T w e n t y S i d e d
This week the Rocketeer takes us on the long journey through the Mosphoran Highwaste, across the Salikawood, over the Phon Coast, to the Tchita Uplands, into the Sochen Cave Palace, and to many other places I can’t be bothered to look up on the wiki now that they’ve all blurred together in my mind.
While we’re on this long journey, I’d like to ask you:
Remember the start of the game?
Yeah. Remember all of that narration? The map? All those proper names? The history lesson?
Did you enjoy this frantic struggle to keep track of all the places and people? Did you manage to keep Nabradia, Nalbina, and Nabudis straight when they came up in conversation? Do you have a handle on the Giza Plains, the Galtean Peninsula, Gramis Solodor, Judge Gabranth, and Judge Ghis? Can you remember which country is Rabanastre and which one is Rozarria?
Maybe you’ve been paying attention enough to remember that Ondore is from Bhujerba and not Bur-Omisace, and maybe if you think for a minute you can remember his relationship to the Marquis. And maybe you’ve got a handle on things so that you don’t confuse Vaan, Vayne, Vossler, and Venat. Or Drace, Dalmasca, and Draklor. Maybe you can sort out the two different characters named Cid, and maybe you can remember who Reks, Reddas, Raithwall, and Rasler are.
Good job. Now that you’ve put in the work let me ask you:
What are you getting out of it, aside from the ability to follow the convolutions of this wayward plot? You put in the work, you memorized the names, and maybe you even checked the wiki when you got lost. And for all of that effort, your big reward is the ability to clearly understand that the storyteller has lost their mind.
The game made a big show of that initial history lesson, but now we’re halfway through the game and it turns out that all of that intrigue, politicking, and statecraft is just background noise in a story about collecting magic rocks and enchanted swords.
It’s like spending hours on a jigsaw puzzle, and then you finally stand back and realize you’re building a Dick Butt.
The Final Fantasy Draft XII
Like I said way back in part 5, I’m not a fan of anyone in our main party. Our heroes seem to always be the least interesting people in the room. They’re gloomy, directionless, and they make almost no effort to hook up with each other. We get several guests during the course of the game – Vossler, Larsa, and Reddas – and without exception they’re more interesting than the people in our party.
So let’s dump these losers back into free agency and select a new main party from the available characters. How will the plot work with new leads? Wouldn’t a new cast require an all-new plot?
To which I say: Shut up and I don’t care.
Here are my picks:
Ondore
Obviously we gotta have Ondore on the team. Look at that magnificent outfit. His outfit is actually a little too stylish and non-insane for a Final Fantasy team, but I’ll allow it. He would be the Gandalf of the group. He’d chime in at the end of debates between the other characters to drop some nugget of wisdom on the kids and remind them of some important guiding truth.
When it comes to combat, I assume he’d thwap monsters with that sweet cane.
Al-Cid Margrace
I almost had to disqualify Al-Cid on account of him being too cool to join the party. He’s witty, stylish, sexy, and he’s a head of stateIs he THE head, or just A head of state? I can’t remember. of the one non-evil superpower in the world. He’s so powerful and glamorous that he’s going to wind up being the central protagonist unless we handle him very carefully. This is supposed to be an ensemble piece, so you can’t just let one character steal the show.
Mjrn
I’ll be honest, I’m not crazy about the Viera (the bunny girls) in this game. At first glance they seem to be trying WAY too hard in the fanservice department. But then you get to know them and you realize they’re actually incredibly boring.
I’m not against fanservice characters! Far from it. I just think that you ruin it if you make the fanservice too overt. Moreover every character needs some depth, regardless of how fun they are to look at.
But swapping Fran for Mjrn will at least give us a more interesting bunny-girl. Fran is old, wise, quiet, and (worst of all) has no arc. She has no chemistry with anyone on the team, not even her supposed BFF Balthier. Mjrn is young, which gives her room for emotional outbursts, personal growth, and a sense of wonder at the world around her.
Larsa
Oops. I didn’t mean to have Larsa on the team. I was saving this spot for Curly, but Larsa snuck in here while I wasn’t looking.
Still, I like the story suggested by having both Larsa and Al-Cid in the same party. These two sons of warring nations get together and scheme to avert armageddon, like a geopolitical version of the Parent Trap.
Supinelu
Now, we already have a Gandalf on the team. That puts a noble savage like Supinelu in a tough spot. We can’t have two people trying to be the voice of wisdom and reason in the party.
I suggest that maybe we take Supinelu in a slightly different direction and make him quiet and mysterious. We can recycle Kimahri’s character from Final Fantasy X: He barely speaks. When he does speak, he says something surprising. And at some point in our journey we’ll come across his homeland and he’ll have to sort out some messy tribal politics.
Drace
I’ll admit that Drace doesn’t give us a lot to work with. But the party so far – and indeed the game itself – is a massive sausage fest and if we don’t put some females on the team then we end up with FFXV’s “no girls allowed” club. And that sucks.
I suppose Drace can show up in full armor during Act I and the story can act like this is a dude. And the audience is like, “Are you kidding? Just listen to that voice. This is so obviously a woman.” And then at the halfway point we’ll have a big scene where Drace removes her helmet and all the characters are like, “No way! I totally had no idea this person was female! My worldview is so challenged!” And we can pat ourselves on the back for being such clever writers.
Also, Drace will need a personality, backstory, personal goals, etc etc.
Reddas
My personal preference would be to have the party be a little more even between males and females. But we have to pick from the characters in front of us. And unless we want another bunny girl on the team, there aren’t any more voiced female characters left in Final Fantasy XII.
Besides, there’s no way we can leave the Pirate King on the table. If we’re drafting a fun party, then this guy has to be on the team.
So Now What?
You might argue that it would be hard to make a sensible story out of this collection of misfits. I suppose that’s true, but I don’t see that’s all that different from how things are now. If the story is going to be an incoherent mess either way, then at least we should experience it through a group of energetic and interesting characters. Maybe we can get some of these idiots to flirt with each other so the shippers have something to work with.
So that’s it. This is basically everything I have to say about Final Fantasy XII. I have one last entry next week where I engage in a little heresy, and then my part in this adventure is over.
Footnotes:
[1] Is he THE head, or just A head of state? I can’t remember.
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Trying to come up with a similar team in FFXIII but I’m having a really hard time thinking of any character in that game who’s remotely likable, useful or interesting. I suppose Sahz’ son is not hatable, but he’s an infant, he certainly can’t work a weapon. Then I guess LeBreau is the least annoying member of Snow’s team, but she can barely manage to scrounge a personality, let alone a story arc.
And that’s pretty much it. I suppose a story where a gun-totting lady makes team with a fragile child could be an interesting premise for a game (provided the whole thing wasn’t a giant escort mission), and these characters are nearly one-dimensional, which puts them miles above the actual protagonists, but I still think the best way to rescue this game is to go back in time to where the writers were kids and use an Inception-style device to plant the idea in their heads to dedicate themselves to sell donuts for the rest of their lives and never go anywhere near a videogame.
The “Moms are tough” lady? Snow dies early, she takes over?
I’d submit that in FFXIII there is nothing at all wrong with any of the characters in concept, only in execution. Which shares the execution problem with most of the rest of the story, which is “almost everything interesting is stuffed in the Codex and most of the actual story that plays out on screen is just our party members being grumpy jerks to each other nonstop”. It also doesn’t help that the game starts with “increasingly contrived excuses to split the party” and as a result Chapters 4-9 or so are just spinning wheels.
Where does concept stop and execution begin? Snow is an idiot who charge head first into situation without thinking about the consequence of his action. The game makes it unambiguously clear that it thinks this the right way to be and event consistently works out for Snow, up to the ending where the party is willing to sacrifice the entire human race just to kill the bad guys, they can figure out what to do after (and miracle, everything works out).
Was the concept for Snow that he was suppose to realize he need to learn to think before he act and the execution botch or was that the concept all along? I would guess the answer is both as the game was in production so long he probably went trough 20 re write.
That’s essentially the concept of Tidus, where it worked for the most part. Maybe also Sora? “Follow your heart, it knows best” works fine in theory.
No, it really doesn’t. Even in theory it’s obviously foolish.
I agree with Chad Miller, Snow is the worst concept of all of them and even he has actually got a pretty well defined arc that would have been fun with a better execution.
I’d go as far to say that Hope and Snow’s arc together is better in concept than almost all of the arcs of the main party in FFXII
I mean, in a vacuum, in settings where there’s literal magic and destiny and stuff? I could see that ‘follow your heart’ stuff working out…
But~ in the real world, where we all actually live… that’s the sort of thinking that makes people put their house mortgages on red down at the roulette table, and then they double down on red again with their car keys, because it also “felt right, and they just knew~ in their hearts~ that their streak was changing.”
So… yeah~, it’s a pretty disgustingly irresponsible bit of storytelling if you actually stop and think about it. You’re basically teaching people to stop thinking and quiet their doubts, and just one step away from outright encouraging folks to be exploited with a smile on their faces.
It’s basically the same exact thing as tropes like the evil scientist. In a vacuum, one story, they’re perfectly fine… but they get repeated to the point where they shape folks lives and way of thinking, and thus by repetition, become destructive forces.
Snow blusters forward in the most obvious, optimistic course of action because he doesn’t know how to grapple with difficult decisions or dire situations. This is explicitly spelled out in chapter 9 dialogue with Hope.
The fact that the actual answer turns out to be “just keep blustering forward anyway” is a product of the fact that their idea for a resolution was “the heroes follow the villain’s plan to the letter and it works out for them without explanation.”
Hope/Snow arc is one of the worst thing in the game. Snow decision to rush and free the people from the train and then arm Hope’s mom is 100% correct and pretty much the only instance where Snow being an idiot who rush in helped people. Having his arc with Hope focus on that point just undermine both of their arc.
Maybe going for something like Gurren Lagann? The idea there was similar to snow. Just keep going forwards and you’ll succeed. Don’t give up. Etc. Done much, much, much better of course, but still roughly there.
Execution was indeed terrible though.
As soon as I saw you draft Supinelu, I thought ‘Thats the Kimahri of the group’.
I would draft Ashe over Drace. First because I’d already forgot who Drace is. Second, Larsa, Al-Cid _and_ Ashe is such a potent story combination just saying their names together conjures up a more interesting plot than FFXII. Third, now you have drafted actual characters to your party who do things Ashe’s broodiness will feel less pronounced.
Her vengeful streak and her position as a victim of the clashing forces of the superpowers will add some spice and serve as a counterpoint to the perspectives of Larsa and Al-Cid.
EDIT: Actually keep Drace as well as Ashe. Drace and Larsa would have a good dynamic, it puts Drace into the Lulu position
I agree you’d want to keep Ashe in there but you’d need a personality transplant. As it stands her title is the only interesting thing about her and most of the storylines you would want from her have to do with being a princess. Having already been involved in one political marriage, how does she feel about potentially engaging in another? There could be interesting stuff there but as it stands I don’t really want to spend more time with her.
I could see her functioning a lot like Yuna does in FFX even without major changes. Someone with a major responsibility that a lot of the plot revolves around, who wants to do the right thing but sometimes doesn’t know what that is.
For the purposes of this list, I felt like I had to replace everyone. If for no other reason than “but we keep Ashe” is boring and requires no effort on my part.
But I agree that Ashe would make a lot of sense on the team. Her flat personality wouldn’t be bad if she was surrounded by more vibrant characters. She’s an heiress, she’s got skin in the game, and she’s got beef with Archades.
But then we have to decide who we’re going to cut to make room for her. After looking at the list, I’m honestly leaning towards cutting Reddas, if only because I can’t bring myself to cut Supinelu.
If we’re keeping existing characters on the table, I’d keep Balthier and Ashe.
I’d even keep Vaan, just not as the protagonist: having an idiot on the team so everyone has an excuse to explain the plot using small words is useful, this often overly serious game needs comic relief from time-to-time – and the Reks plot-point if it’s used to give depth to a character who at first seems like a joke, not the thing we lead with.
As for the drops?
Supinelu: I can’t imagine how “he could be this game’s Kimarhi” could be a selling point! Sick mask, but hard pass.
Drace: I know some will miss Judge Milf, but I wouldn’t.
Reddas: He’s just a hybrid of Balthier and Ondore – “sky pirate
and former Judge” crossed with “ruler of an independent city that opposes the Empire but not openly”.If you keep Ashe, you have a decent reason to keep Vaan. She wants to regain her birthright, but the death of his brother is a good, personal reminder of the human cost of war and other political intrigues. Which to FFXII’s credit it *did* actually explore…
I’d much rather have Judge Milf than Basch, I have to say. He’s directly linked to that opening assasination nonsense-plot. By rights, he should be dead.
Plus, Judge Milf can teach Ashe how to handle magic stones!
I hope Rocko is appropriately happy about how that joke has taken off.
If we’ve got Mjrn fresh out of Bunnyland, she can fill the “excuse to explain things” role pretty well, we wouldn’t need Vaan for that. And hopefully the more interesting party dynamics mean we don’t need a comic relief character, personality jank will do that naturally.
I’d probably switch out Balthier for Reddas and give Balthier Reddas’ NPC spot; they’re quite similar characters, although Reddas is more visually impressive. (Not so for Ashe and Ondore; Ashe can’t handle Ondore’s spot.)
Yeah, Mjrn can probably cover most of the “exposition excuse” role, but I think I’d still keep Vaan. It’s maybe less that we need an explicit comic relief, but I think his energy is a good balance against most of the rest of the cast, that mostly fall on the spectrum somewhere between “reserved”, “serious”, and “dour”. And he does serve as a good foil to Ashe (as BlueHorus mentions).
As for Balthier vs Reddas, they’re similar, but Balthier’s got the connection to Cid that makes him a lot more interesting. Could even make Rocketeer’s thinly-veiled Balthier/Ashe shipfic dreams come true if we’re making major plot changes. (And, I dunno, maybe Reddas gets more interesting, but I honestly just like Balthier better)
You could have make Ash ten times more interesting by making her have an infant son / be pregnant and play up the widow angle more. You have heir to two kingdoms plot lines, and you can make a lot of funny Ladislaus the Posthumus jokes.
She gets married, pregnant, widowed, orphaned, and dethroned all in the same day? This is a pretty hard-core origin story.
Well, week, but yes.
It is a credit to the skill of the FFXII team, that they managed to take a character that innately interesting boring.
Rather than keeping Ashe, how about the ghost of Rasler? He wouldn’t have skin in the game…. but only because it’s lying on the floor (like the rest of what could have been a comprehensible plot and character arcs). =P
I know it’s fun to throw shade at, but XV might actually be worth a look for you if you like a Final Fantasy with a strong main party. When I played it I was hoping I’d find something to like in spite of the boy band crew, but they were easily the best (and some might say only good) part of the whole game.
I loved Final Fantasy XV so much. It was not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but I have never seen a game capture the spirit of friendship more than it did. Even when the characters were dumb and broody, they were dumb and broody in very believable ways, and their friends all reacted appropriately (mostly a mixture between supporting them, calling them out, and getting in arguments). It was very impressive how the game starts and you already believe all of these characters have a history together, but then they each still have their own arcs and grow and change over the course of the story in ways that develop naturally from their existing relationships with each other.
It fumbles a lot with the gameplay especially, but I honestly feel like even the fumbles were more a result of going too hard than of screwing things up. The first, like, third to half of the game feels really slow, for example, when you’re essentially just on a road trip and doing side quests… but in the process it totally captures the exciting boredom (or boring excitement?) of a real road trip. Was it a good idea to try to capture the feeling of boredom in a video game? Of course not, but it was so insane I love that they went for it. And dudes-only party, which I didn’t love at first, really made sense once I saw that they were targeting a very specific feeling of a group of best bros hanging out together.
I love the photos Prompto takes and how they have no mechanical effect on anything, I love how you’re forced to rest if you want to advance and each time you do there’s little side convos and photo reviews, I love the meaningless questions your party members will ask you when you’re driving from place to place. Everything the game does feels intended to serve the idea of the party all being best friends and it all totally works.
For all its flaws, the areas where it succeeds are areas where I’ve never seen a game succeed before, or at least not to the same depth and degree.
Yup, this puts it really well… I know a lot of people see that it’s four anime-looking-dudes and think “what an overdone trope”, but the FFXV party is genuinely a refreshing departure from the stereotypical RPG party of murderhobous misfits, and by far the best thing that game has going on.
It’s a credit to how well the game builds and sells the party dynamic in the first half that even in the second half, where I had zero understanding of the overall plot, I was still invested in the character’s and their relationship. (And I mean really “zero understanding” – it’s not even comparable to FFXII to me - which yes, has a lot of names and places, but I could still describe the plot)
I agree with you on both the positives and negatives of that game.
On the one hand, the bros really are likeable. On the other hand, near the end the main villain reveals his real name…and the intended implications flew completely over my head because I’d long past forgotten the background details necessary to make that even be a plot reveal.
I liked the band in the first 1/3, but I feel like they all slowly turned into a group of asshole as the game went on and by the end I would have been very happy if they all feel into a wood shredder (Prompto can stay but he’s on thin ice). Gladiolus deserves to fall into a furnace after the wood shredder, it feel like his entire character arc is to piss off Noctis for no reason and often felt like his complaint contradict each others.
I liked the party for the most part, but there is one point where Gladio starts lecturing Noctis about duty or responsibility and I wanted him to respond with something like “Okay, speaking of duty, wanna talk about that time I was heading into a dungeon and you just kinda fucked off for no reason?”
I feel like this probably depends on just how strong those preferences on PC gender are. I never even considered playing XV, since as a trans lesbian I feel like there’s basically nothing there for me in the cast. After the years of, in a sense, playing as a male character IRL when I didn’t want to, I’m kind of done and it’s a rare game that’ll convince me to play a male protagonist even with a balanced cast.
I’ve already confessed that I stopped trying to keep track of the plot about half this series ago. Way too many strange names and inexplicable motivations. Video games are probably not the best medium for having complicated political stories of fictitious entities, especially when you have multiple writers involved. EXTRA especially when you have writers who subscribe to the Game of Thrones philosophy of “Creatively it made sense to us, because we wanted it to happen” which throws out understandable motivations (and thus a coherent plot) for spectacle.
I don’t think Al-Cid is a head of state at all. I can’t remember exactly what he says, but I definitely had the impression that he was not in the line of succession. Wasn’t he working behind the scenes trying to make peace even as his country rolled steadily toward war? Sort of like Larsa (if he weren’t actually King Troll).
I might be alone in this, but “Archadia and Rozarria are major superpowers in conflict, and the minor countries, Nabradia and Dalmasca, between them are taking it in the shorts” is way, way, WAY easier for me to remember than which button does what (which one jumps and which dodges, which draws the bow and which brings out the spear, etc.). I could easily log tens if not hundreds of hours in a game before I start getting better than 50% accuracy on my button presses.
Maybe I should stick with reading for my main hobby. (And also, story mode.)
Yeah, he describes himself as “just one of very very many” in the ruling family. It’s possible he’s just being humble (counterpoint: the rest of his character), but yeah, I got the impression that he’s not in-line for the throne though he may hold some lesser position of authority.
Mrjn is a terrible name. It makes me miss Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, in which viera were perfectly normal people. Sure, they might have bunny ears and they might have a few unique jobs–or not, since Ritz is human but uses the viera job tree–but they lived in all the same places as everybody else and their names were drawn from the same pool of vowel-containing and apostrophe-less random names as everyone else’s. In my view, Mrjn really should have been called something else. I nominate Cheese Toast because her name seems vaguely Welsh and, y’know, she’s got bunny ears.
Yeah, okay, I’m sorry. I’ll go now.
I don’t remember if they say Mjrn’s name in the dialogue, but I’m pretty sure they’re drawing on the tradition of pronouncing ‘j’s like vowel ‘y’s. So, ‘Myurn’.
Yeah, Mjrn seems like a fairly decent Nordic-sounding name, and pretty acceptable by Final Fantasy standards. Though it might not mean anything to someone actually from Scandinavia.
Gotta be better than Lightning or Snow*, anyway.
*Well, actually Yuki (which can translate to Snow) is a pretty common Japanese name, so *shrug*.
Ktjn, on the other hand…
My brain insists on pronouncing it “kitten.”
Katyan, maybe?
I was literally just coming down here to ask, “Is it pronounced ‘Myrn’? ‘Muh-jern?’ ‘Majorana’ without the vowels?” So thanks for that.
“Majora, and the ‘n’ is silent?”
Yeah, and then he takes off the mask and he sounds exactly the same.
Heehee, we could have a running joke where Supinelu pulls out some vague wisdom and then Mjrn completely misinterprets it and Supinelu has to stop trying to be cool and just explain the thing in its entirety.
Drace would make a great Steiner. She’s Larsa’s bodyguard, and constantly clashing with Al-Cid over his cocky attitude and princess kidnapping.
That makes Gabranth our Beatrix.
Persona 4 pulled that one, and spent so long not revealing it I really started hoping it was an untwist where this guy just had a really effeminate voice. They even had a secondary twist for the Deep Dark Secret, it really could have worked.
Final Fantasy 5 also pulled this, except that one was unvoiced. It still completely didn’t work because she had the same hair and Tifa-sized knockers that the other female character had.
This depends heavily on what version we’re talking about. The original 16-bit version certainly kept the character plausibly male before the reveal (after the reveal you do start seeing more feminine sprites)
Yeah, I had not yet seen the Android version sprites so I was very confused.
Also shout-out to the PSX translation which takes the goofy up to 11.
Heh, now I’m just imagining the pirates that Faris leads were humoring her all along.
“Yarr, d’ye think we should tell the Cap’n that if she really wants to pass as a man she’ll have to do something about that bust?”
*Slap* “Don’t ye dare, ye scallywag! Can’t ye see we’re all enjoying the view!?”
Not sure about her making a great Steiner. To me, Steiner is mostly comic relief. He has all the responsibility for the princess, but no authority over her, so he gets frustrated and jumps up and down clanking his armor. FFXII isn’t cartoony enough for that.
His story about believing in the empire at first and then seeing what it really is, is (supposedly) Larsa’s story. Except Larsa subverts Archadia’s plans from the start because he’s just a giant troll or something.
And that’s most of what we know about Drace’s relationship with Larsa. So Larsa is effectively Princess Dagger, running off to stop his family’s schemes, and Drace would be Steiner, tagging along and trying to talk him into going back and using the internal channels. And Al-Cid would be… not Zidane, but a similar corrupting influence, undermining the idea of Archadean nobility. Reddas probably shares that spot, but in a less comical way.
Maybe we get a mid-game scene where Reddas takes everyone to the zombie pit that used to be Nabradia, and that’s our big turning point for the uninformed cast; Mjrn, Drace, and Larsa get caught flatfooted, and everything seriouses up.
Serious answer to a rhetorical question, but I unironically think all of these names and places is a good thing for this game. A lot of this comes down to genre, and all these details (though not the details of the details) are important for establishing FFXII’s intended pseudo-historical feel.
FFX is by far the better game and story, in my book, but FFXII’s Ivalice feels far more real and “lived-in” and alien than Spira. And I think a lot of that comes from the very things Shamus has criticized: the long list of names, the “wall-of-text” cutscenes that are extracts from a fictional history book, and yes, to go all the way back to the beginning, the inclusion of fictional calendar system in the opening cutscene.
Yeah, it throws a lot of unfamiliar terms at the player, but the fact that they’re unfamiliar is kind of the point, for the same reason it leans into having so many non-human species: it’s supposed to feel different and alien and… well, like a fantasy story.
To me, this feels like a lot of conversations around certain fantasy novels. There’s a whole popular genre of “heavy” fantasy, (like Wheel of Time being kind of a classic example), and some people love them, and a lot of people don’t. And it’s a pet peeve of mine is when the people who don’t like them will describe the very things that I like about them as if they’re “writing mistakes”. Saying a fantasy story has too many names always feels like criticizing a superhero movie for having too many action scenes.
I think FFXII does an excellent job establishing its genre and building an interesting setting. Of course, that’s not the same as telling a good story, and this one largely doesn’t – but for me that comes down more to a failure to execute on any of the interesting ideas in this story. I don’t think the fundamental failure of this story is that it was “too complicated” much less that it “has too many names”. That’s low-hanging fruit, and potentially an indicator of a genre-mismatch with the player, but not actually the core issue.
I think the map and location design is probably more responsible for that than the opening narration. The Zertinan Caverns connecting to three or four different map locations, the Giza Plains changing shape when it rains, the sheer amount of “flyover country” we’re walking through to get places. Rabanastre being this sprawling five-section monstrosity of a town with shops scattered all over the place. Big optional areas like the Garamsythe Waterways and the Nabudis Deadlands, where the plot never sends you.
I’ll compare it to Morrowind, actually. Morrowind’s cutscenes are pretty short and all revolve around the Nerevarine Prophecy, but the world seems alive* and real because of the location designs and interconnectedness.
*(if you can ignore how static the NPCs are.)
Not for me; I was hooked on the setting by the end of the opening cutscene, so I really don’t think it was the map design that sold me. Though obviously the visual design of the world itself – the floating cities, the weird looking airships, all the different species – is a prominent part of that opening cutscene.
But as for the MMO-style open-world maps themselves, I think they actually hurt the realism as much as they help. On the one hand, they are larger than average, and the changing weather and seasons is a neat touch, but it’s all very artificial and makes the sense of distance very confusing.
A lot of this is just inevitable for the genre of game, but I actually found it easier to imagine in FFX that the small “railroad path” we were on was just part of a larger world, whereas in FFXII where I have much more free-reign to run around the world, it’s harder to not get the impression that this is all there is.
A thought I just had, is that if you’re reading a book and forget a name, you can (at least theoretically) easily flip back as many pages as necessary to where it was introduced to remind yourself who or what it was. But you can’t really easily do that in most games. You could, perhaps, start a new game to watch the opening cutscene again, but that doesn’t help with anything beyond it. So unless the game allows you to go back and watch previous cutscenes again, or has a good “journal” system to keep track of settings and details and such, you pretty much have to rely exclusively on your memory. And really big games can take longer to play (even if you’re progressing quickly and not getting distracted by mini-games or grinding or whatnot) than ever really long novels take to read, so you have to rely on your memory for longer.
I do feel like it’s possible to have “too many names” in a story, but that depends on the story and writing quality, and is not in itself a bad thing. I don’t think the Lord of the Rings (or even the Silmarillion) has too many names, because they’re part of a well-written story that uses them effectively*. But it’s easy to look at the success of LotR and draw the mistaken conclusion that a story’s quality is proportional to the number of proper names it contains.
*Though I’m sure more than one person has been tripped up between ‘Sauron’ and ‘Saruman’.
Video games can normally take advantage of that fact with a lot of Fridge Logic. Things only have to make sense from scene to scene to keep most players interested. Even our dear nitpicker Shamus has discussed how some of his gripes don’t come until much later in the game or even a second play-through when he’s had time to evaluate the plot and realize the set-ups and payoffs are syncing, and motivations don’t matter.
Tangent, actual tabletop role-playing games can get by with a LOT less coherent writing because players won’t typically find out everything anyway (they’ll assume the nonsense makes sense because of information they haven’t received yet), and they will almost never get to replay the same story to realize the problems.
Lord of the Rings partly backs up its noun heaviness by having very carefully chosen nouns that have in-built resonance to it’s target audience. You can intuit a huge amount of what ‘Middle Earth’ implies just by living in a culture that has some vague Nordic influence.
You can probably guess Eowyn is female and Eomer is a male relative if presented with nothing but the names alone.
I don’t know if the Japanese version of FFXII had that precision, but the translation definitely doesn’t.
I’m 25% Irish and 50% Scandanavian, and could 100% not guess the gender of Eowyn or Eomer based on their names. It’s possible I’m an outlier, but I kind of doubt it.
I’m pretty sure LoTR gets away with having its Arwens and Eowyns and Eomers and Sarumans and Saurons and its Baggins and Boffins (and its other prescription drug names) specifically because it’s Lord of the Rings, and thus one of the best fantasy stories of all time.
The people who complain about names in fantasy books would absolutely complain about names in Lord of the Rings if it were any less good (and in fact, many do, and increasingly so the farther back you go, I think).
Perhaps it’s not as common as I thought then. ‘Wyn’ in Eowyn and ‘Wen’ in Arwen both share the same root as the real life name ‘Gwen’ meaning ‘fair’.
It’s not technically gendered and I wouldn’t have expected people to feel confident they’re female names, but I’d expect if asked to guess most people would guess female and be surprised they’re right.
For example, I didn’t know Tolkien was using them as gendered names before I wrote thus, but I was pretty sure in my guess and when I looked it up, yes, Eowyn’s mother is Theodwyn and her grandmother is Morwen.
Hmm I’m less convinced now. Maybe I’m backporting my associations based off Eowyn rather than the other way round. ‘Gwyn’ is a male name afterall
Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight vs Sauron
Whoever wins, everyone else loses
If Sauron can parry it wouldn’t be much of a fight.
“From 1925-45, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university, to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, positions he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.” (W) so I’m guessing he was doing it right, like the rest of the language stuff.
Which is to say, party is not Hot Betty, Kweku, S’l’ghrr’h’n of the massive gazongas, and Samurai Fedora.
I can guess Eomer is male, but Eowyn is one letter off from both Edwyn and Erwyn, I’d definitely read it as male in a vacuum.
I think LotR does it by not bringing characters back very often. Once the party is done in Rivendell, the reader doesn’t need to remember who Elrond is anymore. The list of hobbit names is clearly not meant to be remembered, it’s got something of a Dr. Seuss vibe. Characters who do come back, like Saruman and Gollum, get reintroduced; they’re always talking about Saruman’s betrayal, or Saruman’s scheme, or Gollum’s nature as a Ringbearer, and the reader can go “I don’t remember them but they’re clearly bad news.”
Well, his sons do show up as allies 15 chapters later.
I like how subtle the thing with his daughter is. You only notice it on your second reading.
That might work for the Rohirrim, being based on Anglo-Saxon culture and language (though the chasm between even that and modern-day English is perhaps larger than you might think), but what about names in invented languages like Galadriel or Gil-galad or Khazad-dum*?
I do think that Tolkien having consistent rules for his various invented languages is important; the names in LotR come across as having internal consistency (Elvish names sound one way, Rohirrim names another, Hobbit names another, etc.) which makes them easier to remember, rather than feeling like someone picked Scrabble tiles out of a bag. FF12 doesn’t seem to have this same internal consistency (from what I can tell from this series, not having played it), other than perhaps the Viera having their own set of names. I certainly couldn’t tell you whether “Basche”, “Vaan”, and “Balthier” come from the same, related, or completely different cultures.
*If anything, Tolkien’s dwarvish most closely resembles Hebrew, though considering “Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!” is like the longest sentence of it in his writings there’s not a whole lot to go on beyond individual names.
In itself I’d expect people to innately understand the contrast implied between languages like ‘Galadriel’ and ‘Kazad-dum’. It’s following the association that letters like K and Z sound harder and more aggressive than the rounder sounds in Elvish.
Oh, for sure; I was replying your your point that people’s real-world knowledge might help them with names due to association, and saying that while that might work for Rohirrim names, nobody’s real-world experience is likely to make them better remember names in Quenya or Dwarvish. (Nobody’s going to be able to guess whether “Gil-galad” is a male or female name with better than 50% accuracy, for instance.) I think the names are memorable because they’re working off internally-consistent language principles which provide association and repetition of similar sounds for each language, which lets people intuit that “there’s linguistic patterns here to pick up on” even if it’s not a language they had, or even could have, experienced before.
Yeah, having some system of reminders is a good idea for most games, and games definitely have more tools for reminding the player, like DQ11 gives you a quick refresher of the most recent events every time you load, which is a nice equivalent to “looking back a few pages”.
With books you can flip back, but it’s often unhelpful (if I don’t remember who someone is, there’s a good chance I don’t remember what section of the book introduced them). I mentioned Wheel of Time, and those books always had an index at the back that would contain reminders about the most important characters and places. (As well as some dubiously helpful pronunciation guides – knowing that Semirhage is pronounced “SEH-mir-RHAHG” would be more helpful if I could figure out how “RHAHG” is supposed to be pronounced)
FFXII even already has a place to put this stuff, it’s got your “Clan Primer” which includes your Bestiary, some basic history and character refreshers could have gone there.
Yup, that was me. I mean, in fairness, I was like… 9 years old at the time, but I absolutely did not understand that Sauron and Saruman were different characters at the end of the book. I also did a fair bit of “this is boring, let’s skim until it gets interesting again”.
Having a lot of names to make a world lived in is nice and all, but the nature of people is that they can only pay attention to a few threads at a time without additional tools to help them. This is not just a storytelling thing – we can claim that the world is “lived in” and “alive” because it’s literally real life, yet how much of the world do we truly process besides what occurs in our daily life? Not much, and arguably the influences that do tell us that the world is larger than our senses is often bad for our senses (see the discussion on news cycles, for example).
So I don’t think having a lived in or alive world is, in itself, a good objective. What I think makes the idea of a lived or alive world something to admire is that it can help support creating an interesting setting that people care about, but that’s not the ONLY factor in getting people to care about a setting. By overly concentrating on the “aliveness” of a world, it’s easy to distract from all the other factors that need to be put into play to make a setting feel good to explore or dive into, such as the conflicts in play or how the characters interact with that setting.
I think a lot of the name issue could be fixed if they took five second to make them more distinct. Why are there two country with similar name that both start with R? Why are there so many N starting city. You don’t need to name everything using alliterative name or anything, but just take two seconds to have most place using very different name (and if a country is just a city state, just use the same name for both). Hell, why are there two Cid in this story?!
I wouldn’t call Rozarria and Rabanastre similar in any way, other than sharing an incidental first letter. I’d also be surprised if anyone mixes up the main city of the game, a place you spend a lot of time with a place you never visit that pops up a few times, despite sharing the first letter. But I bet you can figure out by context whether they’re talking about the city that you’re all from or the empire across the border, anyway.
—
All the N-places are intentionally named with the same letter, and arguably make things clearer. They’re all part of the same location: the Country Nabradia, has the capital city of Nabudis (which has been destroyed and is now a Necrohol), and a border fortress called Nalbina, as well as another optional area called Nabreus).
Did I have to look any of that up? Absolutely. But the naming convention is actually useful because every time I see an N name, I know “oh, it’s the place with all the N words, that was the neighbor of Dalmascia that got destroyed in the prologue”. And frankly, these places aren’t that important that I need to be able to precisely remember which is which. It’s not going to be on the test.
Whereas, if, say “Andor” was the country, “Cairhien” was the capital, and “Fal Dara” was the fortress and “Maredo” as the surrounding area… well you still probably won’t remember which is which, and in fact, if I throw out the name “Fal Dara” six hours later in the story, you’re actually less likely to have any idea what I’m talking about. Making the names more distinct doesn’t actually help. (And in fact is worse as it sounds like four completely different cultures named these places)
Of course you could do something like “Nalbina” the country, with “Nalbina City” as the capital city, and “New Nalbina Fortress” as the border fortress, and… “Nalbania” as the surrounding region. But that sounds super artificial, and would hurt the realism of the world, especially if you did too much of it.
Did I have to look any of that up? Absolutely. But the naming convention is actually useful because every time I see an N name, I know “oh, it’s the place with all the N words
Oh dear.
Preach it, Brother Young!
I have a slightly different idea. Various unmarked spoilers for all of FFXII to follow.
Kick off Ondore and Larsa. I like both of them, but I do think that Ondore works best more or less in his capacity as the Big Good, the character that’s coordinating this army of like-minded allies while the main party is off doing things better suited to a half-dozen misfits. Also, we already have an older gentleman on the team if we make Reddas 52 years old, like he looks, rather than the 33 years old the game seems to think bald b=Basso profondo men with hoary muttonchops should be. I think Larsa works better than Ondore as a party member, but again I think he works better in the capacity he’s already trying to fill, a lordling trying to move and shake Archadian politics at a level way above his probable ken that occasionally entreaties our party, tags along as a guest star, and fills us in on the latest Valendian happenings.
You say it would be too easy to keep Ashe. I say keep Penelo, and make her the main character. Takes us to an even six with three guys, three gals, just like the vanilla game. No Vaan, no Reks, Penelo is Basch’s much younger sister or half-sister. Basch is DEAD. The conspiracy to kill Raminas went basically the same way, except instead of relying on Reks for some reason and keeping Basch in a dungeon to inevitably escape and fuck everything up, Basch actually does murder Raminas. He’s tried at Nalbina by the Imperials and, before a crowd of Nabradians and Dalmascans, proclaims the glory of Dalmasca and revels in his deeds at his hanging. Penelo survives the most hated man in Dalmascan history.
Penelo was forced to grow up very quickly as an orphan and assume grown-up responsibilities basically working full-time for Migelo, who took her in. She’s still somehow cheerful and chipper and has a playful, childlike side to her that she rarely gets to show.
Keep Ashe in the setting, but not the party. As in the game, she either faked her death or was falsely proclaimed dead at the war’s end and has been leading an insurgency ever since. The game should acknowledge that she’s basically one step shy of mad with vengeance, understandably blind with hatred of the Empire and desperate to take back her throne. Her people are obliged to serve her whims because she is the rightful liege bu she isn’t a tactical mastermind and the people around her understand— but can’t openly say— that she makes terrible rash decisions that jeopardize herself, her compatriots, and her nation for the sake of short-term gratification. If and when the 8th Fleet disaster occurs, she goes public and accedes to the throne immediately, with all the chaos and danger that entails.
Penelo comes into the lost Dusk Shard somehow early on, which Ashe shortly claims as her birthright. The 8th Fleet disaster makes clear exactly what the stones are, and Ashe’s accession sets the stage for a war between two nethicite-armed sides, which Ashe relishes as she assumes she will win, reasoning that the Archadian stone was expended the moment they obtained it.
Eventually, Her Royal Highness deigns to accompany the party to Giruvegan and meet with the Occuria, assuming she will finally receive her due as the scion of Raithwall and receive the blessing of the gods and the power to lay low all her enemies, only to find out that the party— though mostly Ashe— has misinterpreted what has become very obvious to the audience: the Occuria care nothing for Ashe and plan to anoint Penelo as the harbinger of a new era, wiping the slate clean of Raithwall’s shambolic legacy. They openly scorn and insult Ashe as a petty, ignorant, selfish, spoiled, unserious, self-obsessed power-hungry little harpy unfit to rule a bowl of jello. Penelo, meanwhile, as all the foreshadowing and visual storytelling have hinted (the way the real game fruitlessly has done for Vaan) fits the mold of Raithwall: a young warrior and wanderer from obscure and humble origins in whom the gods, in their inscrutable omniscience, have perceived the right stuff for a great and enduring sovereign. However, the Occuria perceived in the aging Raithwall an insulting mistrust of the Occuria evidenced by the pains he took to hide away the power lent to him and even set up countermeasures to their influence like the Sword of Kings, and they demand a show of obedience: as well as extinguishing or conquering the reigning houses of the nations of Ivalice, take and use the new nethicite from the Pharos to raze Archades to dust and make an example of the nation that dared co-opt the power of the gods.
Rather than being introduced and then dying more than halfway into the narrative, Drace needs some motivation to part company with the Ministry of Law early on. Like, say, finding out the handsome and charming fellow Judge she’s become fast friends with actually murdered Raminas (after it became apparent that the king had figured out their designs on the nethicite and planned to make this knowledge public) and framed his brother for the deed, premising the Imperial occupation of Dalmasca on a dastardly lie for the sake of the Emperor’s ambitious heir-apparent. Vayne knows she knows, and orders Gabranth to get rid of her. He instead gives her the chance to escape, telling Vayne she had already fled. Drace, as an older and very formidable woman of integrity acts as a good role model for Penelo and a foil for Mjrn. She’s also at odds with Al-Cid, whose usual rakish regard towards the ladies seems rather muted when it comes to Drace. She has many things in common with Reddas, but they fight terribly because politics; Drace is a true believer in Archadia and the Ministry of Law, and never gives up hope that her nation’s honor can be restored.
I don’t understand the phrase “Supinelu should be like Kimahri” and I’m going to assume I misread it. The thing that makes Supinelu and the garif enjoyable is that they play against type for this kind of game and are forthcoming and affable. When they party visits the garif early in the narrative to inquire about the nethicite (having recently lost the Dusk Shard to Ashe and planning to seek the Dawn Shard for reasons I don’t know yet), the garif are stunned that the legacy of Raithwall is returning to the forefront of Ivalician events, and to Supinelu’s surprise he is asked to accompany the party more or less to bear witness to history, honor the will of the gods, and steward the nethicite and those who might bear it. Later in FFXII, you can find out that Supinelu doubts his fitness to serve as warchief and asks the party to serve as witness to his duel with a very dangerous monster, believing he will likely die in the attempt. I think he only became war-chief after his brother suddenly died and vacated the position and he’s never believed he was truly worthy of the role. Shamus says we can later return for him to sort out some sort of trouble among the garif. Eeehhh. Maybe, but I prefer the idea of developing party members through other party members as the plot continues.
Mjrn, meanwhile, should basically just be what I’ve always been shocked Fran isn’t, or wasn’t. She has this curiosity about the world incompatible with her cloistered society’s strict rules and a sense of duty to involve herself in perilous times that she’s been taught her people are above. Maybe don’t act like Mjrn is fourteen when she’s 78. Maybe change one of those integers. Instead we’ve got Penelo, the young girl, Drace the woman grown, and Mjrn, sort of in the middle, responsible for her own life and making her own decisions but clearly aware of her own ignorance and wanting to grow into something other than what she is. Supinelu makes for a natural contrast to Mjrn. Supes has been out and about, he’s got no illusions about the world and he enjoys and honors the garif’s way of life in spite of his knowledge of civilization, not because of his ignorance of it. Mjrn, meanwhile, comes almost immediately to regret breaking her vows and sees the world at a bit of a low point, at a lull between old wars with a new, horrible conflict gearing up and most of the nations of Ivalice that we see either occupied, impoverished, or devastated. She initially feels a strong sense of judgment for the world compared to the very sterile and demanding but relatively peaceful and comfortable life in the elf village, but comes to understand blah blah blah JRPG platitudes about human kindness and passion, experiences all kinds of things she’d have died without ever knowing in Eruyt, and comes to regard the viera’s way of life as cowardly. She also learns something incredibly important for people like her: regard men like Al-Cid Margrace with extreme skepticism.
Speaking of, we’ve got a Rozarrian noble palling around with us. Al-Cid Margrace has this over-the-top caddish hedonic affectation, and while he clearly enjoys playing it up, it becomes clear that this is an affectation, one he embraces partly because it fools people into underestimating his ambitions as a mover and a shaker in very competitive and fast-moving Rozarrian noble politics and the intensely studious grasp he has on the details of the same. What a man of culture knows he’s just read is, “Al-Cid is James Bond.” There’s this moment in FFXII where Balthier takes a break from being an asshole and affects this fawning, gentlemanly attitude for the sake of the young, innocent Penelo. It’s one of my favorite moments from the game, representative of the kind of interaction we needed in about 100x the quantity we got, and a dynamic we should snake for Al-Cid. There should be this persistent question about who the real Al-Cid is, or if there is one, eventually resolved when dire circumstances delineate what lines he isn’t willing to cross or what he’s willing to sacrifice for his genuine ideals. Al-Cid is stylistically an intentional anachronism, and his relationship with his aide comes across like the very modern dynamic between a celebrity or business executive and their iron-blooded, hypercompetitive PA. Al-Cid’s aide can serve as a sort of Moneypenny character, someone completely indifferent to Al-Cid’s flamboyant antics who is typically not with the party and is doing Al-Cid’s bidding behind the scenes to liaise with his homeland and appear periodically to dispense whatever plot-correcting exposition we need.
Finally, we have Reddas. No need for Reddas to be Judge Zecht in this cast; we already have an ex-Judge on the lam in the party. Instead, just make Reddas a literal freebooter, i.e. he’ll stick his boot up your ass if you try and take his freedom from him. Final Fantasy XII has this undercurrent of skepticism of power but no one in the party seems to ever actually represent this point of view except in the specific case of being skeptical of the power specifically of magic nuke crystals and creepy alien angels which is a dumb and useless thing to care about. Reddas is a non-noble leader of a prosperous port city that manages to somehow maintain its independence from nearby Archadia. Reddas is a formidable man, highly educated in history and statecraft and with many connections earned through Balfonheim’s economic connections and Reddas’ force of personality, but with few friends and many enemies in Ivalice’s centers of power, where he’s regarded as little more than a shit-stirring bandit. Reddas would bicker terribly with Drace and Al-Cid, but become fast friends with fellow laid-back warrior Supinelu and an avuncular mentor to Penelo and Mjrn. Reddas finds an unlikely friend in fellow pragmatic old bastard Ondore, whose long years navigating the currents of Ivalician politics have engendered a similar skeptical, transactional attitude toward the realm’s great powers, and who treats with Reddas candidly without pretense or judgment.
In the end, of course, Penelo doesn’t blow up Archadia and conquer Ivalice because she never desired power as Dynast-Queen or whatever. Vayne and Venat are laid low, and with the Solidors disgraced and the Archadian people furious, Larsa is reported dead aboard the Bahamut; Drace returns to the Ministry of Law to willingly face judgment only for Zargabaath to reinstate her. She helps watch over Archadia’s return to its republican roots as the Senate is re-established in the absence of an emperor.
Al-Cid Margrace returns to his homeland. Wild stories circulate in all the right places at just the right times that everything that transpired in the Galtean Peninsula was owed to his incredible powers of persuasion and seduction and his uncanny aim with a rifle, but even as other nobles flock to be seen with the fascinating rising star of the Margrace-Dynasts, he insists when asked that it was little more than a diverting vacation and that anyone of his preternatural cunning and integrity would easily have done the same.
Ashelia Dalmasca, shaken and chastened by the events at Giruvegan, comes to terms with her neglected responsibilities as the steward of Dalmasca and its people. She dedicates herself to constant betterment as a monarch, surprisingly proving a quick study under her uncle Halim Ondore and soon keeping pace with her counterparts abroad, with whom she communicates frequently. Some even say the miraculous emergence of the talented young queen, seemingly back from the grave, is a sign of Raithwall remade, a new Dynast-Queen growing before their eyes. But Ashe never sits easily on the throne, and lives her whole life knowing that somewhere out there is a pigtailed girl who could have thrown Ashe’s corpse into a gutter, and would have if she had been the kind of person Ashe was at the time.
Supinelu returns to Jahara with his faith shaken. Though in dread of the consequences, he faithfully relates all that has happened— including the gods of their legends unmasked— and is relieved to find that they care very little and mostly just want to celebrate the honor Supinelu has brought to Jahara, as envoys from across Ivalice have been arriving at their village more or less since Supinelu left to tell of the garif hero standing and speaking as an equal among the lords and generals of the greatest nations of Ivalice. Supinelu, once wracked by insecurity and self-doubt, is remembered as the greatest war-chief of garif history. Tragically, his spine snaps when he is awarded a mask equal to his renown.
Oh, I guess Mjrn needs a denouement. Uhh…. let’s say halfway through the game when the party gets to Eruyt they find out Mjrn’s little sister, I dunno, Fran or something, is missing because she was kidnapped by Imperials. After saving Fran, they return to Eruyt only to find that with their initial experiments on Fran completed, the Imperials easily invaded the village itself to cart away as many viera as they could. I dunno, they invented some magitech device with nethicite that acts like a dog whistle and incapacitates the viera because of their acute sensitivity to magickal phenomena. Only Mjrn, with difficulty, can resist its influence because she’s been away from the Wood for three years or so and she and the party slaughter the Imperials and save Eruyt, only for Jote to tell them “Oh hey Mjrn I guess you saved us, by the way you’re still a proscribed ick person and you have to leave.” The viera go back to thinking that they can stick their fingers in their tall fuzzy ears and ignore the world around them. Fran wants to leave with Mjrn immediately, but Mjrn kneels down, puts her hands on Fran’s little shoulders and has her big moment where she tells Fran, “Fran, I’ve been all around and I’ve seen all kinds of things and a lotta the time the world is dangerous and sad and there’ s a lot of mean people and bad things are happening right now and things can seem hopeless, but also people are good sometimes and I’ve met a lot of neat people and seen lots of cool things and eaten a bunch of weird food. I did a Triple Clusky with two guys under a waterfall. You won’t be old enough to know what that is for at least thirty years. So don’t get fooled by these fucking frauds squatting in their little stick village but also you’re really little still and you should probably grow up some more before you make such a big decision, anyway I’m outta this piece” and she tells every individual viera in Eruyt “fuck you” before going on to finish her journey with the party and goes on to become an inhumanly prolific, polymathic scholar of Ivalician history and contemporary culture, literally been everywhere and seen and done everything.
Reddas gains the grudging respect of the international community in recognition of his personal daring and his close relationship with universally-revered Halim Ondore. He’s never quite welcome in most parts of the realm, but his hardline passions become tempered with his new respect for politics as the art of the possible learned not only from Ondore but from his frequent testy but productive exchanges with Judge Magister Drace in Archadia, where his ideas have become rather trendy following the strong public turn against an unchecked imperium and the re-emergence of the Senate, grown patrician and self-serving in recent years, as a more grassroots outgrowth of Archadia’s origin as a confluence of independent city-states. Never quite comfortable with his new reputation, it’s not long before Reddas announces a voyage to seas unknown, and disappears.
No one but Migelo would think to miss yet another orphan in Rabanastre, but a couple years after the war, he finally hears tell of a pigtailed young blonde occasionally seen at the aerodrome with a posh Archadian boy. People say they’re sky pirates.
With the gods’ guidance spurned and the scions of darkness unleashed upon the land, within a century Ivalice is ripped apart by a nightmarish cataclysm. Mjrn herself lives to see unimaginable suffering, human civilization dashed to pieces like an infant skull. The diabolical mistress of— oh, I’ve discovered a slight flaw in the plot. Hmmm.
Hmmmmmm.
..the events include a boss fight, right? We have to get at least one fight against Dark Queen B’Nargin.
As it must be. Mewt is inevitable.
Bravo!
Wow, not even satisfied at having your own series of articles on the site, you need to come into Shamus’ article and write your own article that’s twice as long.
It was good though, I enjoyed it.
How could this party work? Well the original party tries to have a sort of cross section of the society: a royal, a soldier, a poverty-driven thief, a commoner, a sky pirate* and a “non-human”**. Yours is clearly leaning more towards high-society, particularly if we kept Ashe as you have admitted you’d like to do but felt compelled to go with an all new cast. While this would clearly be a somewhat different approach to the situation the “second sons, lesser nobles and deposed monarchs try to prevent the people actually in charge from starting a world war with nukes” seems a fairly obvious angle? And then finding out, as they do in the actual game in the part we haven’t reached yet, that it is all
machinations by the “gods”, eventually rejecting their power and “help”, which would make for a stronger act if it was done by a party of people who all actually move in the corridors of power and would strike a counteroint to someone like Vayne who ostensibly claims to want to do the whole “reign of history” thing but by actually desiring domination is unwilling to reject said power which ultimately keeps him bound to Venat.Again, something of a different story but that’s my take on an attempt to keep it close to home. Along the way you could have all sorts of interactions relating to the responsibility of rule or being able to put the fate of the world over the benefit of your nation.*Is that a “career criminal” or are we tapping into some kind of “independent adventurer” social strata here?
**Which is probably rather racist and tokenistic if you think about it but hey, I work with what I have.
…Honestly, that sounds like a potentially AMAZING source of inter-party conflict. Just have two genuinely wise and intelligent people that basically never see eye to eye due to different priorities and cultures. And the rest of the party, basically get torn apart due to both paths being equally wise seeming, unless the actual leader steps up and makes choices.
Kinda like the Spock the logical butting heads with McCoy the emotional, while Kirk the sort of in-between is actually flexible enough to pick what seems the best option.
Given the numerous troubles in the story and characters of FF-12, though, I think that sort of writing is a bit beyond this game’s team/s skill or just plain ‘wrangle this mess’ energies, alas.
Reminds me of the sitcom Desmond’s. Young student Matthew would constantly come up with “old African sayings”, which would contrast with the older Porkpie’s practical life experience.
He’ll certainly steal the female players’ hears.
SEE ALSO: Sephiroth.
[sharp exhale into amused chuckle]
When I played the game, way back, I always thought I’d rather have Montgomery (Mogry, head of the Hunters guild) on the team than Vaan, Penelo, Ashe or Bash or all together. But Montgomery was on the Hero Team in Tactics. Square cannot have returning heroes on a main entry.