T w e n t y S i d e d
This week The Rocketeer takes us through some cutscenes where that scamp Vayne murders his father the Emperor and mischievously dissolves the senate, thus making himself the autocratic ruler of an expansionist military empire. What a rascal.
In this series I’ve been trying to make the case that this writer is maybe not as incompetent as they seem. This is hard to prove. Maybe impossible.Other people have pointed out that the author has done good work elsewhere. That’s nice, but that’s not really how we discuss “the author” around here. At some point we have to give the author the benefit of the doubt that the good parts are good on purpose, and the bad parts are bad due to problems other than the writing, like cut content that leaves holes in the story, shifting scope and direction that necessitates 11th hour rewrites, fluctuating team composition that pulls writers away from jobs before the work is done and polished, or large-scale coordination problems where individual ideas work in isolation but are incompatible with each other. But then a reasonable reader might ask me: What has this writer done to deserve this benefit of the doubt? Why don’t I just declare them incompetent and have done with it? It’s not like I’ve shied away from that sort of condemnation in the past.
The Case Against
If you’re looking for evidence that the writer was a dangerous lunatic that shouldn’t be allowed access to a word processor, you don’t have to search very hard. Back in Part 2, The Rocketeer thoroughly demonstrated that the assassination of the king of Dalmasca – the inciting incident that kicked off the supposed character “arcs” of Vaan, Ashe, and Basch – was an illogical disaster. It wasn’t a good scene with one or two plot holes. It was a clumsy scene that confuses the player on the first viewing, utterly dissolves when examined in retrospect, and continues to create ongoing bafflement and incredulity on the part of the audience, right when the story is still trying to get off the ground after the ass-backwards introduction.
While none of the subsequent scenes can attain that same level of sublime awfulness, we get many smaller failures that are similar in kind. Ondore’s betrayal / xanatos gambit to spring Ashe from prison by having the entire party thrown in with her is yet another scene where nothing makes sense at first, and then makes no sense in a different way once you know the facts. In one scene Ashe says she doesn’t want the throne yet because that would lead to war, then in the next scene she’s talking about how the only way to avoid war is to take her throne. She lies to Balthier – effectively swindling our alleged sky pirate – so she can attain proof of her lineage, and then once she has it she goes to Jahara and tells them she has no such proof.
I suppose that some of these failings could be explained away with the excuse of development tribulations. But can we really blame all of this on shifting schedules and changing plans? I can understand why scene A might contradict scene C because scene B wound up on the cutting room floor. And I can understand if D introduces ideas that aren’t properly paid off because E and F were merged and radically reworked. But like… Part A should still make some kind of sense in isolation, shouldn’t it?
You could give the project a few more million dollars and another six months, but I don’t care what you add to the plot, nothing short of a rewrite is going to fix the scene where the bad guys murder a king who is trying to surrender to them, blame it on some enemy captain, and then murder their only witness. Unless you reveal the whole plan was just Larsa dicking around for a little recreational chaos, you can’t really blame this manifest incoherence on “we didn’t have time to write a scene that wasn’t ludicrous, pointless, and baffling”.
The Case For
Having said that, a lot of these other scenes are really good! The exchange where Basch and Vaan talk about his life as a street rat is great. So is the conversation Vaan has with Ashe in Jahara. These are sober, well-written scenes with organic dialog, moments of character growth and revelation, and absolutely solid cinematography. A hack writer isn’t going to “accidentally” make something this good by just flailing around.
This is also a rare Final Fantasy game where I can believe in the villain. Vayne has the same soft-voiced preening delivery that Seymor did in Final Fantasy X, but Seymor was very much a stock anime antagonist that wants to fix the world’s problems by killing everyone. That’s fine, I guess. I’ve seen worse. But Vayne? Vayne is an interesting guy. He can barely be bothered to oppose the good guys, and when he does show up in their adventures he doesn’t make a lot of sense. But his machinations within Archadia are pretty good.
Vayne’s mocking quote of his father, “And so house Solidor lives on,” after murdering the old man is both poetic and wonderfully obnoxious. He’s not even trying to look smug and his face is still irresistibly punch-able.
The Good, the Bad, and the Sloppy
I still can’t figure out what happened to this story. Some parts are brilliant and some parts are a mess, and the messy parts don’t feel like the stump left behind by hastily cut content. They just feel sloppy and confusing. But after obsessing over this for way too long, I have noticed one curious detail…
The brief personal scenes where our party interacts with each otherVaan and Basch in the streets of Rabanastre, Ashe and Vaan on the bridge in Jahara, and to a lesser extent the scene where Penelo expresses some vague affection for Vaan out in the Giza Plains. are great. And the scenes where the bad guys are scheming and betraying each other are great. Either group is fine in isolation. But then the two groups interact and everything falls apart. Nobody’s motivations are clear,Why is Balthier giving a handkerchief of no value to Penelo in the middle of getting arrested? Why is Vayne keeping Basch alive? Why is Vaan running around claiming to be Basch in a city where making such a claim is both laughable and a good way to get your throat cut? Why is Basch pulling out his sword? plans don’t make sense,Vayne’s plan to frame Basch for the murder of Raminas, Basch’s (Ondore’s?) plan to rescue the princess by getting captured, and Vayne’s plan to stop Ondore and Ashe from working together by asking the former to announce the death of the latter. the action is driven by contrivance and happenstance,On two different occasions, characters are in shackles and yet somehow take the latest magical rock out of their pocket just in time for the bad guys to see it. the cinematography is suddenly and inexplicably muddled, and everything just feels… off.
And when we back up and look at the story on a macro level, we find similar inexplicable gaps. This week our heroes visited a quasi-religious oracle who could see the future, and he told the party to seek out the Sword of Kings. Laying aside questions as to why it took us this long to visit the clairvoyant sage who is sympathetic to our cause,Really? This guy was lower on our list than the mask dudes and the Bunnygirl village? what are we supposed to do with a sword? I can’t claim to understand nethicite, but it seems to be involved with things like nukes and doomsday lasers. Those are not the sorts of threats you want to engage at melee range. I get that you can use the sword to destroy nethicite. But if I somehow have the martial strength to get within sword-swinging distance of enemy nethicite, then I could just as easily pick that shit up with my primate hands and walk away with it. This magical super-sword just means that – assuming I somehow miraculously overpower this vastly superior enemy – I’ll have a way to destroy the weapons I capture rather than turning those weapons against our enemy.
And that’s assuming I can get close enough to the heart of their superweapon to touch it with a sword! It also ignores that these rocks seem to act like nukes and the story suggests that perhaps using the sword as intended would cause it to blow up in our face.
Okay Luke. You’ll need to fly your X-wing down this trench to reach this exhaust port. Then just put your ship in park, climb out, and stab the space station right in the blowhole with your laser sword. And then maybe try to stand way, way back. How far back? Oh, I dunno. But I’d jog away from the moon if I were you.
So scenes where main characters are bonding with other main characters are great, even if these moments are too few and they exist as vignettes instead of forming arcs. And moments where bad guys are scheming with other bad guys are also great. But whenever the two sides attempt to move the plot forward by planning or acting against each other, everything falls apart. Cutscene-driven stories are almost a quarter of a century old by now, and in all those years I have never seen anything quite like this.
We’re coming to the end of my analysis. Rocko has many weeks left, but I’ve said just about everything I have to say about this game. I have a couple more entries left, and then I’m going to go quiet and let the Rocketeer prosecute the rest of this on his own.
Footnotes:
[1] Other people have pointed out that the author has done good work elsewhere. That’s nice, but that’s not really how we discuss “the author” around here.
[2] Vaan and Basch in the streets of Rabanastre, Ashe and Vaan on the bridge in Jahara, and to a lesser extent the scene where Penelo expresses some vague affection for Vaan out in the Giza Plains.
[3] Why is Balthier giving a handkerchief of no value to Penelo in the middle of getting arrested? Why is Vayne keeping Basch alive? Why is Vaan running around claiming to be Basch in a city where making such a claim is both laughable and a good way to get your throat cut? Why is Basch pulling out his sword?
[4] Vayne’s plan to frame Basch for the murder of Raminas, Basch’s (Ondore’s?) plan to rescue the princess by getting captured, and Vayne’s plan to stop Ondore and Ashe from working together by asking the former to announce the death of the latter.
[5] On two different occasions, characters are in shackles and yet somehow take the latest magical rock out of their pocket just in time for the bad guys to see it.
[6] Really? This guy was lower on our list than the mask dudes and the Bunnygirl village?
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The simple answer is that it’s easier to write decent individual scenes (all of us have had decades of experience to media, and I think there is a good chance many of us could write scenes that stand well on their own), but much much harder to write everything well in a collective sense. That’s why Folding Ideas wrote such a popular video on the importance of Editing in movies to bring everything together in a cohesive whole (or you end up with a cohesive hole?).
I think there’s a good chance that the oversight of this project was severely lacking, and a vague central plot was thrown to individual teams to work with who didn’t maintain consistency. It’s also possible that even with a central team, there’s just an issue of the writer allowing too many variations on the same idea to fit gameplay needs and didn’t realize/care that the story was a whole was such a mess. There may be a philosophy that the story only needs to make enough sense to get from one scene to the next, because the gameplay is distracting most players enough so they’re only paying minimal attention to what’s going on. Going to Wikipedia,
It seems like the first issue?
This is a response to, like, the first four posts today. However, I think the basic problem for the plot specifically to a lack of clarity regarding the Primary Conflict of the story. This *may* have been because it started life as kinda-sorta an MMO, but Square showed they could manage that pretty well in other games. The problems presented here are legion, but to me, it makes sense that the writing team would have these problems if whomever was in charge didn’t clearly enunciate what the Primary Conflict.
Games being games, the Conflict is usually external though obviously some exceptions exist. And in FF games, the main conflict driving events is usually external, and really obvious. In generally, the smaller initial conflict is a stepping stone to discovering there’s a much larger problem, but the first flows into the second. For reasons I won’t get into, the even-numbered FF games tended to have a stronger story element and the odd-numbered focused on mechanics and gameplay.
*FF2: “2” introduces its main villain as the threatening side literally in the first battle, where you get squashed by minion of The Emperor.
*FF4: Here Square does something different. The external conflict at the start is muted as Cecil is having a crisis of faith over his actions. he is an honourable knight serving a man he supposes to be a good and wise king.
*FF6: Empire enslaves a girl with magic powers to fight a bunch of rebels, then she allies with then. Hilarity ensues!
*FF8: The plot meanders, but Squall duels Seifer in the opening cutscene. You will continue to smack him around for the remainder of the game. There’s also a random side plot with a sorceress or something, but I’m sure it’s not important. (This is an obvious jab at the game’s plot being all over the place. You see a lot of the same problems here in miniature form. I’m not sure if anybody knows what the Sorceress was even trying to accomplish and she’s barely even the villain.)
However, what is the Primary Conflict of FF12? Is it Dalmasca vs Archadia? Is it actually Rosaria vs Archadia and we’re just pawns? (I can even bring up this because Al-Cid is a One Scene Wonder.) Is it an internal conflict of Ashe’s uncertainty of whether she can even lead her people? Is it an internal conflict of her *becoming* strong enough to lead her people? Is it about proving that she is the true heir? Is it actually about stopping Vayne personally? Is it about Venat? Is it the party vs Venat, or the Occuria vs. Venat, or the the party vs all of them?
The fact that I can list all of these conflicts and honestly not be able to tell you which is the main driver of events is a rather significant problem. And if we don’t know, there were likely a number of very confused people at the Square offices trying to make all this work but without a prayer of succeeding.
The earlier games all had really easy to follow initial plots that relied heavily on clichés and tropes. You could basically describe what was going on in a sentence that anyone could understand, followed by a second sentence that explained what you were doing at the present moment.
In FF7 you’re a mercenary helping out some terrorists who are fighting against a polluting megacorporation. That basic plot summary sustains you basically until you get out of Midgar. For those first 4 hours or so of gameplay it’s very hard for you to get lost and since you can’t really get lost you can have the larger story layered on. You don’t fully understand why Aeris is special yet, but you know that Shinra captured her and are holding her in their HQ so you’ve got to go rescue her. As you go on the rescue mission, you learn more about the world and Shinra but you’re never overwhelmed. FF12 just hands you the plot firehose at the beginning and tells you to do your best to stay hydrated. It doesn’t build a foundation for you in a gradual way
Final Fantasy Tactics has more than the standard number of irons in the fire, but it also has pretty clear central villains at all times; the opening has Delita as the villain with Gafgarion giving off heavy Bad News vibes, then into the prologue where Delita is your friend and Wiegraf is the villain, with Algus giving off heavy Bad News vibes.
Exactly. The relationships are always really clear. It’s been years since I’ve played the game so I’ve forgotten the name of every country and the political machinations, but I still remember my relations to Algus and Delita and how that plays out.
Also I remember that time I was getting my ass kicked and about to game over when my archer crit someone knocking them back and off a cliff to an instadeath, totally swinging the tide of battle. One of those video game memories I’ll have forever.
This seems like the best explanation to me as well. The story as described comes across as the product of several different writers who weren’t co-ordinating. The scenes that work do so in isolation, with not much connecting them to the rest of the story.
Fran’s history with her people; Vaan’s characterisation; the parallel story of the Empire’s power struggle; there’s a kind of ‘modular’ writing to a lot of it. Someone wrote these scenes deliberately so they could be slotted into the story pretty much at any point.
As I was reading this post, it occurred to me that, as time has progressed, we’ve learned more and more that the story and creation process for all the Hironobu Sakaguchi Final Fantasy games was a team/collective effort. He directed most of the games, and he may have provided some of the core or ground work of the story, but several other members of the team were major contributors. Even Final Fantasy VII, which he did not direct himself, was greatly informed by his initial vision to be a sort of noir-in-a-city, and later the loss of his mother influencing the loss of Aeris and how that’d impact the entirety of the game (as opposed to the death of Tellah or General Leo, which happened and then was barely mentioned again after). I recently learned that the main writer of Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers, and Chrono Cross, for example, was responsible for the scene where Tifa does a mind-dive into Cloud’s consciousness and helps him piece his memories together. So while Yoshinori Kitase was the director and Kazushige Nojima is credited as the “scenario writer”, it was clearly a major team effort. One could argue that, if nothing else, Hironobu Sakaguchi was really good at managing and working with a creative team.
But Sakaguchi wasn’t involved with Final Fantasy VIII, as far as I’m aware, and Final Fantasy IX was the last Final Fantasy he worked on before leaving Square. To that end, what did the creative process look like for the different games? Did this “everyone throws an idea in” start to fall apart as game budgets and player expectations got bigger in the turn of the Millennium? How many of those contributors began to move away from Final Fantasy and into other projects? I need to do more research on this myself, but I have a feeling Final Fantasy XII is the result of Square Enix as a corporation trying to just grab people together and expect them to play nice, and given the two separate teams involved in this one having creative differences (and the director leaving before the product is finished) I feel that might be indicative of the inconsistent mess the story and writing seem to be in. You likely still don’t have just one person contributing to writing, but the creative teams are not synched up and… here you are.
I’m curious what the development of 10 and 13 were like in comparison (15 is a well known mess).
It is interesting to note that “Final Fantasy stops making sense at the end” really started with VIII and never stopped.
VIII After spending a lot of time thinking the primary villain is Sorceress Edea, you eventually find out that you’re actually up against sorceresses being possessed by another sorceress, and then when you finish dereferencing all these villain pointers then you find out the plot is to use Time Compression to make all of time occur simultaneously or something. I don’t know if they even try to explain this as I’ve only read a let’s play, having tried and failed to finish this game like 5 times.
IX actually manages to keep things making sense until the last second, when the true final boss turns out to be complete nonsense literally from nowhere.
X sets up an impossible situation and basically solves it with…they solve it.
XII…well, this series will cover it. Eventually.
XIII: After learning that the villain’s master plan is to get killed by the heroes, the heroes kill him. Since it’s the end of the game and the heroes are supposed to win the game, this works somehow.
XV: No individual stretch of this game was coherent to begin with unless you bring in licensed anime and paid DLC
Even the first one had a twist at the end about the stable time loop or something? It sounds like a Shyamalan situation where they like to have something at the end showing a twist. FF VI really didn’t, but that’s also one of the better received entries by Western fans. FF IV totally did, with not only “The guy you think was the villain mind-controlling people was actually being mind-controlled himself”, but also “The main villain only shows up in the last 10% of the game, you barely have any interaction with him, and even after you kill him he comes back in a stronger form because he’s a Hater or something”. Side note, as a kid in the U.S. (not being aware of the games that weren’t shipped), I always assumed that the reason Kefka was so prominent in VI was as a reaction to how the villain in IV comes out of nowhere, and didn’t want to get accused of that another time.
Japanese media seems to like the “this isn’t even my final form!” trope a lot more than American media does. It always feels like an anti-climax when you get to the end and finally defeat Exdeath and there’s that brief moment of victory that quickly sours as Neo-Exdeath appears with even more hp. The same way people scream at Horror Movie characters to shoot Jason in the head when he’s down I do in JRPGs during the respite between Final Boss and Final Boss’s Final Form.
I, personally, hate the emotional journey from the buildup to the final confrontation, to the final confrontation, to the thrill of victory, to an annoying second fight (where you might die multiple times as you learn it), to an actual victory whose thrill (for me at least) is diminished because of the final form ass-pull. For whatever reason the FF people decided to extend this not just to a final form of the boss, but a final plot form that is just very narratively unsatisfying.
Yeah, ending with a weird twist that’s often out of nowhere is not new.
The new part is the twist generally being gibberish. Chaos and Ultimecia both have goofy time-traveling plans but Chaos is looping time as part of a bargain with the Fiends for eternal life, while Ultimecia wants to collapse the time lines because of Playstation disc storage limits. Zeromus being some magical manifestation of the hatred of a moon racist may be corny as hell, but Necron is so out of nowhere that his apologists often resort to something about it being a metaphor. People sometimes complain that Jenova should have gotten more attention in FFVII than Sephiroth, but even his biggest detractors can explain what he’s trying to do, why he wants to do it, why the heroes are able to kill him, and why killing him solves the problem. Every game from X onward botches at least one of those.
You say that, but why does Half Naked Sephiroth show up after you kill Safer Sephiroth? And why does Cloud solo him in the abyss? And how is Cloud subsequently teleported back to the collapsing crater?
Although the greatest FFVII “but why” question is the intro to AC: ending to FFVII, flash-forward to “500 years later”, flash back to “497 years earlier”.
So admittedly, I’ve never, ever looked at material outside of FFVII itself as canon, and kind of despise all non-original games as narrative material, so if there’s an actual answer I don’t know (I know the answer Crisis Core gave for the “one wing” thing was stupid is all I know).
However,
my assumption has become that you’re not actually fighting Sephiroth proper throughout the game, or not as you’d expect. Jenova came from space and is basically John Carpenter’s The Thing, so the Ancients had to seal it away but then Shinra did Shinra stuff after finding it. Or something. This part I’m always fuzzy on. The thing is, the Sephiroth you are fighting are basically a bunch of Jenova cells combined with Sephiroth cells, which is why he just leaves forms of Jenova all over the place. In addition, Cloud, by having some Jenova cells (spoilers?) is easily manipulated. So what you’re fighting is kind of just Jenova in different forms throughout the game, including Safer Sephiroth, and even half-naked Sephiroth (though really that’s all because there’s always three forms to a final boss, duh). As for normal Sephiroth, that’s basically the last vestiges of Sephiroth himself that had fallen into the lifestream, and Cloud solos him with an Omnislash to completely free himself from his past and surpass the one responsible for the worst day of his life. Once this is accomplished, Holy is able to be cast and save the planet.Hurray!That’s my best read of it, but this is also why I just wanted a better translation of the game for so many years. Instead we’re getting remakes that are throwing in all kinds of the unnecessary garbage that the extraneous materials and sequels added in, which means we’re getting Worst Timeline Final Fantasy VII now. But hey! At least the combat is fun.
Ehhh, this has been a thing for most of the series I’d argue. VII goes off the rails pretty immediately where it looks like you’re an eco-terrorist, but then suddenly fighting against Sephiroth and his mom. It works more because their interests are fairly simple, and they sell the characters extremely well. Sephiroth by being an insane badass and Jenova as being remarkably alien yet still with an understandable (if alien and nonsensical to us) goal. Bonus points too for Cloud being a character that has a pretty hefty arc all to himself that helps carry a lot of the slower points.
Or VI where you accidentally let the bad guy win and have to deal with the apocalypse afterwards.
I personally liked VIII, even if it did meander. And do a lot of odd shenanigans. The memories and time travel aspects were entertaining.
It might help to know that the original final boss of FFIX was going to be Hades, suggesting that they died or were on the brink of death. Despite not being a big fan of FFIX’s latter half, I still no longer hate Necron as I used to as I understand him as an embodiment of the antithesis to which the protagonists were fighting against in one way or another. It’s kind of silly, and I swear there’s one singular mention of him before you beam aboard the Garland world, but it’s so minor.
Still, it’s not as random to me considering it at least fits with the themes of the game.
XV is/was Tetsuya Nomura so there’s no saving it from nonsense regardless.
I kept thinking “Good writer, low on totem pole” and bad managers thinking that they (manager) could write well but didn’t. Also, lack of good project management, and this entire thing just stinks of a combo of “person in power takes over when shouldn’t” and “massive lack of communication between teams/people.” It’s a shame, there’s some good stuff in there, but it’s completely lost in the nonsense.
Note: the manager(s) might be very good at the other aspects of their job, but in this case they’ve hit the Dilbert Principle perfectly….”The most ineffective workers will be systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management:”
So….Mass Effect 2, then? Except with the villains also being great?
(Note to Paul: This time, I’m trolling)
I think most of the Mass Effect 2 cast was overrated. Yes we had Mordin and Legion but we also had.
– More uninteresting than Kaidan.
– I have *perfect* buttocks.
– I am justice, and I have great boobies.
– I kill people for a living, yet I am spiritual.
– I am crazy and violent
– I am a grunt
Their personalities are just tropes. There is very little actual personality to them. Thane is more interesting when you are a complete asshole to him, because then he talks back to you. Warning you not to become like him. But on a paragon playtrough, all he will do is tell you about the Drell people.
So no, I do not buy in the narrative that Mass Effect 2 had great characters but a nonsensical story. Mass Effect 2 has mostly very tropish characters and a bad story. Luckily there is still some Mass Effect 1 quality in some places: the aforementiomed Mordin and Legion, Tali and Garrus, Wrex, Joker and the Morinth mission.
More uninteresting than Kaidan
I have to say, I quite liked Jacob, specifically for this. His Cerberus connections are, in retrospect, as frustrating as Shamus has detailed – but the fact that he was Just Another Human Guy? Great.
I always imagined Shepard going to the armory in between missions, just to chat with someone relatively normal:
“Hey man, have you seen who we found this time? She’s some kind of 800-year-old warrior-monk, who struts around in a catsuit and high heels! Where the hell do the Asari come up with these people?
I wonder if there’s going to be any issues between her and the fish-man assassin on deck 2…
Well I guess Jacob’s boringness had a “refreshing” quality indeed given the rest of the cast.
I was just thinking that Samara’s intro scene was the kind of writer’s self-gratification that ultimately led to Kai Leng. After the recruitment mission, she is actually quite okay, despite being quite tropish.
I must have been one of the few people who liked Casovir from Neverwinter Nights 2 for a similar reason. Apart from Sand (who was cool), everyone before him was some combination of wacky, creepy, and/or asshole. “Look how crazy I am, isn’t that cool?!?”.
Kinda getting really curious just what the original MMO version of this plot looked like.
Have a sneaking suspicion that it would explain a lot, if Square-Enix just… simply had what they had, and had to crowbar in scenes to make the main plot and what was meant to be companion slash NPC plots into a mess they could sell to get back SOME costs. With the biggest story messes being the ‘weld marks,’ if you so will.
I wonder if perhaps all of these flaws can be laid at the feet of “not having a competent Narrative Lead Designer”. From what you’ve described, it sounds as if you have somebody who’s good at putting together narrative cutscenes, somebody who’s good at writing world lore and bestiaries, and somebody who’s good at writing to a particular style (the overly formal, flowery language that’s used in the game), but there’s nobody who’s good (or even exists?) at the role of mapping out a proper narrative structure for the plot, and make sure that all of these little individual writing parts are put together into a cohesive whole. That stuff is usually the task of the Narrative Lead Designer, and they USUALLY have a writing or editing background themselves, so they know how to step back and look at everything from a wider angle and make sure it all makes sense. Without knowing who worked on FF12, I don’t know if there was such a person or whether it was given to somebody who didn’t know how to pull this vital aspect of story writing off, or whether the project managers at Square just went “Eh, we don’t need one. I’m sure our writing staff can figure it out.”
I think that’s at least half of it, though I didn’t know what to call that position. They’ve got some good writers going, but they’re all just wandering off doing their own thing.
It’s the sort of position that tends to have different names at different studios.
So basically the same issue as Bethesda, except nowhere near as bad.
It really feels like the Jahara trip should happen after they rescue Ashe and find out nethicite is a thing and before the visit to Raithwall’s Tomb. The idea being “the enemy has this weird magick rock, let’s consult the local experts on myths and magick rocks!” This makes her lack of proof make sense, and the lack of info can lead into let’s get our own to figure this out and proof of linage while we’re at it. Larsa could even show up and propose his claim throne plan, but they need to get the proof first, with a warning that the empire is also looking to raid that tomb for the shard.
This sets up the empire at least being there as the party emerges from the tomb. The fleet can still go boom, and the timeskip after that didn’t make any sense so should have been removed anyway. Without the timeskip, they can continue their original plan to claim the throne (after a major Victory, from a position of Strength even!) with the kiltas’s blessing. They head there, get told they “need” the sword because their shard is spent, and then the story can continue as is.
I feel the above is a much more reasonable series of events, and it probably got shuffled to introduce mechanics in a certain order (I think chocobos are properly introduced in the Jahara section, either to or from) and maybe enemy strength, but those are also adjustable so who knows.
Nope, they’re introduced after backtracking from Golmore Jungle to look for Mjrn.
Alternately they’re introduced in the Estersand tutorial Hunt when we fought the tomato.
This doesn’t matter for the more egregious problems in FFXII’s story, but I think at least some of the befuddlement you describe comes down to the readability of the animations. For example, as I remember (it’s been years, I played FFXII when it came out) the “Basch draws his sword scene,” was not at all unclear to me on first read: there’s a beat after when Ondore says the line about “keeping up appearances” where Basch gets a “Mission Accepted” look on his face that made it obvious to me he was trying to get himself arrested for allegedly “attempting” to assassinate Ondore.
There’s some non-verbal emoting between characters that I feel like I picked up on but you guys didn’t, or something. The scene where Balthier takes Ashe’s ring for payment is another example, where it made perfect sense to me that Balthier’s demanding the payment as a test for Ashe’s determination based on the emoting of the characters involved.
The best I can figure is that I started on FF2/4 and played through a bunch of SNES/PS1 FF games before the PS2 era, so I grew up with the particular style of animations they use to have their characters do lo-fi emotes? I’m never-ever-ever-never the person who notices these things where other people miss them in any other context…
Of course this doesn’t help with the bonkers opening scene’s terrible logic, but I’d say like 30% of the complaints in this series have had me saying “uhhhh…are you not seeing that cue there? How am I seeing this if you aren’t? Am I making this up?”
I think you’ve put your finger on the key problem of FFXII. It’s a structural mess, like someone wrote a plot about politicking empires, and someone else wrote a bunch of characters with some sketches of how they would interact, and no-one had an idea of how they should fit together.
Their solution was to play cutscenes of the story, whilst sending your unrelated party of characters on the most ‘I have no idea how to connect these levels’ videogame plot device of all, the McGuffin hunt. But because the story wasn’t designed with that hunt in mind, the McGuffins also don’t do anything.
And then their attempts at connecting the stories amount to occasionally putting a member of the plot into your party and have them give your party an update on the proper story whilst you’re off hunting.
This needed a lead editor early in the process to say something like ‘Hey if the story is about Larsa, maybe you should play as Larsa’
The simple resolution to “Is the author good or bad?” is to acknowledge that the game was made by a team, with people of different skill levels contributing to The Case Against and The Case For. I understand that the singular author is a super convenient assumption for analysis but this seems like a case where it confuses more than it clarifies.
So the Vayne part of the story is indeed pretty good, the problem is that it essentially doesn’t matter, its always happening in cutscenes that our characters have no way of knowing and it’s all ultimatly pointless in the end, they don’t recontextualize the story, the empire starts bad and end bad. I think an interesting twist would be if the game had dual protagonist system where you’d play as Vayne for maybe 1/4 of the game, similar to breath of fire 4. You’d need to change a couple of stuff, maybe the emperor is more along the line of a mad king and so Vayne “plot” to take over make is at least somewhat sympathetic. You could also use that time to develop the various judges so there’s more impact when you have to fight against them as the main party. In exchange you can easily cut a lot of content from the main party (like most of it really).
I would say, it feels like they had input from different writers that the lead writer / director failed to piece together to make something coherent. I even have my own suspicions about the “good” writer and “not so good” one on the team. I mean, when you study the background of at least two of the three whose bios are available on Wikipedia (Daisuke Watanabe and Yasumi Matsuno), it’s hard not to notice the former of them was the lead writer for Final Fantasy XIII (and we all know what that means, right?), and the latter wrote and directed Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant story (and, AFAIK, both are revered among many die-hard JRPG fans).
The problem is, it could quite well have been the other way around. A good author can have a bad streak, or be a bad team player, or just plain stop caring when their ideas get “improved on” by the lead – and so on. And a mediocre writer can absolutely shine when they’re just churning out ideas, and there’s someone on the lead team who knows what to do with them (and which ones should just be shelved). Or sometimes there’s a raff-raff team, no lead and no budget – but everything would just fall into place nonetheless. Creative process is weird.
Though I have never played it, I hate that FFT exists. Growing up, I bought all of the Ogre Battle Saga games and loved them. FFT killed the thing that I love, skinned it, and wore it as a hat.
I want the full 16oz of the thing I like – not 6oz with 5oz each crystals and chocobos added.
Half the Ogrebattle series postdates FFT (and Matsuno, which is apparently why they stopped being named after Queen songs.)
I definitely consider Final Fantasy Tactics to be a strict improvement on Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Apart from the smaller squads (5, down from 10), and the branching paths*, it’s an upgraded version of TO’s narrative and mechanics both.
Then FFTA killed them both.
*(Although Lawful was the “correct” path in LUCT; Chaos route was half filler, and I’ve heard Neutral was worse.)
I liked that the chaos path made you a hunted nobody.
On the bright side you get Aloser. :)
Yeah, Chaos isn’t a bad narrative, but it could use a lot fewer bounty hunters. (…like Tactics did! There’s a fight where you stumble across a group of random deserters who think killing Ramza will let them buy their way out of the war.)
Yeah, Aloser’s a strong bow user in a game where bows are victory sticks. Although I liked Lawful Aloser better. Chaos Aloser is all “I will kill you and avenge your atrocities”, while Lawful Aloser is like “I WILL RIP YOU APART WITH MY BARE HANDS!”
What, you want Ruining Blue Earth? (I still can’t believe it didn’t get released for EU and ‘straya, WTH MaxFive).
I’m actually a little surprised to hear Shamus say this was a goal of his, because it’s not the impression I’ve gotten – if anything I’ve found Shamus’s posts to be harsher critiques than Rocketeer’s meditations on the “junk sculpture” of “this fucking game”. (Which is totally fair: critique is Shamus’s big thing – I’m just honestly surprised that defending this story was a meaningful goal here)
“This writer is maybe not as incompetent as they seem” has been the case I’ve largely been trying to make down in the comments. It seems to me like a lot of the high-level planning for this game was really good, in a way that was largely not borne out in the actual finished product. I think this game is absolutely filled with interesting ideas that just don’t work as well as it seems they should, and since Shamus and Rocketeer both do a good job of pointing out why these often don’t work, I’ve focused on trying to point out why they could have. Like, these are all things that I think are actually great ideas the high-level story has:
– The whole opening – though I actually don’t think this one is muddled at all, except as far as it raises some hard-to-answer questions later.
– Basch being setup to take the fall for the king’s death and his subsequent role as a sort of Batman-esque “hated by the people who he’s trying to save” hero and <a href=https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=53515#comments?forcing Vaan and Ashe – who both have serious reasons to distrust Bashe to work with him – good conflict in theory, but resolved in like 3 cutscenes.
– Vayne’s role as the competent and fair administrative representative the oppressive empire – a fascinating idea that we never see in practice.
– Ondore as Lando, trying to balance his support for the secret resistance that he’s truly loyal to against the mundane needs of his city which might get crushed if he too openly opposes the evil empire – good idea, but ambiguously executed and another idea that’s basically picked up, then put down and not revisited.
– Vossler’s turn towards collaboration and the resulting schism between him and Ashe and Bashe – this one in particular should have been so much more effective than it was, with how close these three characters, and how devastating the ‘betrayal’ should have been, yet done for potentially sympathetic reasons.
And particularly our main party is kind of filled with these “should work but don’t” moments and relationships: a lot of ink is spilt on how terrible the party is, but again, I think there’s a lot of great ideas in the party composition:
Vaan has (the potential for) interesting and different dynamic with every character (who isn’t named Fran): pseudo-apprentice to Balthier, narrative foil to Ashe, grudging ally turned supporter (turned imitator) of Bashe, while arguing with Penelo over who gets to be R2-D2 and who has to be C-3PO.
And my read on Balthier’s whole schtick is that he’s basically pretending to be Han Solo – the bounty hunter who’s only in it for the money – but in actuality he’s working harder than anyone to keep this little field trip on the rails: constantly looking out for Vaan while pretending he’s not, smoothing things over when Basch gets introduced into the party, and making sure Ashe doesn’t make the same mistake his father makes (more on this… next week?). And I’m sure he has a fascinating relationship with Fran, if we ever get to see it.
Apologies for the self-aggrandizement of linking to a bunch of my own previous comments (and I’ll eat my hat if this doesn’t end up in the spam filter), but this collection of comments is largely my “case for”.
As for why the actual execution doesn’t live up to these ideas? I think a lot of it is that Matsuno did a lot of high-level planning, but the actual point-by-point writing was left to teams/writers that just didn’t have the ability to execute such a complicated story, especially after he left the project. Implementing someone else’s story can’t be easy in the best of times, and especially one that has so many moving parts.
A second point, though, perhaps just as important (and I’m sorry to bury it here below such a TL;DR comment): I think this game’s plot is too short. I know this seems like a crazy thing to say of a 60 hour RPG… but very little of this game’s runtime is its plot: after the very dense opening, it’s quite sparse.
A way to gauge this is to look at the “all cutscenes, movie-version” videos people put on YouTube for these games: the main one I’ve seen for this game is only 6.5 hours[1]. By comparison, the ones I’ve seen for FFX are like 9-12 hours, and that game has a much simpler story!
And, while a lot of RPGs are able to slip story into the gameplay: e.g. I remember a lot of in-fight dialogue helped develop the characters in FFX – like the memorable “newbie here” moment[2] – FFXII’s MMOish gameplay means there’s none of that stuff, which is probably a big part of why the party seems so flat. The characters basically only exist in cutscenes and we just don’t get very many small character developing moments (e.g. Vaan asking Fran her age being a notable exception).
So much of the above list would work if they just spent more time on it. The Ashe/Vaan/Basch stuff, the Vossler stuff, the Ondore stuff: so much of this game feels like they pick up an idea, play with it for five minutes, and put it down to never talk about again, and just taking the same rough content and spreading it over more cutscenes could have solved a lot of that.
[1] I did find a multi-part one that’s 8ish hours, but it includes a lot of cruft: random running around in engine, boss fights, and of course, several minutes to show the “I’m Captain Bashe of Dalmascia!” minigame in full. On the other extreme, I even found a ~3 hour one version that claims to be complete but, e.g. cuts out the entire opening cutscene and starts with Reks
[2] In the previous cutscene, Wakka dismisses Tidus as “a newbie”: next time you switch Tidus into battle, he’ll angrily announce “newbie here!” and Wakka will apologize.
I don’t know if what you’re describe is really high level planning as much as world building? Because the high level planning for this game is the worst part of it, nothing fits together, there’s no through line on the plot. There’s not enough work to connect the empire plot to the parties activities etc.
The ‘this is the backstory of this bit’ and ‘this is an interesting thing that will happen’ is good, but the failure isn’t in the execution, it’s in the planning to make those odds and ends into a cohesive story.
I feel like someone on the Bad Half of the Writing Team really hated the idea of morally complicated characters. Thus, we get:
*Bosch has squeaky clean hands even though the story has to tie itself in knots to give them to him.
*Vain is all bad all the time.
*Serving Prometheus makes you crazy and stupid.
Each of these makes the story vastly less interesting.
I would add ‘Prometheus seeks to put the reins of history in the hands of man’ to the good idea pile.
Though that sort put the writers on the hook for answering the question, “What is the current relationship between man and the gods?”. Temples, burnt offerings, omens, divine squabbling, &c all seem like they should feature prominently.
I initially read that image caption “Oh, Vayne!” as “Oi, Vayne!”, and thought it was a pretty good pun.
+ 1
You mean that caption that, as I write this, reads “Oh, Vanye!”?
(Only because you must’ve read the caption at least twice.)
My fan rewrite on this would change it into being Gabranth’s plan, paying off alongside the running “who’s side are you on really” thing when we reveal in the endgame that bum bum buuummm, he’s on the side we still haven’t met yet. (Seriously, the complete absence of anyone in game even mentioning the Occuria yet is making things hard to talk about.) Rewrite his opening speech to be more ambiguous, and then reveal “His Majesty was a traitor” wasn’t in reference to Dalmasca, but the coast-to-coast Space Ghosts, who are pissed he sued for peace instead of using the nukes they’d given him.
Would also help the ending. It doesn’t save it, but it stops it tripping at the first step and losing its helmet.
It looks to me like this writer is good at writing character interaction but terrible at writing plot. Sounds similar to the same problem people tend to have with the Amazing Spider-Man movies.
If it were not for the fact that I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, I kinda would like you to play through FFXIII, so you can see with your own eyes just how utterly terrible things could get in the writing department. At the very least XII does have some genuinely good parts here and there. It’s truly the mark of a terribly written work when you start questioning your own sanity and intelligence in order to justify it. “Did I miss something? I must have misunderstood this! Maybe a cutscene explaining this didn’t load? This can’t possibly be what’s happening, I must keep mishearing things! This makes no sense whatsoever, is this game bugging out the dialogue?
13’s plot when summarised basically makes about as much sense as Shamus’s summary of Fallout 3’s plot. Though Fallout 3’s maybe makes a bit more sense. Maybe.