A Travelog of Ivalice, Conclusion: MIDLIGHT

By The Rocketeer Posted Wednesday Jun 1, 2022

Filed under: FFXII 31 comments

The basics of a character arc are these: you establish what a character is like, you develop some motivation for changing, and then you demonstrate this change. These can really be anything; the immature young man who overcomes a great challenge by learning to take responsibility for his actions, the big city office lady who learns to make time for herself with the help of a flannel-clad stud from her rural hometown, or, uh… alright, it’s usually one of these two things, but in theory a character arc can encompass any sort of character change you can imagine.

Character arcs can be useful tools for engaging the audience emotionally. We see a character struggling with their conscience, and the emotional stakes creates tension. Their vulnerability humanizes them, lends them depth, and engages our sympathy. There’s a part of us that yearns for them to succeed in their inner struggle even more strongly than we want them to overcome the physical threat presented by their enemies, and tying these struggles together lends urgency to the emotional stakes and poignancy to the mundane conflict. Creators also use these changes to teach the audience and convey a moral or message. We see the suffering characters endure and the mistakes that they make when their spirit is disordered, the power of the feelings and forces that clarify their conscience are proven, and we see the worth of their new values demonstrated through action, marshaling positive change within and without.

A conflict of character sits at the very heart of Final Fantasy XII, with the emotional and narrative tension of the whole story resting upon it: a young woman, gripped by bitterness and grief, risks cashiering her soul by giving in to vengeance and destruction. As the climax looms closer and closer, the minds of the audience are focused on this single looming question:

Why is Gabranth the only character in the game with a complete character arc?

Gabranth begins the game as an uncomplicated villain. He does bad things in the name of the Empire and puts on a scary tough guy act. Later, the game humanizes him, gives him a sense of nobility and duty not so different from his brother’s. His service to the Empire, and to Vayne specifically, compels him to commit repellent, dishonorable acts, setting his loyalty against his virtue. This inner turmoil threatens to tear him apart, and eventually he resolves the conflict by turning on Vayne for Larsa’s sake.You might remember this arc from when it belonged to Beatrix in Final Fantasy IX Granted, he basically already threw away his loyalty to Vayne and to the Empire when his disgust and compunction drive him to beg his enemies to overpower and destroy them, but we can still identify the basic framework!

Malformed character arcs litter the rest of the game, eerily looming empty and incomplete like North Korean hotels.

You could almost claim Reddas has a complete character arc; we can infer the personal change he’s experienced from witnessing the dread power of nethicite at Nabudis, and he embraces this new motivation to the bitter end at the Pharos. But from the sound of it, he may well have been tricked by Cid into using the Midlight Shard, or at least had no idea what it would actually do. We have no idea what he was like before the events of the game other than that he was a loyal Judge Magister; what would serve as his arc is already closing in on its endpoint by the time we meet him in Draklor, conveniently eliding all of his growth and change. Likewise, we witness the end of Vossler’s fall from grace, but the appearance of a change in his character is partly the product of his duplicity; if Dalan’s implicit doubts about Vossler’s loyalty are to be taken at face value, he’s either already given up on the Resistance in the timeskip after the prologue at Nalbina or will soon turn coat offscreen at some point we can’t really nail down.

Much the same can be said for Balthier. At the Phon Coast, we learn with Ashe that Balthier has already undergone a significant character change before the game began, unseen by the audience, for which his primary motivation seemed to be his personal frustration with and estrangement from his nethicite-obsessed, apparently mad father. But the Balthier we know is an arrogant, greedy, self-involved jackass, the kind of guy who doesn’t stick his neck out for others, has the absolute chutzpah to call himself the leading man (implicitly categorizing the people around him as second bananas in his story), and is mostly concerned with living beyond his means. At the end of the game, Balthier’s theoretical arc is completed when he risks sacrificing his own life to save Rabanastre from the falling Bahamut. Did he realize that the limelight of being the leading man comes with the responsibility to play the selfless hero from time to time? Oh, sorry, I left my projector on; I have no idea what this abrupt character change is supposed to demonstrate. What, in the interim, are we supposed to infer motivated this change? Feel free to invent whatever you want; I’ve moved on.

<b>Balthier:</b> ''Well, fuck you, too, buddy.''
Balthier: ''Well, fuck you, too, buddy.''

Moved on to Vaan, that is! Why yes, our— and I won’t put thirty seven sets of sarcasm quotes around this like I should— main character, who begins the game with big dreams and big talk of becoming a sky pirate, escaping his lowly life under Archadia’s heel. Later, his indecision and directionlessness becomes apparent, and he eventually comes clean with Ashe: he embraced escapist daydreams as a coping mechanism for his disempowerment, and for the first time, feels a sense of capacity and responsibility to make real change and face off with Empire in earnest. Why, these seem like the beginning and middle of a character arc! The stage is perfectly set for Vaan to, ah, fade into the background and allow Ashe to grasp the reins of the story from now to the credits. If I didn’t respect myself I might lend some partial, dubious credit to the convenience of resolving Vaan’s inner conflict in a way that lets him sublimate into a wordless combat asset. Hey, did you see the way Bergan’s guts sprayed out when Vaan hacked him open? I guess he was really serious about fighting the Empire! Ultimately, of course, Vaan takes the Strahl and becomes a sky pirate in earnest, resolving the… ah, pretextual dream he grew out of in the interim? Wait, did we mix up two different script drafts here? Because one of these arcs has no ending and the other has no middle again! Vaan fulfilling his dream by succeeding Balthier and becoming a real sky pirate after proving his mettle is a fine enough story arc, it’s just missing the entire process of becoming a sky pirate. Remember all those scenes where Balthier, after his initial, typically arrogant and dismissive rebuttal, slowly warms to Vaan and reluctantly teaches him how to fly the ship? Because we really need some scenes like that to establish that Vaan has placed his hands on the controls of the Strahl at least once in his life before Balthier entrusts him with vouchsafing the party away from the Bahamut and into the largest, fiercest air battle humankind has ever witnessed. The point, of course, is not the dry fact of whether or not Vaan has any more knowledge than the average cactoid how to fly the ship, although we might like to know that he does. What matters is the emotional stakes, the character question; we’ve already taken a different answer and tabled the matter long before the game suddenly springs this on us as if it were the resolution to Vaan’s character.

And I’m not even gonna bother touching Fran giving the right seat to Penelo. I mean… what the fuck.

Speaking of Fran, she might be the biggest mystery of all. I’ve never been able to square what we see of her story, in which she emerges briefly from Balthier’s 10 o’clock to throw cold water on her younger sister’s curiosity by expressing her disillusionment with the world and her regrets at leaving the narrow cloister of her village, with any possible message I can infer, however tenuously, we are meant to take from this game. An Olympian eisegete might manage the superhuman leap from this mystifying glimpse into Fran’s character to some sort of conclusion that reconciles her regrets into some sort of growth or lesson. But while my abilities don’t extend that far, the absence of any such conclusion in the game we’ve actually got before us is well within my narrow vision.

Which brings us to the pinnacle: Princess Ashelia Dalmasca. It’s fine for every character in this game not to have an arc except Ashe. It’s fine for every character in the main cast and beyond to just have some basic personality or motivation— hopefully some that play well together and are entertaining and endearing to watch— that reflect some lesson or motivation for Ashe to internalize on her way to becoming the character she needs to be for the plot to resolve correctly.

Ashe is traumatized by the loss of her family and kingdom, and desperate for vengeance. She has the opportunity to take revenge on the Empire with the power of nethicite. She chooses not to. Clever readers will notice the missing element: we never see a clear character reason for the change in her thinking. Yes, every person she meets from Kerwon to Kalamazoo guilt trips her for her bloodthirst and warns her that nethicite is fucking evil, but if there’s any lightbulb moment where she actually sees the wisdom in forbearance, it flew right over my head.

Why does Ashe choose not to use the nethicite? The thing that seems to force her at long last to literally cast it asideYep, still bitter about dropping the Dusk Shard on the floor! is seeing Rasler’s ghost egging her on to take it. Is Ashe pissed that the Occuria are using a hologram of her dead husband to very obviously manipulate her rage and grief? Does Ashe even realize it’s not really Rasler? A character with a double-digit IQ would know, but I don’t have an answer to this question.

Hey, what if they leveraged Ashe’s relationship with Rasler to motivate this change? Oh, we never saw her relationship with Rasler and have no idea what he was like or what they saw in each other.

Hey, Yuna and Tidus, maybe take some notes on romantic tension from this classic scene, you frauds.
Hey, Yuna and Tidus, maybe take some notes on romantic tension from this classic scene, you frauds.

At the Phon Coast, we just see a flashback where they’re out on a balcony and Ashe says, “I’m into you,” and Rasler replies, “I’m into you, too.” We’re supposed to be copying Star Wars, not the Star Wars prequels! What if Ashe is pondering the intoxicating power of nethicite and she flashes back to that scene, and she and Rasler are arm-in-arm laughing about how much they hate sand, and suddenly Rasler’s countenance tightens, he gazes out to the horizon and says, “B’nargy, if anyone ever tries to pressure you into using a cursed death rock to commit genocide, just remember: it’s a trick by creepy ghost angels that don’t really care about you. And I’d never want that life for you.” Ashe doesn’t really understand, but she nods, and makes a JRPG young couple flashback promise not to forget. Then Rasler leans in real close and whispers into Ashe’s ear, “The second you turn eighteen I’m gonna f[REDACTED]”

Not the most elegant or clever motivation, but we’ve got nothing! It’s not that deciding at the very last moment, apparently from the collective browbeating of everyone in Ivalice but the Occuria and Gabranth, doesn’t make logical sense, in the same way that we can assume that Vaan learned from Balthier to fly an airship entirely offscreen. Sure, maybe it just took exactly that long for the lesson to sprout in her rage-addled brain. But once again, we lack any clear structure to Ashe’s character growth that communicates her evolving emotional state, much less allows us to invest emotionally in it.

But unlike every other character, the pride of place that Final Fantasy XII grants to Ashe’s character, the centrality of its resolution to the narrative and emotional stakes, withers the core of the story. The desultory, gratuitous quality of her maturation decrees the mien of the climax itself. It just… happens.

Now, I have a question for you that I’m sure Fran has asked Basch several times: do you like coffee?

Parched. Still can't read.
Parched. Still can't read.

It’s a perverse miracle that, despite its labyrinthine intricacies, Final Fantasy XII manages to seem underwritten compared to its predecessors. It’s obvious from the outset that Final Fantasy XII is missing something common to its forebears— missing it sorely indeed. From at least Final Fantasy VI, the games of the Final Fantasy series have broken up the action with the occasional chance to just pal around with your fellow party members for a moment: take stock, read their sense of the situation, or express their feelings. These might seem more like connective tissue for the story than muscle, but I think we can credit Final Fantasy XII with demonstrating just how important these little moments can be.

I’m talking about moments like arriving at Cosmo Canyon in Final Fantasy VII: everyone splits off at the entrance and goes to do their own thing. Walking around the location, you can see how your other cast members choose to spend their time, and whom they choose to spend it with. After choosing a few of them to participate in the next scene with you, everyone convenes around the campfire and shares an introspective moment; to proceed, you have to go around the circle, sit with each of your fellows, and just listen to them share their feelings with you about where you’ve come from and where you’re going, narratively and emotionally. In Final Fantasy X, Yuna’s little guardian corps would frequently break off and loiter around the area, either at the beginning of a new location or to provide a breather amidst a long section of exploring and fighting. Once again, the game leverages your control of Tidus in these sections to reinforce his role as your window to this world and these characters, learning about them and growing with them as one. Open your ears, I’m about to heap some rare, if backhanded praise on Final Fantasy VIII: as terribly used as I think the characters are in the story, Final Fantasy VIII might use these moments more effectively than any other game in the series. You have moments like Irvine ineffectively putting the moves on Selphie as she’s too fascinated by the train ride to pay him any mind; in a good example of how FFVIII goes a step further and tries to give your party members quality time with one another rather than defining them all through their hub-and-spoke relationship with the protagonist, this is an early step in Irvine eventually moving past his sad attempts at womanizing and slowly growing closer with Selphie until they’re clearly an item near the end of the game.

These moments, especially when they herald the start of a new area in the older games, did also serve a mechanical function, nudging the player to take the opportunity to switch up their party if they needed and subtly cluing them in that a long gameplay section was starting and they might want to take a leak, or leave it until tomorrow evening, or whatever. But they also helped set the pacing of the game, adjusting the tempo and varying the player’s activity and focus. Just as some quiet, slower paced time in otherwise action-heavy games can be important for relieving (and rebuilding) tension and providing a welcome switch-up of the player’s task, a game can be very well served by taking a break from characterizing its cast through their participation in combat and cutscenes and just let the player take it easy and catch up with their companions over a nice cup of coffee.

Final Fantasy XII is completely devoid of these coffee breaks. Once a character joins the party, they effectively cease to exist outside of combat and cutscenes. There’s a moment that most players of Final Fantasy XII would likely be hard-pressed to recall that I find absolutely fascinating: when Vaan learns that Penelo has been kidnapped, he seeks out Balthier and Fran to beg passage on their airship. When he finds them, they’re sitting together in the tavern.

Look! Look at it! He's at the table and everything! I can't sit still!
Look! Look at it! He's at the table and everything! I can't sit still!

CAN YOU EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE IT?! Oh, you don’t understand what’s so amazing about this scene? It’s the only moment in the entire game, in the environment, not in a cutscene, where we see how our party members spend their time outside of traveling in a small group harvesting monster parts semi-automatically. They sit in the bar together. Buddy, it ain’t much, but it’s all I have to hold on to.

Do you ever wonder about this pathetic fiction that Vaan is supposed to be our “viewpoint character,” whatever that’s supposed to mean? Couldn’t the game have slipped some flimsy joists under this soggy floor by using Vaan as our means of interacting with our party, just as past games had done with much more fully-defined characters like Tidus or Squall? Why, at the beginning of some new area or some new beat of the story, can the party not take a little breather, put the kettle over the campfire, and enjoy a nice cup of coffee before taking off on the next leg of the trip? Wander over to Ashe, see what’s on her mind? How’s Penelo holding up after getting kidnapped by lizardpeople? How’s Basch acclimatizing to life outside of an oubliette cage? Fran, is there anybody in there?

And nevermind Vaan’s direct interactions with everyone. These are opportunities for visual and environmental storytelling. If Fran and Balthier are always together and apart from everyone else at first, and later we see Fran spending more time closer with Penelo and Balthier with Ashe, that tells us things! If Basch is always standing ramrod straight, scanning the horizon and playing his role as Ashe’s guardian, that’s important! And rather than just talking directly with Vaan, we can always invoke our right as JRPG main character to just rudely eavesdrop on the other characters as they talk to one another. About what, you ask? Well, “anything” would be a start.

Again and again, every time I go to the text to try and find evidence for what’s going on in the characters’ heads during the big moments, I have to return to the same few handful of scenes, perhaps only one or two conversations in the entire game for most of them, and often I can’t patch together a complete answer. Nevermind quality time; we badly need quantity time with our characters. Even just a few lines here and there as the journey develops and we crest each big hill could go a long way to providing a more complete understanding of our cast, their personalities, their motivations, and a more granular development of their attitudes and feelings as they approach the more expensive moments when that development is tested. Previous games tended to use the airship as a hub for this kind of thing in the late game; the much-mentioned Strahl has no gameplay interior and serves as a mere interface item.

What’s distinctly lacking is personality and, dare I say it, charm. Games with worse plots than Final Fantasy XII have earned at least a partial pass on the strength of their charm. You generally get more personality by the time you’ve passed the character select screen of an arcade fighting game than you’ll squeeze from the turnip of Final Fantasy XII’s entire first act. I’m not so foolish as to believe that Final Fantasy XII would be improved by just filling space with something and assuming that it would serve as an improvement over nothing; in fact, I’d argue that Final Fantasy XII is a pretty solid example of what you get when you fill a game with just “something.” But you have to sow to reap more than dust.

Like many other things in the game, we can only assume and project what that might have been. It’s not necessarily easy to imagine how these characters would spend their quiet time with each other, as we’ve got nothing to extrapolate from. Could Fran have teased Ashe about Al-Cid’s advances, a conversation that could fork either into “poop or get off the pot” as Fran implies she might be interested if Ashe isn’t, or inadvertently breaching the subject of Ashe’s relationship with Rasler, souring the lighthearted moment by making clear how much bitterness Ashe is carrying inside? Could Balthier have realized too late and to his aggravation that Vaan has tricked him into teaching him about flying the Strahl despite his strenuous refusals by cleverly stroking his ego? Has Basch drawn a hand turkey for Ashe, who promises to put it on the fridge but then throws it straight into the garbage when she thinks he isn’t looking but he was? Is Penelo chatty and fawning with Ashe, who unsubtly bristles at the commoner’s overly familiar manner before being won over by her sunny and earnest demeanor? Do Balthier and Basch openly despise each other for being the people they are, conflicting Vaan, who sees the person he’s fantasized about becoming in Balthier but increasingly recognizes the man he’d like to grow into in Basch? Does Fran keep asking Basch if he likes the taste of coffee, and sympathizes with how long he must have gone without… coffee… locked up all alone for so long, because she knows what it’s like to go too long without strong… hot… coffee?

Sorry, I think I got off track there. But I hope I’ve made the message clear: I’d like to get to know these characters. I’ll never get that chance, because the game never gave it. Would it have saved the plot? Nope! But some glue and glitter might have helped it end up on the fridge, even if only out of the lenience that a sense of heart and charm can earn.

The conclusion continues next week.

 

Footnotes:

[1] You might remember this arc from when it belonged to Beatrix in Final Fantasy IX

[2] Yep, still bitter about dropping the Dusk Shard on the floor!



From The Archives:
 

31 thoughts on “A Travelog of Ivalice, Conclusion: MIDLIGHT

  1. Dreadjaws says:

    Man, the quiet time between missions when you get to chat with your companions in your hub area is one of my favorite parts of an RPG. Mass Effect performed this gloriously, but it used to be a staple of the FF franchise. Needless to say, the complete lack of such a thing in FFXIII is one of the many reasons you can’t ever connect with that band of imbeciles that constitutes the game’s main cast. Considering XIII is far more linear than most (if not all) games in the series, this particular issue is certainly worse there. There really is no place to stand and talk. Outside of cutscenes you can’t even get all of your characters together in the same general area.

    I don’t know how FFXV operates in that regard, since I haven’t played it, but having a smaller group of characters in what seems to be a constant road trip should work well for this sort of thing.

    1. Lasius says:

      My favourite scene like that in a game is not from the Final Fantasy series but instead shooting the shit with your witcher buddies in Witcher 3.

      1. BlueHorus says:

        While that scene was great*, Witcher 3 also did well to devote entire quests to introducing – or just being with – characters. Hunting down Dandelion via his jilted lovers, finding ingredients with Lambert and Eskel for a plot-important potion…it understood the importance of showing us the characters that are driving the story forward.

        * “Wait! We should put on Yennifer’s clothes first, so they think we’re women!”
        “LAMBERT YOU’RE A GENIUS”

        1. FluffySquirrel says:

          Yeah, just hanging out with people who you could tell were really good friends always feels good in these kind of games. All the moments in Saints Row like that were the best too

          You never get the impression this party are friends, other than the designated two people. Soon as this is over, they’re mostly all just gonna go off doing their own thing

    2. BlueHorus says:

      Hey, you’re back, and mentioning FFXIII! Yaay!

      The streak may be broken, but the challenge remains ;-D

    3. Thomas says:

      FFXV is much better at emphasising the party dynamics, I’d go as far as to say it’s the selling point. Every little interaction and mini-game in the first half is built to emphasise the party dynamics.

      When you drive the car around the world map there are lots of pieces of party banter and even animations to show how each person passes the time.

      It’s still lacking in many points where they all spread around the area of a map and you can talk to each character though.

      If you combined FFXII and FFXV you’d get a better game, but still not a complete one. FFXIII gets you a little closer, by dint of actually explaining the characters backstories, but even combining the best qualities of all three wouldn’t equal an FFX or earlier.

    4. Mye says:

      I’d argue that in many ways FF13 had plenty of those interaction, but they were all so terrible that they don’t even really count. Like, iirc, when you visit the amusement park (for no reason whatsoever, par for the course in FF13) you can talk to Basch/Vanille a bunch, but neither really have anything resembling character so nothing really progress in their arc, nor do you feel like you know more since they’re so one note (Basch has a kid and Vanille is brainless).

      15 does this a lot more, character will chatter will driving around and sometime when you camp/stay in hotel. But FF15 is divided into two sections, the roadtrip is the first half of the game and this section has almost no story progression so none of the characters really have anything resembling an arc. Then second half has all the plot progression, but the game is entirely linear at this point so you don’t get any time for character to slow down and talk. Awkwardly there’s also a big time skip but none of them really changed during that time except that they all hate each others now . Furthermore FF15 is sold in many parts, most of the cast backstory is told trough a series of OVA, most of the worldbuilding behind the plot is in a movie and character progression/arc are locked in DLCs. So as a results those little interaction in the game don’t really do much.

      1. Chad Miller says:

        Basch

        You mean Sazh, though Basch showing up in that segment may have made it more interesting somehow.

      2. Kathryn says:

        They “hate each other” because Gladio blames Noctis for Ignis losing his sight, and Noctis disappears for 10 years or however long it was before they have a chance to resolve the conflict. During that time, they don’t know where Noctis is or what happened to him. All they know is, they are barely holding the line against the daemons, and Noctis isn’t there.

        The problem is that the World of Ruin, after Noctis wakes up and comes back, is WAY too short. FF veterans will remember that the original World of Ruin was almost as long as the World of Balance (maybe even longer if you do every optional side quest? It’s been a while since I did it, but I definitely remember spending a lot of time in that damn dinosaur forest looking for Economizers). In FFXV, it’s, like, five minutes. OK, it’s slightly more than that, but Noctis literally walks up a hill, gets in a car, and then the band gets back together, and that’s basically the end of the World of Ruin before the final dungeon. Squeenix should have expanded this portion of the game. There should have been side quests to re-recruit each of the bros and resolve the conflict.

        1. Retsam says:

          Just looked up a play through – in a 15 hour run (which is very quick – I assume they basically didn’t do hardly any side-questing in the open-world section of the game) it’s a single hour from waking up in the World of Ruin to the final boss.

          It’s so bizarre.

    5. Karma The Alligator says:

      I disagree on FF13 lacking those interactions: it has them, only they show up in chapter 10+. Hell, chapter 10 starts with one of those because the party was given their focus on a platter and now are at a loss as to what to do: complete their focus and kill everyone they know, or do nothing and die, leaving room for the bad guys to rope others in to do the same focus.

  2. Joshua says:

    “Clever readers will notice the missing element: we never see a clear character reason for the change in her thinking.”

    This was one of my major gripes with Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Isaiah Bradley gives a heartfelt and compelling reason why Sam should NOT become the next Captain America. We then skip to a montage episode of friends and family and repairing a boat. Immediately after, we can see that Sam has been convinced to pick up the mantle. What about this exercise convinced Sam to change his mind? They seriously needed him to make a speech expressing his motivations* instead of requiring the audience to have to make their own conclusions.

    *Hopefully something more eloquent than “Do better”.

  3. BlueHorus says:

    We’re supposed to be copying Star Wars, not the Star Wars prequels!

    I laughed. And I immediately though ‘I’m going to mention sand!’ – but Rocko beat me to it. Ah well.

    On that note, though – WHY are we copying Star Wars? It’s a good film with a decent story, sure, but the game already features a standard Final Fantasy story: There’s a resistance against an evil empire, then bigger stakes are revealed, an ancient cosmic conflict takes over, etc etc etc.
    Shoehorning in plot beats from Star Wars just kind of gets in the way, and leads to nonsense like Gabranth suddenly being still alive and on the Bahamut.
    *Why* is he there? Because Star Wars, that’s why!

    1. Syal says:

      I’d say he’s there because Final Fantasy; ever since 5 they’ve always had at least one recurring boss of some kind, and Gabranth is the closest thing we’ve got to personal stakes.

      Although I guess we already had Cid, but… Cid’s too plot relevant? Beating him the last time feels like a turning point in the story, in a way that Gilgamesh or the Turks don’t.

  4. Retsam says:

    I will continue to defend Balthier’s character a bit – yes, the whole “only paying lip service to mentoring Vaan” is a huge omission – but for the most part, I think his character is pretty competently written. (The only one in the party who gets that lofty honor)

    With all the Star Wars parallels, it’s tempting to try to read his “character arc” as Han Solo – the “only in it for the money” mercenary who is swayed to a more noble cause at the end of story. … but I think the point of Balthier’s character is that he’s only pretended to be Han Solo from the start. He claims to be in it for the goods, but if you watch the hands not the mouth, he’s pretty consistently heroic, protecting Vaan and trying to guide Ashe – he’s pretty consistently the one actually keeping this little field trip on the rails.

    He doesn’t so much have an arc as the audience is supposed to come to understand his character better over the course of the game, and his apparent sacrifice at the end isn’t really a sudden change in his character but just a continuation of it. If anything is changed it’s just that he doesn’t try to hide that action behind his usual self-serving pirate routine.

    And yeah, the lack of small moments, while it couldn’t have salvaged the plot, absolutely could have salvaged the main party. The whole post about how this party is unlikable and needs to be replaced with B-tier and C-tier characters (and Ondore) I think is a direct result of this lack.

    I think I pointed out how the battle system means you don’t really even have the absolute minimum bit of in-battle interaction that you’d get from the previous games, like FFX’s memorable “newbie here” moment.

    … by contrast, I’m currently (slowly) playing Persona 5 which if anything has far too many small moments of interaction with the party. (If someone on that writing team wasn’t paid by the word, I’ll eat my PS4 controller) Clearly, the solution for Final Fantasy XII was to give the entire party cell-phones and to have them group text constantly with reminders of the plot, rehashes of conversations you’ve just had ten minutes ago, and the occasional selfie like posing on top of the thousandth turtle you’ve slaughtered while looking for a damn Water Crystal.

  5. PPX14 says:

    eerily looming empty and incomplete like North Korean hotels

    Aww

  6. Syal says:

    Even regular old cutscenes would help. Balthier’s got the most personality because he’s got the most one-on-one cutscenes in the game. Basch and Fran have close to none, and struggle to have personalities. Penelo’s got a couple early ones with Vaan, and one with Larsa, and then she’s gone into the background of the group shots again. Vaan’s got a couple with Penelo before the rest of the cast shows up, and then the one with Ashe, and then he’s gone into the background too.

    Fran, is there anybody in there?

    Man, now I want to see a Fran-centered music video of Comfortably Numb.

    “Ok, ok, ok, just a little pinprick
    There’ll be no more (shot of Fran getting infused with Mist and going berserk in the Shiva)
    But you may feel a little sick”

  7. W says:

    Has Basch drawn a hand turkey for Ashe, who promises to put it on the fridge but then throws it straight into the garbage when she thinks he isn’t looking but he was?

    This whole section made me smile. It’s sardonic but it nails that missing depth that I wished this cast had. I really wanted to like these characters but there’s just nothing to hold on to.

  8. Mye says:

    It’s interesting that FFT has the exact same problem where character disappear when they join the party. In FFT it’s, presumably, done for gameplay purpose because the game has perma death system and so any character that join you could potentially die in the very next fight and so wouldn’t be around for the rest of the game. So, to avoid having to create two version of every scene (one with the character alive and one for them dead), to game simply assume everyone is dead once they join you, they never appear in scene anymore. In fact the game goes further and make them vanish from existence as even mentioning them would inevitably require some sort of comment if they were dead. This also mean the game has to keep some character out of your party until their arc are complete, or in some case they simply never join you even though it would make a lot more sense. Minor aside, the game also has a pretty strict limit on how many character you can have in your roster, if you try and collect every special recruitable character you often end up having to kick out some player created character.

    It almost feel tempting to say that maybe since FF12 also has this issue they might stem from poor writing rather than gameplay limitation. But the rest of FFT cast and arcs are so strong that it put an end to that notion quickly.

    1. I realized this was the case in FFTA, when Montblanc suddenly died in a random jagd mission. When I realized this wasn’t a game over, I knew his role in the story was over.

      Tactics does compensate by having side quests for the more prominent characters, like getting a birthday present for Agrias (this may have been from the rerelease?) and Mustadio helping reactivate a golem. I think… it’s been a long time since I played FFT.

      This is actually another thing absent from FFXII: side quests that spotlight your characters. Again, we can’t imagine what these might be, as they don’t really give the cast lives or interests and all of their baggage is folded into the main plot. Basch doesn’t have an old war buddy he wants to track down, Vaan doesn’t take part in Rabanastre street gang warfare, Penelo doesn’t turn out to be the daimyo’s daughter when you visit Wutai, etc. They occasionally use the Hunts to give additional story to side characters like Supinelu and Ba’Gamnan, but not our main cast.

      1. Retsam says:

        From a bit of Googling, it looks like FFTA does have cutscenes with Montebanc that are modified if he dies beforehand, which is the better way to handle it, but it does limit how important they can be to the story.

        I’m surprised more games don’t take the Fire Emblem approach where story-critical characters are “seriously wounded” – dead for all gameplay purposes but still show up in story cutscenes, so the game doesn’t need to have a lot of conditional dialogue to handle whatever set of characters happens to be alive.

      2. Mye says:

        Agrias birthday was always there, but the requirement are really obtuse so I imagine vast majority of player will miss that one. I think Mustadio is the only one with a long quest chain (aside from Cloud but I don’t think that really count). There’s also a few quest chain only character like dragon girl, but those don’t get involved in the main story.

        It’s just a shame that some of them aren’t allowed to interact more, Agrias never meet the princess again (nor does the princess ask about her), Orlando never come back to expose the corruption of his former master, the twin don’t really get revenge, and so on.

    2. bobbert says:

      the game has perma death system and so any character that join you could potentially die in the very next fight and so wouldn’t be around for the rest of the game. So, to avoid having to create two version of every scene (one with the character alive and one for them dead),

      Tactics Ogre(Cling) does exactly this for every cutscene. Though it does hold the cast size down some.

      1. bobbert says:

        Boy! did I screwup the formatting there. What a difference a ‘/’ makes.

  9. bobbert says:

    I am tired, but I cannot find the paragraph about Penelo’s arc. I never really noticed it the first time around, but the ‘Penelo as Esther’ subplot is now my favorite part of the story.

  10. Dogbeard says:

    I think SE has at least learned where their strengths are. Playing through more of their recent games like 14, 15, and 7 remake has shown a very consistent and successful effort at characterizing the hell out of the party and making you like the game through them, even if the overall plot might not be very strong. 15 was entirely held up by the little moments between our boys that get paid off massively at the end of the game. Even little things like the high score list on the dart board in 7R fleshes out the characters more. Wedge has the high score because he’s a big boy who likes to drink and eat all day. Tifa is second place because she works there and probably gets challenged by patrons constantly. Marlene has a higher score than Barrett because of course he’d let her win just to see the smile on her face.

  11. Kathryn says:

    My favorite moment with the bros in FFXV was when they discover that Luna’s wedding dress is being made by Vivienne Westwood and have a lengthy discussion/product placement about what a great designer she is. I laughed because I thought that the intersection between JRPG players and people who even know who Vivienne Westwood is, much less would recognize a Vivienne Westwood if they saw one, had to be very close to null (possibly just me). My husband certainly didn’t know she was a real designer. (For my part, I legitimately didn’t know Cup Noodle was a real brand, so…)

    (That being said, I later told my BFF who worked in the fashion industry about it, and she said that the Far East is a big market for Vivienne Westwood and that she’s offbeat enough that appearing in a video game is totally on-brand for her. So maybe that intersection is small only in the US.)

    1. Volvagia says:

      I mean, both product placements, and the Dub’s reference to the LIFE ALERT ad (which just made me go “really?”), are some level of immersion breaking.

  12. Karma The Alligator says:

    I might be wrong, but isn’t there another of those moments just before we head for Raithwall? When we learn that we can’t fly there, we are in a very small area with a save crystal and a merchant leading to the sandsea, and I could have sworn we could see at least some of the party members talking to each others.

  13. damiac says:

    I have to imagine most of the reason for the roughness and bareness of ff12s story and characters is because it was meant to be an MMO. I’m not just imagining that right, this was supposed to be an MMO at first, wasn’t it?

    Because then it makes a lot more sense. The gameplay and systems were developed with one thing in mind, then they were like “Oh shit we need to shoehorn in some characters and involve them in the story. And, OH SHIT, the story has to actually go somewhere!”

    1. Retsam says:

      There was discussion in the comments much earlier in the series. It was definitely originally planned to be an online game – (in fact they originally thought all Final Fantasies after X would be online games).

      I suspect it wasn’t ever going to be an “MMO” in the sense of FFXI or WoW, but more like Destiny or Monster Hunter, but AFAIK there aren’t really many details on what they intended or how far along the design process before it was scrapped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.