T w e n t y S i d e d
In this week’s episode, we rescue the princess. This means that our party is now complete. And I have to say I’m not really a fan. Of any of them.
Oh sure, there’s all the problems we’ve already covered, like how their personal goals don’t align with the plot, or indeed go anywhere interesting. But the more immediate problem for me is that these people aren’t any fun.
“Teenagers team up and fight space-Satan to save the world.” That’s how people derisively describe your average Final Fantasy plot. But the truth is that I like that dynamic. It’s silly as hell, but I love having a large cast of colorful personalities, all going through their own arcs as the plot ramps up from “ridiculous” to “surreal“.
Final Fantasy Shamus
I love how the groups always feature a variety of characters. A mix of male and female, young and old, rich and poor, serious and playful, badass and comical. You can see the same personalities pop up again and again throughout the series like meta-cameos, but each time those personalities are behind different faces, and fulfilling different roles within the story.
Here’s an example cast I made up:
The Cheerleader
This brash blond-haired loudmouth go-getter is always thrilled to be doing whatever it is the party is doing. He thinks the solution to every problem is to punch the problem in the face, even if the problem is an interplanetary flying space demon. He dresses like his body is split between two different climates. Maybe he’s got a parka up top and swim trunks on the bottom, or maybe he’s got long sleeves / pant legs on one side and shorts on the other.
Backstory: His whole family was killed by the bad guys, but you can’t let stuff like that get you down. Gotta stay positive, guys!
The Furry
This character is half human, and half $animal, where $animal is a mammal that humans find cute, majestic, or otherwise attractive.Maybe even sexy? Look, I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying I’ve seen some of the fan art you people make.
Backstory: This character has some family baggage you need to deal with once you meet up with the rest of the $animal tribe. This side-story will be both mandatory and irrelevant to the overall plot.
The Jailbait
Based on her voice, behavior, language, and body type, this character is very obviously a bubbly hyperactive 14 year old girl. She’s wearing a long-sleeve jacket and short-shorts, or a one-piece bathing suit with six inch heels, or something else overtly sexual yet completely goofy.
Backstory: She’s actually a 36 year old astrophysicist. I don’t know why you keep insisting she’s 14. Maybe you’re a pervert?
The Ice Queen
She is SO over everyone’s bullshit, and always has been. She’s got dark hair, angry makeup, and tons of cleavage that she can get angry at you for noticing. In terms of visual design, she looks like she smeared herself in glue, catapulted herself through the front window of a Hot Topic, and decided to wear whatever stuck. Yes, even the broken glass, you smartass.
Backstory: She has a secret crush that she will express through verbal abuse and problematic behavior.
The Shy Nun
Why is this mopey wallflower on a quest to fight space-satan? Probably because someone told her it’s the right thing to do. If this setting has eyeglasses, then she’s wearing eyeglasses. Also she’s wearing all the clothes the other girls forgot to wear.
Backstory: After spending her entire life doing the right thing, she finally faces the ultimate test of her convictions, where (plot twist!) she continues to do the right thing.
The Badass Mope
This geezer is wandering around this technological wonderland wielding a Samurai sword, a spear, or a rusty old six-shooter for no explained reason. He’s quiet, reserved, and has no obvious justification for teaming up with these loud teenage lunatics. He speaks in fortune-cookie platitudes, but only when it’s time to defuse an emotionally charged situation.
Backstory: He has a secret vendetta against one of the bad guys, which he will awkwardly reveal just before you fight them for the last time.
The Idiot
This dunce is our comic relief, because there’s nothing funnier than gross incompetence when the literal fate of the actual entire world is at stake. He makes up for being wrong all the time by also being loud and clumsy. He’s probably fat. (I’m sorry, “big boned”). Barring that, he’s wearing something that covers up his washboard abs, because looking sexy is only for the “cool” characters. Paradoxically, this means his outfit is the least insane of the entire group.
Backstory: Probably something about a long-lost mother or something. Look it up on the wiki because nobody ever bothers paying attention to his nonsense.
But What Do I Know?
Is this silly? Sure! But it’s my kind of silly. The characters tend to be vibrant, they have really clear motivations, and they play off of each other really well. A roster of 7 people means the story has 21 relationship pairs to consider, just within the party. Something like that can get out of hand quickly, but the distinct visual styles and loud personalities make it easy to keep track of everyone.
(Incidentally, this is why I find Final Fantasy XV so aggressively unappealing. Our party is only four people? And they’re all dudes? All young? All pale? All slender? All medium height? All wearing black? This is like a version of DOOM where all of your guns are variations of the Deus Ex tranq dart. It’s Minecraft, but your only building material is cobblestone. It’s Mass Effect, but you only have four crew members and they’re all Kaiden Alenko. People keep telling me the game is good, but I look at that box art and my curiosity evaporates.)
Anyway, getting back to the game at hand…
The Kingdom of Mopes
Final Fantasy XII does not deliver the kind of fun-loving party I look for in this series. This party hates fun. Nobody is having a good time.
This party is a bit old by the standards of the series.Again, by “this series” I mean 7 through 12. Penelo and Vaan are the only teens, with the rest of the cast being more or less mature adults. This isn’t a problem in and of itself. I don’t think Final Fantasy stories have to be about high schoolers. But FF characters do need to be vibrant, and making them young is an easy way to create characters with really strong and clearly visible emotions. I don’t think that the facial animation technology of the early aughts is well suited to Christopher Nolan style stories of guarded conversations and masked emotions.
Most of the cast this time around seems to be using the “Auron” personality template of grim stoicism. More importantly, none of them seem to have any affection for each other. Penelo seems to express interest in Vaan at the start of the game, and then we never come back to it. Our heroes eventually get to the point where they’re working together, but I never get the impression that any of these people are friends. Like, if it wasn’t for the bad guys trying to kill them, I imagine the entire cast would wander off because there isn’t any hint of affection or comradery drawing them together.
If Ashe announced she was going bowling, nobody else in the party would say, “Oh, that sounds like fun! I’ll come with you!” Instead I imagine they would follow her without comment and for no reason. They would then sit in stony silence while she stared listlessly into space, unable to pick a lane or a bowling ball.
I can imagine an interesting version of this party: A bubbly enthusiastic Penelo. A bratty smartass Vaan. Maybe a boisterous version of Basch that loves to fight hard, drink hard, and tell boastful stories about old battles. Balthier could be a jokester and a bit of an incorrigible scamp, always pilfering minor items and leaving without paying the bill. Fran could hint at the deep wisdom accumulated in her long years by making cutting remarks and wry observations, like Gandalf by way of Okoye. Ashe could be a fiery hothead who wears her emotions on her sleeve. She understands that – as royalty – she’s supposed to be reserved and aloof, but she has no idea how to keep a lid on her feelings.
That would be an amazing cast. You just throw that cast into danger and let their personalities bounce off each other for lots of hijinks and interpersonal fireworks. But no. We just get six different flavors of “detached mope”.
What a shame.
Before I talk about a character I actually like, I want to draw your attention to the following moment…
Ghis, Have You Been Skipping Cutscenes?
The Rocketeer already covered this bit in his entry this week, but the short version is that the party decides to bust the princess out of prison, and on the way out she runs into Judge Ghis here. And when she insists on not surrendering, he accuses her of “spurning” an honorable surrender, like her father.
Except, like… that’s not what happened at all! He father didn’t “spurn” anything. He just died.
The scenario that Judge Ghis describes is not the official story, and it’s not the actual story. No matter who you ask, everyone agrees that Dad was good and ready to surrender. He showed up for the express purpose of doing exactly that when he was murdered. The only detail in dispute is is regarding who did the murdering.
This is like saying JFK spurned his invitation to Dallas. It makes no sense.
What are we supposed to make of this? Is Judge Ghis just way, way out of the loop? Did some nuance get lost in translation and “spurned” is supposed to be more like “missed out on”? Is this something that got changed in the rewrites and nobody got around to updating this line? I know it’s been a running joke in the comments that nobody can follow this story, but a lot of times it feels like the people within the story are just as baffled as we are.
Anyway, let’s talk about a character who knows how to have a good time, unlike the rest of these sourpusses…
Larsa
Can I just say I love Larsa? It feels like he’s in his own game. Like, Vaan is over here playing Final Fantasy, while Larsa is playing Crusader Kings II on hard mode.
Shit. My older brother has consolidated a ton of power and he’s next in line for the throne. Oh! I know: I’ll spring these revolutionaries from prison, give them some critical state intel, and to top it off I’ll give them a hunk of WMD. The resulting instability should keep big bro busy and give me time to get the senate on my side.
OH HEY. I just had an idea. I could hook up with this resistance chick and put a couple of royal bastards into her to make sure that…
Hang on. I just did the math and realized I’m only like, 11 years old or something.
Okay, so I can’t make any bastards yet. But I’ll put the bastard idea (and this resistance chick) on my To-Do list.
Can I kick Basch off the team and pick up Larsa as a free agent? I don’t even care what his combat stats are. I just want to keep the little dude around.
Footnotes:
[1] Maybe even sexy? Look, I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying I’ve seen some of the fan art you people make.
[2] Again, by “this series” I mean 7 through 12.
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I maintain Final Fantasy XV would have been way better if it committed to the roadtrip aspect and dropped all the epic-scale story shit with the kingdoms and politics in favor of a low-stakes but more personal adventure about a bunch of friends traveling and exploring the country.
Honestly, I really liked that aspect of the group dynamic with the FFXV gang. The way you’re all clearly the best of friends, having as much fun as they possibly can… but there’s also this undercurrent of nobody ever forgetting that Prince Noctis is THE guy in charge, and that this is his last hurrah of as close to freedom he can get before his entire life becomes one long string of royal duties.
I found it a very fresh source of tension, something you don’t see often in games. Far too often ‘noble’ is just treated as this slightly impressive job-title instead of being A Big Deal, as it should be. The guy that can have you thrown into a dungeon for disrespect, and that’s being NICE about it… just is not somebody you should be disrespecting.
And that’s before how one of Noct’s literal royal duties is to slowly have his life-force suckled out of him, once he takes the throne. As his slowly melting father before him, because that is the literal source of his entire kingdoms stability and safety. And that’s the actual reason you have those magic powers. You beating up Monsters is literally the next monarch out big-game hunting for fun, using the ancestral ‘sword’ because exactly one person is allowed to tell him to stop that… and the king knows exactly what his son is going through, because he too had to shoulder that duty years ago.
Really wished they’d focused more on that duty, heritage, great burdens and politics stuff instead of pulling out that dang ‘Evul Empire~! Tiz invadingz!’ stuff that’s been in so many dang FF games I genuinely don’t even consider it a spoiler… but that’s just an unfortunate trope that’s been gnawed into the bones of the entire series by now. You might as well stop playing Doom because it keeps throwing demons and hell at you.
Final Fantasy XV was about fishing.
That’s all it was about.
That’s all I remember.
In XV there was this grumpy guy caller Cor, who was thirty something and was meant to be part of the team, but was cut, when Nomura and co. felt that he doesn’t gel with others.
Last time I made fun of 15 for the time Gladiolus kinda fucked off for no reason, but the real reason is “Aranea was played up in a lot of prerelease material and we couldn’t just not include her no matter how much the script has drifted since then”
It’s funny because while FFXV is my least favorite FF that I’ve actually finished (and I’ve finished all of the main series except II, III, VIII, and the MMOs), I think it has easily the most likeable main cast since X. That’s really it’s only selling point as far as I’m concerned. Maybe they could have had a bit more fun with the clothes instead of making everyone’s default “black that looks like it would be uncomfortable during those outdoor camping sessions”, but once you start playing don’t really all look alike the way they do in that picture in the article. Gladiolus (left) is distinctly “the buff guy”, while Prompto (the dude on the hood of the car) is “the little guy”, and they all have distinct personalities (all of which could be described as a different person’s version of an ideal boyfriend, it turns out). Despite that last part not really being my cup of tea it’s a breath of fresh air vs. XIII’s cast of jerks and, in hindsight, the primary selling point of the game.
For me black clothes wasn’t a problem, I just changed their clothes the moment I could (I don’t remember if it was ingame option or through mods/steam workshop). Yes, they looked like band of clowns, but it was pretty funny that way.
And I must confess, I was very hesitant when it came to start this game, but I grew warm to these guys. The best part was camping and just hanging around, the worst – main story and last few chapters.
I mean, “most likeable main cast since X” isn’t really saying much, considering the contenders are XII, XIII and an MMO. Not a high bar by any stretch. That said, I do like Noct and the gang. Fewer party members and the fact that they all have history with each other does make for better interactions than your usual JRPG.
I mean, even three games ago can be an eternity in a video game series. “Best shooting since [three games ago]” would be high praise in a shooter, especially if the last couple games were infamous for having bungled the shooting elements somehow.
And to be clear, that was meant as praise for that one critical element (if not the game as a whole)
The last two expansions for FFXIV they’ve really leaned into the whole ‘party’ thing. Not only do they accompany you in dungeons, they’re there as the story develops… unless they’re off doing their own thing. Which rarely comes across as arbitrary, because you’ve basically got seven or eight party members if everyone is there; even if half of them are busy, you’ve still got three or four people for your ‘silent’ protagonist and the events to bounce off of.
It may be controversial but I really enjoyed the level in the game where something disastrous has happened to the party, and there is that dreadful tension of being angry and stuck with people who you can’t stand right now.
It’s one of the most honest moments the series has hit, and all the more impactful because the group were normally so good to each other. I thought the process of healing past that point was really good too.
—-
But FFXV can’t even do this right, because you need to watch those 10 minute Youtube videos to properly understand the dynamics.
Yes, XV has many moments that feel like they would have worked if so much stuff weren’t flagrantly missing. The part I keep making fun of where Gladiolus just disappears for awhile without explanation actually comes back to bit the narrative later; when Gladiolus starts giving Noctis a speech about his duties as royalty, I really wanted him to say “Yes, I know you’re all about your duty. Now I seem to recall my bodyguard vanishing without explanation for awhile…”
When one character became blinded, I literally laughed out loud. Not because I didn’t like the character, but because by that point the events of the game just felt random. “You’re blind now? Okay, whatever I guess!”
Yeah – I thought the party dynamics was the one part of the back-half of FFXV that actually worked. The plot had pretty much imploded by that point – but I was invested enough in the their friendship that some of the emotional moments in the back half still worked.
A big part of what made FFX so much more disappointing is that it’s clear there was a strong core to build a story around… they just completely failed to do that, even more so than FFXII.
I completely agree. To be honest I think FFXVs biggest problem is that it’s an FF game. As result of being an FF game it needed world ending stakes and other hall marks of the series. Others have commented that it is unfinished, but I would argue, it could actually be trimmed to just be the road trip to his marriage. It would be significantly shorter, but I think it could be a higher quality and more focused story about a royal dude going off on his last hurrah before living a life of obligation.
Wasn’t FFXV’s working title in development Boy-Band Road Trip?
Yup, loved the roadtrip in the first half, where the dudes were real bros to each other and having fun. And then we get to Not-Venice, and everything goes grimdark so quickly it’s not even funny. The tonal whiplash hit me really badly.
Same here. I loved all the open world road trip stuff. Once Fantasy Venice happens every narrative choice the game made was less interesting than the previous for me.
Typopolice: “In this week’s episode, we rescue the princess.”
should read:
“This week, I put everything on the front page again.”
Well at least they didn’t say “Whole thing on the front page, boss.” (Also it was either a joke or fixed by the time I posted).
“Rescued the princess, boss.”
“Our heroes eventually get to the point where they’re working together, but I never get the impression that any of these people are friends. ”
I got a different impression. For starters, Balthier is very fond of Fran and deeply cares for her. They have this strange relationship, where everybody thinks that Fran is Balthier’s sidekick, but if you pay attention, it’s the other way around (one of last cutscenes shows it straight, the one on destroyed skyfortress Bahamut). Fran is the leading one and Balthier is much younger man who only thinks he’s leading (or pretends to think that way).
There is also this hinted only Ashe’s affection towards Balthier (it goes nowhere of course, because she’s the queen and he’s a rogue noble and in relationship with Fran – like in VI, where you had triangle between Locke, Ceres and Terra, hinted and never consumed in any way iirc) and building relation between Balthier and Vaan. I agree, it’s not much and it could be portrayed better, but it is more in line with older FF’s, like VI, where you had much bigger cast and some of them were around for no good reason at all (Setzer, I’m looking at you!).
XII is sometimes a callback to older games in the series – it was VII and VIII that gave FF’s this teenage centred angle. In IV or VI characters tend to be more varied and older (18-22 older, but still), there are elderly people (Tellah, Strago), grown ups (35-50 – Cyan, Cid, Yang, Setzer, Shadow) and there are children as well (Rydia, Porom & Parom, Relm), and Balthier is a succesor to characters like Locke or Bartz (there is no other character like this in VII, VIII, IX or X). In VI there are no teenagers aside of Gau, in IV and V there are no teenagers at all, but young adults (19+).
I know, Shamus made clear disclaimer about his interest in VII to XII, so feel free to ignore this rambling if you like :)
It’s been a while, but I don’t remember any sort of romantic interest between Locke and Terra. Locke had had his own sweetheart and it wasn’t until Celes showed up that he gained interest in anyone else. Sure, he was the first guy to help Terra, but his interest in her seemed borne out of curiosity and nothing else.
There’s some stuff in the beginning of the game where Locke seems unnaturally protective toward Terra, but with the context of the rest of the game it becomes clear that it’s probably not romantic attraction so much as a savior complex borne of his guilt about Rachel.
Yeah this was my take as well. The love triangle, such as it was, was Locke-Celes vs. Locke-Rachel. Terra’s only real attachments in the story beyond basic friendship with the party were the kids at the orphanage in the World of Ruin.
I didn’t write it was a love triangle, but relation triangle – but truth be told it was all vague in the begining and if one wasn’t paying attention it could be missed.
Yes. On first glance, it’s meant to be interpreted as a possible love interest, but going through the rest of the game Celes becomes his love interest instead and his backstory reveals his protector issues. However, it’s still a little awkward because there’s just not enough dialogue to indicate why he’s attracted to Celes when he wasn’t to Terra*, and yet has the same initial protector issues.
*I’m guessing it’s because Terra is shown to not reciprocate flirtation or interest, and instead views it as sadly strange to her?
Having replayed the game recently, Locke treats Celes and Terra identically. Terra just took none of his BS and Celes took a little.
I think there’s a huge difference between “never consumated in any way” and “handled haphazardly. Especially with Locke and Celes in VI there’s a lot of time exploring their relationship. There’s mutual attraction. There’s significant baggage on both sides, which goes so far as
Locke using Magicite to resurrect his ex-girlfriend briefly so she can tell him her death isn’t his fault. They both have baggage. They both deal with it over the course of the story, over the course of several plot points. The ending leaves it ambiguous (though strongly hinted) that they might get together post-events of the game, and bringing their relationship back around is a not-insignificant piece of the ending. It’s a strong, reasonably interesting, consistent, and generally-well-handled subplot (even the spoilered bit is less crazy than it sounds).The later FF’s have romances more like “we will hint that we are attracted to each other” in a cutscene, then never mention it again for several hours of gameplay, then have a cutscene that shows them completely indifferent to one another, a few more hours, then they’re attracted again, then we drop the whole thing because we have other things to talk about.
Technically, I think Celes is supposed to be young (like Celes is 18 or something), but there’s no photo-realism so you can assume based upon their conversation that they’re in a more ideal 20-25 age range. Terra is old enough that procreating teenagers look up to her as a mother figure, so she should at least be in her twenties.
Honestly, I can’t stand this fascination with teenage characters. I’m just a bit biased, because teenagers tend to be absolutely stupid (I don’t exclude my teenage years from this generalizing). I think you should still be able to get across youthful optimism with someone who’s college age vs. someone who’s still literally a child.
Yeah, Celes is supposed to be really young, despite somehow already being a full general, and Terra is younger than her. I think Dwane and Katrine were supposed to be scandalously young too – like 12 or something.
Celes is only a general through the principle of AsskickingEqualAuthority; she’s a Magitek Knight, and Gestahl put her in charge of an army rather than deploying her as a superweapon like Terra.
According to wiki both Ceres and Terra are 18.
I also talked in an earlier post about how Balthier seems to be pretty fond of Vaan.
As a whole, I think there’s reasonably interesting dynamics between any two of Vaan, Balthier, Ashe, Basch. (Or at least, the potential, since a lot of the Vaan/Basch/Ashe potential goes untapped) It’s really Penelo and Fran who are kind of the odd ones out – other than their relationships with Vaan and Balthier respectively, they don’t really have much going for them. That’s probably why they add the Penelo/Larsa thing, to give her connections to someone othrer than Vaan, but it’s not much.
It’s not really that weird for FF games to have party members like this – Kimarhi is kind of disconnected from the rest of the party in FFX – but when two out of six of the party members are kind of “isolated” it’s not great.
>”Is Yaoi gay? If not, is it secretly straight?”
>”Of course Yaoi is gay, it’s two dudes fucking”
>”Then loli is pedo”
>”uM WELL UM ACKSHUALLY NO..ITS..UHM uHHHH”
You might have put all the time into this franchise you ever want to, and that’s fine.
But if you ever want to try one of the earlier, all-sprite games, give VI a try. Huge cast. Many really interesting characters. Mostly coherent and interesting plot. And some of the best writing in the series.
One of my favorite bits is that certain characters who have something in common sometimes get a “moment” together as part of a quest if you brought the appropriate people.
Worth noting that the Steam pixel remaster is set to drop in less than two weeks, for anyone so inclined.
aaaand I just bought the whole bundle for the nostalgia binge…
Yeah, got the bundle during one of the recent sales. Waltzed through the first game and, despite going into it with a “this can’t actually be good so many years later” attitude enjoyed it a bunch. Got through most of FF2 but I need/want to level up some spells in the endgame and that’s a bit of a chore because of that game’s systems but still enjoyed it overall.
This right here. This game has some genuinely emotional moments and the crazy part is that some of them are completely missable. The game wants you to experience its story but also doesn’t force it on you.
Now maybe the gameplay is a bit too grindy for today’s standards. I’m not sure about it, tbh, it’s been a while. But if you can get past that, it’s a fantastic experience.
FF6 is kinda weird with grind cause for most of the game leveling up offer very little reward (until you get some of the better esper), you can do a low level run of 6 and for most of the game its no different than if you were leveling normally. The game is, however, 50% side quest so if someone consider that grind then yeah its pretty grindy.
There is almost no need to grind at all. Simply never run from a fight, and you should be perfectly fine* all the way until you get to the Floating Continent, which will be hard regardless. It especially helps if you have *not* already finished playing the game to the point where you know where everything is and will thus get in more random encounters as you explore around. In the World of Ruin, it will be slightly harder, especially if you haven’t grinded all of your spells from Espers, but is still doable. You can reasonably beat the game at around level 45 without much difficulty.
*You may have trouble if you haven’t picked up any useful Rages for Gau, considering that the fight in Narshe to protect the Esper can be really hard if you don’t have a lot of AoE skills.
You could probably get through the game with almost no grinding if you decide you don’t care about minmaxing Gau, especially if you instead minmax esper stacking bonuses by noticing when your characters are naturally about to level up.
Damn straight. Gau has an annoying gimmick ability, which demands you grind in one area, hoping that the right enemy turns up. When the game has you pick teams, I just put him in a team by himself and stood him in the corner where he’s never going to be needed.
I also honestly never noticed that the equipped Espers grant additional stats and still managed to complete the game fine. I did grind a little bit, but it was optional and unnecessary at the end of the game.
Of course, if you do decide to give Gau a couple of decent Rages, he can solo the game. Even without Wind God.
Isn’t there one that is ‘super confusion that no bosses are immune to’?
Yes, that’s on the shortlist of easiest broken exploits in that game.
I remember FF6 very fondly, but it’s quite a bit of nostalgia at the very least. The cast does have a lot of interesting characters, but because of that some only get the most cursory of stories, if any at all.
In hindsight, I think my biggest complaint is the magic system. Every character can learn every spell thanks to magicite, which is . . . fine? It’s narratively appropriate. But it also makes the characters more or less redundant. Everyone of the characters has a unique talent, but why bother with that when you can have them all cast Ultima and steamroll your way through every battle?
As I recall, characters have more affinity to certain kinds of magic than others, but I might be misremembering. In any case, sure, you can teach everyone any spell, but this sort of thing takes a lot of time and grinding, so just following the story it’s more effective to spread those spells out between characters. Besides, Ultima is not a spell you can obtain until late in the game, so it’s not like this whole deal changes things until several hours into the game.
Besides, Ultima is a really expensive spell in terms of MP, and Edgar’s Chainsaw ability or Sabin’s Bum Rush cost nothing. They don’t need offensive magic at all (they’ll do it badly), so just teach them healing.
The unique abilites people get informs the spells that it’s worth teaching them.
(Well, some of them have gimmicky/not-great unique abilities. But whatever, just ignore those characters.)
Sabin always knows virtually every spell from an Esper not because I’m specifically wanting him to cast magic, but simply because he’s almost always in my party anyway. I’ve read that the developers were not concerned about making the characters balanced with each other, and it shows. Sabin is also really reflective of the popularity of certain fighting games at the time. Shamus made a joke about Diablo III along the lines of “Press X button to melt enemies’ faces”, and that’s basically how Final Fantasy VI developers made Sabin.
The characters are balanced, but mostly because there are so many broken options that there’s one for everybody!
Also, only scrubs go for Ultima spam. Kings go for max-speed dual-wield+Offering spam. Gets the job done even faster! (I kid. Partly.)
Time to recommend another LP: https://lparchive.org/Breaking-Final-Fantasy-VI/
Features “brokenness” in every sense of the word; both things like Psycho Cyan and things like Terra time-travelling to become her own father (yes, really)
Just make sure the person with Dual-Wield and Offering (AKA 8 attacks) is immune to Confusion or Zombie.
Man, that was nasty.
I think you’re misremembering. Terra will learn Fire spells through leveling while Celes will learn Ice, but there’s no other bias towards casting spells once you know them.
Which version do you suggest? I played IV and V as a kid and X as an adult and liked all of them, but never got into VI.
If you can hunt down the GBA version, that’s the best one in terms of content. The pixel remaster is about to release in 1-2 weeks for PC, but as far as I know it doesn’t have any of the extra content from the GBA version, which includes a few more dungeons and summons, plus a whole new translation job that’s less clunky than the original SNES one and a few other flavor add-ons. It has a lower resolution, but it still looks good.
Avoid the mobile and PS1 versions. The former is basically the SNES version with remade graphics, but they’ve lost all the charm of the original art style and frankly make the whole thing look like a cheap RPG Maker game. Meanwhile, the PS1 version is again the SNES version with a few minor bug and translation fixes and a couple of FMVs created specifically for it. They’re cute, but they don’t add anything and this version of the game has the worst load times of them all.
So yeah, the GBA is the way to go but, well, it’s also the hardest one to find. And you need a GBA or Nintendo DS to play it, of course.
I don’t think I know where to find my Gameboy Advance, I might know how to track down my Nintendo DS and its charging cord, and thank you!
Also, the mobile versions have a couple of really difficult spots due to the reliance on touch controls when the original sequences assume you have an actual controller. On the other hand, they made Sabin’s Blitzes almost 100% accurate to implement.
I’d go as far as saying the core appeal of a lot of RPGs is getting 20 to 100 hours of a good Party. These days plenty of games are story focused and have dialogue out the ass, but this used to be a relatively unique trait of RPGs compared to action titles, especially combined with having a bunch of friends out on adventure together. To some degree I think you get attached to characters just by being around them(or playing as them) for a long time, so when you also capitalize on that time with likeable characters and funny party interactions, you can end up with something really beloved.
FF12 was bound to be different just because it had a different creative team than those other games, so maybe a wacky party was never in the cards. But having said that, I think it’s easy to imagine it working as its own distinct style if development hadn’t been such a mess. Final Fantasy Tactics is very beloved.
I bet if you ranked RPGs by the quality of their party, the list would be pretty close to a list of the most popular RPGs (of the ones that have parties). It’s an interaction games are really well suited to.
One of the greatest disappointments of the last generation (and currently this one) is there have barely been any RPGs with a good party.
Hey! Don’t you disrespect Kim Kitsuragi like that! He’s a party all by himself! :-)
But I take your point. As much as I adore Pillars of Eternity 2, I can’t in all honesty claim that’s it’s party is a patch on those from BioWare’s heyday.
I really like the party of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Well, except for Greybor.
Kim is great, but surely the real party in that game is the one in your head…
That’s still what people turn to Bioware games for. Nobody much cares for the Collectors plot of ME2 but it is to many the most beloved game in the series because of the companions, the parts of ME3 that people like resolve companions arcs, DA:Inquisition Corypheus is a borderline non-entity but people will fight over spirit Cole vs human Cole.
Velvet:Achoo!
Magilou: Maybe you should put on some pants on this ice floe.
Velvet: Demons are immune to the cold. Also no one on this entire continent sells pants. I checked.
The best part is the game actually has that exchange. One of the first things Theresa says to Velvet is “you look really cold.” And Velvet pauses, responds “yes,” and gives a half-hearted fake cough. So even the in-game characters acknowledge how impractical her outfit is.
(Of course Magilou’s wearing a book miniskirt and pasties.)
Hey, this sounds fun!
Right, first you ditch Vaan and replace him with Reks. Now that character’s got a better, clearer connection to the story.
Condense the characters of Fran and Balthier into one character, called Fran*, because as far as I can tell, between them they contribute slightly less to the plot than one average character (and you’d also be giving Fran something to do in the story).
Penelo is the bubbly, enthusiastic one, and there’s a love triangle between her, Reks and Larsa.
Basch is your broody, serious type who’s devoted to protecting Ashe, so he reluctantly follows her around on whatever she’s doing – and she does a lot, because she’s as headstrong and wilful as Shamus suggested.
Larsa joins the party full-time at a later point in the game, because he seems like an interesting guy and super relevant to the plot.
Then add a new, cute, furry, mascot-type character. Not ‘sexy’ like Fran, but quirky, like a dancing moogle, or something that falls over a lot, or swallows things whole at inappropriate moments.
*I mean, if one of those two has to be cut, it’s clearly not gonna be the scantily-clad bunny girl, is it.
If Vaan’s presence was necessary in the great all seeing concept of FF12, then he could just be Reks’ annoying little brother who keeps showing up in places and getting in trouble while trying to follow the team. Could probably use it for some character development between the two, and eventually Reks gets him to just stay away while they do dangerous things.
Maybe at some point he’ll end up being useful somehow, which is something I don’t see happening in the real version of this game.
If we are doing ‘let’s rewrite FFXII so it is good’ here are my thoughts:
Ash make her pregnant with her dead husband’s son, have her struggle with her desire for revenge and victory vs a quite life in exile for her and her son, possible pressure to remarry to secure an alliance? Son being heir to two kingdoms is a good plot point. show that the two have different cultures, traditions, and treatment by the Empire
Bosch make him a Dalmaskan Ultra who killed his king to try to save his country, maybe he only meant to imprison the king and things went sideways, popular with the knights in exile and republicans
Make the two above have independent power bases, so they have to cooperate despite hating each other.
Balthier His running joke of being the Leading Man, and the game absolutely not taking it seriously, is one of the funniest parts of the existing game. I would hate to lose it.
Penelo her quietly advocating for her people as imperial concubine is now my absolute favorite. Having her meet (and be contrasted with) Larsa’s betrothed would be fun.
The best party members of FFXII are equivalent to the Unnecessary Human party member in any Mass Effect game.
Shepard.
Reks.
When you condense it down like this, you can begin to speculate the much, much more Matsuno-esque story that this game was supposed to be. “A tool to the ends of the nobles” is all over his Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics work, but is so not in the style of Final Fantasy at the time. It’s kind of amazing he got away with Final Fantasy Tactics being called Final Fantasy Tactics, in fact, but I suppose that was still before Sakaguchi was off the franchise for good, and no doubt Matsuno’s style of fantasy was close to Sakaguchi’s classic inspirations.
I really, really want an investigative report regarding what happened to FFXII’s development.
Regarding FFXV, there’s a lot of reasons it is what it is, including putting way too much in the hands of Tetsuya Nomura, famously quoted as saying he doesn’t really relate with the protagonist of his Kingdom Hearts series, but instead relates to all the bad guys, which is no doubt why there are constantly more and more of them, and everything becomes more absurd. One of my favorite bits of trivia to cite is how Nomura came back to the office after seeing Les Miserables in theaters and decided FFXV was going to be a musical now. Honestly, his obsession with mopey adolescents makes so much sense the more you learn about him, only he was never able to actually sit down and finish something. This is part of the reason the characters all look the same, because he seems to really struggle differentiating hair-styles and faces (I mean really, he’s the new Akira Toriyama in that regard). In addition, Square Enix hired an actual fashion company to design everyone’s outfits, which is one of the reasons they look so similar: they’re designed to be a “set”.
But really, the issue with FFXV is that it’s incomplete. The game we got was simply duct-taped together into a somewhat shippable product, and in time Square Enix cut their plans to keep working on the game short and just call it done. I like it, I really do, but partially as a fascinating mess of a game that was miraculously pulled together into something playable. It’s also a neat aesthetic of “modern, but fantasy”, but I cannot lie that I’m happy to see FFXVI return to fantasy.
Though I suppose it may lack the colorful cast you so enjoy, and is so clearly informed by FFX being your first entry in the series. It continues to fascinate me how fan expectations of the series will differ in some ways based on when they jumped in. Having played since the first game on the NES, I feel like FFXVI is a sort of return to that more pure fantasy it began as, including focusing on more mature characters. Granted, FFIV is awfully silly, but when you’re seven years old and a console gamer it’s a wake-up call to the potential of games as a narrative medium. But that’s the thing, Cecil was not a teenager, he was a grown man in a relationship with a grown woman and torn between loyalty to his kingdom and the crimes he is now forced to commit in their name. The execution of the narrative is silly, but, again, when you’re seven, it’s some seriously heavy stuff, and even as an adult Cecil’s journey to go from a Dark Knight to a Paladin speaks to me. Oh, did I mention his best friend had been hiding a crush on the protagonist’s girlfriend? Because that’s a factor, too.
But even then, you’re not wrong that Final Fantasy has always had a diverse cast of characters, and I suppose FFXII doesn’t quite match it in ways the prior games had.
Curious what you’d think of FFIX though, in terms of a colorful cast. It’s probably one of the better groups of characters in a Final Fantasy, even if the story is… well, I mean, I guess you can call it a story? At least the first half is a good story. Yes, the first half is a good, fairy-tale style story.
Hey, man! I’ll have you know that Akira Toriyama can draw at least two different faces. There’s the hyper-masculine cheekbones & square-jaw face and also the other one. So there!
I am curious how FF IX somehow skipped that progression of play. I remember it fondly enough, though it suffers from many of the issues that plague other Final Fantasy games.
I’d say FF9 has one of the strongest cast too, and it map pretty well over Shamus theoretical party.
True! Vivi and Ice Queen are the only parts where there’s really no overlap.
Amarant is totally the Ice Queen.
Good one!
I had Amaranth as “wants to be Badass Mope but is trying too hard”. (While Freya is both the real Badass Mope and The Furry.)
…my god. I just realized Vivi’s the Furry.
IX is sort of a forgotten installment. It was originally going to be a spinoff “Gaiden” game until it was made one of the numbered series at the last minute, at which point it was released for the Playstation at the tail end of its life. So even fans themselves often missed or skipped it. Shamus started with X as I recall, and if he bothered to find anything out about it probably one of the first things he heard was how it was a bit of a nostalgia title full of intentional callbacks to the rest of the series. It’s not surprising someone haphazardly picking up the games out of order would skip it.
Yeah, I think the original PlayStation era of Final Fantasy fans is a bit of an odd one. Final Fantasy VII basically had most of your old, 16-bit fans on board as well as a massive host of new fans. Then Final Fantasy VIII happened, and I, like many other older series fans, noped out. If FFVII is what made Final Fantasy a mainstream name in the West, then FFVIII is where it divided the fanbase.
FFIX was… a weird mixture. Additionally, it “looked goofy” compared to the two games that came prior. Regardless of what you think of FF7’s sprite work, the story was still told “seriously”. A dystopian city, revolutionaries, terrorism, and a brooding protagonist with brain problems. Final Fantasy VIII opens with a super epic montage of CG, only to follow up with a brooding teenager whose sword is also a gun and… uh… I dunno I guess Harry Potter appeal with the school that has T-Rexes loose in a training paddock seriously how many students get eaten a year?!
And then Final Fantasy IX opens with a bunch of thieves kidnapping a very willing princess with a Queen that looks like Maleficent and Jabba the Hutt had a lovechild.
It’s just a totally different, but refreshing, tone and on top of releasing in the year 2000, right as the PS2 was about to launch, it was bound to be perceived less favorably.
I don’t know how many other old-time fans dropped the franchise after X like I had, but I also gave my PS2 to my brother and missed out on XII due to lacking a proper console. I was fine saying goodbye, though. Now, I’ve made amends with its weird history and am curious enough to want to try VIII again, as well as XII (basically had to give up again since it’s leaving Game Pass, natch) and XIII.
I know this is the most common, and possibly even “official” reading of the story, but that was not my take on it when I replayed it as an adult. It really looked, to me at least, like Kane was in love with Cecil, and his jealousy was directed at Rosa for coming between them.
…Probably just wishful thinking on my part, though.
There’s definitely a lot to be explored about how the SNES Final Fantasy games were able to juggle tone so well. Yes, Cecil struggles with the war crimes he’s committed, but also a Fat Chocobo helps him store his excess inventory. It never gets too serious and dour, but the bits that threaten to get goofy, like airshipping to the moon, always stay emotionally grounded.
So I’ve gotta say, that FF16 trailer is just jam-packed with tropes. I laughed out loud when they suddenly brought up a plague on top of everything else. I haven’t seen such a humorously tropey trailer since the horror movie Dead Silence.
What’s bugging me about the later part of the story in FF9 is how obfuscated it seems. In the first part, you have the mysterious femboy goading the evil queen into one war after another. Why is he doing that? The explanation is fantasy technobabble, but it maps pretty well to “softening up the world for an alien invasion”, I think.
Oh yeah, and the random final boss with no relation to anything else was pretty dumb.
Technically he had been mentioned before! In the castle with all the talking faces. He’s referenced there.
But basically he just exists for thematic reasons since he sort of embodies nihilism in death and the whole point of the game is that life is beautiful because of the friends we made along the way.
I thought it was just backstory of Terra. If he’s referenced there, it went right over my head. Can you explain it to me?
I would if I remembered more specifically how he is mentioned. As Rocketeer and Shamus have complained in XII, there’s basically one or two lines where he’s mentioned, but there’s no context for what or who he is (and it’s possible he’s not even named).
He is brought up, but if you’re playing for the first time you’ll inevitably forget about it since not long after you’re dragged off to Exposition Land where everything but Necron is mentioned, and oh yeah, Zidane is depressed for all of five minutes now because we can’t have a Final Fantasy on PlayStation without the protagonist brooding for at least some of it.
I’ve heard two takes on Necron that make some sense:
1.) Necron in the embodiment of destruction, since Kuja pretty much was on the brink of ending the world(s). Killing Necron prevents the annihilation or some such.
2.) That final attack kills the party. Necron is basically death/the grim reaper, and by defeating Necron, you’re fighting desperately not to succumb to death.
Not much but better then pretty much the nothing we got.
If you like characters with different and contrasting personalities on an adventure together like you just described, might I suggest Xenoblade Chronicles? In fact, the characters from the numbered Xenoblade games fit the archetypes you described pretty well.
Larsa is putting Ashe on the To Do list.
I see we’re not doing the Phrasing thing…
I think you’re screwing with Ashe and Penelo.
Are we seriously not doing phrasing anymore?
Well, that’s how you get ants…
Aunts. It’s how you get aunts.
Oh, put a cork in it.
Must… resist… urge… to complain… about FFXIII’s… cast… NNNNNNGGGGGGAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
Oof. Uh. I’m good. I think I made it. Wow.
Anyway, let’s talk about your ideal party and why FFXIII doesn’t have it.
GODDAMMIT!
Well, anyway, four of those actually show up here:
– The Cheerleader. This is Vanille. She is most of the time obnoxiously cheery and happy despite the fact that yes, she does have a tragic past.
– The Jaibait. This is also Vanille. Two defining traits already. That puts her above most characters in the game.
– The Ice Queen. This is the role given to the protagonist, Lightning. Well, save for the “emo” look, and if she is even capable of having feelings for anyone that’s not her sister this game will never let you know. I guess she is also sort of “Badass Mope”, except that she does carry tech that’s way more advanced than anyone else on the team has.
– The Idiot. Everyone. Everyone in the party fits this role. Sure, Snow is the most obvious one, but everyone else is also grossly incompetent, just to a marginally smaller level than him.
The rest of the characters are functionally different from the rest, but they’re just so bland or inconsistent that it’s hard to even fit them into an archetype. Sazh is the kind-hearted guy who nevertheless has no issue gunning down everyone in his path. Hope more or less fits into “innocent kid dragged into war” trope, but only when the plot feels like it. Snow is, of course, the idiot supreme who only barely stands out a bit by being more of a bumbling doofus than everyone else. And Fang is… also a member of the team.
Man, there will never again be a party like the one in FFVI. There’s a really large cast of characters but most are so well developed that nearly any of them could qualify as the real protagonist. The obvious exception are the secret characters, since those don’t have anything in the way of characterization and are there just for muscle and gameplay variety.
6 just casually flex with having not one, not two but three fully fledged out main characters. Whereas 12 over here can barely justify the main character existing and 13 main character has exactly 0 agency and motivation (except when it comes to killing all of humanity where she’s 100% on board).
Come on man, embrace it. As I said, the challenge is to bring up XIII in every single post.
You can do it, I believe in you!
Only thing I remember about Sazh was that he had a tiny chocobo living in his hair. Which…ew. Yes it’s a JRPG and weird is the norm, but come on, man, that’s just unsanitary.
Sazh to me was the only member of the team which I liked and could refer to. Maybe because he was a father to 6 yo son or maybe because he was the only one who wasn’t teenager or young adult.
Sazh was easily the best character of 13, he was also the most disposable one that didn’t really have a role in the story. His dad arc lead nowhere and could easily be removed (to be fair so would most of the game arc). At most he was just the chauffeur of the group and nothing else.
I mean, sure, yeah, Sazh was the good guy. The only problem is that his whole deal with his son only came up when the plot remembered. Annoying and insufferable as Snow was, he at least was in a constant state of worry about his girlfriend, while Sazh seemed to only remember once in a while.
You probably like Sazh in part because he’s the only character who isn’t expressly a jerk at any point. (I know that the other characters have reasons to behave like jerks with varying degrees of legitimacy, but they’re still jerks!)
Yeah. You just know that hair is full of bird shit.
Still, the thing I remember most of the character is that part where he fakes suicide in front of the enemy and they take away his body without at any point checking if he’s actually dead. The only thing that saves the team from their own incompetence is that the enemy side is also comprised exclusively of useless idiots.
Despite Sazh being carried out in what looks like a makeshift coffin, a news report shows that he’s really alive in the very next cutscene. It’s not even clear that that ruse served any purpose apart from faking out the audience, for less than five minutes.
I’m here to see if he can pull the challenge off xD
I don’t mind FFXIII’s cast too much. I think it’s significantly better than XII’s. Sazh is a good guy, Hope has some interesting drama going on. I personally don’t mind Lightning either, although I also find Snow hard to cope with. Vanille would have been fine if they hadn’t made the actor localise all the anime breathing tics.
The two biggest problems with XIII’s cast is 1) they’re barely together for most of the game and 2) they all hate each other. That severely undercuts the appeal of a game’s party whatever the characters themselves are like.
So I never thought I would say this and I know it doesn’t help the folks who are looking for single player content, but the Final Fantasy story I have enjoyed the most by FAR since VII is actually the most recent couple expansions of FFXIV. I am in the Endwalker (current expansion) prologue stuff, which means I recently completed Shadowbringers (the previous expansion), and it was amazing. The characters are very well done, very vibrant and fun and have great personal interactions. Tropey as hell, of course, ’cause it’s Final Fantasy, but by far my favorite FF cast in *ages*. The game even managed to make me care about MY character as a person in the story, which is impressive given how little you actually talk (something the game enjoys lampshading). I guess the people at Square-Enix who know how to nail story content are all working on FFXIV these days. Which… yeah, not helpful unless you like MMOs (which I do).
[For the record, Heavensward, the “first” expansion, seems like it has a pretty decent story as well. Stormblood, the “second” expansion, felt more mediocre to me, but it gets good at the end/in the lead-up to Shadowbringers. A Realm Reborn, the base/remade version of the game, on the other hand… you may want to read a summary of that, which is what I ended up doing, because WHOOF that was not a well told story. Also, one of the things that really turned me off the game at first is that it has some issues with content and no content warnings. So, trigger warning for A Realm Reborn and some of the stuff near the end of Stormblood, in particular:
sexual violence/sexual slavery. And a lot of it is done in super gross/exploitative ways, too.I highly recommend skipping the entire class story of the Arcanist, in particular.]One of the big problems with Heavensward and Stormblood is they don’t have the Trust system yet, and the party doesn’t really exist in the overworked in any expansions. In ARR it didn’t matter as much because you were just an adventurer and the dungeons were sellsword-scale conflicts, though Stone Vigil should have been Player, Alphinaud, Cid, and… I feel like we had someone else at that point as well.
But it’s kind of weird going up Sohm Al in Heavensward with a random party of players instead of Estinien, Ysale and Alphinaud, as is storming the Vault without Haurchefaunt, Alphinaud, Lucia and Hilda as our party members.
And in Stormblood, Gosetsu, Alisae, Lyse, Yuguri, and Hien should have been our party members in dungeons.
Ashe: “I am going to go bowling.”
Basch: “I am with you, in bowling as in life.”
Balthier: “You’ll do it without me, your Majesty. I never saw the appeal of Striking those who can’t defend themselves.”
Fran: “In ancient times, this bowling alley was home to our progenitors, who played with pins of flint and balls of stone. The crashing of their pins still echo here.”
Vaan: “Bowling sounds like fun! What do you think, Penelo?… Penelo?”
Balthier: “Perchance she was kidnapped again.”
Vaan: “We have to rescue her!”
Ashe: “No. We are bowling.”
Basch: “I am with you, in bowling as in life.”
Penelo: “Hey everyone, guess who I ran into!”
Larsa: “A hail greeting to all of you. I see you are endeavouring to bowl; ’tis a sport I have come to greatly enjoy. I will warn you, however; I noticed in my last visit that many of the balls had strange gaps in their surface, large enough even to fit human fingers. I have sealed up as many of the holes as I could find, but cannot promise that all of them have been undone. Now, let me show you my favorite lane.” he takes them to a lane with a large mound in the middle, sloping down on either side into the gutters.
You have my upvote despite the fact that we don’t do that here.
I am contractually obligated to comment on any thread that brings up Crusader Kings II. Especially when it does so in a *really funny* manner.
… I really want the story with Larsa as the protagonist, honestly. He seems like so much fun!
Actually, wait, I want to *write* this story. Hmm…
I’ve heard two takes on Necron that make some sense:
1.) Necron in the embodiment of destruction, since Kuja pretty much was on the brink of ending the world(s). Killing Necron prevents the annihilation or some such.
2.) That final attack kills the party. Necron is basically death/the grim reaper, and by defeating Necron, you’re fighting desperately not to succumb to death.
Not much but better then pretty much the nothing we got.
All right, I’m sure that someone has already mentioned this, but when it comes to costume design–Ashe’s is terrible. She’s supposed to be someone who we take seriously as a princess and political player, and she’s wearing a belt, a skirt that’s maybe twice as wide as the belt, a top that looks like a cape that starts just above her cleavage instead of at the neck, a weird undershirt thing, and boots that go up to mid-thigh.
Nearly everyone else’s costume design, even if it doesn’t exactly fit the character, isn’t utterly antithetical to what that character is supposed to be in-game. With Ashe…I don’t even know what effect they were going for, besides maybe inspiring thoughts of “one good gust of wind, that’s all I ask.”
Yeah, they could have done way better with the ‘grieving widow’ angle. Even a black armband would have been a huge improvement.
Oh God, I clicked that link to the FFX retrospective. 2016? Eight years ago? How long have I been reading this site? Where did the time go? I thought that was like a year or two ago!
Are you reading this from the future? Last I checked it was only 2022.
“Maybe even sexy? Look, I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying I’ve seen some of the fan art you people make.”
You’re talking about a game where one of you companions is an Amazonian Playboy Bunny. I don’t see the “maybe” here.
“Larsa is playing Crusader Kings II on hard mode.”
I didn’t know he had as sister.