T w e n t y S i d e d

The sun-scorched Giza Plain has entered its rainy season, transforming it for a time into a swampy network of rushing wadis. Just beyond it lies the Ozmone Plain, a rather pretty area dotted here and there by derelict airships from a battle long, long ago. Both areas can be jogged through easily and nothing of import occurs therein; Jahara, settlement of the garif, lies upon the western edge of Ozmone.

However, the game opens up a great deal at this point, and canny players can test their mettle against areas they really aren’t supposed to be in to grab tons of equipment they’re not supposed to have. So it was that by the time I had crossed the two small areas between Rabanastre and Jahara, I had packed on over a dozen levels and adorned myself with some very high-tier equipment. But the greatest allure of these areas is the severed limbs of greasy monsters.

See, as in most RPG’s, the player can always go spelunking in some haunted ruin and rummage through random hope chests and clay pots inexplicably containing plate armor and magic staves of calamitous power, but FFXII has something else up its sleeve, too: the bazaar.

Allow me a tangent here. Er, again. Just.. just go with it.

With a handful of exceptions, monsters in FFXII have four to six items they can drop, some common and some rare. Sometimes these items are things the player can equip or use right away, but at least half of them fall into the Loot category. Rather than just horking up scads of gil once they expire, the player makes money by selling loot to merchants. Stronger monsters have rarer, more expensive loot. Simple, right?

Well, ideally it would be, but selling certain combinations and quantities of loot will unlock special one-time offers for all manner of equipment. Some weapons, like new ammunition for ranged weapons (especially guns) are all but unavailable anywhere else. In particular, the Tournesol, one of the game’s ultimate weapons, can only be obtained through the bazaar after trading in top-level materials which themselves require the bazaar as well. Those who know what loot to sell, and where to get that loot, can keep themselves well ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately, knowing either of those things is impossible. Short of keeping two or three FAQ’s open at all times and making a fucking spreadsheet,No judgment, we all do what we have to do to cope with compulsive anal-retentive completionism. the bazaar might as well be the Voynich Manuscript; if you’re lucky, the bestiary might tell you— on a monster’s secondary page— one of the several items a given monster drops. Beyond that, you’ve just got to kill a few dozen yourself to find out, and then commit the drops of several dozen monsters to memory. Certain other secondary pages might give hints about what a particular recipe requires, but only on the rarest occasion does it tell you everything you need. So yes, that’s a lot of monster grinding beforehand to have a chance at learning something that may help you discern part of what you need to unlock something unknown that may or may not be of any use to you once you’ve already spent the money for it; Bazaar goods are mystery boxes referred to only by cryptic titles until you pay for them. Even then, some of the most useful loot for the bazaar will only have a chance to drop if you happen to possess one of a group of items called monographs, which are themselves obscenely expensive and can only be unlocked through esoteric means.

It’s an opaque, bass-ackwards system. It seems to reward either complete chance— since you will stumble into several bazaar items just by turning in the wheelbarrow of severed wolfman dicks every foray into the wild turns up— or through total reliance on guides and FAQ’s, with nothing in between being worth much of a damn. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like how Final Fantasy XI tended to work much of the time… Yes, I’m polishing that old chestnut again: the bazaar would have been a fine system for an MMO, with the overall availability of certain goods relying on the loot brought in by the player base, and an investigation of the obscure bazaar/loot dependencies would be right at home on a site like FFXIclopedia or Allakhazam. But the form it took in this game is tedium incarnate, a nuisance that serves only to occlude the postgame with interminable chart consultation and grinding; beyond a certain point, Final Fantasy XII can come to resemble a robust Chinese medicine market simulation with a hackneyed faux-medieval technothriller riding on top of it.

And if you dare claim you got a Tournesol without considerable outside aid, drink poison and choke on your lies.

Aaaaaaaaanywaaaaaay…. Arriving at Jahara, you meet the garif for the first time. Garif are an odd tribe of mask-wearing humanoids. Every garif wears a mask from the time they are born to the day they die. These masks seem to resemble the beak of a bird of prey, with soaring horn-like protrusions. They really wear those damn things as babies? Garif must have strong necks! They are, in fact, a good deal larger than humans, and seem to have rusty brown fur that lightens on their fronts. It takes a bit of effort to see they aren’t part of the masks, but they also seem to have pointed ears, as well.

Garif society works on Catholic rules: the higher up you are on the totem pole, the more badass your mask is. As Vaan approaches the small bridge into the settlement, the sentries take one look at the effeminate foreigner and brusquely tell him to GTFO. But from behind comes another garif, who says that he had been impressed watching us fight for a while, and that there’s no harm letting such warriors into the village.

Holy crap, man, I hope for your sake you weren’t watching me fight my way across half of Ivalice collecting monkey hooves and rainbow chaps or whatever; I at least got some overpowered equipment out of it and I still scuttled most of my interest in this game and a good chunk of self-respect.

Despite the cold welcome, the garif are a relaxed and accommodating bunch. I like them a lot, and I hope they were spared the inevitable non-hume genocide that seems to have taken place between this game and the time of Final Fantasy Tactics. The war chief is a bloke called Supinelu, and he’ll be one of a few familiar faces around the village. Though he has already let us in, he wants to know what brings us to Jahara, and, once Vaan explains the situation with the welcome narrative shorthand of a nodded head, points us in the direction of the elders.

Once inside, a quick look-see doesn’t turn up much. Geomancer Yugelu only has a bare understanding of nethicite, and even the High-Chief Zayalu seems to either know nothing or lack the authority to relay anything of value. It seems only the Great-Chief can enlighten us on nethicite, but of course meeting with him is a big deal. Ashe requests an audience from Supinelu, using her royal blood as leverage; he asks us if we happen to have any proof that she’s a princess, yet she hangs her head and admits she does not.

… What. Um, Ashe? Honey? Did you forget, the, uh… the, you know… major plot point? Acquired it specifically for the purpose now suggested? Raison d’être for even coming here…? No? Holding it in your pocket? I just EQUIPPED IT ON YOU, does that help at all? Nothing…? Uuuuughhh… Oh well.

Supinelu is given slight pause by Ashe’s blatant flubbing of the script, but improvises like a champ: he has seen the truth in her countenance, and that’s good enough for yurt-dwelling savages. Across another bridge, we arrive at the so-called Elderknoll, and sure enough there are elders and chiefs of all kind, just knolling it up, playing board games, feasting, dozing, exchanging anecdotes about epic mask-wearing and nanna rodeos and all the various nuances of the robust garif culture.

Seriously, Rabanastre fucking sucks, can we retire here? Please?

Within a high-fenced circle, the Great-Chief Uball-Ka himself sits behind a large fire, sporting the baddest mask a garif, or indeed, fucking anyone could ever hope to wear, and a great white beard billowing from underneath it. He takes the Dawn Shard and ponders it for a bit. Yet, while he can tell the stone has been recently used, he admits knowing nothing of how to do so himself; in fact, this deficiency on the part of the garif is a part of their history. The gods themselves granted their nethicite to the garif in ages long past, but the garif never got the hang of using it, or any kind of magicite apparently. Once Raithwall entered the picture, he showed up on the gods’ recommendation, signed for the Stones, and went off on his merry way to conquer all Ivalice.

The garif remember the Dynast-King fondly, saying he used the stones “to bring peace to a troubled time.” Yet the Great-Chief is crestfallen to have met with a descendant of Raithwall himself unable to enlighten her on how to make use of his legacy. In fact, he seems taken aback that Ashe doesn’t just know how to use it, by instinct or intuition. Be that as it may, he does confirm Ashe’s fears: the power of the stone, collected by ages and ages sitting in the rich mist of the Jagd Yensa, has been spent utterly. If she found a good place to let it recharge, her posterity would find it ready for them.

Hey, that gives me an idea… Did we leave the Epoch around here? No? Ah, nevermind then.

Uball-Ka gives a word of warning: the nethicite may indeed have something of its own will. He cautions gravely that those who desire nethicite are often in turn desired by nethicite… As he speaks, a third party intrudes upon our little parley. It’s… Larsa?! Holy shit, Gabranth! Do your fucking job! Every time you let this kid out of your sight he’s giving away Archadian state secrets and abetting your worst renegade war-mongering enemies. Put the little Loki on a leash if you want Archades to last through the end of the fiscal year.

No, they don’t explain how or if he knew where we were, or what else he was coming here for otherwise. Does anyone else in Archadia know our exact movements? Oh, whatever.

Sure enough, the precocious little scion has a plan in mind: leave for Bur-Omisace immediately. Larsa seems well aware of the Marquis’ counter-Imperial fleet. (Of course, the little bastard’s probably on their board of directors.) He worries, as the Senate does, that if recent events haven’t already provoked Rozarria into a new war, the inevitable clash between Archades and the ever-growing Resistance certainly will.

But if Ashe, with Dawn Shard in hand, were to receive the blessing of Gran Kiltias Anastasis, she would have an undeniable claim on the Dalmascan throne once more, a position she could leverage to prevent the war in the first place.

STOP THE CLOCK! Wasn’t Ashe just sitting on the stone for four days, knowing full well that she could do exactly this, yet electing not to because she believed that that would be more than enough in itself to provoke the Empire to war? Weren’t we trying to learn how to use the stone as a weapon specifically to enforce this claim on the Dalmascan throne, as insurance to prevent or even win the inevitable conflict that such an action would precipitate? Is Larsa telling us to embark on exactly the course of action that only moments ago was driving us under the impression that it would lead to the very Ordalia-Galtea-Valendia World War that he claims it will prevent, with Dalmasca and Bhujerba stuck right in the middle with no means of defending themselves from annexation or outright annihilation?

In a perfect world, that’s exactly what would have happened, and the ensuing Ragnarök of nethicite WMD’s and deific politicking resulting from it would fill Larsa with such supremely magnificent lulz that he achieves the kind of over-charge apotheosis that Sephiroth dreamed of.

Ashe is immediately offended by the idea, but for all the wrong reasons: preventing a devastating world war would be helping the Empire, in a sense. Holy shit, Princess… Larsa points out the blindingly obvious: such a war would see Galtea, and Rabanastre in the center of it, as the battleground. He states with confidence that, in such a situation, Vayne would not hesitate for a second to Dusk Shard Dalmasca into a mist-wreathed, zombie-haunted ruin. Ashe is given pause by being told what she already fucking knows.

Hey Larsa, weren’t you telling Penelo just a week ago how much you looked up to Vayne and how Rabanastre would be just peachy fucking keen with him at the helm as consul? Don’t get me wrong, I support your plan to wreck the entire continent on a lark, but that’s sloppy work.

After nightfall, Ashe is wandering around having a good hearty think, palming the Dawn Shard like a good luck charm, when she has another vision of Rasler just ahead on the Elderknoll bridge. She rushes forward to see… it was just Vaan.

I’m serious, game. Knock this shit off. I’m usually at least partly in jest every time I get on to the game about some annoyance or other, but this just sticks in my craw. This shit is the worst.

Vaan realizes she was having another vision, and confronts her about what they saw at the tomb. Ashe is taken aback that he could see Rasler as well, and wonders aloud why that might be. In response, Vaan gives a total non sequitur about not really knowing Ashe well or Rasler at all, and that maybe what he saw was a vision of his brother. Well, nice try hanging a lampshade on your own nonsense, but we already saw exactly what he saw, and I’ll tell you this: Reks didn’t dress like a fucking Nabradian prince.

But the game rallies expertly, and actually gives Vaan a great little bit of characterization. Mentioning Reks gets Vaan and Ashe talking about him, and Vaan questions out loud why his brother or Prince Rasler would fight the Empire knowing they were throwing their lives away on a fight they could never win. Ashe offers an obvious platitude— “To protect something”— but Vaan is having none of it, pointing out how they didn’t protect jack shit through their sacrifice and, in getting killed, prevented any other good they could have possibly done and brought more misery to the people closest to them.

Then Vaan makes an admission: all his high-minded talk about fighting the Empire and being a sky pirate someday was a lie for himself, a proud bluster meant to distract himself from the pain of losing his entire family to disease and war, knowing that he could never do anything about his hardships due to his powerless station in life.

Holy shit, game. This is starting to sound like we’re in Ivalice again. This is a tantalizing look at the character Vaan could have been: a maturing, relatable personality, even if it took a while to come to light; an awareness and examination of the nature of power and rank, a pillar of the setting; and a dynamite contrast to the princess that they’re so desperately trying to connect him to. Ashe, who was so bitter and angry, and so eager to let that grief and vindictiveness dictate her command of power which would alter the course of human events; who believed herself to have lost everything, yet remained a leader even in exile, playing the Great Game, juggling magic superweapons and treating with gods and kings alike; who hated the Empire and lusted for unbelievable power, for the sake of her satisfaction and her entitlement… and Vaan, who had almost nothing, and lost even that; who could only watch in desperate denial of his own impotence as his place in life was repeatedly degraded by people who see his rung of society as chattel; who, through terrible personal experience, knew very well the price of war-sport and the agendas of the strong.

Having spoken his piece, Vaan makes a resolution. He had tagged along from the start just to distract himself from his own misery without ever hoping to truly address it. But he knows now he’s stumbled on to something extraordinary in Ashe’s little band of misfits. He feels, for the first time, the freedom to affect the world around him, and he’s excited for the opportunity.

If at any time, even if nothing up to this point had changed, they had taken this little bezoar of personality and ran somewhere with it; if, in a game even partly about the very themes that they posit so strongly shaped this character’s life, ever gave him the chance to motivate the events of the plot; if they had done any damn thing at all with the character they tried to show us in this moment, that might have been enough to light a fire in this game, to set off something unique and unforgettable.

But they never do.

This fucking game. I swear.

The Travelog continues next week.

The Rocketeer —PLEASE—STAND—BY—