T w e n t y S i d e d
This week The Rocketeer escorts us through the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea. I love the Sandsea. Well, I love the premise, anyway. This section of the game kinda drags on for a little too long, and there are a couple of annoying “gotcha” enemies in the area that can ruin your day if you haven’t been reading the game designer’s mind.
Gotcha!
Back in the old days, a fight in Final Fantasy would start by cutting away from the open world to a little battle arena where you’d fight whatever random nonsense the game designer thought up, like a Malboro, or a big-ass flan:
But here in FF12, fights take place in the open world, without any of that nonsense where you somehow get “ambushed” by immobile foes that don’t have legs.
This game has the gambit system, where you set up a series of conditional actions. “If someone is injured, heal them. Otherwise, see if they’re KO’ed and if so, revive them. Otherwise, just attack the nearest enemy.” That’s a really fun system and I love it. I never want to go back to the old system. This is brilliant.
However, with fights happening in the open world, we are now vulnerable to getting jumped by new foes in the middle of a fight. Again, this is not always a bad thing. Unless the foe is massively more powerful than your party and is capable of wiping out the whole group before you realize you’re in a real fight.
Shamus, are you complaining about the Salamand Entite?
Yes I am. That thing is MASSIVELY more powerful than anything else in the area.
You dolt. That thing won’t attack you as long as you don’t attack it or use magic near it!
It’s true. The Entite normally leaves you alone and floats on by without giving you any problems.
The trick here in the Sandsea is that there are regular enemies around. They will attack you, as per usual. In the ensuing scuffle, you’ll take a little bit of damage. So then your gambits will kick in and your healer will cast healing to fix them up. This use of magic will anger any nearby Salamand Entite, and suddenly you’ve got this angry lens flare one-shotting its way through your party and you have no idea why.
Like I said: You need to read the game designer’s mind.
Which, fine. Whatever. It’s a mistake you only make once.Is it? For me it wasn’t at all obvious that I was being attacked for using magic. I dunno. Somehow everyone got that memo but me. What I don’t get is why the designer would set this trap for the player. What is the purpose of these things in terms of game design? Is there a lesson you’re supposed to learn? Is the designer trying to get you to change your party composition? Is this a setup for a boss fight I missed? The game just taught you how to use the gambit system, and now we have an enemy that will punish the use of gambits.
I don’t know. I realize this is a small thing, it’s just a really weird design decision and it makes me wonder what the thinking behind it was.
Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. No, I want to talk about these…
Abandoned Oil Refineries.
In western stories, magic typically precludes technology. The idea is that mages, wizards, clerics, and other practitioners of hoodoo are so effective that society never bothers to invent engines, computing machines, mass media, internet porn, or any of the other hallmarks of the modern age. So the world ends up trapped in this eternal middle ages, unable or unwilling to mechanize.
Slightly less common is the idea that modern society collapses and magic arises in the post-apocalyptic chaos that follows. Magic has apparently been here all along, but we never noticed it because we were too busy watching our TVs and playing arcade games to notice, man.This sort of ignores all the effort people spent looking for magic before modern technology, but whatever. The whole point of fiction is to make sure the truth doesn’t get in the way of a good story.
And then there’s my wife’s favorite genre, urban fantasy. If not for digital books, my house would be hip-deep in dog-eared urban fantasy novels. In these stories, magic and technology exist side-by-side. While your car is at the mechanic, you can walk next door and chat with the elementalist about the gnolls infesting your neighbor’s garage.
But the one thing I never see is what Final Fantasy XII is doing, where technology became obsolete not because it was wiped away by an apocalypse, but because magic was just straight-up better.
(This doesn’t explain why the Empire is clanking around in suits of armor and stabbing people with swords. Firearms exist in this world, and magic doesn’t change the fact that firearms are the universal hard counter to knights. But look, if you’re not willing to tolerate anachronistic weapons for the sake of style, then you really need to stay far away from Final Fantasy games.)
Like I’ve said in the past: I’m an interloper to this genre. I imagine people are going to jump down to the comments and give me the exhaustive list of all the stories that did the “magic makes technology obsolete” schtick before FF12. But the idea is new to me, and I really dug it.
A Likely Story
This part of the game tells us about Raithwall, the Dynast-King. As the game tells us, he was a big deal a thousand years ago. He united the world and brought about centuries of peace.
Once again demonstrating my inability to parse this genre, I actually thought this was going to turn out to be hogwash. It seemed like such an obvious setup. The story told us about how this guy basically conquered the world and brought about a thousand years of peace. Usually people who (try to) conquer the world are not good guys, regardless of their motivations. I really expected that we’d get a twist somewhere down the line where we discover that Raithwall was actually a bastard and all of our current problems are somehow the result of poor planning or a faustian bargain on his part. Also: I figured he was still around, perhaps lurking as a great big boss fight skeleton in a mountain somewhere.
Even his name sounds vaguely innsideous. Raith sounds like Wraith, the likeness of someone after death, which is typically malevolent in nature. Once again, my western expectations were leading me astray. If this game was made by English speakers then yes, a name like Raithwall would probably be an indicator of villainy like General Grievous, Cruella de Vil, or Count Puppykicker.
But this game was written by Japanese speakers. Maybe they chose the name Raithwall because it sounded cool, or maybe he had a totally benign name in Japanese and the translators just bluntly anglicised it without thinking about how it might sound to English speakers. Whatever. You’ve got to keep your wits when consuming a translated work, because you don’t know how many layers of misunderstanding and obfuscation stand between yourself and the words you’re hearing. Maybe an English speaker bent the meaning of a word for artistic purposes. A Japanese person heard it, liked the way it sounded, and decided to use it in his story. He smashed it into Japanese phonemes and used it slightly improperly. Then a translator got hold of it, tried to “fix” the spelling, and handed it off to a voice actor who pronounced it wrong. Then someone like me blunders into it and tries to parse the word using various western expectations and assumptions and ends up comically off-base.
So yeah. The plot twist is that there is no twist. The heroic conqueror was actually a hero and not another villain with good PR.
Footnotes:
[1] Is it? For me it wasn’t at all obvious that I was being attacked for using magic. I dunno. Somehow everyone got that memo but me.
[2] This sort of ignores all the effort people spent looking for magic before modern technology, but whatever. The whole point of fiction is to make sure the truth doesn’t get in the way of a good story.
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The Dynast-king stuff always felt like an old Chinese style mandate of heaven story. “Virtuous man, chosen by the gods, puts an end to all the destructive squabbling (and presumably squabblers) and establishes a new era of law and justice &c &c &c.” The Japanese had their own waring states period, so it probably didn’t seem to weird there.
I like how all the princelings all claim decent from the old dynasty, it’s one of my favorite parts of the story.
Well, considering they’re Japanese games I’m more inclined to point towards the Mikado (Heavenly Sovereign of Japan, whatever). The Japanese Imperial family is also considered to have united the nation from small warring factions. And, of course, he’s holy and free from weakness or error.
The whole “and under his descendants things slowly fell apart” can also be considered a reference to the Shogunate era, I suppose.
In Europe, we consider Great People who tried to Unite Us All as evil – Alexander the Great might just escape because he mostly went East, but the Romans, the Moorish, the Habsburgers, Napoleon, the German Emperor, the Nazis, Tsarist Russia, Communist Russia, … anyone who tried to unite us is bad, because they want to make us all one. This is, of course, because in the end they all failed, and history is written by the victors. In contrast, in both China and Japan the unification is considered a positive. The same holds for the German unification – Bayern might object, but I don’t think most Germans or German Länder still really think of themselves as separate nations/people forced together.
In the west we tend to have a lot of fictional settings where there was a golden age, then a cataclysm, then a rebuilding period that gestures towards the Roman Empire, its fall, then the Dark to Middle Ages. Obviously the actual history is a lot more complicated than that, but that basic narrative structure provides the foundation for a lot of fictional fantasy settings that come from European writers. I think it makes sense that Japanese writers have a similar broad narrative of chaotic groups -> good leader unifies -> squabbling descendants that underlies their fiction and is loosely based on their own history.
Considering that the Japanese imperial family has spent most of its history utterly dominated by various courtiers and warlords, the idea that they are free of weakness and error is rather comical.
Anyone who tried to unite people by war and failed is a villain. Anyone who tried to unite people by war and succeeded is a national hero, a King Arthur figure.
In Chinese culture, many of our most cherished and revered literary traditions have a very strong “to serve the state is far greater than to serve the self” moral. From there, there also tends to arise a subtle “the ends justify the means” lesson. When Qin Shi Huang, China’s first Emperor, unified China, he did it under the justification that the ordinary people were suffering from the endless wars and skirmishes between minor lords. Which was TRUE; a lot of Chinese history is one long litany about one powerful warlord getting a taste for power, overextending himself, multiple foes ally against him and beat him back down, and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile the peasants just keep on getting drafted in one war after another, have to hand over their lands and crops to feed the armies of the conquerors, and generally just have a miserable time of it. So Qin Shi Huang stopped it, by conquering everybody else and finally uniting China under a single ruler. But he was also absolutely RUTHLESS to his enemies, quashed dissent without mercy, and by introducing a singular language, system of measurements etc. it also meant that a lot of unique cultural traditions were lost forever.
In modern times, a lot of China’s autocratic leaders have drawn from this history to justify the harsh rule that they impose, and in many ways, this long history has also influenced that of Korea and Japan, which have strong roots from Chinese traditions and legends. I suppose FF12’s depiction of Raithwall was “Yes, we know it’s never as black and white in real life, but what if it WAS?”
Qin Shi Huang is an odd choice of role model, considering that he was widely hated and the state he established didn’t last very long.
The naming issue happens in Fire Emblem but even worse.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses uses genuine UK place names as the flavourful names for their fantasy world, and it’s such a weird experience.
Yes, Lady Rhea of the Church of Seiros on the fictional continent of Fodlan is talking to the Duke of … Leicester. What?
I’m sure for a Japanese person Leicester is a fun medieval sounding name, and not a bunch of concrete flats and a football team.
They also have characters with Irish names who in no way sound Irish or look Irish.
One noble house is House Blaiddydd (which is clearly Welsh possibly meaning Day-party) and the main Blaiddydd in the game is called …Dimitri.
This must be how it feels when Western companies make Japanese media. A lot of words that sound meaningful to us but come out as a cultural hodgepodge to a Japanese person, full of unintended significance.
Final Fantasy VI starts with the story of a girl with natural magical ability, an extreme rarity in that world. The creators decided they wanted to emphasize her “outisder” nature with an exotic foreign name: “Tina”. (The English translation changed it to “Terra” to keep it unusual)
And then there’s a counterpart character named Celes as well, in a similar but mirrored situation (making them CelesTina)
Then she meets a thief named Lock and a martial artist named Mash. At least they didn’t call the other king of Figaro Randy.
Practical Guide to Evil actually does the same thing to convey culture.
So the Principate has mostly French names, the Kingdom of Callow has English names, and the Evil Empire of Praes has Latin and North-African names.
Yeah, so, getting back to FFXII for a second…Fran?
The only normal-ish English name in the game I can recall. It’s not common these days, though more appropriate to the quasi-Elizabethan setting. And given to the least normal-ish person in the main cast.
I assume this is intentional, but can’t quite grow the symbolism.
Did the oil rigs come before or after the Dynast King? I’m imagining him sitting in a tank and yelling “Drive me closer, I want to hit them with my sword!”
This is actually a really interesting question. If magic killed the radio star, then even if the Dynast-King was right around the transition period, these oil rigs are at probably a thousand years old. Abandoned. Unmaintained. In a desert full of constantly blowing sand.
A hunk of steel can last a long time, but a millennium in a sandblaster? Having still-standing catwalks that can support multiple people?
This is the kind of detail which is cute but needed more commitment. The rest of the world doesn’t show much evidence of a technology boom and decline.
To be fair, Count Puppykicker is more a tragic figure than a villain. A martial artist cursed to be unable to tell friend from foe (and assume everyone is a threat) might harm folks and critters who don’t deserve it. But it’s not like he’s internally setting out to be evil.
Plus the non-lethal resolution of the quest involving him is totally awesome. I won’t spoil it here.
Is that the one with the tearful puppy telling the Count he has to kick him one last time to save the world? Man, that was heavy.
It still pisses me off that the sequel declared that sequence non-canon.
Isn’t that a Michael Morecock novel?
Yes, though Morecock is most famous for his porn parody of the Eternal Champion, featuring Eldick of Melnibonér.
The whole “hey, it’s in translation!” point really makes me curious. How much of the bad, overlapping, similar-sounding names are deliberately confusing choices by the writers vs choices by translators.
Sure, none of the place names are English words, but are they straight up phonetic transliterations of the original or something “similar-ish” a translator decided on? Also, is there more logic to the names in Japanese that’s lost in the translation (e.g. the names of East Fooville and West Fooville and Olde Fooville in the state of Foolandia are similar for a perfectly sensible linguistic reason, and English speakers probably wouldn’t find the similarity jarring).
Or is the naming as lazy and confusing in the original Japanese?
At least in writing, it’s better. Most names in JRPGs are written in katakana, which has five different symbols for consonant-vowel syllable sounds. They don’t have B, they have bah, bee, boo, beh, and boe (‘b’ doubles as ‘v’). The characters with English V names seem to start with Wah and a modifier, Vaan gets a W(a), Vayne gets a W(eh).
Nalbina, Nabradia and Nabudis all still start with ‘Na’, though.
ヴ is actually based on the “u” (ウ) character not “wa” (ワ), and that’s the “modern” way to represent a v sound in katakana. (The “old” style of just using ‘b’ is still pretty common, though) On it’s own it’s “vu” but it’s combined with a second small character to replace the vowel.
So “Vaan” (ヴァン – “van”) and “Vayne” (ヴェイン “vein”) are pronounced basically identically to their English, with v sounds. But Vossler’s Japanese name is based on a w sound, though: (ウォースラ “wo-sura”).
And then there’s the Darksword Trilogy*, where Technology is banned because it is superior to magic and is actually called “Sorcery”.
I also find Dune’s “thou shalt not make a machine that resembles a man’s mind” prohibition on computers but not other machinery interesting.
Wasn’t that just how the writer made the Spice an important part of the Dune universe by enabling the creation of human supercomputers (and thus interstellar travel)?
That’s definitely a major part of the reason. I’m not sure how the navigators would be a thing if they could be computerized.
Whatever the narrative reason for it, I think it’s fairly unique to have a highly technological, even spacefaring, civilization without computers.
Possibly an unnecessary degree of nuance, but human supercomputers and hyperspace navigators are completely different things in the Dune universe, though both do exist. And human supercomputers – “mentats” in the setting nomenclature – do not require Spice, though Navigators do (and a LOT of it).
It’s a bit hard to say where Frank Herbert started with his conception of the Dune universe – whether the narrative seed was “spacefaring society without computers”, or something else, because there are a lot of big ideas jammed into Dune which end up playing second fiddle to mélange (the “Spice”), but may well have come first in the brainstorming process. Certainly the humans vs. machines thread eventually took on a much larger role later in the series (and is of central importance in the books written by Frank’s son, allegedly off Frank’s own notes), but it was largely a historical footnote in the first 3 books.
And then there’s Mutant Chronicles, where “thinking machines” are banned, because the Dark Symmetry can corrupt them directly instead of through agents and Faustian bargains, and already nearly destroyed humanity once that way. It’s an interesting way to allow for space travel, a terraformed solar system, and advanced weaponry while limiting computers to 1990s levels, as well as the occasional high-tech villain.
A bit less cerebral than Dune, since it’s an RPG (I’ve heard it described as “Warhammer 40k with six times the crazy but no warp”), but I was reading one of the source books recently, and this discussion reminded me.
“I really expected that we’d get a twist somewhere down the line where we discover that Raithwall was actually a bastard and all of our current problems are somehow the result of poor planning or a faustian bargain on his part.”
This sounds like Final Fantasy Tactics, which is sort of set in the same world.
This does get weird later on, because the game sort of vaguely gestures at Mankind Growing Up. Except the party does as the ancient energy beings ask, more or less, and they’re basically only requesting what is 100% reasonable for any sane person.
Same with Tactics Ogre, also by Matsuno. It feels like we don’t fight Raithwall because that arc got cut, more than that he was a good guy.
According to the etymology section of his name, Raithwall “likely derives from Rædwald of East Anglia“, which wouldn’t be surprising, as it wouldn’t be the first time in this franchise that character’s names are bastardizations of real historical names.
Anyway, here’s my (second) weekly rant about FFXIII. I like the Gambit system fine, but it only really works in an actionized battle system like the one in XII. XIII uses a relatively similar system (whereas you only control the main character and leave a few instructions for the others to follow), but the battles are more traditional, with the end result that the combat is trivialized. I’ve said this one too many times before, but combat in XIII is so easy that you can literally play the majority of this game with your eyes closed, and that is without using the auto-battle system which, as the name implies, literally lets the game play itself.
I’m all for accessibility, but that games takes it to ridiculous levels. At that point why even bother releasing a game at all? Make it a movie instead.
The systems aren’t that similar. In XII it’s an interesting little programming puzzle (that doesn’t give you quite enough to tap into its potential). In XIII it’s about picking the right combinations of stances at the correct time.
The thing about XIII is they were crazily slow at actually giving you control of the system.
Yeah, in 13 they really wanted the player to try everything at length before giving you the option to choose your team.
There’s not many things I’d go to bat for on FFXIII’s behalf, but I think it’s battle system is pretty great, and even one of the better ones of the series if I’m feeling generous. It sacrifices the granularity of hand picking every action for something faster paced that has you swapping between buffing/debuffing, healing/tanking, building meter, belting out damage or any combination of the aforementioned by quickly flicking over to what paradigm setup you want for the particular situation. It makes battles flow quite well and gives you good enough control over the fights that your performance can differ vastly depending on both how you set it up and how you handle it in the fight itself….
…After about 30 hours of playtime, once the game lets you actually use it to it’s full extent. On the very few worthwhile fights you have left by that point. I think XIII has a great combat system dragged down by a bad game, and the reception would have likely been totally different if they let you off the leash 3 hours into the game instead of 30.
I still think its pretty half baked, 95%+ of fight can be won by simply keeping your team in com/mage/mage (don’t remember the name of the mage class) and not doing anything in battle beyond picking auto fight. The only 2 exception are esper battle, which are just mini puzzle (that you often have to lose just so you can make the right class combination) and boss battle where you rotate trough the same 4 class setting.
It feel like FF13 was made for a game where you fight with, say, 10 party members and instead of controlling one you have to constantly switch individual character class based on the flow of battle.
“Firearms exist in this world, and magic doesn’t change the fact that firearms are the universal hard counter to knights.”
Not really. You need serious penetrative power to punch through proper steel armour. Firearms were unable to do that for centuries, until incremental refinements meant you could have high-powered rounds in rifled barrels without the whole apparatus slowly jamming up with unburned powder and eventually exploding in your face.
Historical armour from the right period often has a dent in it from where the armourer shot it to test for bulletproofing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofing_(armour)
>Firearms were unable to do that for centuries
Depending on the thickness of the armor, yes. Over the course of those centuries, though, armor was gradually made thicker to counter improving gunpowder, and conversely made less covering to keep weight down to a manageable amount. By the English Civil War, if I recall correctly, plate armor typically left the forearms and lower legs uncovered, and by the Napoleonic Wars armor was mostly limited to a few units of heavy cavalry wearing chestplates
I didn’t want to be the one who said it but yes, the decline of knights had more to do with state consolidation allowing the fielding of large professional armies which made the “eggs in one basket” approach of expensive warrior-aristocrats less effective.
Of course, that state consolidation was partly a result of the proliferation of cannons, which were extremely effective against medieval castles. So you might instead say that guns are a hard counter to the political apparatus that enables knights?
The Raithwall stuff really feel like there was a big twist at some point in development and it was cut. Later on we’ll meet the “people” who put Raithwall in power and the game treat them like they’re absolute evil and when they offer our character the same deal they gave Raithwall the game is pretty clear we shouldn’t take it and that it would be like a deal with the devil. Yet Raithwall was absolute good and at no point is it even implied that his rule was bad for people, you could even say that everything bad happening in the game is a results of Raithwall legacy being eroded. The game never even attempt to bridge those two aspects.
Still its a pretty unique idea, there’s very few game story where the old conqueror was considered good and I wished it was developed more, maybe instead of Ashe seeing her dead husband ghost for no reason whatsoever she could be having conversation with Raithwall about the burden of ruling. Maybe Raithwall had a really successful empire but a really crummy personal life and he regret taking the deal while also acknowledging that this sentiment is somewhat selfish.
Given more facts about those people, Wraith-Wall is actually a fantastic case of nominative determinism.
I’ve been following this blog for years. I don’t believe that last part for one second.
I can only imagine the fractal madness that awaits anyone foolish enough to ask this author about the infrastructure of this world. Given how they took the simple premise of “bad guys assassinate benevolent leader” and turned it into a 4-dimensional puzzle box of contradictory tropes, it’s safe to assume they would fail spectacularly when it comes to advanced, detail-oriented worldbuilding.
My guess is that everything runs on perpetual motion machines, which somehow still require fuel, which comes from plants, which is grown using back-breaking manual labor, which is driven by slave driver robots that run on solar energy, which are programmed by blind priests who don’t believe that technology exists.
You just came terrifyingly close to describing the premises of human technology in Warhammer 40k…
ALL HAIL THE OMNISSIAH
FEAR THE ABOMINABLE INTELLIGENCE
Final Fantasy IV had some enemy encounters that were just an unhatched monster egg that would hatch after the battle started. They, too, could ambush you.
I actually liked the added danger of elementals and touched on the reasons in Rocketeer’s last post:
The entites aren’t really training for any later game design lesson. They’re just another aspect demonstrating that the rest of the world is there and it’s dangerous and it’s not strictly curated to be an ever-yielding path for our main characters to slash their way through. The fact that they don’t automatically attack means you can get past them if you’re careful, but the fact that they can attack due to relatively benign actions means that you do have to pay attention rather than casually strolling by like they were some caged zoo animal. It’s danger for its own sake.
Subtly, the fact that they open with Silencega makes them harder to fight but easier to escape, in the sense that if this previously-friendly monster suddenly mutes your party and turns hostile then that’s your cue to get away (assuming you have Libra up and can tell how grossly it outlevels you at this stage). For those who haven’t played, this is also an unusual installment in that you don’t get a Game Over unless you lose the entire party; none of this “lose if the current battle team dies while the rest are standing on the sidelines watching” or even “lose if the party leader goes down even if you have Raise” (look, I can complain about FF XIII too). So while this thing is likely to kick your ass it’s actually very unlikely to outright kill you if you were paying enough attention to have any idea what you’re up against.
Please stop and explain how the infrastructure and the entire supply chain of this world operate.
It all comes from TIM Island.
Re: Entite
I think it’s one of the last instances when you had to buy things called Ultimania to get through the game. Ultimanias were kind of extensive guides to many puzzles, hidden artifacts (Zodiac Spear, I’m talking about you!), hidden bosses and so on. Now we have this little thing called the Internet, but back then it was the only source of information.
Every Final Fantasy had one back in a day.
Personally, I think the gambit system works a lot better on paper than in practice. In theory “JRPG battle via basic programming” is kind of a cool idea, but in practice I find the system too limited to do much interesting. Other than the obvious “[Ally: X status] -> [curing item/magic]” and “[Ally: [Heal]”, I don’t find there’s a ton of interesting things to do with the system, so most everyone ends up just set to attack.
For one, a lot of stuff that I’d like to do with gambits end up requiring more precise logic than what the game actually supports (i.e. ANDs/ORs/NOTs).
To pick a specific example, one item you can find in the Sand Sea is a Healing Rod. Humorously, it’s literal. This isn’t a magic wand that makes your healing better – it’s a rod that you hit people with in order to apply Regen to them. … which seems like a useful thing, until you try to fit it into the gambit system. The command I’d like to set is “[Ally: Lowest Health] AND NOT [Status: Regen] -> Attack”… but it lacks the AND and NOT to actually set that up.
In practice the weapon is useless except for manually controlling the healer.
—
The other problem I have is when I want to turn some behavior on and off – e.g. I want my to steal until successful, then attack. There’s no gambit for “stop stealing once successful”, so you have to manually turn it off if you want to switch from stealing to attacking[1], and going into the gambit menu to make changes in the middle of combat is annoying: it’s not a single button press, you’ve got to pause, scroll down to “Gambits”, then select the character you want to edit.
The game almost solves that with having multiple gambit sets per character that you can switch between… but again that requires going into the Gambits menu in the middle of combat which is not a quick operation. Plus if you want to just make a small change to the gambit set, (e.g. disable steal, keep the rest of the gambits in place) it means duplicating the entire set and keeping them “in sync” manually.
—
I can see this system becoming really good if they iterated on the design, but in traditional Final Fantasy style, they threw it away instead and replaced it with something completely different, and it mostly serves the purpose of letting you automate away some of the boring combat. Strictly speaking, it’s better than the alternative, but I wish the game had more interesting combat to begin with.
[1] I see some people set up to “steal >= 90% health” which is a decent workaround, though it might mean giving up after a single failed steal, or attempting to steal from an enemy multiple times while the rest of the party attacks a different enemy.
It’s arguable that the Paradigms of FFXIII was an attempt at an iteration on Gambits. Too bad not all the changes made were improvements. Especially given that it feels like they sometimes corrected the problem of the AI teammates doing the wrong thing by dumbing down the battle system until the AI’s strategy gets it right.
The Healing Rod (sometimes it’s a staff) is an FF tradition. A lot of FF games have throwbacks to earlier games in them and sometimes the developers forget to retool the throwback items for the gimmicks built into the latest entry.
About the way stealing works as a gambit…
The gambit system is actually smart enough to prevent characters from performing pointless actions, e.g., you can actually just set status curing items to “Ally: Any” and not specify allies with the status needing curing, and your characters won’t just spam the item endlessly but only use it on allies on whom it would have the proper status-curative effect.
Given this, players have always been frustrated by the way stealing works as a gambit. Why can’t it recognize, in this same way, that an enemy has already been stolen from, and pass over that gambit the way it passes over other valid-but-useless gambits? Well, there’s actually a reason for this! They specifically considered making Steal work this way in gambit logic… but director Hiroyuki Itou thought it made stealing too easy. That’s it. It was a conscious decision to make stealing less convenient.
Ah, I’d noticed the “no useless actions thing” in that you can do this with buffs, never noticed it works for removing ailments. I’m a little surprised it works that way as it seems to make a good chunk of the gambit conditions you can buy pointless.
This is not true. Elementals go hostile from any magic, including the enemy’s. And you’re fighting waves of enemies here that love casting Haste and Slow. That Entite is nearly guaranteed to turn hostile even if you’re just running.
Maybe I missed it, but I’ve played quite a bit of this game (including a full playthrough of the three major editions) and I can’t recall ever seeing this happen even once. I found it pretty easy to not provoke them once I noticed that magic was setting them off and started turning gambits off accordingly.
Could be a version change. I think it was in the Rains I specifically set my guys to only attack, and an enemy spell still made the nearby elemental go hostile.
Society and it’s infrastructure would look very different, but it shouldn’t logically result in the world being “stuck”. Industrialization and development still happens, it just takes a different form, because the technology is based on different principles.
For example: anything that’s commonly useful still needs to be made economically at scale, and that drives what “magic” gets used and how. If it takes a prohibitive amount of skill and training to make a single enchanted whatsit of any utility, then conventional industrialization is still incentivized to happen. If the ability to make enchanted whatsits of utility can be trained easily enough to scale, then wizarding degrees become the new engineering degrees, and enchanting becomes the means of industrialization.
If the enchanting process doesn’t scale to manufacturing, then you make enchanted machines to manufacture mundane whatsits (in which case you still have strong incentive to develop mundane whatsit technology). And so on.
In high-magic fantasy settings, “magic” is often really just technology that exploits physical laws that don’t exist in our world. Like, the people of whatever FF12’s world is called wouldn’t think of this situation with the oil rigs as “technology being replaced by magic”, they’d just think of it as one technology replacing another, very analogous to how we conceptualize the idea of solar or nuclear power replacing coal. Or steam power being replaced by electricity.
Labeling stuff like that as “magic” feels like a sloppy conceit of our world being ported down into their world in a way that doesn’t make diegetic sense. Even though the key physical forces/principles don’t exist in our world, conceptually this stuff is technology. It doesn’t even really work as a conceit, because pulp sci-fi stuff like “hyperdrive” is often just as much outside the principles of our reality, but audiences and authors have no difficulty conceptualizing it as “technology” instead of “magic”.
Some people think this is about how well something is understood (Clarke’s Law, et al), but this isn’t accurate. “Technology” doesn’t imply deep understanding. An ancient coppersmith has no idea how fire and metal really work. He might believe his forge is powered by a salamander spirit or whatever. But he knows how to use it to make hammers and knives and such, and both that process and its products are technology.
This isn’t just a FF thing. It also applies to D&D, Elder Scrolls, and basically any other fantasy universe where “magic” is a set of real forces that are utilized in structured, repeatable ways. “Magic” in these settings is something that is existential and consistent enough to be subjected to science and engineering. The inhabitants of these worlds shouldn’t have a distinction between these phenomena and phenomena that we’d consider “natural”. Something like “manna” should be just as much a scientific/naturalistic concept to them as gravity or electricity.
People of these settings absolutely can and likely would have a concept of “magic” (for the same reasons we do), but it would be defined the same way it is for us: explainable things that typically can’t be demonstrated or duplicated well enough to even prove they exist, much less be commonly used. Stuff of legends and snake oil and fiction. It’s just that for them that category is slightly more exclusive than it is for us.
In a taxonomic/semantic sense, all magic should be wild magic, and rarely encountered, regardless of setting. If it isn’t, then it proportionally won’t be seen as “magic” to the people of that world. Or at least no more or less magic than other technology is (for those worlds where any technology is labelled as “magic” by people who don’t understand it). Doesn’t mean you can’t have people throwing fireballs or other stuff that would be called magic in our world, just that they wouldn’t call that stuff magic.
Magic as a concept isn’t counter-technological, or counter-scientific; it’s counter-existential. If it’s demonstrable, systemizable, and useful, then it’s not magic, and the people using it shouldn’t be written as calling it magic any more than we call, say, electricity magic.
The Trails JRPG series does a good job with this. The world is going through a rapid industrialization based on something called the Orbal Revolution. Orbal energy drives technological systems like trains, airships, cars, computers, and even a version of the internet. It also drives the spells the characters use in combat.
But there is also a hidden world of spiritual power, exercised more directly through willpower and personal training, with covens of witches, spirits haunting ancient castles, and the like.
At a few points characters speculate on the relationship between orbal energy and spirit magic, and it’s sometimes implied that the former may be a mechanical way of tapping into the latter, but it’s never conclusively stated.
Final Fantasy VI actually made the difference rather principled, in that “magic” encompassed abilities granted by the Espers specifically. There’s one character in the beginning who can cast magic without any known connection to the Espers, and the mystery of why she can do this is a plot point. There are even some characters who don’t know the difference and just think “oh wow she can make fire in battle, that’s cool I guess” without realizing what she’s actually doing.
Slight point of contention. You are for the most part utterly correct. But in tabletop rpgs like dnd and pathfinder, there are gods with magic as a domain, and gods with artifice as a domain. Meaning the gods themselves draw a distinction between some natural systems of their world and others.
This means the distinction between technology and magic is built into the system, in terms of how divine domains divvy up aspects of reality between the gods. So the people living there would have a *very* similar distinction between magic and technology.
Turns out, they are both real (but no posts):
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My god, I was going to joke that I could not find the links, but they went ahead and did it.
Shamus: OnlyFlans and OnlyFrans were particularly high-quality humour! I laughed, aloud.
Sometimes, designers just get sadistic and forget to ask this basic question above. It’s the game designer version of “subverting your expectations”. I’ve seen it in a couple of D&D adventures from the last few years. Players are put in a position to make a choice, and the most level-headed one is the wrong choice. This would be fine if there was some additional information to help make the decision so the PCs aren’t coasting by only on common sense, but there isn’t: it’s just the designer screwing with the PCs.
I remember a lot of early RPG adventures tended to deliberately make the sensible choice be the wrong choice. “When you finally you surface from the water and take a breath, you discover that the air in the cavern above is poison! Ha! Gotcha! You should have dived down and opened the giant clamshell instead!”
Both the game manual and a man in the magic shop in Rabanaster will tell you to not use magic near elementals. You’ve skipped this game’s tutorials if you didn’t talk to the shop NPCs in Rabanaster.
When it comes to gambits, they are a diversion from the true fix for boring repetitive battles in RPGs, which is not to make them automatic, but less frequent. The reason this system even is in the game is inherently bad.
In almost any other game I would agree, but this game’s design heavily encourages a lot of revisiting old areas and once you’ve gone that route you have to accept either trivial battles or level scaling (and the last time FF tried level scaling we ended up with FFVIII)
y only vivid memory of my first playthrough was getting mostly wiped (maybe by the elemental? That part isn’t so vivid) about halfway through the Sandsea. I had forgotten to buy phoenix downs and everybody was dead except for Penelo. She could cast Cure but did NOT have Revive. I had to pull aggro on a single enemy, kite him to an area she could kill him, then run around in circles until she regained enough MP to heal back up. There were no savepoints nearby and there certainly wasn’t autosave so that was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve had in a Final Fantasy game.
I’m 95% sure that Raithwall, or at least the idea of “benevolent, no really: benevolent conqueror” is loosely based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, a Japanese historical figure who was the first Shogun (and/or since there are three major magic macguffins, it’s also a reference to the three “great unifiers” of which Ieyasu was the third). Shoguns are indeed totalitarian military dictators, but Japanese historians generally view the rule of the Shogunate to be far, far more preferable to the Sengoku or “Warring States” period.
The tl:dr of Sengoku goes like this: you have wars like the 100 years war in Europe, right? Imagine something like the 100 years war, but it’s literally every Japanese province in a cold war against literally all of their neighbors for almost two hundred years.
It was so bad that all Oda Nobunaga really needed to almost unify Japan himself was a single provincial ally that he could trust with his life. That ally was Tokugawa Ieyasu, who originally was fine with being his friend’s vital ally. After Nobunaga was betrayed and assassinated by another of his generals, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ascended to the position of Imperial Chancellor (but not Shogun), and, long story short, eventually Tokugawa Ieyasu seized power after Hideyoshi died to prevent yet another civil war. (I’m actually skipping over several other civil wars that also happened parallel to these events. It. Was. That. Bad.) Ieyatsu was technically only Shogun for two years, but he strengthened the Shogunate so the country wouldn’t fall back into chaos. He was not a nice guy, and wiped out several clans that were on the wrong side of the major civil wars. But he did stop all the civil wars and was basically, more or less, Japanese Abraham Lincoln.
So to the Japanese audience, it would probably seem weird to characterize Raithwall as a bad guy.