T w e n t y S i d e d
This week, Rocketeer recounts how our heroes escaped from prison and then bumbled around town trying to find the plot.
This disastrous opening has left our writer in a terrible position. The main characters are out of prison and are finally free to do what they want… except they all have different goals, none of which align with what the player cares about, which is doing something about this dastardly Empire that just took over.
Balthier is a sky pirate, and Vaan wants to be a sky pirate, but this isn’t a game about sky piracy and that’s not where the author wants to go. Also, Balthier doesn’t like Vaan, doesn’t need his help, and doesn’t care to teach him the finer points of sky-piracy, so the whole “sky pirate” angle doesn’t help us.
Basch and Vaan want to “do something” about the Empire, but Vaan still has a grudge against Basch so they can’t work together. Meanwhile, Basch needs to clear his name with the resistance.
Bathier has no immediate goal, and Fran’s only goal is to follow Balthier around.
Penelo has no goals whatsoever, she hasn’t met the rest of the party, and she’s never expressed any interest in our ostensible main plot of fighting the Empire.
So everyone in the main cast is either directionless, enemies, or working at cross-purposes. The next section of the game is a chain of cutscenes designed to untangle this horrendous mess and get our heroes all pointed in roughly the same direction. The author accomplishes this with Penelo’s kidnapping. This works… eventually. It’s just that it takes some time to get all the pieces in place so that the plot can begin inching very slowly forward.
This means that we’re still dealing with the fallout of this story’s horrible introduction. Not only was the “evil twin” plot corny and cartoonish as hell, and not only was it (as Rocketeer pointed out last week) nonsensical beyond reckoning, but it created headaches down the road because now Basch and Vaan have no reason to team up except that the plot needs them to.
The Matrix
In the past I talked about how bad writers make bad stories by failing to see the inherent complexity in a story. Maybe the writer sees the lobby fight from the Matrix. “Oh, that’s cool! I should have a scene in my movie where my heroes shoot a bunch of people and the walls fall apart. That’s badass!” But what this “writer” is overlooking is that the Matrix just spent an hour and forty minutes coaxing the audience to the edge of their seats.When it comes to movies that obviously tried to imitate the Matrix without understanding The Matrix on even a basic level, I always want to cite Ultraviolet. But I can’t, because I’ve never made it more than 15 minutes into the film. I don’t know what the next 75 minutes are like, but those first 15 are pretty cringe.
The movie has created enormous forward momentum by setting up multiple ideas and getting the audience to care about them. We have:
- Personal stakes – our friend Morpheus
- Broad stakes – the fate of humanity!
- Mysteries – Is Neo the One? If not, then who is? If he is, then what can he do?
- Love – The love story between Neo and Trinity isn’t an exemplar of the form, but it’s serviceable enough. We have two potential lovers who are about to battle side-by-side against impossible odds. Speaking of which…
- Impossible odds – How will our heroes survive assaulting this massive, unkillable enemy, at the apparent seat of its power?
- A great villain – If you don’t want to punch Hugo Weaving by the hour and forty mark of the Matrix, then you are Gandhi.
So yes, that scene had great special effects, superb choreography, brilliant cinematography, a slick presentation, and a bangin’ soundtrack, but it also had a Saturn V rocket worth of potential energy underneath it thanks to all the work the writer did in the previous scenes.
When I complain about “bad writing”, I’m usually complaining about this sort of thing, where a writer will mindlessly copy a scene or idea without understanding what made that idea work in the first place.
The thing is, these are not the failings of Final Fantasy XII.
You Look Like You’re Having Fun
This story is not the product of a clueless writer. Yes, this story is very broken in several ways, but this isn’t the result of a hack shoving random things together. The overall thrust of the war and the conflict between these various countries is actually really interesting. It’s just that there are these huge fault lines running through the thing, preventing it from holding together.
Having Bathier be a sky pirate is a fun idea and very on-brand for a Final Fantasy game. Having Vaan be an aspiring sky pirate is a cool motivation and a great way to bring these otherwise disparate characters together. Except, none of it really pays off and it’s kind of at odds with the central premise of overthrowing this evil empire.
Having the evil empire frame our greatest warrior and use his disgrace to cover their own treachery while simultaneously weakening their rivals is some next-level Machiavellian shit. Except, as presented the plan to frame Basch makes no sense. If this made sense – or if it even came close to making sense – it would make us both respect and despise Vayne. When we saw him, we’d think about how much we were looking forward to beating his ass, instead of just thinking of that one music video.
Having our future queen teetering on the edge between wrath and restraint as Ondore teaches her to play the Great Game is an inspired idea that was literally ahead of its time. A decade after Final Fantasy XII, the Game of Thrones TV show demonstrated that this idea was lightning in a bottle. It would have been a joy to play as a member of Ashe’s entourage, trying to keep her alive in a world teeming with foes and betrayers. It would have been exciting to watch her friends try to nudge her away from vengeance and towards wisdom, even as the scheming empire makes us all long for vengeance. But no. Ashe isn’t playing Game of Thrones. She isn’t even playing musical chairs. She’s just walking around glaring at things and refusing to make decisions. (Or will be, once she enters the story.)
So if it wasn’t a lack of talent, then what was the cause of this mess? What shattered this story into a dozen irreconcilable pieces? Who do we blame for so much wasted potential?
I don’t actually know, but I’m going to keep bringing it up anyway because it drives me crazy. We’ll come back to this topic once we have a bit more of the story under our belt.
Footnotes:
[1] When it comes to movies that obviously tried to imitate the Matrix without understanding The Matrix on even a basic level, I always want to cite Ultraviolet. But I can’t, because I’ve never made it more than 15 minutes into the film. I don’t know what the next 75 minutes are like, but those first 15 are pretty cringe.
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Having watched Ultraviolet in its entirety exactly once, for the life of me I can’t remember what the plot is about, but the whole thing is most definitely an exercise in imitating The Matrix without understanding it. This is also a thing in the Resident Evil movies from the second one on, all of which also star Milla Jovovich and are only slightly more competent.
Well, you’ve played Resident Evil 5 (and, as I recall, about to do it again), so you know Wesker is clearly inspired by The Matrix. But it’s also evident that the writing in the 5th and 6th game is inspired by the films. At some point the people at Capcom saw that the ridiculous action-fest nonsense from the films was more popular than the ridiculous b-movie horror nonsense from the previous games, so they shifted gears.
The Matrix was a great movie, but maaaaaaan, the amount of imitators that it inspired grew annoying very fast. Just like how every movie tries to be Marvel these days everyone wanted to be Matrix back then. The difference being that no one seemed to grasp at the time the fact that the Matrix had an excuse for all of those crazy stunts: they were happening inside a simulation. That’s the one thing everyone forgot to copy. So when in Ultraviolet the protagonist literally sets her sword on fire just by scraping it against the floor until it sparks you realize that you just wasted two hours of your life in elementary-school levels of fanfiction.
I actually more remember the movies that came out around the same time that all had similar “You are in a simulation” concepts like Dark City, Existenz, and The Thirteenth Floor. I can’t say they were ripoffs because as I said they all came out at similar times, but man did it seem like such an odd coincidence.
Virtual reality had been a running theme throughout the ’90s, from The Lawnmower Man to Strange Days to Virtuosity to probably a ton I’m forgetting. The dawn of the home computer and internet age was as revolutionary as splitting the atom, and there was similarly a ton of sci-fi focused on its perils. It even showed up in terrible action/thrillers (internet perils, not virtual reality) like The Net.
Dark City came out long before The Matrix, and along with Ghost in The Shell was one of the major films that influenced, it according to the Wachowskis (specifically the cinematography and production design), so that example actually goes the other way around.
Existenz and The Thirteenth floor both came out the same year as The Matrix (IIRC), so are most likely just convergent evolution. Existenz in particular, given that David Cronenberg’s right next to David Lynch in terms of people you’d never expect to bother with trend-chasing.
In regards to the “living in a simulation” theme, The Matrix probably had more influence on later films like The Truman Show. Though that specific film makes it it’s own by referencing the then rising Reality TV trend instead of VR, and by using a completely different tone and visual style.
I watched it way back when when it came out as well, and I also can’t remember much about it, except Aeon Flux came out around the same time and I remember thinking it was a better version of the same movie (which may not even be true – I only remember the thought, not anything it was based on).
In fact, this week I decided I wanted to watch some breezy, nonchallenging action after work and found Ultraviolet on HBOMax. Watched about 15 minutes of it too before giving up in disgust, then watched No Country for Old Men for the first time instead, which was quite opposite experience in every way.
Oof, saying Aeon Flux is better than Ultraviolet is damning with faint praise.
I mean, it’s technically true, in the sense that Aeon Flux is more watchable than Ultraviolet (in the “if it’s on TV in the afternoon, and you’re bored” sense, not in the “worth a rental” sense), but still.
Huh, the weirdest thing about Ultraviolet is that I was absolutely sure it had been directed by Paul W.S. Anderson as yet another entry in his and Milla Jovovich’s version of couple’s porn, like Resident Evil and the Three Musketeers. But no! Ultraviolet was actually directed by Kurt Wimmer. The guy who had already made a pretty good version of The Matrix in Equilibrium. So the fact thay Ultraviolet is quite so bad puzzles me.
Then again, Alex Proyas directed Dark City and has been sliding downwards at increasing speed ever since. Those things happen.
I’m reminded once again that I am apparently highly resistant to implied villainhood. My initial reaction to both Vayne and Seymour was “I like this guy. he seems pretty chill”.
The hair, man! DO YOU NOT SEE HIS HAIR?
I kid. Yeah, it’s nice that they are “chill”. They would be tedious if they were growling, cackling tyrants.
Yeah, I think the point of both of them is that they’re supposed to seem reasonable on first glance. And it’s basically just genre-savvyness that would make you sense otherwise. Honestly, I really dig Vayne’s introduction here, which is basically:
I think that’s a really solid hook for a character, and the fact that it seems to be basically just a cover for his actual villainous motivations seems like a shame. … but admittedly, I either didn’t get far enough into the story to see his character play out, or don’t remember it, so I can’t really comment on how well written his story is.
I think the story would have been more interesting if Vayne was less evil and more machiavellian. Maybe he want to overthrow his father but doesn’t have the support so he tries to team up with Ashe in exchange for giving her kingdom back its independence.
Isn’t he already the heir apparent? Granted there is plenty of historical precedent for that.
I also liked the “I am here to do a job and will do it by the book.”
Well in the game he’s prince #3 but 1/2 were assassinated, it would be easy to change it so he’s either not the heir or he’s worried he’ll also be killed to make room for prince #4.
I don’t know to what extent this is the opposite of the intention with this series, but it’s making me really badly want to give FFXII a try. Not only is it the only non-MMO, non-sequel numbered entry I’ve never tried, but it seems to be broken in fascinating ways. Reading these entries has been giving me a bit of a headache, because I just can’t quite picture a game being bad in the ways described here while also being good in the ways described here. I don’t know what it says about me that being told a game is flawed in interesting ways makes me more excited for it than being told a game is very good.
Reading series like this, particularly for games I have played, always makes me want to play them again.
The authors often mention details or mechanics I missed, glossed over, or straight up disregarded; The implied change in the experience and the alternative perspective granted by the series makes the game rather appealing for replay.
I often resist because I have too many games on my plate already.
As you’ll see from the comments a lot of people like FFXII and will probably recommend it.
I’ve played through it 3 times, but I’ve only ever found it frustrating. Previous Final Fantasy games are good although flawed. Future Final Fantasy games are either so bad I come to them from a point of charity, looking for the good stuff, or they are exactly what they are (FFXV).
Final Fantasy XII is game which should be fun but isn’t. The actual gameplay loop is fine, but all the good stuff Shamus describes just doesn’t come through at all because the game is so inept at showing any of it.
The writer may be a good world-builder / plotter (although heavily flawed in both of those areas), fine, but they’re so bad at the nuts and bolts of telling a story, at introducing things and establishing them for the player, at having any individual scene or piece of dialogue work, that none of it matters.
Playing the game is like having an itch you can’t scratch, or a scab that you want to break. You’d love to get to the good stuff, but you never will.
“I’ve only ever found it frustrating”
“I’ve played through it 3 times”
Wha?
Final Fantasy fans are weird, man.
I can say the same things about XIII. I’ve also tried and failed to complete VIII about three or four times.
XIII is so bad storywise (as discussed in the comments to this series)… but I’ve played it twice because I actually like the combat system once it opens up (not an opinion shared by everyone) and it is a rather pretty game.
It took me a long time to realise it was never going to be good .
Also, I was 14 and I didn’t have money to buy more new games.
I’d put it somewhere near the bottom of Final Fantasy games, but I did enjoy it. The story is interesting but feels incomplete more than anything; the whole Nalbina/Basch section might as well have a big “Scene Missing” card, a lot of convoluted stuff that might possibly make sense with the right explanation (like the Basch framing, or next week’s Bhujerba shenanigans) get no explanation at all. The ending doesn’t tie up loose ends so much as hit them with the scissors.
But there are some good characters, and some good scenes, and the core gameplay is mostly a good time, and hunting monsters and Espers is good fun. It’s certainly better than X-2, at least; I wanted to finish 12 (unlike 13 and 15) and didn’t regret doing so (unlike X-2).
Whether that’s worth the price tag… no idea.
X-2 is one of my favorite games in the whole series. Then again, it’s not even *trying* to make any sense or take itself seriously 90% of the time. And when it does, it’s accompanied by good music.
Most importantly, it’s just really fun to play. (Imo, then again I really love class changing type games.)
XII was probably the start of my “get halfway through long games and wind up never finishing them for some reason” curse. Which I’m sure has more to do with how my attention span for games has shortened as I’ve gotten older.
Thinking back on it I don’t recall thinking…. anything in particular about the plot. I certainly didn’t analyze it like Rocketeer and Shamus do. Honestly I probably just wasn’t paying a ton of attention to the plot at all. I recall the game being fun enough, though not really my style (I strongly prefer turn based games).
The part where I (unintentionally) abandoned it forever was about half way through where the game opens up and you can do all those big monster hunting sidequests. I’ve since noted that that’s a pattern for me. I can at least point at XIII and Tales of Vesparia specifically (and probably other games I can’t recall off the top of my head) that my drop off point for long games like this is when it opens up to let you go off and do whatever.
In addition to the lower attention span issue, I think this is also because I’m the kind of person the fells compelled to try and do all the sidequest stuff…. but that actually doing it usually requires you to take the extra effort to look up a bunch of stuff online and at that point it’s really easy for me to just get distracted by some shiny new thing or feel more pressure to catch up on other hobbies I’ve let slide while I was spending all those hours on the game instead of them.
At which point I’ll eventually notice “whoops, it’s been six months since I’ve played” and the way my life works out this often means it’s actually inconvenient or maybe actually basically impossible for me to go back and play (due to now a lack of access to a TV or the system being in a box after moving or something of the sort). At which point it winds up in the “whoops, guess I’m just never going to finish that game”.
So I’m certainly glad for this retrospective(s) since it should give me some closure on at least one of my accidentally abandoned games regrets.
Why I never got into Breath of the Wild. “Here’s this big open game you can do whatever you want in whichever order you want and spend as much time screwing around as you like, no hurry!”
Me: *Stops playing the game and wanders off*
Kinda similar. I’ve never played BoTW, but I too have had this experience with other games.
For me, there needs to be some kind of underlying thread of “you’re working to accomplish a goal”, otherwise I become hyper-aware of how I’m just throwing my time away when I could be doing literally anything else more meaningful with it.
It’s why I never take advantage of the “post game” part of an open world game. It’s why I’ve never actually finished a FalloutScrolls game (the story is so backburnered by the open world content, and there’s SO MUCH open world content, that my engagement in the game is already used up by the time I’m only about 1/2 or 2/3 through the main story)
It’s why I never get into abstract building games like Minecraft or Space Engineers. After spending X number of hours in such a game, I log off and am immediately hit by depression as I realize that nothing I made means anything outside that bubble. Even with a story-motivated game, (or movie, novel, etc.) I’m getting an emotionally transferable experience which can make the act of consumption feel additive to my life. But with a pure “builder” game, I could’ve just spent those hours aimlessly doodling in Blender, closed the program without saving, and I’d still have more to show for it in virtually every sense.
I can usually march (or even waltz or sprint) straight through Bethesda open world games because they’re decent at providing intermediate/side objectives (do faction X questline, explore that ruin, go see that setpiece and its associated ministory). I can basically never replay them in full. I’ll start with a premise like “I’m going to play this style” or “I’m going to mod it for survival” and I’ll have fun in the beginning, but then the appeal of wandering around and redoing all that content only this time with a bow or dealing with hunger just burns out for me…
That’s very similar to how I play them. The main difference (I’m guessing) is that I don’t use fast travel, as I really enjoy the experience of hiking through those worlds. As a result I think I end up spending a lot more time in game per-quest, and end up picking up more side quests along the way than the average player.
I said most of what I wanted to say about X-2 back in October (not sure how to link individual comments; it’s the wall of text that starts with X-2), but X-2 was basically a spiritual alder root; it dug itself into my brain, and when I finally got it out it left a giant ripped-open hole where it used to be. The fact it’s got the best Job system I’ve ever seen just made it hurt more.
I also dropped XII the first time I played it, but left with the opinion of “this was dumb and not compelling, but still more fun than not.” And so, having suddenly come back to it years later and pushing through to the end, I’ve still got the impression “This was pretty dumb and not really compelling, but still more fun than not.”
…I seriously can’t believe XII brought back the monkey minigame from X-2. What an inexplicable thing to do.
Just as a heads up, the moniker “X-2” doesn’t communicate clearly without the “FF” part. I spent this comment chain thinking you guys had taken a very sudden swerve from talking about a JRPG series, to talking about an interstellar commerce sim.
…hm, that leaves a quandary. “FFX-2” takes too long to say, and “10-2” looks especially ugly.
I think the correct solution is to just never talk about the game again.
I’m still a little confused. Which game are we actually referring to?
If Final Fantasy XII, then “FF12” is one less character (and the same length as “10-2”)
If Final Fantasy II, then “FF2” is even more efficient.
Is there a whole separate series called “Final Fantasy X” that’s messing with the roman numeral convention? If we’re typing out whole paragraphs anyway, why is one or two extra characters too long?
Wait: I’ve got it!
It’s a hybrid numeral system, and “X-2” means Final Fantasy 8, right?
You mean “Final Fantasy 3+V”.
FFX-2 is the direct sequel to FFX, featuring Yuna and Rikku and new character Paine, flying around a post-Sin Spira. It’s the first direct sequel to a main series Final Fantasy game, hence the really awkward numbering.
The first direct sequel to a main-series Final Fantasy game? How dare you disrespect Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals?
Final Fantasy X has a direct sequel called Final Fantasy X-2. The X actually does stand for “10”, unlike, say, Mega Man X, but the “-2” is specifically to indicate it’s a direct sequel to X and not part of the main numbered series.
They did something similar with Final Fantasy XIII which got a sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2 (and another one called “Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII”, because I guess Final Fantasy XIII-3 was just a bridge too far) Final Fantasy VII also has several spinoff games that adopted the “Title: Final Fantasy VII” naming scheme
For bonus points, half of the earlier games weren’t originally translated into English, but Japan tried to hide it from the Western World by sequentially numbering the translations anyway. So after the first Final Fantasy, II and III were not released outside of Japan, then IV was released in the west as Final Fantasy II, then they skipped translating V only to release VI in the west as Final Fantasy III, before giving up on the scheme and making Final Fantasy VII be Final Fantasy VII everywhere.
Also, this game has a sequel of its own called “Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings”. It’s an RTS for the Nintendo DS.
…at least I never subjected myself to Kingdom Hearts.
Disagree on it being better than X-2. X-2 is silly and I really don’t recommend completing all the sidequests because some of them were designed entirely to sell strategy guides but it’s really cool seeing a world coming to terms with not being under constant apocalyptic threat anymore.
I agree that the idea of a world coming to term not being under threat is fun… but FFX-2 is just too silly to seriously tackle that idea. Yuna should be super Jesus in that story, yet is treated as a whimsical rascal/pop idol. Having one of the major faction be new Yevon makes little sense when everyone should know at this point that its just a pile of lie (would have been far more interesting if the new religion was forming around Yuna). Having the civil war be resolved by a concert (held literally in the stupidest place possible) just show how little the writer cared about that aspect.
FfX-2 has character motivations and a plot where things happen, and it explains why you’re doing things, which immediately makes it better than XII.
Sure it’s silly, but why can’t things be silly? It’s a theme of the game that you can’t grind yourself down doing only the serious stuff all the time. At some point you need to kick back and dance.
Albeit I do think you need some distance from FFX before playing it. If you’re carrying expectations of similarity it fails hard as a sequel. It’s more like a goofy spin-off game, the Citadel DLC to ME3’s apocalypse
Nothing wrong with being silly, but there’s a time and place. Imagine if Biden went to Ukraine and organized a big a pop concert and invited Putin/Russian army.
FFX-2 could have worked if it stand alone and way less serious in its ambition. But its hard to seriously take a game where there’s a minigame where you have to make your rival climax.
FFX2’s gameplay (hitting dudes with swords) is really fun. The story would have been fine if they would have kept Yuna out of it. Riku and the two new girls have zany adventures with lots of collateral damage and underpants would have been a fun story.
I share your hatred of that mini-game, though.
What I’m saying is FFX-2 doesn’t need to be Ukraine. It’s only Ukraine if you’re expecting it to have a closeness to X (which is not an unreasonable expectation). But if you come at it with distance it’s fine. The New Yevon / Crusader stuff feels sufficiently goofy itself (it resolves with a pop song as you say) that it doesn’t clash with the tone of the game.
Well that’s kinda the problem, half of the game is trying to be Ukraine while the other half is trying to be raunchy charlie angels. If they picked a style and sticked to it I think it could have worked fine, but as it stand you have to ignore a big part of the game.
I suspect it’s more likely going to come down to whether you like the gameplay or not than the story beats.
I definitely had issues with the story, too, but ultimately, I didn’t find the gameplay very satisfying – the license grid is dull (significantly worse than the sphere grid, in my view), gambits are never as interesting as they should be, and the game expects more grinding from you than I’d like (as Shamus alluded to in the previous column, IIRC).
I’ve been playing the Zodiac Age version, and it definitely seems better than the original, but I’m still finding it somewhat dull/frustrating several hours in.
I don’t remember if there’s an entry on the actual battle/RPG mechanics of the game in Rocketeers “tour”, but I imagine Shamus will bring it up at some point for more extended discussion.
At this point in the writing we’re still at a point where lots of event happen in relative quick succession, but soon the plot will halt to a screeching stop and limp along while not much is happening. At that point you need to really like the gameplay if you plan on playing trough.
But I understand full well the desire to play bad game, not long ago I played trough left alive (after buying it for like 5$) and it’s a fascinatingly bad game that I’d recommend anyone play if they enjoy this sort of post mortem analysis. It’s not quite like watching a B-movie, but its interesting seeing all the interesting idea and how they were thwarted by baffling one. I can also recommend trying last remnant in that vein.
I’ll repeat what I said earlier: I think that these kind of story problems around character motivation have frequently been an issue with the series since IV, where characters join up with other characters they don’t like or trust with only token resistance and almost instant forgiveness. What I think Shamus is commenting on here is that there was a shared antagonist that was central to the plot that at least gives plausibility to the shared goal even if the rather quick character turnaround time of motivation change could be written off as an abstraction of the medium.
However, it seems like Square Enix kept repeating its tried and true formula from before until the one time they forgot to give a shared purpose here, and this time the flaws are even more obvious with the constant upgrades in visual fidelity and voice acting.
Curiously enough, this particular flaw hasn’t been repeated yet.
FF XIII actually has an extremely valid reason for the party to be working together, in that they’re all being coerced. It’s less “we’re a team because we’re friends on the same side” and more “we’re a team because if we don’t be we’re all gonna die.” In fact I like to make fun of the game for the opposite; it still feels the need to break up and reunite the party at times and the only reason they ever come up with, literally the only reason at any point in the entire game, is making the protagonist abandon someone.
XV is about a prince and his entourage from the start and I honestly think that’s something the game gets really right even if I’m not a fan of that game and its story in general. And actually one of the few times they force someone out of your party is also one of the parts that annoyed me.
All the conflicting characters come together at once here in FFXII. With most of the other games you start with a small group (sometimes not enough to fill a full party) to which more characters are added. Usually one or two at a time. This gives each of the new characters room to raise any potential conflicts with the group and have them addressed. I don’t know if you were including IV when you said since IV, but I am pretty sure in that game everyone has a line about how “Gee Cecil, you were a giant dick when you were a Dark Knight but this new Paladin thing seems okay so I’ll join up with you for now…”
Here though it throws multiple conflicting characters together all at once and does not allow any of the conflict to resolve itself. The speed at which the party comes together is worsened by the lack of clear goal. If the stakes are high enough, you can buy disparate characters coming together out of necessity, but we just don’t have that here.
Yeah, I think it’s kind of a classic pain-point for RPGs – it’s kind of the D&D problem where fundamentally the reason all these characters are together is “because that’s the game we’re playing”, and it’s often awkward justifying in game why this particular group of misfit murderhobos is together.
A game with writers has more control than a D&D session where each player brings whatever fresh madness of a character they’ve cooked up to the table independently, but there’s still competing priorities other than narrative consistency – like most RPGs want to have a large cast of unique and bizarre characters in its cast, but the more you do that the harder it is to justify in-context. (Or this game apparently wanted Vaan and Penelo as “audience inserts” which created similar issues)
A lot of RPGs just kind of hand-wave this: oh we meet this person and help them once and now they’re going to leave everything and cross the entire world with us to go do a thing, because that’s just the sort of people do in these sort of stories. (But only interesting people: sorry Random NPC #205, you keep tending that field and try not to worry about that looming apocalypse) And this works up to a point, but the more “realistic” these games get and the more complex the stories, the more that feels artificial.
FF VI has a whopping 14 characters, and only 6 (maybe Shadow as #7?) of them have a strong connection to the story. The rest just kind of tag along because they like the main characters or are just feeling adventurous. It’s kind of hidden though since the main characters tend to have the strongest abilities and personalities so you’re more likely to have them in your party anyway. Obviously, it’s more pronounced and obvious if you don’t even have a single party’s worth of characters with strong cohesion.
Let me do the numbers.
Strong Connection to Story: (MC’s)
I. Celes – Disillusioned general; wants to stop her former allies
II. Terra – Human – monster hybrid, her existence raises questions about the nature of magic.
III. Cyan – Last knight of a dead kingdom; wants vengeance
IV. Edgar – King, winning war would be good for his kingdom
Weak Connection to Story:
V. Strago – winning war would be good for his village
VI. Shadow – Mercenary; feels ill used by villains
VII. Setzer – Only feels alive when taking dangerous risks
Relatives:
VIII. Locke – Emotional problems; lusts after MC’s
IX. Sabin – Brother of MC
X. Relm – G Daughter of MC
Little to None:
XI. Gau – party fed him once
XII. Mog – Bonus character
XIII. Uramo – Bonus character
XIV. Gogo – Bonus character
I’m including Sabin and Locke in the main characters, even though the game doesn’t dwell as much as why they are so against the Empire. Sabin presumably has emotional ties to Figaro that makes him naturally predisposed to join the Returners even though he doesn’t explicitly say “I hate the Empire because X”. He does drive the story to get back to the main characters to aid in their fight, picking up Gau and Cyan along the way, Locke is also explicitly with the Returners and against the Empire, even though his character arc doesn’t have anything to do with the Empire personally.
The rest are how I would define them as well, except for Strago. It doesn’t seem like the Empire has much involvement with his village except for the one time, and then they are forgotten about.
Strago doesn’t really care about the empire. His thing is more – big picture – prevent the power of magic being misused.
Which is truly fabulous. The best bit has to be the three other members of the band, who appear to have given all of their emotions to Pete Burns for the duration of the shoot.
Just three po-faced dudes, popping up in the background.
Hey, come on. Don’t forget that Fran has a copy of the game’s story – how else would she be able to lead them to Basch apropos of nothing? It’s her power!
AND she knows that countries tend to be on continents, and to get to the country you’ll have to enter the continent.
I guess everyone who plays this already knows these details (I’ve never played it), but a quick trip to wikipedia confirms that Vaan wasn’t supposed to be the protagonist:
But if Basch was the original protagonist, based upon what I’ve read so far, it doesn’t seem like it would make much sense for Vaan and Penelo to be in the game at all. Only six main characters I guess, and two to three (Vaan, Penelo, Fran) of them don’t seem to have much role in the story?
I’d add Basch on there. Basch is on par with Fran, maybe a bit worse.
Balthier isn’t much better.
…it’s not really a story where we… do… things.
Yes, “Vaan and Penelo don’t even need to be here” is a very common fan sentiment. Especially since Penelo seems set up to be the love interest and nothing else but then they don’t actually follow through on the love interest part (not even in the sequel)
Oh man, Vagrant Story was so good. Hands down my favorite square plot and characters.
I don’t know if I agree with your thesis here. As in, I don’t DISagree, but I’m not sure I agree that all these different directions for the plot are really incompatible. Like, Han Solo’s entire character arc is literally “criminal who get drawn in to overthrow an evil empire.” FFX was sort of a departure, in that it DIDN’T feature a politically important character stowing away with a main party comprised of mercenaries/sky pirates like both XIII and IX did.
“Sky pirates bite off more than they can chew when they accidentally abduct a princess, only to discover their hearts of gold and deliver her to her mentor so she can learn the Great Game and defeat the Evil Empire,” is a perfectly serviceable plot. It’s not that the threads are incompatible it’s just that they don’t flow the way they’re supposed to in FFXII.
I thought Balthier’s motivation in this early section was fairly clear: he wants to obtain something valuable. He’s a pirate! And so he goes from trying to steal the Dusk Shard to having said gemstone as payment for helping to free Penelo. It’s only later when his motivation changes to…wanting to see something interesting? For shits & giggles? It’s a bit mysterious, and I haven’t properly finished the game yet. My best guess is that he
wants to marry Ashe.Cid being Balthier’s fatheris another example of a plot point that can work in principle, had they found a way to introduce it more quickly among all the other balls this plot has been juggling/dropping.My read on Balthier is that he’s more heroic and less mercenary than he lets on – you can see this a bit in how he stylizes himself as “the leading man”, a heroic title, rather than having self-deprecating mercenary humor.
Shamus says “he doesn’t like Vaan”, but I think he does, basically immediately. It’s why he doesn’t murder Vaan or leave him in the sewers and just take the Dawn Shard, why he watches his back in prison, why he takes him when they leave, etc, and I feel his stated justifications – like taking the Dawn Shard as payment or saying “we need to work together to get out of this sewer/prison” (game mechanics aside, is a random street orphan really an asset in combat?) are more excuses he’s giving to himself to let his more “sensible” side indulge his more “sentimental” side, which is what he really wanted to do anyway if he were being honest with himself.
I think this is very accurate, and also another problem that may have been possible to smooth out with more time/a stronger vision that wasn’t interrupted by the creative head leaving. We’re not nearly there yet, but eventually it transpires that
Balthier is a former Judge, and his father Cid is the main researcher behind the magicite-based weaponry which hasn’t really been talked about but was responsible for the fantasy nuclear bomb dropped on Nabudis in the prologue. Executed properly it would have been even more of a Han Solo ripoff (merc who eventually sticks around for principled reasons) but I don’t think most people would have minded.That is the most frustrating part of FFXII. The writer sets the foundation for a very interesting story. Then, another writter steals the pen and charges off in different direction before anyone can stop him. This happens, like, a dozen times. None of the build-ups ever go anywhere.
I mean, that’s kind of the elevator pitch for FF9, isn’t it?
Beat you to it :).
Though I evidently wasn’t paying close enough attention when I typed XIII instead of VIII like I meant to. I’ve never actually played XIII and am almost curious what the plot of that one is and whether it contradicts my statement…
“Princess kidnapped by thieves that she hired to kidnap herself” is a plot point I’ve always wanted to work into a roleplaying campaign.
(Yes I know that’s not quite what happened but it’s close enough)
I played and beat XIII when it came out and I don’t really remember anything about it other than I hated it and everybody in it except for the dude who kept a chocobo in his fro.
I think there’s a case to be made that this was intentional.
Not to say that made it good, mind. It’s another problem arising from the game’s slow pacing and copious filler; “this character is a jerk because of some inner pain that they eventually move past” is fine, but not if it’s nearly every character and not if it’s all that’s going on for 20+ hours.
The obvious answer to how FFXII ended up a mess is that it got butchered in the editing room and they didn’t have time to fix it before launch. This is a kind of boring answer because there’s no simple “don’t do that” advice to point at the problem (or if there is, it requires more detailed knowledge than we’ll ever get of their specific development environment). All we can do is look at the train wreck and opine that things would have been better had it stayed on the rails.
This 100% feels like a AAA studio falling prey to “The Writer Will Do Something”. It’s not that the author(s) is (are) incompetent, it’s that narrative coherence was priority 8 at best and any narrative they were trying to construct was broken in development.
More than that, the lead writer was changed midway through development, possibly more than once, which is a recipe for a difficult production even if well-managed, and this was anything but. Couple that with the original writer having a solid grasp on the complex political storylines FFXII tries to be and none of the follow-up writer(s) having that skill and you get the narrative mess that you see here.
Re: Ultraviolet – I can remember one thing about it. There’s some exchange near the very end where the villain and Violet are arguing right before the final battle. He caps off his side by saying “It’s a relative term.” The problem is that this absolutely didn’t follow from what the hero said to him, meaning that they couldn’t even get their token cliched final battle dialogue over the very low bar of “not blatantly missing things due to editing”
I have not watched Ultraviolet in a long time now, but I am pretty sure vampires are involved. Like, almost everyone is one, or something? Or at least all the powerful people are? But it’s, like, a medical condition, not a supernatural thing. And Milla’s character is one, too, but doesn’t agree with how the ones in power are running things.
Honestly, the most memorable part of the movie for me is her unfolding-in-sections sword, though.
I’ve read others suggest that the chaos around Square Enix at the time led to the game being butchered in production -lots of ideas being thrown together without much real creative direction.
I wonder, however, if the problem isn’t instead that they are playing in the Final Fantasy Tactics sandbox. A lot of the problems described sound like external constraints -“we can’t contradict the feel and details of the other games that are set later,” maybe especially coming off Vagrant Story.
These aren’t really my games, but I’d be interested in what it was like trying to write a main FF game without it being a new world or a direct sequel.
With Tactics Advance being an Ivalice game, I don’t think that was a problem. They’ve got races from Tactics Advance, they’ve got the Lucavi as optional bosses and changed how they work in 12. If anything it feels like they’re being pulled away from Ivalice canon.
I don’t know if this is really the case since Final Fantasy Tactics is actually far enough in the future that the events of FFXII are effectively myth. How that works, I don’t know, but there’s a moment in FFTactics where the character Mustadio is talking about the days when there were airships in the sky and yatta yatta and that’s what he would excavate. So while it’s still Ivalice, it’s a big enough separation that one history doesn’t need to really align with the other.
It’s a little bizarre that FFXIV‘s version of Ivalice is instead far in its past, with Ramza, Delita, and Agrias all being ancient heroes, while Fran, Ba’Gamnan, and Dalmasca are modern day people and places.
Although FFXIV has the excuse of regularly having world shattering Calamities destroy a civilization and ensure it’s lost to legend.
I started a new game in this last weekend, and while I haven’t gotten very far, I really do wonder if some of the issues aren’t even just Square Enix meddling, but the pressure of having to make a Final Fantasy in a post-cinematics world. The SNES games could only be so flashy given the tech limitations, but once Final Fantasy VII unleashed its cut-scenes upon the world, flashy spectacle that looked good in a television commercial sort of became the norm for the franchise.
Thinking on Final Fantasy Tactics, its big set pieces feel far more grounded in comparison. The game has magic and people transforming into horrific Hell beasts, but the actual narrative is cloak and dagger or swift duels between men (and women). The opening of Vagrant Story is a silent, stealthy infiltration on foot and hiding behind statues, where the most exciting thing to happen is a dragon coming down from glass above (which, frankly, is pretty exciting!). When you compare that stuff to Balthier and Fran’s “stealthy” entrance into the castle on a noisy and glowing hoverbike speeding through the sky, it suddenly feels like style over substance and is no longer grounded. This increases as Vaan is dangling off a bike held on by Balthier while Fran fights the controls and an airship is dropping bombs on a courtyard below.
The resistance breaking in? That feels suitably Yasumi Matsuno. The hoverbike and airship bombing? Not as much, and it makes me wonder if he had to try and adjust his style or was forced/encouraged to adjust it to “be more Final Fantasy”. At the same time, what was the original plan, then? If Basche is a prisoner, do you start the game as Balthier and Fran and stumble upon him? Do you find Ashe? What was the plot before Penelo and Vaan were forced to be the protagonists? How much was Matsuno trying to force things into the plot line he wanted until he finally quit?
Basically, FFXII is kind of fascinating to me because it seems like an example of what happens when you get a guy with a very specific style and voice and try to strong-arm him into a style of game that’s just not his own. Which is also kind of interesting to look at the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI, which seems to be nailing Matsuno’s tone and style while simultaneously hitting the big epic spectacle.
Really, though, this all not only makes me want to replay FFTactics, but to go back and play Vagrant Story, which I missed out on. Sadly, neither are available on modern hardware (unless you count the phone, and I’d rather not play a game on my phone).
This really is the core of the issue I think, the setting and worldbuilding is all very Matsuno, with all the care and attention that went into the world and the political situation that surrounds the game. Meanwhile, the incredible mess that is the plot and the various issues that come along with it feel very much that they came from outside interference.
It’s been a while, but from what I remember the reason Matsuno left in the end was due to illness, so the issues from conflicting directions wound up just compounding after losing his vision on the project and, presumably, his grasp of his specific storytelling structure.
I’ll second that this made me want to go play through Tactics again, if you can get the hardware for it it’s definitely worth a replay.
> The game has magic and people transforming into horrific Hell beasts, but the actual narrative is cloak and dagger or swift duels between men (and women).
I’ve written about this under the previous episode, but I’ll repeat myself: FFT is not super cloak and dagger either. The actual narrative is people transforming into horrific Hell beasts. Ramza is absolutely terrible at cloak and dagger. He is thrown across the kingdom like a pinball and prevails through sheer perseverance, not intrigue and guile. He wrecks every single plot by refusing to die and killing the next horrific Hell beast.
Ramza is reacting to the narrative, not driving it. The narrative is cloak and dagger four levels deep.
The part of the narrative Ramza is reacting to is the demonic conspiracy. I don’t think he ever interacts with either of the warring dukes.
Typo spotting: teaming -> teeming
Grammer nit-pick.
should be
coaxing the audience to the edge of their seats.
unless they are all sharing one very large chair.
Wee-woo wee-woo
Sir, I need to inform you that “grammar” is spelled with an A. Are you sure you’re part of the typolice?
I will forever remember how to spell grammar after that exact same mistake cost me first place in a spelling competition as a kid.
Man this drives me bonkers. It happens a lot in shows that run long enough for most/all the original writers to move on; some (or all) of the new writers have no idea how the characters really work (and often apparently aren’t really even familiar with the older episodes), so they just emulate the characters’ most basic/outstanding traits but with no idea why those traits worked or what they were based on. I’ve likened this to someone enjoying the notes of a song but not understanding that the order the notes go in is important, so they try to emulate by just throwing notes together at random and end up making meaningless noise.
This isn’t true. She wants to marry Vaaan, despite him being a tool who constantly shuts her down.
I feel badly for her. The game NEVER throws her a bone.
I don’t think that the format of two simultaneous FFXIII related columns is working for me. Each of them is a lot of fun, but reading them one after another is 1) too much FFXIII per week for my liking 2) makes it feel very slow and redundant, as we analise every bit of story twice.
I think I might choose one of them to read as it comes out (probably the Rocketeer’s, as I started reading this material ages ago and always wanted to come back and finish it) and leave the other column for a later date, to read in one go someday.
I hate to admit it, but you’re absolutely right. There has been entirely too much FFXIII on this site lately and if it grows any worse we may be looking at drastic measures.
I’ve already worked out a solution to the problem. I wrote an SQL script that will go through your series and replace all instances of “Final Fantasy XII” with “Daikatana”.
Looking forward to all the posts about DaikatanaI (this would work better with Roman numeral 1 rather than capital i).
I don’t really get where all this snark is coming from. I just wanted to point out a problem that more people might have, and that might be important to Shamus as I remember you talking about shaping the “pacing” of this site multiple times. It’s not like I’m criticising anything (as I said, I like both columns) or asking any of you to change things to suit my tastes.
For the record: My comment wasn’t intended as snark, but rather as “playful”.
We’re doing two columns a week – probably covering ~5k words – on a 16 year old JRPG. That’s a lot of content, on an old game, that’s a little outside of the genres we typically cover around here.
To be honest, I’m surprised I haven’t gotten more pushback.
Then again, this series is young. We’ll see how folks are holding up when we get to week #20.
I think rocketeer was just teasing about your typo (and implying that even the comments about ffxiii in these threads is more attention than that game deserves)
Oh I disagree. I like both being posted in a row. I’ve already read rocketeer’s… play through? Retrospective? Playspective? So for me the first post is a refresher, then shamus post is the new stuff.
Shamus, I have begun calling it “cargo cults plotting.” That is writing which thinks that by copying the form of something, it will gain the function. When really one must have the function first, then the form of the story will follow.
FF12 seems especially to have the problem which sfdebris called complex vs complicated in his empire strikes back musings.
https://youtu.be/uwHQ_Wc7TyU
Not sure if I agree or disagree on that point, either for FF12 or in the broader sense. But one thing is for sure; his proposed twist for Contradiction would have been awful. It’s a Comedy game for heaven’s sake.
Oooh, I’m stealing that term. That’s such a good way to describe it. “A kid has died”, “odd partners”, “reluctant hero”, “moral event horizon”… we all know how these things are supposed to work, tropes are tools. The difference between someone who understands and someone who creates the fiction should be that a (successful) creator knows how to use them well, build up to them, put them in the context that makes them work. Instead we’re seeing people who understand that these tools exist and just apply them blindly probably assuming that the very presence of the trope is enough*. Caro cult describes this perfectly.
*Mileage obviously varies but I’ve found AC series to be almost entirely this.
Right. Tropes are tools, but the story is the product. These “stories” are like putting a bunch of chisels and hand saws and wood shavings on a workbench and calling it woodworking. It isn’t storytelling at all, even though it looks similar, and involves a lot of the same elements.
Use the terminology with my blessing. :)
From what I understand (from videos like Resonant Arc’s review on the subject), many of the issues with FFXII started because Square was in turmoil right before the FFX/KH/FFXI releases. FFX was taking forever to release, the Spirits Within movie destroyed Square’s financials, and there were already history of disagreements between Hironobu Sakaguchi and the upper management with regards to the direction of Final Fantasy (leading Sakaguchi to leave to form Mistwalker around the time of Square-Enix merger after the aforementioned 3 games releasing).
Around that time to after those three games were released, FFXII was already under development, but with that turmoil around that time, there was huge restructuring processes, including the teams under Sakaguchi being led under new management, which had different managing styles (more “corporate meddling”, in other words). This led to all sorts of problems, such as Matsuno (the former director) being shifted to a supervisory role, then eventually leaving.
So yeah, FFXII had a *lot* of drama behind the scenes, and this combined with more meddlesome upper management scuttled a lot of the development.
To further give an idea of how that affects the writing, Matsuno, the director that left? He was the director/writer of Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. He LOVES that political stuff and he’s shown to be very very good at it. So when you pointed out in your previous entry how the story is shifting from crazy dense political stuff to Star Wars? It’s easy to imagine that the dichotomy came about because Matsuno penned the political stuff before leaving, then the next writer had to pick up the pieces while a corporate overlord was probably insisting on how the story needed to be cooler or more appealing.
Really, FFX/KH/FFXI’s successes probably made the issue WORSE not better. FFXIV has a pretty famous documentary among their fanbase by the Noclip YT channel (considering what a fascinating subject that game’s rebirth is) and a running theme through that documentary is that Square was getting increasingly arrogant with the successes of their early PS2 games, with nonsense like not playtesting other MMOs like WoW during FFXIV’s development or getting their programmers stuck programming middleware like Crystal Tools while their designers were running rampant with scripts without regards to optimization.
While we don’t have the same level of insight into FFXII’s development, it’s not hard to imagine that that attitude started even back then.
I don’t think of Ultraviolet as a Matrix rip-off (besides everyone doing those sort of action effects at the time, like everyone does quick-cut punches you can’t follow today) as more anime tropes, honestly.
Also it’s practically my platonic ideal of a mindless popcorn movie. I don’t think it’s a well-crafted movie but it’s poorly crafted in a very specific way I enjoy.
I’m gonna admit, I do like Shamus’s take on this game more then the Rocketeer’s(no offense) but I do appreciate it because I doubt I’ll ever play it for reasons that both of them have been articulating very well thus far.
To be fair, the last Final Fantasy game to grab me was IX. I played through X and started X-2(before dropping it after a few hours) but honestly it felt like these a really cool world and story that I’m not allowed to see because the entire game is on rails and there are pratically no towns to just go around and explore and talk to people, among other reasons. Also it took me a very, very long time to stop wanting to punch Tidus in the face every time he talked so that probably had a lot to do with it as well.
Pretty much the rest of the games are like this:
XI: MMO. Don’t like MMO’s(I’ve tried), don’t care.
XII: See above.
XIII: Heard a lot of bad things, watched a LP with all the non-codex story bits. Felt it was a horrible waste of a great concept.
XIII-2: Liked it a little better for it’s campy Dr. Who time romp but still not enough to play it.
IVX: MMO again. Still don’t care.
XV: Actually plunked down for this on sale. Still haven’t played it. I’ve heard the buddies on an adventure game is good but much of the rest of the game has issues and the fact a lot of the story was either chopped out and a.) Sold as DLC b.) Chopped out and made into the movie and c.) chopped out for the Anime all kinda ruined it for me wanting to play it.
Maybe XVI will change my mind but honestly SE hasn’t been winning me over for a long fucking time. I still haven’t gotten around to playing the Remake of VII yet because I haven’t felt like it and we still don’t know how fucking long it’s going to take for the whole thing to be done or how many games it’s going to encompass so I don’t feel any hurry to do so.