T w e n t y S i d e d

Back in Giruvegan, the party is back in the room where they fought Shemhazai; the gate to the floating platform is forever closed now. Too bad, since we, you know, STILL DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE NETHICITE. I’m serious, even if we’re content with just using it as a blunt-force nuke crystal, how do we even do that? Do we throw it like a grenade? I can see some issues with that regarding the blast radius. Are there magic words? A dance, perhaps? At this point our only method of deploying nethicite as a weapon is to load it into one of our own airships’ engine drives and fly it into the enemy’s lines as a kamikaze superbomb. I mean, that’s not bad, but it only works once, and if we can use it as more of a deathray I think that would be a bit more efficient. I’m not hard to please.Well, I mean… Oh, fine.

Another thing the Occuria neglected to mention is where to find the Sun-Cryst. I’m sure it slipped their minds. The party looks to Fran, to see if Gerun’s flowery description stirred anything in the ol’ travelogue,Why did I not spell this here as I spell it in title of the thing? There’s a very good reason: I’m still a hack. but she comes up empty. It’s fine, I’m sure Fran’s really good at plenty of other stuff we never see.

Vaan remembers that Reddas had another lead he was pursuing, but Balthier is terrified that if we spend any time around a real sky pirate we’ll realize he’s an even bigger poser than Fran. The party bravely ignores his bitching and retraces their steps back to Balfonheim Port.

Getting back to Reddas, we find him in the middle of organizing a rescue effort; the fleet he sent to Ridorana ran afoul of bad seas and foundered. Reddas guessed that Cid likely wouldn’t be found at Giruvegan, but we certainly didn’t come back empty handed; after filling him in, he decides at once that the Occuria are our bullshit to worry over, and he’s better off not knowing about them. Smart man! The party figures now that Cid may be trying to goad them into leading him to the Sun-Cryst. What’s more, Fran states that if we struck the Sun-Cryst with the Sword of Kings, it would not only destroy it but make the stones already cut from it useless.

Whoa there, ma’am, where are you getting that idea? Let’s not overcompensate for earlier by pulling things out of our frillies. The shards work from the power of the mist they gather within them; they don’t channel it from the Sun-Cryst as far as we’ve been told. Do they need to be in radio contact with the Sun-Cryst to unleash that energy? Should we have asked how nethicite works, maybe? In any case, we conjecture that if the Sun-Cryst and the nethicite cut from it were destroyed or depowered, the manufacted nethicite of the Empire would still function just fine, which would leave Archadia with all the best toys and no competition.

So it seems that either way, we need to find the Sun-Cryst, and after that we decide which legendary blade to use on it: carve a new stone or ten with the Treaty-Blade, or shatter it with the Sword of Kings. Reddas, of course, opposes the idea of using or making nethicite, but harming the Sun-Cryst would basically hand ourselves and all Ivalice to Vayne on a platter— not to mention, it would be spitting in the faces of what may or may not be the gods themselves. (Guess which one we go with!)

Reddas seems to have a line on the Sun-Cryst’s location, too. The information he saw while raiding Draklor alluded to a place in the Naldoan Sea, in the region called Ridorana, where an ancient lighthouse stands. Sure enough, that’s where the troubled fleet was sent to, and if anything assures us we’re on the right path, it’s disaster.

Of course, we can’t sail there, it seems, and the seas are in jagd, so it seems we’re at an impasse… except Reddas also stole one of those new-fangled nethicite skystones from Draklor that the Imperials have been using to fly in jagd, so we can refit the Strahl and fly there ourselves. Reddas even offers to go with us. Ashe wonders why Reddas is so interested in helping the party, to which he can only vaguely allude to some troubling memories of the disaster at Nabudis.

No, Judge Zecht, we aren’t going to indulge your pity-party by asking. Either just tell us or shut the fuck up about it already. But let me tell you, it’s great to have him on board. If there’s anything you feel like you need some extra muscle around for, Reddas’ stay in your party is a grand time to take care of it.Reddas’ weapons are the Chirijiraden in his right hand, named for the strongest katana available in Final Fantasy Tactics, and the Ninja Knife in his left. Both are actually off-brand Nepalese substitutes, a kora and a khukri, respectively. Like Larsa’s Swordbreaker, the Ninja Knife is effectively a shield.

But let’s indulge the only black man in Ivalice, shall we? Off to the Ridorana Cataract, set far to the east in the Naldoan Sea! “But Rocko,” I hear you say, “how can a cataract exist in the middle of the sea?” That’s a very astute question, and if you come up with an answer, I’d sure as shit like to hear it. The Cataract appears to be none other than the edge of the entire goddamn world, ye-olde-pirat-mappe style, and indeed the high cliff spans from horizon to horizon north to south, with the sea pouring over it into the void and nothing but an endless bank of clouds visible far below and stretching beyond sight ever eastward.

It’s an outstanding visual setpiece, hampered only— yet significantly— by the fact that it makes not a buttfucking grain of sense. I keep wanting to fly the Strahl out past the edge and trying to get a good look at the great serpent upon which Ivalice so precariously rests. Really, what’s stopping us? Common sense?

Our destination is an outcropping at the edge of the cataract on which sits the towering Pharos, with the Sun-Cryst itse;f ensconced at the very top. The mysterious Pharos was famously unreachable until now, due to the cataracts making the sea unnavigable and the powerful jagd mist making air travel impossible until the advent of nethicite skystone. Yes, that means that Reddas intentionally sent those lackeys of his out here on a suicide mission.

There’s a large courtyard right in front of the Pharos that would be perfect for mooring our airship, but rather than land us there, or indeed, just flying to the top of the fucking tower, Balthier sails to the opposite side of the island like a total prick to drop the party off. Perhaps it just seems like the proper thing for adventurers to do. Fran muses to herself at the sight of the Pharos, likely committing the environs to memory so as to never be caught without travelogueWhy did I not spell this here as I spell it in title of the thing? There’s a very good reason: the Rule of Threes, of course. exposition again.

Reddas prods Ashe to make up her mind about the nethicite before they get to the top, to which she testily asks what he’d do if she chose to cut a cupboard full of nuke crystals. He replies only that she would do so “to her sorrow.” It doesn’t come off as a threat when he says it, but really, would Reddas be content to just click his tongue disapprovingly if she went against his wishes? In her head, Ashe gets a wicked “I have altered the deal” ready just in case we have to throw down.

Off to the side, Balthier tells Vaan that if anything “happens” to him, Vaan should take the Strahl. Vaan is taken aback, but Balthier tries to play it cool, saying that, as the leading man, he might just have to do something heroic. It’s sort of telling how he sounds almost self-deprecating this time around. I wouldn’t be surprised if he finally figured out just how fucked up the casting in this game is, and is trying to save as much face as possible by insinuating himself as the “older mentor character who selectively withholds important information,” while hedging his bets if he should fall into “older mentor character who suffers tragic but motivational death.”

…You know I guess I’m not going to get a better chance to talk about Balthier, so I might as well go off on it now; once the Pharos wraps up, we’re pretty much at the endgame. Actually, there’s nothing of substance besides the final bosses after the Pharos, so this is essentially the final dungeon.“So this series is wrapping up, eh?” the reader prays aloud and vainly.

It approaches insulting the reader to waste words pointing out that Ashe or Balthier should have been the main character of the game. Ashe is already our de facto protagonist, given that she’s essentially the Luke Skywalker of this plot, around whose decisions and developing character the game’s story is premised, as is most of its presentation. But given that they were too chickenshit to make a female lead the de jure protagonist, they settled on a story initially centered on a mostly irrelevant thief character that devolves into a faux-ensemble cast in which only the female lead’s status and character make any real difference to the game’s events or message. Oh, sorry, some of my Final Fantasy VI notecards got mixed in here somehow.

Infamously, the older, more rugged Basch was originally intended as the lead.Or at least, that’s a commonly repeated factoid. The truth is that Vaan and Basch both derive from a scrapped character called Aqua. But given the open secret that Square was nakedly pandering to market demographics, they wrote in the younger, more effeminate VaanVaan was originally more childlike and effeminate than he is in the finished game; after casting knuckle-dragging ogre Kouhei Takeda as his voice/motion capture actor, the creators were forced to revise Vaan into the hulking space marine we know and adore. later in development and continuously rewrote his personality based on what they thought audiences would enjoy.

But if we’re running with this dubious logic that our primary playable character should be more an accessory to Ashe’s story and not a traditional protagonist around whom the story is more directly centered,Hey, what works for The Great Gatsby will probably work for a swashbuckling JRPG, right? Balthier is still a more natural choice for this role than Vaan, who adds nothing to any scene he is in and whom the developers have to struggle desperately to make seem artificially relevant by giving him unexplained connections to Ashe that never pay off and by framing and blocking him in cutscenes as if he were an important character when he doesn’t have an actual role in the scene. Frankly, the frequent and obviousYou might not have noticed it… but your brain did misuse of visual storytelling where Vaan is concerned might be the most jarring and contemptible aspect of Vaan’s entire character. But let me lay off the obvious Vaan-bashing and make my case for Balthier’s unused potential.

Balthier’s tied intimately to the narrative. The prime movers of the plot are Cid and Venat, neck and neck for first, and Vayne in a close third. Yes, Vayne is the most powerful and dangerous of the three, but he’s putting into practice a plan handed to him by Cid and Venat. All his canny navigation of Imperial politics and Archadian conquest is at the behest of his buddies, Faust and Mephistopheles, to bring their plans to fruition through his methods. Venat is both the mind and power behind the three, providing them with the knowledge of nethicite and all the artifacts and lore they need to bring… whatever it is they’re plotting to completion, and it is ultimately her agenda and hers alone that Cid and Vayne have merely adopted, accepting it as their ideal course of action. Cid, meanwhile, is the fulcrum of the three, whose brilliance led him to Giruvegan and thus to Venat, and allowed him to both understand and perfect the making of nethicite, and thence all technologies derived from it; and whose lofty position in Imperial affairs granted him Vayne’s confidence, thus making his tools and Venat’s plans the chisel and blueprint of the Empire itself. Balthier, as Cid’s son, is personally invested in the main arc due to his knowledge of his father’s deeds and any suffering he sees those deeds cause throughout the game. Balthier can always conceivably know just enough about nethicite or the Empire or whatever to keep him invested and the party pointed in the right direction, but not so much that he could blow the plot open at a whim. Of course, this ties closely into the fact that…

Balthier’s tied intimately to the themes: Balthier was born into a position of great luxury and power. With his father at the reigns of Archades’ technology and a close friend of the Solidor dynasty, Balthier was a shoe-in to become a judge— and was, we are told, for a short while. Yet he witnessed firsthand the corrupting nature of power in his father, and he threw away his judgeship and fled the Empire for a life of freedom. His formative years practically amount to a crash course in the ethical questions of the game concerning power, authority, and man’s place in charting the course of history. We briefly see as much in the character he became, when he uses that background to try and give guidance to Ashe at the Phon Coast. In fact, he and Ashe make— or, in a different game, would make— excellent foils to one another, because…

Balthier, like Ashe, fits the outline of a protagonist. Easily, the game could have been helmed not by Ashe or Balthier but by the pair in tandem. Ashe is a moody, vengeance-obsessed princess who had her power taken from her by the Empire and has been trying to claw it back ever since. Balthier is a carefree Archadian ex-judge who threw away his title to free himself from political affairs and live a wild life on the lowest rung of society. They are practically distaff opposites to one another, yet circumstance throws them immediately together and never really lets go until they have good reason to remain with one another.

Now, it’s basically even more pointless to suggest individual improvements to this game than it is for any other game, because Final Fantasy XII is tore up from the floor up and you can’t slot in modular characterization fixes or tighten up plot points or dialog in a smoldering junk heap of a story that would have to be more or less reimagined from the outset according to a more consistent, coherent vision that we, the audience, can’t arbitrate. But just stipulate for a moment that Vaan never existed, and the game opens in medias res with Ashe’s assault on Vayne’s fete at Rabanastre Palace. Instead of Reks and Basch, we open with Ashe cutting a gory swathe towards Vayne, and the game switches over to Balthier and Fran once she gets in over her head. The pair slip in, grab the Goddess Magicite as they intended to do, and then get caught in the crossfire of the rebel assault, ending up in the sewers with Ashe as before. From here, the game easily progresses just the same without Vaan or Penelo.

The audience knowing Balthier was a highborn Archadian and ex-Judge from the start could easily be leveraged for dramatic tension as he keeps it concealed from the vengeful Ashe, rather than just being a heavily-telegraphed admission at some point that ends up having no real effect one way or the other. Even the small bit of good development Vaan gets could apply just as well to Balthier instead; Vaan admits that his yearning to be a sky-pirate and fight the Empire was all bluster, a diverting fantasy to keep him from despair without really meaning much to him. Meanwhile, Balthier’s whole bid at becoming a sky pirate never seems to pay off; he never steals a damn thing of value until the Dusk Shard binds him to Ashe, and he admits that despite running away from Imperial politics and his father’s mad machinations, he ends up running right back there anyway, forced to face what he tried so hard to ignore. Vaan’s little admission would fit Balthier’s mouth with the edges hardly sanded.

What’s more, the primary duty of Ashe’s foil (as far as the narrative is concerned, anyway) is to try and coax her away from the ruthless annihilation of the Empire that the Occuria offer her, warning her away from the seductive promises of vast power as a new Dynast-Queen. Tell me, who’s best suited to this task: Vaan, who is possibly even more fixated on bloody Imperial vengeance than Ashe and never displays any sort of emotional maturity or ethical depth; Basch, who is a length of pine lumber; or Balthier, who saw someone close to him utterly corrupted by nethicite-slinging Occuria and willingly abdicated political and military power for at least partly ethical reasons?

If the diabolic intercessors of market research insist that the imbeciles like me who shell out for this schlock want a younger, more energetic protagonist— and I must, because they’re never wrong— it would be very easy to write Balthier as less experienced and street-smart than he is in the game, especially since this is purely an affectation in the game is written and even then only relative to Vaan. Rather than have Vaan be the clueless newb, Balthier the smug mentor, and Fran entirely fucking purposeless, you could have Balthier be a “more bravado than brains” sort, excited about being a nominal sky-pirate by virtue of having the Strahl,an excellent ship presumably stolen right from under his father’s nose at Draklor but not actually knowing much about adventuring or fighting, with Fran as his world-wise mentor. This would accomplish two things: it would make Balthier, not Vaan, the audience surrogate, learning about the world and the game with a relevant character with an actual personality. And it would give Fran an actual reason to exist in the game. The biggest obstacle to connecting with Fran is her consistent portrayal as little other than Balthier’s taciturn minion, and it’s hard enough to care about Balthier himself with how little part he seems to take in the narrative due to Vaan snaking what could have been all his action.

We’re supposed to believe Fran has some compelling reason to hang around with Balthier, but they never interact in any way and we are never given any indication of how they ended up together or why they stay together. I could get behind never even showing how they meet; just leave it a mystery. Sure! But Fran’s already got at least an entire human lifetime of experience wandering the world and taking care of herself, and that’s after spending an unknown number of decades growing up in the upper echelons of viera society; even as it stands in-game, she should still be the wiser, more able half of the couple by far. If Balthier could have served as the audience surrogate, then Fran could have served as the audience’s mentor, too, and without Vaan and Penelo to share the spotlight, a whole lot of capital gets freed up to focus on a naïve, brash Balthier and a pensive, world-wise Fran, hashing out the whys and wherefores with each other as the party treats with gods and plunders ancient superweapons to maybe start or end a war or a civilization.

Just as Ashe and Balthier could have been apt foils for one another, Fran could have been an apt foil for Balthier: they both rejected a high place in society to forge their own path, but whereas Balthier ran from Archades to reject responsibility and recuse himself from the course of Ivalician events in a life of merry prodigality, Fran became an exile from her people to take responsibility, unwilling to sit idle with typical viera impunity as the entire world around her boiled into chaos, in spite of the disgrace and alienation from her family and tribe she would bear.Not that we have any idea why Fran actually left Eruyt. No one asks because no one cares. I realize they wanted Fran to seem aloof and mysterious, but what we got was hollow, gratuitous eye-candy. And I don’t know what to make of her little stint in Eruyt but that she regards her departure as a mistake.

With Vaan taking up the roles of “perspective character,” Ashe’s foil, and wanna-be sky-pirate, Balthier is left all but redundant— but for the fact the he’s the only member of the party with a little personality, and ends up as many players’ favorite character by default owing to that dubious distinction. The game goes out of its way to make a big, obvious, comfy main-character-shaped hole where Balthier (or, you know, fucking Ashe, the main character) could easily fit, and then they plop him down on the periphery where he does so little good and hammers in a Vaan-shaped bit of drywall instead.

What a stupid waste. This game.

The Travelog continues next week.

The Rocketeer —PLEASE—STAND—BY—