His whole character arc is about how his brother was murdered by the Empire during a peace treaty; the one thing we’ve established is that the Empire’s word means nothing.
He’s literally in handcuffs surrounded by soldiers at the time – it’s not like he’s really in a position to do anything else.
I’m too lazy to go back to the old posts. Who is Vossler again?
Dalmascan Resistance leader. Yelled at Basch about being not dead, or something. We gave him a sword, he threw it back at us, I don’t think we can equip the sword. Now he’s playing Han and Lando at the same time.
Vossler is a former Dalmascan Knight Captain who served with Basch, including at the ill-fated assault on Nalbina. He’s the de facto Number 2 in the Rabanastran resistance, just under Ashe herself. Basch met with him briefly in Dalmasca after escaping the oubliette, and despite their testy tete-a-tete there, Vossler now stands up for Basch to Ashe, who has yet to reckon with his aliveness/innocence. In Bhujerba, Vossler’s meeting with the resistance movement there is a subtle but important moment, as it represents the unification of Archadia’s foes that Vayne’s scheming had deftly prevented by sowing confusion and discord among them.
Can someone explain this story in Star Wars terms? Ashe is Leia, clearly. Balthier and Fran are Han and Chewie. Vaan and Penelo are C3P0 and R2D2. Who’s Basch (in Star Wars terms)?
Wedge. His subplot is mostly over anyway. Ash is the only PC you need to keep track of.
Don’t worry about keeping track of people anymore. Now that we have reached the magic rocks subplot, nothing we have learned until now will be important for the rest of the game.
Hummmm reverse Lando? (everyone think he betrayed them but he didn’t)
I really appreciate the shift in tone as you turn your attention toward the political drama in Archades–the stuff with the emperor, the senate, and the question of imperial succession is some of the strongest material the game presents and you smartly let its quality speak for itself! It made for quite the contrast with your jokes about the total nonsense going on with the main party.
First of all how dare you
I haven’t had any problem keeping the names straight but then again I also read The Wheel of Time throughout high school and college.
Well, can you name all the random Aes Sedai* who a) get given a chapter in the books series and/or b) spend some of their chapter thinking about the neckline of their clothes?
Though I agree – as I recall, the first disc of FFIX was the one that made most sense. Princess Dagger (stupid name) runs away using kidnap-by-theives-but-not-really, and the Queen becomes obsessed with the power of summoning and tries to take over the world. Much shit gets rekt.
Then everyone gets married in order to cross a bridge that’s actually a town…
…then something happens, and something else, then Kuja’s involved and elemental shrines and I forgot to care.
But the important thing is, the beginning is the bit I remember wokring.
*No, not Moiraine Damodred, Siuane Sanche, Eladia do Avriny, or any of the plot-central named characters who become Aes Sedai later on. I mean the random people who get 1 chapter explaining how they’re Black Ajah, or not really Black Ajah, or secretly Forsaken, or randomly politicking, or other such bullshit.
That’s actually Disc 2. Disc 1 is getting to Lindblum and then the Festival and then getting to Burmecia.
…you know what I’m going to give this Aes Sedai thing a shot.
Adeleas and Vandene, Leana and Liandrin, Alviarin, Galina, Halima and then Verin…
…hm.
Dashiva and Logain… someone with an N-name… Chegwyn, Moridin…
Guess that’s all I’ve got, then.