FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 8: The Protagonist Conversation

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 4, 2022

Filed under: Retrospectives 89 comments

This week Rocketeer talks about Vaan’s scene with the princess. Which means it’s time for us to have “the protagonist conversation” about Final Fantasy XII. To be honest, I hate this conversation. It’s an unproductive time-sink, and there are always a handful of people willing to argue about it until the internet runs out of storage space.

The argument begins when someone complains about the apparent protagonist of a game with an ensemble cast. Maybe they’re boring, unlikable, inert, or they have no personal stakes in the plot. So the critic will say so:

Critic: Man, Bob is just the worst main character.

And then it happens:

Oh Mr. Critic, I see you fell into the classic blunder. You assumed that Bob was the main character. Sure, he’s the only one present for the entire story, he’s the audience POV character, and he’s the most prominent character on the cover, but that doesn’t mean he’s the MAIN character. You sweet summer simpleton. 

If you really paid attention to this story on a thematic level and you understood how it fits into the overall lore of the setting, you’d realize that the actual main character is Bob’s bulldog Mr. Scruffy. Scruffs is the first character we see after the title card, and the way he growls at Dr. Crazo shows that he knew Crazo was going to betray the group long before anyone else in the party. This gives Mr. Scruffy agency that nobody else in the story demonstrates. 

Also, if you look at how this series handles pet sidekicks you’d realize that… [3,000 words of conjecture, selective wiki citations, and fan-wank.]

If you’re foolish enough to argue that Mr. Scruffy isn’t a good main character either, then your opponent will tag someone else in and they’ll argue that no – wrong again, dipshit. The main character is actually Princess Hotpants. And if you shut down that line of argument then there’s another guy in line who wants to sell you the idea that the main character is actually Jimmy Sidekick. And right behind that guy is someone who says they can prove to you that the main character is actually the villain somehow, because fuck you and your logic. Then there’s another guy who wants to make the case that the REAL main character is the nameless flower girl you bump into at the start of Act II, and another guy with a theory that the Flower Girl is actually the capital-G God of the universe and the whole story is just her daydream.

And while all of this is going on, everyone is going to want to split hairs with you over the differences between “main character”, “POV character”, “author insert”, “audience surrogate”, and “protagonist”.

Have fun!

The problem here isn’t that people make annoying arguments. If we got rid of all the annoying arguments, the internet would be out of content by Tuesday. No, the annoying thing is that you can’t actually disprove what these folks are saying. Sure, you can argue that their argument is weak and implausible, but you can’t corner them with a well-placed QED and shut them down in the same way you can refute 1+1=potatoe.Actually, you could argue that this would fall under “Not Even Wrong“.

When ActualLee shows up and argues that the protagonist is actually Mr. Scruffy, he’s just engaging in a really radical style of literary analysis. As a critic, I can’t rule ActualLee’s suggestions as out-of-bounds without also invalidating my own analysis. If we outlaw subjective interpretation, then all we’re left with is the obstinate literalism of CinemaSins

There’s a performative aspect to this sort of thing. It can be fun to propose and advance ideas that other people never considered. Things like Deckard being a replicant,Okay, this one is old hat now. But there was a time in the pre-internet 80s where this idea was brand-new and mind-blowing. or that Pixar movies all take place in the same universe, or even suggesting that Ferris Bueller is living in a “Groundhog Day”-style time loop. And of course there’s Indoctrination Theory, which people are still advocating as a fix for Mass Effect 3’s broken ending, eight years after the game came out. The problem isn’t that ActualLee is looking for hidden meaning or alternative interpretations to a story. That’s fine. The problem is that he’s using these alternative interpretations to attempt to shut down criticism. 

You can’t claim that Vaan is a shitty protagonist if Vaan isn’t the protagonist, and so you’re not allowed to make your case until you first prove that he is the protagonist, and good luck litigating that in an interpretive framework where anyone – or even no-one – can be the protagonist, a protagonist, or hey, just what is a protagonist, anyway?

Lit majors are taught to look for meaning and messages in a work, and it’s considered totally valid to find meaning that the author didn’t put there on purpose.  The author is dead, and ActualLee has the body in the trunk of his car. 

Having said all that…

Vaan is a Lousy Protagonist

If you haven't played the game and are having trouble keeping track of the characters, just remember than Vaan is the bored child with nothing to contribute. You can usually find him center-frame.
If you haven't played the game and are having trouble keeping track of the characters, just remember than Vaan is the bored child with nothing to contribute. You can usually find him center-frame.

Nothing about this guy works. He’s an audience surrogate that doesn’t ask questions on behalf of the audience. He’s a POV character that’s absent from many pivotal scenes. He’s a protagonist with no arc. He’s a leading man that blunders past two different suggested romances without noticing. He’s a hero that never impacts the plot and has little to no agency within the story. He’s the character that takes up the most space on the box while having the least interesting design. 

You could argue that he’s the main character because he’s got the best stats. But if making the player more powerful is all it takes to make you the main character, then allow me to nominate the Strategy Guide for the position. Vaan’s stats are nice and all, but they’re not nearly as game-breaking as the description of how the byzantine and bizarre bazaar works.

He doesn’t drive the plot. Maybe he has a little agency at the start when he accidentally blunders into some treasure, but once Ashe joins the party he becomes just another lackey in her entourage and spends the rest of the game orbiting her. Which might be okay if we assume he’s handing the protagonist ball to someone else, but then Ashe can’t do the one thing protagonists need to do, which is make decisions

His motivation of wanting to be a sky pirate is a good idea, but it doesn’t work because the game doesn’t do anything with it. Balthier is positioned in the story to be his mentor, but he never does any sky pirating, he never teaches the kid anything, and the two never bond. Obi-Wan never handed the kid a lightsaber, told him about the force, or taught him to fight. Shit, the two don’t even talk to each other after Penelo is rescued. All we do is fly Ashe around in an airship. Sometimes. When it isn’t broken or grounded by contrivances. 

Vaan isn’t training to be a sky pirate, he’s training to be a royal chauffeur. 

Go ahead, be the protagonist. / Oh no, this is your story. You go ahead. / I couldn't possibly. You do it. / Oh please, you're doing me a favor. Go right ahead and take charge. / I really don't want to steal your story. / Etc.
Go ahead, be the protagonist. / Oh no, this is your story. You go ahead. / I couldn't possibly. You do it. / Oh please, you're doing me a favor. Go right ahead and take charge. / I really don't want to steal your story. / Etc.

Yes, this scene where he talks to Ashe is really good. You could use this scene as a starting point for a journey. You could use this scene as the turning point in a journey. And maybe you could even make this moment the completion of an ongoing journey. But you can’t build an entire arc out of a singular point. This scene introduces some interesting ideas, holds them up just long enough to make us curious about them, and then drops them and wanders off forever.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Actually, you could argue that this would fall under “Not Even Wrong“.

[2] Okay, this one is old hat now. But there was a time in the pre-internet 80s where this idea was brand-new and mind-blowing.



From The Archives:
 

89 thoughts on “FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 8: The Protagonist Conversation

  1. MerryWeathers says:

    Things like Deckard being a replicant

    Never understood why this theory caught on, wouldn’t it invalidate one of the big themes of Blade Runner about how Replicants like Roy ironically end up being more “human” than the actual humans themselves like Deckard?

    1. Mattias42 says:

      The Westwood game adaption did something really interesting with that ‘Is Decker a Replicant?’ thing, since it has at least a tiny amount of choice you can do due to the nature of the medium. They basically made Decker and thus the player, answer that question themselves by your choices.

      https://youtu.be/zPyqInHrHR8

      Were you human all along? Were you just another tool, literally, for the big businesses to enforce a horrific law they wrote? Literally programed with the memories of succeeding the test that proved your humanity?

      …Or did you get radicalized and brainwashed by a terrorist, to the point where you don’t even see yourself as a human anymore? Or did you even have to be a replicant, for him to call you ‘Brother’ in that time-line, or is it an earned bit of camaraderie between freedom-fighters?

      And most importantly… they actually never answer the question. There’s no scene where you ever get proof one way or the other, you just have to live with what seemed the best choice for you.

      Great stuff. For the longest time, it was my THE go-to example of just what sort of stories only games can tell, due to their interactivity.

    2. RamblePak64 says:

      Part of the reason the theory stays alive is because Ridley Scott insists on it. I don’t have the citation for it but my understanding is nearly everyone, including Philip K. Dick, hated the idea of Deckard being a replicant but Scott just wants to keep on pushing the idea, insofar as the “Final Cut” adds unused footage from Legend with a unicorn to try and spell it out to the viewer through nonsense dreams or something.

      Or perhaps those were also in the Director’s Cut. I don’t wholly recall as I only saw the theatrical cut since that’s what was on Netflix.

      1. Christopher says:

        It’s definitely the idea I got, having only watched the final cut version. Deckard has some unicorn dreams and one of the cops on his team threw him a unicorn or something near the end. It’s been a couple years, but I got the distinct impression they knew what was in his head because it was put there.

        1. Andrew McCarthy says:

          Scott also used the Schüfftan process of optical composition to give the replicant characters, including Deckard, glowing pupils in certain scenes. (Guillermo del Toro used this as an in-joke in Hellboy II with the “Schufftein goggles” that allow people to see fairies.)

          I think the usual reason people object to the idea of Deckard being a replicant is that they prefer the idea of Deckard the human having less of a soul than the replicants he hunts. Personally, I like both ideas, but Ridley Scott has always been very clear that he intended Deckard to be a replicant in the movie.

      2. Shufflecat says:

        Cheat sheet for the different cuts:
        The theatrical cut is the one with the narration, Vangelis score, and no unicorn.
        The “director’s cut” is the one with no narration, conventional orchestral score, and haz unicorn.
        The “Final cut” is the one with no narration, Vangelis score, and haz unicorn.

        IIRC there was also an old extended TV cut or something, but no-one watches or references it much. My understanding is it’s basically the theatrical cut with some deleted workprint footage stuck back in as padding.

        The “director’s cut” is actually a studio re-cut that was done as a cash-in. It had Scott’s input, but not his final say. The “final cut” is the actual director’s cut in the sense that it’s actually Scott’s own cut of the movie (and apart from the unicorn, is IMO legitimately the best cut).

        In my region Netflix only streams the “final cut”, but that may vary by region, and if you’re talking discs it could be anything.

        The unicorn dream isn’t complete nonsense…. in a very local Thermian sense. The basic idea is that the unicorn dream is part of his replicant programming in the same way as Rachel’s memories, so someone with access to his Tyrell product sheet (like his human handlers, i.e. Gaff) would know about it.

        …But in a larger sense it doesn’t make sense, as MerryWeathers says. It messes up the themes of the movie, and raises a lot of “voodoo shark” questions in-universe. Deckard being human is the cleaner, more consistent, and deeper option IMO.

        The sequel film makes better hay out of the idea of the main character being a replicant than any cut of the original is able to, and it’s enabled to do so in part by making it central instead of some kind of tacked-on twist.

      3. evileeyore says:

        Part of the reason the idea has any wings at all is that in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (oh smack, the book the movie is based on) Deckard briefly has an identity crisis (his life is pretty shitty and imagining it’s because he’s a Replicant is one way to come to terms with his failures as a husband and a cop) but it’s very firmly quashed within a chapter or two.

        (Don’t @ me, it’s been over 40 years since I read the book, but I was prepared going in the movie for that concept which didn’t appear in the movie for a decade, and is hamfisted into Blade Runner 2.)

  2. Daimbert says:

    In thinking about this, I wonder if the problem might be less someone being annoying or making an invalid argument and more that the nature of games themselves lends itself to this sort of thing. In a game, the POV character (if there is one) is always the player, but when we get into cinematic stories for games that doesn’t mean that they are at least the traditional protagonist, meaning the person who drives the story forward and, essentially, who the story is about. Here, Vaan is an unimportant player in big events and just does what everyone else wants and is just there, for the most part, so the player can be involved in them. This is quite different from, say, the Warden in Dragon Age who is a small player in those events but is indeed the driving force, and a complaint about DA2 is that Hawke is more of a Vaan than a Warden. But it’s definitely a valid artistic move to have the POV character not be the protagonist or most important character, as we can see in works that play with it like “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” who are minor characters in Hamlet and ultimately unimportant to it but are used there as our window into the story and some issues it might raise. Arguably, Ophelia in the game “Elsinore” is the same thing except it is easier to argue that she’s the protagonist of her own story because she specifically gets unique ends to the story that the more major characters from Hamlet don’t (except as driven by her). In the former, nothing the two do matters to change the outcome of the story, while in the latter her actions do, so she’s more a protagonist than they are.

    The thing is, playing with the protagonist is done not infrequently in games. Suikoden III, for example, has three “protagonists” and the player chooses who the Flame Champion is and so who is the “real” protagonist on their own. Games quite easily allow for this distinction between POV character and protagonist. The thing is, though, that sort of thing has to be done WELL. You can argue that the POV character is not, at least, a traditional protagonist, but the story still has to work, and specifically for games it has to work for the player who is the POV character. If the player doesn’t get an interesting story playing from the perspective of the POV character, there is a flaw in the POV character and in the story, even if that character is not supposed to be the protagonist.

    So it might be better, in games, to drop talking about the protagonist and focusing more on talking about the POV character or player-controlled character and how they relate to the overall story. That avoids the issue of defining who the real protagonist is since often the arguments like are being made here are based on arguments that the protagonist is the POV character and should help us narrow down just what’s wrong with the story overall without resorting to simple arguments over what a protagonist should do in a story.

    1. TouToTheHouYo says:

      I concur. It doesn’t matter if Vaan is a shit protagonist, he’s a shit character regardless.

      1. Rho says:

        Now, I have complained at length about Vaan in the past. However, for the sake of playing Devil’s Advocate, Vaan could have worked… except Square didn’t *do* anything with him. I don’t really know what was going on with the writing team for the game, but they built all the characters up to the point where it feels like the story was going somewhere.

        And then it doesn’t.

        Vaan never experiences any kind of growth or develops a real goal. Ashe basically gets an entire plot stuffed into five minutes at almost the last moment of the game, but it’s completely flat. Basch and Fran just turns into a generic party members, space that could be filled by grey boxes. Penelo… exists I guess? And what they did (or rather, didn’t do) with Balthier is a crime against decent art.

        In all these cases the team went to extraordinary lengths to set up story arcs and thematic threads and then, right when each was set to go forward, dropped them like they were disgusted by the idea of storytelling itself.

      2. Trevor says:

        Right. FFX showed with Tidus how you can do annoying goalless protagonist really well. Tidus, like Vaan, is a naive kid who needs the world explained to him, is in over his head, and has fallen in with a party of grown-ups (Yuna is the same age as him but she’s got adult responsibilities) on their quest to save the world. But FFX goes beyond using Tidus’s naivety as a way to deliver exposition at the player by making him the outsider whose perspective allows him to think outside the box and reject the whole cyclical system has been going through. Even before that critical moment in the plot, Yuna, the leader of the group, likes having him around because he provides levity to her Pilgrimage. The shoe never drops for Vaan and no one seems to like having him around.

        1. Chad+Miller says:

          Tidus isn’t a goalless protagonist; he has a goal from the start (“get home”), he just has no idea how to do that and so instead just clings to the few friends he has in the hope that the solution will present itself. Even his initial trip to Luca is framed as the rest of the party just humoring his delusions and hoping that mingling with such a large group of people will help him bump into someone who knows who he is, especially given his demonstrated skill in Blitzball and the fact that this is the biggest Blitzball event in the known world.

          At no point does FFX have to resort to “well, he’s here because that’s who the player is controlling” the way FFXII does.

          1. Thomas says:

            And then he actively romantically pursues Yuna and seeks to protect her, and it’s his influence that helps break Yuna from her fatalism.

            ‘This is my story’ is even the framing device and a key theme.

            Frankly though, it’s true for all the FFX cast to some extent, they’re all motivated and active participants in their story.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      The good thing about Hawke in DA2 is that they’re actually making descisions and affecting the story. They’re a fine POV character to be buffeted around events, because while they can’t STOP things happening in the world around them, they’re fully able to react to them*.
      Plus, you know, they go in treasure hunting expeditions, they form relationships, they make choices.

      *Well, mostly. The game still wouldn’t let me kill Isabela…

      1. Daimbert says:

        I will say here that I do think that Hawke was a good character for the kind of tragedy they were telling. They just don’t have the agency and the ability to make a huge impact that the Warden did. Although YMMV on that since you can end up as the leader of Kirkwall which is pretty impactful, but even then there are lots of big picture and even personal things that you can’t change, but if you could change them it wouldn’t be a tragedy that sets things up for the story in Inquisition.

      2. Mye says:

        I actually really liked Hawke compared to either other DA protagonist. They feel a lot more like a real character, especially sarcastic Hawke which is just delightful. I think a lot of people were disappointed in Hawke not being the super badass who decide everything, but I really like the “rag to rich” story.

        Also, yeah Isabela things is super annoying, if you give her up to the Qunari not only do you lose out on a unique collectable regent but the game cancel your choice by having her somehow escape from captivity. I don’t know why the DA writer are so obsessed with their female Rogue that they’ll always cancel out any player choice that undermine them.

        1. Also Tom says:

          It’s not just the DA writers, it’s Bioware. See the Omega DLC from Mass Effect 3, where any Shepard other than a complete renegade would have at least thought about not restoring Aria T’Loak to her position and putting Nyreen Kandros, who has the undeniable advantage of being a functional person who cares about Omega for reasons other than seeing it as an extension of herself, in charge instead.
          In order to avert that, however, the player is never given that option, and Nyreen is killed off in a way that is noble, self-sacrificing, and somewhat pointless, purely so that the writers can put their Strong Female Character where they think she belongs. Isabela has the same kind of dynamic going,

        2. Sleeping Dragon says:

          This. I am on record saying that DA2 is my favourite in the series (an unpopular opinion) and one of the reasons is precisely that Hawke is not the superbadass but sometimes just feels like one of the many actors in the story. Sure, ultimately the narrative gives them prominence, because player character, but the timelapses also help with the idea that they just stumble into events or get caught in their acquaintances’ stories rather than suddenly the big “A PROTAGONIST HAS ARRIVED” sign lit up and everybody treated it as a signal to have their existential or personal crisis in the next three days.

      3. guy says:

        I continue to hold the position that the Act 3 crisis is Hawke’s fault, albiet unintentionally. Hawke spent Act 1 providing the funding for the deep roads expedition, which brought back the idol, which Meredith made into the sword that made her go crazy. Previously she’d been a hardline but sane templar who probably wouldn’t attempt to exterminate the circle because a mage who is not and as far as I recall never was a member of that circle and who is standing there red-handed and confessing launched a terrorist attack.

        My main problem with Hawke’s role in DA2, though, is that the player has no option whatsoever to do anything useful about Anders before it’s too late. On my first playthrough in Act 1 I threw him out of the city and told him I’d kill him if he ever came back. Then in Act 3 he’s distributing pamphlets within the city and Hawke doesn’t even mention she’s trying to follow up on her threat. Then, admittedly probably as a bug, he got kidnapped and Hawke proceeded to go off and rescue him and let him just walk away.

    3. ContribuTor says:

      I like that approach in many games.

      There are challenges with that approach in ensemble games like this one.

      First and most importantly, the player doesn’t “control” one of these characters to a degree that they don’t control the others. We control them all individually for combat. We don’t control any of them in cutscenes. We control “the group” when we decide where to go in the open world.

      I’d argue ensable games are also way worse for giving agency to the cast. In a game like Dragon Age, it’s pretty clear our character is the one making decisions that advance the story. In ensable games, the developers are a lot more
      Comfortable with decisions being made for the party in a cutscene by one of the characters with nk player choice or input. This game is a great example – most of the interesting decisions that affect the plot need to be made by Ashe, because she’s the one who’s important to the politics of the world. So we watch while Ashe make the decisions for us. This isn’t because she’s specifically a player we don’t control, but rather that we don’t control ANY character for plot important decisions (all of which are made in cutscenes).

      So, all you’re left with is “who’s the POV character?” But even then, it’s not clear this is a single entity. We don’t generally have a first-person POV from any one person. The camera is usually off observing a scene, not tethered to one character. The scene shamus brought up a few episodes ago where the guards burst in and the composition is a mess is a good example. That’s not “what Vaan saw”. There’s an invisible cameraman who tends to follow Vaan around, but not always. If we want to equate “POV character” to “person most often present in the scenes,” ok, but that’s a weak definition.

      And that can be fine. That how most movies work. The audience is the camera. We’re not supposed to “be” one of these characters. And it’s how many ensemble games work.

      1. Syal says:

        the player doesn’t “control” one of these characters to a degree that they don’t control the others.

        Yes we do; we always have to be Vaan in town.

        1. sheer_falacy says:

          Also, he’s always a member of the party, I believe, unlike the rest.

        2. Chad+Miller says:

          Yeah, the last Final Fantasy game that didn’t define a clear player-character is VI. That game had a real ensemble cast, both in the sense that it changed things up repeatedly and no character stays with the player the whole time (in fact very early on you end up getting three different parties acting in parallel and the game lets you choose what order to use them in) and in the sense that focus shifts (generally focusing on Terra, then Locke, then Celes in the overarching plot with many other characters getting various arcs and moments in the limelight)

          The NES games had parties of 3/4 characters that never leave and, in the case if I and III, have basically no individual personalities at all (outside of III’s 3D remake). IV had Cecil as the clear protagonist. V is kind of an edge case between the NES and IV philosophies, with Butz as technically the main character but with so little time away from the rest of the main party that it’s at least debatable.

          The Playstation era had a main character for each game and didn’t make it even slightly ambiguous; if you tell me that you’re not playing Cloud, Squall, and Zidane in their respective games then I don’t know what to tell you.

          FFX is where this whole “but you’re not really the protagonist!” thing started and it’s interesting because it’s not like Tidus didn’t have his own story; it’s just that Yuna’s so important that people reasonably feel her story is overshadowing his.

          FFXIII clearly hints toward Lighting as the main character, although unlike in most of these other examples you do play other side parties sometimes. The only problem is that for the most part nothing interesting is happening, and those stretches are mostly “goddammit why is the tutorial 30 hours long” so nobody has this argument because nobody cares.

          FFXV actually harkens back to the whole “you have a fixed party from the beginning of the game” of the oldest games but still has a clear protagonist and main character in Noctis; the rest of the characters are his entourage, explicitly (to the point that it’s weird on the rare occasion that any of them leave)

          FFXII still behaves, mechnically, like X in that you clearly have one character whose viewpoint you’re following and that the party is defined by who is and isn’t with that character. It’s just the only game where we have this argument because said player character is that boring and superfluous.

          1. Mye says:

            Devil advocate for FF13 (its an awful game, but lets pretend it was a good one). You could easily make the case that Snow is the real protagonist, the very few time the groups make decisions, they usually follow Snow philosophy of doing whatever they feel like, damn be the consequence, including the ending. He’s also the one who get the girl in the end and is the most “protagonist like” with being a brash youthful naive character. Lighting… I don’t even think she make a single big decision in the entire game beyond her initial attempt to save her sister.

            1. Kathryn says:

              I’d argue* Vanille is the protagonist of XIII. Her choices drive almost everything that happens, starting with her choice to lie to Fang about what she remembered. She’s also the narrator (I think…they don’t show who’s talking in the subtitles for the narrator, but my husband said it was Vanille).

              *Although I do not care about it enough to actually *argue*. So perhaps I should have just said “my opinion is” and left it at that.

              1. Chad+Miller says:

                That’s right, Vanille is the one giving the voiceovers in those sections.

                Although you guys are half-making my “nobody cares” point given the way you clearly have considered opinions but both admitted you don’t care all that much. ;) Though I should have said Lightning was clearly the *player* character as I do feel strongly that’s the case even though I agree that she doesn’t have the spotlight much of the time even when it comes to the main plot. Actually her single largest contribution may be regularly breaking up the party; literally every single instance of the party splitting up is her doing. For the entire game.

                1. Kathryn says:

                  Oh, I think Squeenix intended Lightning to be the main character in all possible ways for sure. I just also think that in the story they actually wrote, Vanille’s choices drove the plot (most of them taking place before the game started). Even in Lightning Returns, we spend 13 or 14 in-game days piloting Lightning around, and in the big cut scene before the final boss fight, the decision that gives humanity a chance at the new world is…Vanille’s.

                  I do think about these things and have opinions on them, yeah. I would have majored in Eng lit if I thought it would pay as well as engineering. Where “don’t care” comes in is that I wrote one, or I guess now two, paragraphs making the case rather than 10, and if nobody agrees with me, I will just shrug and go on with my day.

          2. Retsam says:

            Isn’t FFIX also in kind of a similar boat to FFX and FFXII where Zidane is clearly the player character, but not really the character that the story revolves around.

            Admittedly, I remember, very little about FFIX, and didn’t finish it… but I can’t remember anything about Zidane, except that he’s a thief. Looking at the wikipedia, it looks like he has a meaningful role in the plot eventually, but definitely not anything that I got to.

            1. Syal says:

              Apart from endgame where he becomes the most narratively relevant, Zidane’s the emotional core of the party the whole way through. Freya, Amarant and Eiko are following Zidane specifically. Steiner’s arc is largely about Zidane getting him to reevaluate his life. Dagger and Vivi have their crises and Zidane helps them pull themselves together. He’s the clear party leader.

            2. Fizban says:

              I never finished my last replay so it’s been a while, but that sounds about right. He starts out as a thief who the Princess conveniently uses to escape, helps her out ’cause he’s smitten and figures he can turn a profit eventually, then I think gets sort of “hired” as part of the group that goes to investigate/intercept an attack on a city, where another friend/past romance? of his lives. There he meets the big bad and it gets personal (for both him and the big bad), I think he gets flashes of memories that hint towards the endgame revelations, and so he keeps going because he’s made some new friends and wants to put this guy down.

              Edit: and yeah, his interactions with each of those friends is a massive part of each of their arcs.

        3. Thomas says:

          Not in the field though. I’m curious who people stick with (outside of gameplay decisions). I normally switched to Ashe or Basche

          1. Chad+Miller says:

            I mean, you control all characters equally in battle in Final Fantasy IV but nobody really disputes that Cecil’s the player character.

            1. Thomas says:

              But in FFXII you probably pick one character and stick with them for most of your exploration, not controlling them all equally. I’m wondering if that’s an indicator of who the player would ‘prefer’ the protagonist to be. (Or maybe people pick Fran because she’s a hot bunny girl)

              1. Syal says:

                As far as i know, the avatar is always the leader of the party, and I generally made the leader one of the ranged characters because the ranged characters are the ones that can benefit from moving them around during battle. So, mostly Balthier and Fran (and Penelo for the brief time she had grenades). But I rotated through everyone as people levelled up and I brought in the unleveled folks.

            2. bobbert says:

              Fun fact: FFII(us) (&III) has a 2 player mode, where you only vcontrol a subset of the PC’s.

    4. Shufflecat says:

      Are there any games, western or eastern, where you have a party dynamic, but without a fixed protagonist?

      I’ll use Bioware games as examples here, as I’m unfamiliar with JRPGs.

      In Mass Effect, you have a diverse but largely fixed ensemble cast party, each with their own story and motivation, but Shepard is THE protagonist, both in gameplay and story. However since Shepard is a build-a-bear protagonist, he/she is actually the least developed and enstoried(?) character.

      In KOTOR, you have a diverse but largely fixed ensamble cast party, but your Jedi is only THE protagonist in a story sense. In gameplay you can freely swap POV around between characters. If you really wanted to, you could mostly roleplay being one of the party members, sans cutscenes. The protagonist is a largely predefined character with as much of a written backstory as any of the party members. You can build-a-bear their appearance, and make their in game decisions, but they aren’t a blank slate like Shep. My understanding is Dragon Age is like this too.

      Are there any games that go all the way with this: where you are given a party of developed characters you can swap POV around between, but with none of them being THE canonical or implied “main protagonist”? Like, not even a selection screen at the beginning, just who (if anyone) is the “main” character is purely an emergent descriptive rather than prescriptive result of whoever the player tends to inhabit or focus on most?

      1. Steve C says:

        Off the top of my head, “The Lord of the Rings: War in the North was definitely like that. Same with “Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone”. “Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance” was (I think) like that too. There was a PS2 Marvel superheroes game I forget the name of. Maybe it was “X-Men: The Official Game”? “Champions of Norrath” may or may not qualify with the ‘not even a selection screen’ qualifier. “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons” should qualify though even though there’s a clear favorite son by the end. There’s a few other games I can think of that I can’t remember the name of too.

        Anyway, it’s not super common. But it’s not exactly unheard of by in that genre of games. (Fantasy/Superhero) Especially ones operating in a licensed world IP or licensed ensemble characters.

      2. Tohron says:

        Octopath Traveler has an ensemble cast of eight, where you pick which character you start with. One could argue that the character you pick is the “main” character of that playthrough (the credits play when you finish that character’s main quest), but since that could be any one of the eight, that argument is a bit strained.

        1. Syal says:

          Trials of Mana is similar, in that you pick the main character at the start from your six potential characters, and that also determines what the final dungeon and boss fights are for that playthrough.

          Not sure how you would make a emergent main character, apart from putting time limits on the game so you can’t do most of the content in one pass.

      3. ContribuTor says:

        FFVI is interesting here because there three characters that are clearly the protagonist at different points in the story. Terra is clearly the protagonist early in the story. It shifts to Locke at some point after he enters the story and the Returners plot kicks off in earnest. Celes is pretty clearly the protagonist at the beginning of the second act. In the endgame, the party tends to split and Celes and Locke mostly share duties.

        For a majority of the game, you have a clear protagonist, even when the former protagonist is in the party. The late game gets a little fuzzier (though Terra is pretty clearly not it anymore), and it’s not an “anyone is the protagonist” situation. But I really liked the flow. Sort of like Game of Thrones (the novels) where different chapters would have different people they rotated around.

    5. Soldierhawk says:

      Shamus actually talked about protagonist vs. most important character in his FFX write up. He points out (very articulately) that Tidus may be the protagonist of X, but Yuna is the hero, and ‘main character.’

  3. Henson says:

    So here’s my dilemma:

    In Star Wars: A New Hope, the ostensive main character, or viewpoint character, for a sizeable chunk of the beginning of the movie is C-3PO. We’re seeing the assault on the blockade runner from his perspective, we follow him ejecting down the Tatooine, we see him wandering the desolate planet. It’s only when Luke is introduced into the story that there is a shift, and he becomes our main character. And it works.

    FF12 appears to be attempting a similar approach. Vaan is a smaller character caught up in larger events, but once the rest of the party comes together, the story stops being about him, or taking place from his perspective. The difference here is that the game doesn’t make a very clear shift. Are we moving to Ashe? She seems like the best choice overall, but the game doesn’t seem to commit to this. It actually feels more like the game becomes an ensemble piece, like FF VI…but even this isn’t clearly defined.

    In essence, I think the problem is not with Vaan. It’s that the story is timid about defining who it’s about, and since we started the game rather decidedly with Vaan, the audience is more likely to latch onto him as our main character than anyone else.

    1. Syal says:

      The thing about C-3PO/R2D2 is once Luke shows up, C-3PO stops getting the prime spot in cutscenes. The thing about Final Fantasy 6 is Terra, Locke and the other “main” characters are forcibly removed from the party at regular intervals, so new characters get the full screentime.

      The problem with Vaan is, whenever you’re in a town, you’re forced to use Vaan as the avatar. You can switch the viewpoint on the world map, but not in town. If we were switching characters in towns, there’d be a stronger case for it being an ensemble. Make Vaan the avatar in Rabanaster, make Basch the avatar in Bhujerba, make Ashe the avatar in the Garif Village, and now maybe Vaan isn’t the protagonist anymore. But as is, Vaan is the party, for the duration of the game.

    2. Retsam says:

      Yup, this whole R2D2/C3PO parallel isn’t an accident. Both Star Wars and FFXII are borrowing from the same source material – an old samurai film called The Hidden Fortress, at least according to wikipedia:

      George Lucas has acknowledged the heavy influence of The Hidden Fortress on Star Wars, particularly in the technique of telling the story from the perspective of the film’s lowliest characters, C-3PO and R2-D2. […]

      A number of plot elements from The Hidden Fortress are used in the 2006 video game Final Fantasy XII.

      And, yeah, “telling the story from the perspective of the lowliest characters” is definitely what FFXII is going for here. And clearly this plot device can work (see also Lord of the Rings), but it’s not a common trope for video games to invoke, and I think it creates a sort of mismatch between player expectations and the story being told.

      Honestly, I haven’t really decided how I feel about Vaan as the protagonist. I was definitely in the “Vaan is terrible” camp when I first played the game, but this time through I find I’m appreciating him a bit more – part of that is, of course, the magic of lowered expectations, but I also think he legitimately has a number of good qualities as the central figure in the game: he’s an “everyman” and strong foil for Ashe and sort of the central spoke connecting the party.

      He’s definitely not interesting enough to carry the story on his own, but I’m not sure he needed to be. He’s an obvious target for criticism, but I’m not sure he’s actually the weak link in the game’s story.

      1. Steve C says:

        That’s an amazingly good point. It is an adaptation. The source matters.

        Like if “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was adapted into a modern video game, what would that look like? The movie is a surprisingly faithful and literal adaption of the Grail myth. The narrative of the movie is all over the place. It’s still one of the best movies ever made. A video game would likely be a mess too. (I know there have been some Modern)

  4. Gargamel Le Noir says:

    “I’m pretty sure if they took annoying arguments off the internet there would be only one website left and it’d be called “bring back the annoying arguments!””

    1. Philadelphus says:

      “No! I’ve prepared this 1,263-word rebuttal on why annoying arguments should be left off the internet and why anyone who disagrees with me is wrong!”

  5. ContribuTor says:

    You sweet summer simpleton.

    I will be using this phrase in all my internet arguments going forward. Thank you, Shamus.

  6. Ninety-Three says:

    If you want to dodge the protagonist argument I think you could make a simple case that Vaan gets a lot of screentime and it’s all wasted. That’s a problem no matter what role he has in the story, and if you want to focus on the protagonist bit I think you can analyze it in terms of narrative function: no one in the story exercises any agency or has any personal growth and that’s bad, the writers should have put some of that stuff in.

    I think that in this specific case there might be something to the argument that Vaan isn’t the protagonist, but that’s because FF12 is a broken mess that kind of doesn’t have any protagonist at all. Critically, that’s a problem. This isn’t some avant-garde experiment in defying your expectations about narrative structure, it’s just another tragic casualty of development hell, this game ought to have had a functional protagonist and it did not.

  7. Syal says:

    Non-protagonist POV characters still have to contribute something to the experience. The Chief from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is not the protagonist, but it’s his view of the world that we’re following, how the orderlies are “empty people”, that’s not something you get without a POV character saying it. Bilbo Baggins is out experiencing the world for the first time, and is seemingly having a pretty grand time with it all. Tidus is seeing Spira outside of the whole religious order, and is also coming to terms with his relationship with his father. They don’t have to be The Protagonists, they’re worldview is impactful regardless.

    Vaan is anti-impactful. Theoretically he contributes a commoner’s perspective on things, but this is the only scene where he does so, and Penelo does it better when she talked to Larsa earlier. And Vaan actively takes away from establishing the invading Empire as the bad guys. Of course the guards are rude to Vaan; he’s a thief. They could be perfectly civil to the average person, and we wouldn’t ever know because we’re controlling a thief.

    You can fix it in a lot of ways. We’re a couple of beats off from meeting the main antagonist, and you could theoretically draw parallels between them and Vaan; maybe they’re the lowest rung in their own society, and Vaan sees something of himself in them. Just that little bit would give Vaan purpose as a viewpoint character. As a commoner, he could insult Raithwall’s legacy, pissing off Ashe but also making her question if she wants to follow in Raithwall’s footsteps. Or hell, he could be Gatta from 10, gung-ho about the Revolution until he sees people die for it. But, there’s just… nothing.

  8. Hal says:

    This was one of the things that bothered me about FF6 when I first played it. The game is the first “ensemble” cast in the American series (you have a dozen or so characters who, eventually, can be swapped out freely.) However, the game looks, for quite a while, like Terra is the main character. She’s the featured character on the promo art, she’s the first character you meet, and the game revolves around her story for most of the first half.

    Eventually the game moves away from this, both narratively and mechanically; after the mid-game shakeup, it takes quite a bit of time before you can get her back into your party (and doing so is entirely optional.) This always frustrated me. She’s set up to be the main character, but it’s almost as if the writers lost interest in her part way through. I know it has a lot to do with the ensemble setup of the game, and so if no one is the main character, everyone has to have some time in the spotlight for their story to play out. The frustrating thing about this is that many of these characters have a shallow and unfulfilling story as it is. I get that the game can only be so long, especially because it was an SNES game, but it just seems like if they’d had maybe 1/3 to 1/2 fewer characters, the game could have been so much more.

    1. Joshua says:

      This is why on one hand I would think that it would be neat to have a proper FF VI remake that actually fleshes the dialogue and story out. This was one of the last few RPGs where memory limitations severely curtailed dialogue, as just a half decade later you had Planescape Torment which had more scripted words than most books. Can you imagine the dialogue actually changing between party members depending upon who was in the group, a la many of the Bioware titles? Maybe the story wouldn’t have everything be such short-hand and feel so “shallow” as you said.

      On the other hand, I think the story’s told, and it often hasn’t worked to try and revisit a property decades later (LotR being a prime exception with the gap between it and the Hobbit), and that’s even if you can grab the original development team. If you can’t, it seems like you have the situation where there’s automatic backlash to people trying to add story where they don’t have the perceived right (see Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, etc.).

      1. Retsam says:

        Seems like this is exactly what the FFVII Remake is doing, and from what I’ve seen that’s gotten a pretty positive reception. I haven’t played it, (or the original FFVII, for that matter), but apparently it’s not just retelling the original game with shinier graphics (and realtime combat), but actually pulling in story elements from all the other FFVII games.

        Honestly, I wish “remakes” did this stuff more often – I get why they don’t: it’s cheaper and easier to just slap a fresh coat of paint on the original game and tinker with a few mechanics, and of course there’s always the risk that your changes will actually be for the worse (and even if they’re not, you may still turn off a good chunk of fans), as well as practical issues like voice actors…. but it’d sure be more interesting if they did.

        Like, yeah, I know everyone uses George Lucas as the boogeyman of why you shouldn’t change stories… but “Han Shot First” aside, I think people forget how many of George Lucas’s changes to those films were actually improvements. (The newer ending of VI is clearly better than “Yub Nub”, don’t @ me) And, while it’s not quite the same thing, I think the LoTR extended editions is a good example of just how much you can improve the telling of a story with a bit of additional content.

        1. MerryWeathers says:

          Seems like this is exactly what the FFVII Remake is doing, and from what I’ve seen that’s gotten a pretty positive reception. I haven’t played it, (or the original FFVII, for that matter), but apparently it’s not just retelling the original game with shinier graphics (and realtime combat), but actually pulling in story elements from all the other FFVII games.

          Not… really. The FF7 remake is less of a remake that slightly alters the story to take into account the expanded material that has been released and more like Terminator Genisys and the Rebuild of Evangelion movies in that the original plot ends up getting derailed and turns into a completely new story.

          Like, yeah, I know everyone uses George Lucas as the boogeyman of why you shouldn’t change stories… but “Han Shot First” aside, I think people forget how many of George Lucas’s changes to those films were actually improvements. (The newer ending of VI is clearly better than “Yub Nub”, don’t @ me)

          I feel like the only OT movie that ever benefited from the special edition changes was Empire Strikes Back, all the stuff changed and added there actually improve the movie whereas ANH and ROTJ are dragged down (significantly in the former’s case) by the changes with the exception of Victory Celebration being a better ending song than Yub Nub as you said.

      2. Hal says:

        On the other hand, I think the story’s told

        This is the big thing, I think. As much as I’d love to see a modern take on the characters, it seems like the magic would be lost.

        More to the point, I think if the FF7 remake is any indication, the game would be less “Let’s really flesh out the characters” and more “Let’s flesh out the setting,” as well as “Let’s make the spectacles really spectacular.” Like, I’m sure making the various cities (Narshe, Figaro, Vector) really beautiful would be neat. Having the Opera scene in full 3D/HD would be something. None of that makes the individual stories better, and I bet they’d avoid changing that stuff too much.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      To each their own, but I never minded that Terra wasn’t always around in Final Fantasy VI. We start with her story and then it moves on to others as and when they become relevant. She’s not necessary to the story all the time – And, crucially, whoever’s in the party, the plot is still clear. you always know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

      As other people have said, in XII the problem isn’t so much about who’s the protagonist, but flaws running through the whole story. Vaan would be fine if he has some clear reason to be around, or was contributing something. And just having him just be ‘also there’ all the time shines a spotlight on how pointless he is.

  9. Christopher says:

    I don’t think there’s a way to escape these sorts of arguments with the blog being what it is. People don’t explicitly choose who their audience becomes, but they sorta do with the content they make. A positive streamer who’s just out to chill gets a lot of easygoing hanging-out type comments, a video essayist who does a rare one-off stream gets questions about and discussions about game design in his streams. Even if the same people watch all these different creators, they don’t necessarily post the same kinds of comments to each, they read the room.

    I agree it’s annoying but I totally get why the What Do They Eat blog gets a lot of pedantic comments you know, lol

  10. Dreadjaws says:

    If we outlaw subjective interpretation, then all we’re left with is the obstinate literalism of CinemaSins.

    You’re being way too charitable to CinemaSins here.

    In FFVI you had a bunch of characters that could be considered the protagonist. While no one’s going to think the likes of Relm, Umaru or Setzer fit that role, you can make a good case for others like Terra (you start the game as her and follow her plea as she joins the rebellion), Locke (he makes the most work to move the plot forward) or Celes (who starts as an opponent and ends up leading the second half of the game). As someone mentioned up there, the game makes this whole thing work by constantly changing your party in the first half, giving more time for new guys to develop. This makes telling who the protagonist is hard because they’re all well developed.

    In contrast, in FFXIII Lightning is the clear protagonist by design (i.e. the developers intended for her to be the protagonist and waste no time in telling you so), while also being the less interesting member of the team (and, although only marginally, the less stupid one). You occasionally get separated from her, but this rarely works to advance the other characters’ development, it’s generally strictly for plot purposes, as character development occurs (as I’m not tired of mentioning) in the game’s datalog.

    It is also really pointless to define a protagonist in this game because early in the story they’re all railroaded into following a goal. They don’t go for this goal for very personal, individual reasons and while they do have some personal arcs of their own all of them are, at most, only tangentially related to the goal they’re forced to pursue. Their arcs don’t affect how or why they fight, since they do it because they’re forced by a curse.

    Like, imagine if in A New Hope Luke gets content with learning the story of his father and maybe occasionally fighting stormtroopers when they show up in town but near the end he has to go destroy the Death Star because he loses a bet. Actually, no, it’s worse than that. Imagine if he lost that and he got told that he had to do something to pay off, but he’s not told what he has to do, he has to figure it out on his own with zero clues. Then Darth Vader shows up and tells him to destroy the Death Star because that’ll make him (Vader) much more powerful and then Luke decides that destroying the Death Star is not only the logical course to follow, but that it will also fulfill his bet.

    Goddammit, FFXIII’s idiotic plot gets on my nerves.

  11. Fred Starks says:

    Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean does a rather good job at the concept of swapping the role of main character/having a POV character and has some interesting parallels to FF12’s Vaan and Ashe situation. The initial MC, Kalas, begins as a mouthy, self interested teen who complains about helping people for nothing, and is just trying to get back on his quest for revenge on a man named Giacomo. Very early on, he meets Xelha, his far more mature narrative foil, whose personal quest is collecting some magical doohickeys after stealing Plot Device No.1 from the Empire. The thing is, Giacomo is the Emperor’s right hand man, and very quickly shows himself to be highly involved in stopping this girl Kalas just met.

    Kalas’s immediate motivation is connected to the main plot: wherever Xelha goes, Giacomo and his goons are soon to follow as she has something the HAS to have.

    Vaan’s should be getting revenge for his brother Reks, by hunting down Gabranth, but Gab’s not really got much interest in actively hunting the party it seems. Instead, Vaan’s traded in his motivation for vaguely wanting to be a sky pirate and opposing the Empire in general, and the Empire as a whole seems pretty lazy about chasing down this ragtag group.

    (Let alone the fact that Ashe in FF12 is also collecting/has collected her magic doohickeys, but the plot can’t make up a clear idea of what to do with them. Meanwhile, Xelha at least has a good idea of what to do about hers, and instead the conflicting factor that the Empire is actively hounding the group, and attempting to foil their efforts to obtain these already rather difficult to get doohickeys.)

    When a turning point later in the game results in a party shake-up and a change of objective, Kalas’s now goals are sidelined due to new circumstances[strike]mostly because he succeeded in obtaining great power to get his revenge, through his hidden goal of betraying the party for the doohickeys[/strike] and the fact that Xelha’s quest has turned to be far more of a pressing matter. For a time, the game’s POV switches to her entirely, and even when it goes back to Kalas, she and her overarching storyline still matters more as it’s become more important to him than dealing with Giacomo, and in terms of the overall story, hers has always been the more important matter.

    Kalas is hardly the same person as well, as he grows over the course of the game to be far more mature, rather than the snarky and selfish kid he starts as. The game’s narrative no longer needs the initial dynamic between him and Xelha to hook you, he’s sort of already had his arc and he’s around to clean up what his eternal rival started and help the team he’s actually become part of. (And even as a late-game sidequest for Kalas, you can go put an end to all the loose ends left by Giacomo.)

    But FF12 really just fails at this for the same reason a lot of other folks have said: Vaan’s just a bad character with no motivations. There’s the framework for something there, but they just didn’t bother/ get around to it. All of his driving forces are resolved or put on hold, and he’s just here to take in the sights, I guess.

    1. Fred Starks says:

      Well, heck, I did that spoiler wrong. Leave it to me to be used to brackets than crocodile braces.

      Unmarked spoiler for a two-decades old JRPG, I guess

      1. Fizban says:

        I mean, I’ve heard people claim that it was obvious and they totally saw it coming, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people *say* that sort of stuff all the time. I found it to be one of the best plot twists I’ve ever experienced, particularly because the game actually makes a point of acknowledging You, The Player as an outside influence that is known to and interacts directly with the party.

        You’re a “Guardian Spirit” or somesuch, who joins up with Kalas at the beginning of the game, your viewpoint fading in from nothing with some sfx. At decision points he will directly ask you what to do, and sometimes do what you say and sometimes just make a different comment while ignoring you, and there’s even a super attack mechanic which is supposedly influenced by how well you two get along. Xelha is shown to take an interest in the player’s presence and IIRC can even “hear” you just a tiny bit when she joins up.

        To continue the unmarked spoiler:
        After the betrayal, Kalas laughs at you, The Player as Guardian Spirit, for having been fooled by a memory wipe gambit before the game started and says “Your game is over now!”, and the screen fades out. Only to then cut back in on Xelha’s weeping in prison, and you call out back and forth until you form a new bond and can see and guide *her*. The game literally acknowledges in both narrative and viewpoint and game mechanics (as Xelha now has access to the random super attacks) that The Player is there, was betrayed by Kalas, and joins up with Xelha to save her and the rest of the party and teach his dumb ass a lesson.

        It’s frickin great. True, they do go pretty dang easy on him when he joins back up, but he does help undo the problems he caused, and I believe there’s a not-insignificant suggestion that he was driven half mad by the Evil God himself. He clearly had plans of betrayal from the beginning, but between then and the back-stab there’s plenty of room for him to have had off-screen doubts, sunk-cost fallacy’d himself into sticking with the plan, and then got mind-whammied when it actually succeeded, only to seriously regret it once you beat it back out of him.

        Also the game’s timed card-combat mechanic using the c-stick to build houses/straights on top of elemental affinities was excellent.

        1. Fred Starks says:

          I remember watching my brother play through a decent bit of it long ago, (both of us being dumb kids we were never going to finish the game,) so I knew about Kalas’s betrayal because my brother getting stuck on him is what ended his original playthrough. Time had made me forget when it was going to happen and it still managed to blindside me, and how the game goes to show how this has been going on under your nose the whole time is amazing. It is only made possible by the Player being an a character in the world, but that’s honestly the best part because of how much more directly connected to the characters you are.

          When Kalas trips into Melodia in Mira, if you check that key item inventory you rarely look at, you’ll actually see that the End Magnus are gone while the rest of the party has no idea.

          The betrayal is incredibly real and I think that’s why a lot of folks are unsympathetic to Kalas after this, but he does seriously regret what he’s done. Even I can’t deny that the party forgives him pretty fast for everything, but such is the JRPG power of friendship. I do think he’s implied to be under the same level of control that Melodia is.

          Baten Kaitos 1’s card combat is still superior to Origins’ for me (Origins is good, but it aims for something else), and I’m sad there will probably never be another game with such a fantastically weird card game combat.

    2. Mye says:

      Kalas betrayal was a very cool moment, but I always felt that the game was going really easy on him afterward because he was the protagonist. The game treat him like he’s just an harmless prankster and he quickly rejoin the group with seemingly no hard feeling when, if given the choice, I wouldn’t have allowed him back in the group.

      Baiten Kaitos is an interesting game that’s sadly mostly remembered now for having horrible voice acting encoding quality.

      Bonus, the Giacomo battle music was really interesting
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B64f48ewdo

      1. Fred Starks says:

        It would’ve been fascinating if he was a reverse version of Chrono Trigger’s Magus and the game would just let you not take him back afterwards. I was able to forgive Kalas, in part for knowing it would happen from previous experience and that he was still very effective in combat, but I still would have stuck to Xelha if given the choice.

        The game’s legacy being the voice acting is a greatly unfortunate shame, there’s a lot more to it than that. I grew up with it, so I admired the cheesiness of all of it, but it’s easily disabled. I wonder if it’d be possible to try and undo the encoding somehow?

        Chaotic Dance shows exactly what you get when you let Motoi Sakuraba do whatever he wants with the music- the whole game is exemplary of that and it utterly rules. Does this weird technopop theme mostly unintelligible lyrics stand out very oddly amongst the large swathes of orchestra and rock organs? Yes, yes it does, but it’s in a way a perfect stand-out theme for Giacomo, Folon, and Ayme, as they stand out even harder for being some of the toughest fights in the game and proper 3v3s.

    3. Syal says:

      Vaan’s should be getting revenge for his brother Reks, by hunting down Gabranth

      Even simpler than this, give him a personal vendetta against whoever Vayne is replacing. If Rabanastre is supposed to be oppressed, put a face on it and have Vaan want to take them down. Could even be Judge Ghis, why not.

      (Action Story 101: Make jerk, punch jerk.)

      1. bobbert says:

        It would be fun to have him really like Vain because he is leading the indightment against Governor Butthead.

      2. Fred Starks says:

        FF12 has encountered a fatal error:

        Error Code 101 in Vaan.character- “jerk” is undefined

        Would you like to send a report regarding this error?

  12. Mye says:

    I think part of the problem with Vaan is that the game acknowledge multiple time that he’s completely useless. Just like Rocketeer pointed out that Vaan not doing anything is canon, he himself acknowledge it in this cutscene, saying he’s “just along for the ride”.

    https://youtu.be/qliLGY4LD3s?t=80

    Unrelated but I had to go trough quite a few cutscene looking for this one in particular and can I just mention how good looking and great sounding the game is. FF writer don’t always give it their all, but the art and music side is always top notch and, as much praise as they get, it feel their achievement is not often (enough) celebrated. FF12 was a PS2 game and it put game 2 generation later to shame (heck it does better than Pokemon Arceus that came out this year).

    1. Thomas says:

      I’ve been shocked at just how low-fidelity some Switch games are. You can tell a lot of them are being made by handheld developers. Fire Emblem looks like it belongs on a PS2. Valkyria Chronicles, a PS3 game easily outpaces it in art style _and_ pure non-fuzziness.

      1. Fred Starks says:

        It’s partly because the Switch hardware is really not that strong overall and it is technically a handheld system, although I can’t for the life of me understand why you’d take it anywhere. The big three always take shortcuts somewhere in hardware, but Nintendo’s been rolling with cheaper hardware ever since the 3D era began. The Wii was just a mildly souped up GCN, after all. The advantage is that they can produce the console for less and sell it for less, more sales in a business where consoles are generally sold at a loss and profit is made from game sales. Lower the price, much more likely a parent is to buy it.

        In the case of Fire Emblem, IntSys are handheld developers primarily. The last FE console game IntSys developed in house was Radiant Dawn, on the Wii (Warriors was outsourced). They went back to the handhelds following that, with three 3DS games before doing 3 Houses.

        The aforementioned Pokemon Arceus is just the resulting form more of a case of the Pokemon Company still retaining their inhumanly fast paced release schedule and the devs likely not being given enough time. I’m not even going to lie, it looks real rough, and the trees are horrid.

        Am I trying to defend either of them? No, not really. I’ve not even played either of the games myself, only seen others play them. Hell, Gust was able to re-release HD versions of their PS3 Atelier games on the Switch and they run fine. Xenoblade Remastered exists on the Switch- simply a large number of the companies developing for the Switch are just not up to modern console standards.

        1. Chad+Miller says:

          Fun fact a gamedev friend of mine likes to relate: The Wii had a highly unusual “attach rate”. The attach rate in this context means the number of games sold per console sold. It’s a measure of how many games the average console owner is buying.

          The unusual part: The Wii’s attach rate was less than one. That means that an actual literal majority of Wii owners never bought even a single game apart from what came with the console. It was just a Wii Sports machine for them.

          If Nintendo weren’t directly profiting on Wii sales, it would have ruined them.

          1. Retsam says:

            Doesn’t seem like this is correct – based on this wiki – it claims that what you’re describing is the “tie ratio” whereas the “attach rate” is for a given game, what percentage of the console owners purchase it.

            And based on their chart (… which confusingly is still labelled “attach rate” despite not matching the above), the Wii had an attach rate of 9.05 – about nine games sold per console. (Source is Nintendo’s website) I see some places saying that Nintendo may be counting Wii Sports as a sale, but that’d still leave it at over eight titles sold per Wii.

            It’s likely the Amercian specific rate is lower, but it seems a little hard to imagine that it’s actually below one.

        2. guy says:

          I take my Switch on eight-hour car trips to the beach and such, though I agree it’s bulky for a handheld and underpowered for a stationary console.

  13. Shufflecat says:

    A very silly part of me now wants to make a passionate, pedantically contorted argument for Reks being the REAL main character. Just for laughs. Since this retrospective is my only exposure to the game though, I’m ill-equipped to actually formulate such an argument.

    Anyone else want to give it a shot?

    1. Syal says:

      …so the first thing to establish is that Reks is immortal. We know this because he died to death at Nalbina, but still managed to tell the whole world that Basch stabbed him. It’s the only reasonable explanation.

      The second thing to establish is that Reks is Rasler. Think about it; Rasler died at Nalbina fighting alongside Basch, and then when Basch returns to Nalbina, hey, here’s Reks who just so happens to look a lot like the “dead” prince. It makes way more sense that Rasler never actually died, and has instead been waiting here the entire time for Basch to show up again.

      The third thing to establish is that Reks is Dynast-King Raithwall. They say Raithwall’s reign of peace lasted a thousand years; it’s a lot more believable when you realize Raithwall was at the helm of it the entire time. The peace is breeched now because he wants it to be (for reasons that are still spoilers).

      The fourth thing to establish is that Balthier knows Reks personally. That’s why he showed up exactly where the Goddess Magicite was hidden, and more importantly, why Vaan is still alive and traveling with the party after denying Balthier the Magicite. He demanded Rasler’s ring from Ashe because if Ashe inspected it too closely, she would notice the ancient Mordorian writing on the ring explaining all these things.

      That inevitably leads us to our fifth conclusion; Reks is Fran. That’s why Fran knows all the trivia about locations from a thousand years ago. It’s also why she goes apeshit when Ghis stuffs the Dawn Shard into his incinerator, and why, spoilers, she never does it again. The Mist is just a cover; the actual reason is being pissed off at Ghis mishandling Raithwalls’ legacy.

      You’re probably asking what Basch has to do with any of this, and that’s our sixth conclusion; Reks orchestrated the Empire’s invasion. That’s why he told people Basch killed him instead of blowing the lid off things; he wanted the Empire to take Rabanastre, for reasons that will probably take another half dozen posts to not be spoilers.

      So there you have it. Final Fantasy 12 is a story of Reks the thousand-year-old king traveling with his brother, his Great-to-the-8 granddaughter, his husband, and a knight he dicked over for laughs, in order to stop an event he purposefully set in motion in order to get these five people to go stop it. Reks is totally the protagonist.

      1. tmtvl says:

        Reks is Fran

        Now that’s one hell of a disguise, Lupin would approve.

      2. Boobah says:

        Reks is totally the protagonist.

        And apparently kind of a jerk if he spent the last few years becoming a sky pirate rather than letting his ‘brother’ and wife* know he was still alive. Not to mention all the time they spend adventuring together.

        *Two completely different people. Probably. Look, you’d need time travel shenanigans for that to happen.

  14. Steve C says:

    All I know about FF is from opinion pieces like yours so I have no opinion in that regard. But in the debate between Main Character, Protagonist and Hero, the reason why it causes so much strife is that it is a Venn diagram:

    – A Main Character is the player through whom the audience experiences the story first hand.
    – A Protagonist is the prime mover of the plot.
    – A Hero is a combination of both Main Character and Protagonist. (“Hero” being the narrative English Lit definition. Not related to terms like ‘superheros’ nor ‘good guy’.)

    There’s typically a lot of overlap. So it gets argumentative. Here’s a good article with examples.

    1. Henson says:

      Are the Main Character, Protagonist, and Hero of FF XII a Vaan diagram?

  15. danny says:

    “Vaan becoming a respected and accomplished Huntsman of Clan Centuro” was a perfect character arc for him, allowing him to realize the part of Skypirating that actually appealed to him — running around as a self-directed free agent making cash money — in a socially positive way (ie not literal piracy). He goes from street orphan to pillar of an international community of professionals who avoid getting too entangled in local politics to pursue their universally approved-of task, hunting down dangerous monsters.

    Simply incredible thing to leave in an optional sidequest that has no connection to the main plot.

    Ludonarrative gets even funnier when his monster-hunting is subsidizing all the equipment the rest of the party equips. He’s not Ashe’s chauffeur, he’s her sugar daddy.

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      I’ve had a sketch in my head for a while where Vaan is sitting at a bar telling boring stories about wandering from place to place and not doing much of anything, when suddenly his interlocutor realizes, “Oh my God! You’re Vaan Godslayer, Order of Ambrosia of Clan Centurio, who laid low the Behemoth King, shattered the designs of the Shadowseer at the edge of the world, seared away the scourge of the vile Hell Wyrm, crossed swords with the planes-walking six-armed man, and endured the dragon’s radiance which made even the gods shudder? Defenser Ivalicia, to whom every tribe and nation is humbled in gratitude?”

      And of course Vaan is like, “Shut up, I’m trying to tell a story here! So anyway I’m sitting on this rock eating a biscuit and I think Basch was saying something to someone but I couldn’t really hear him, and…”

      1. Fred Starks says:

        It’s a lot like meeting Alan Alda and expecting him to be a lot like Hawkeye Pierce, but finding out the guy is plain grey when not on stage. Sometimes stories make people seem far more interesting than they really are, but then again, everyone’s got a boring side.

        1. The Rocketeer says:

          …Alan Alda? That’s your go-to example? Not Larry Storch? Or Jack Klugman? I’m glad they have wifi at the home, Pawpaw!

          Actually, the reason I wouldn’t expect much from Alan Alda is that he’s always been famous as obnoxiously preening and self-absorbed even by the notorious standards of actors. Well, that and a guy shifting without a clutch between a Groucho Marx impression (in the ’70’s) and maudlin lacrymosity isn’t a good act, actually.

          Other M*A*S*H cast members would be much better choices; Larry Linville was famously good-natured, David Ogden Stiers even more so. Harry Morgan possessed a tireless dry wit not at all representative of many— maybe any— of his roles.

          And of course the metaphor is flawed from the start. These are actors, performers; Vaan has literally done the things that would earn him world renown if the game were interested in acknowledging them.

    2. Retsam says:

      Ludonarrative gets even funnier when his monster-hunting is subsidizing all the equipment the rest of the party equips. He’s not Ashe’s chauffeur, he’s her sugar daddy.

      Though the other way of looking at this is that he’s always interrupting the “save the kingdom” quest to get the party to go help him out with his side gig: “Hey Ashey, I know we gotta go take the magic stone to the place, but can we stop by the Westersand real quick? I got a… thing… to do. Won’t take more than an hour and a dozen Phoenix Downs”

      It’s double fun because the best time to do this is when you’ve got a guest in your party – (since that’s the only time the party limit goes to four). So Larsa and Ashe makes an unlikely alliance for the sake of world peace and Vaan’s like “great, I’ve got this todo list, lets get right on it.”

      (This last sentence is actually exactly what I’m doing right now in my file… it’s a problem because I’m about to fall behind on the retrospective)

      1. Mr. Wolf says:

        Every now and then in an RPG you get a character who complains about sidequests being a waste of your time, but what I want to see is a character who complains about sidequests being a waste of their time.

        “Dude, I’m the General/Chief Engineer/Arch-Wizard/Prince. I should be leading armies/fixing the ship/divining the future/performing pop songs. Why did you drag me along to fight a friggin’ street gang?”

  16. guy says:

    I tend to be skeptical that the viewpoint character isn’t the protagonist; for instance even discounting Hawke’s central role in the red lyrium incident I’d call Hawke the protagonist of DA2. It’s tightly focused on Hawke and is about what Hawke is doing; Hawke is almost always the one taking action on screen except in companion quests.

    My main example of a non-protagonist viewpoint is Croaker from Chronicles Of The Black Company (specifically the first three) where Croaker is a minor participant while the Lady and Darling drive the action and the company wizards and the Taken do a large chunk of the onscreen major actions.

    1. Gautsu says:

      Someday, somewhere, The Black Company will be more than just one of my favorite series of novels, and hopefully that version won’t suck

  17. Damiac says:

    LOL Shamus you’re such a sweet summer dummy, everyone knows the protagonist was the rat the dog dreams about chasing.

    This is obvious if you look at the latin roots of the word. “Pro” as in “Good” or “Fake”(As in wrestling). Tagon as in “tag along on (an adventure)”. Ist as in “Ist this the protagonist or ist it someone else?”

    We put those together, and obviously the protagonist must be a good or fake person tagging along on an adventure. Bilbo Baggins fits this perfectly, this is because JRR Tolkein invented literature and the concept of the protagonist, before that all stories had no point and were about anthropomorphized animals learning weird moral lessons about grapes.

    Mr. Scruffy simply symbolizes the ego of the universe, and therefore is simply an avatar for the reader. It is the creature observed by the reader’s alter ego, i.e. Mr. Scruffy’s dreamscape, who is the protagonist of the story. This unnamed rat is furthermore a brilliant statement on the ephemeral nature of what constitutes a “character”. Within this solipsistic frame the author reveals the emptiness of the promise which a “protagonist” truly is.

    Any third grader worth his salt knows this Shamus, obviously.

Thanks for joining the discussion. Be nice, don't post angry, and enjoy yourself. This is supposed to be fun. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked*

You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.