T w e n t y S i d e d

There are a few characters to whom I’d like to extend an honorable mention. Yes, there are a few characters in the plot that I find interestingly written, and, as I transition from talking about the cast to digging a little deeper, who have a little more going on under the dome. Strangely, all of them number among our enemies— or perhaps not so strangely, if you consider that proximity to our party bears an inverse relationship to being interesting and depthful.

Starting from the bottom and working our way up, I find myself oddly endeared by the Judges Magister, despite most of them appearing in three scenes or fewer. Aside from Gabranth, Judge Ghis is the most prominent in the story, and I think the game uses him well in a nuts-and-bolts sort of way to represent the Empire through the first act of the game before being sacrificed to demonstrate the fatal allure of the nethicite. But Ghis has no interaction with the rest of the Ministry and takes no part in what I consider their most interesting scenes in Archades. As Vayne plays Macbeth above, the Judges Magister find themselves playing a community park rendition of Julius Caesar.

In their introductory exchange they all wear their helmets, making it look and sound a bit silly, but it makes them seem more formal and impersonal, setting up a contrast for later. The looming succession occasions a show of their viewpoints: Drace is more concerned with virtue than with unblinking loyalty, Bergan is a malevolent voluptuary of power, and the elder Zargabaath naturally takes an institutionalist posture, respecting his duty despite his clear concern. Gabranth falls right in the center of these three. He capitulates to the Empire’s power and serves them after the fall of Landis, subverting Dalmasca and damning his brother through deception, finding purpose in life through the dogged fulfillment of his duty. Yet in spite of his misdeeds, his warmer exchange with Judge Drace reveal a sense of virtue that he hopes his duty to Larsa can fulfill.

This scene is paid off when Gramis is assassinated. None of the judges wear their helmets for this scene; in a literal and figurative sense, the masks come off, and their true selves are revealed. Drace rejects her duty for her sense of justice, and is laid low by Bergan, who is loyal to the most eminent person of Vayne, not the Law. Zargabaath does his best to restore order in spite of the travesty. Vayne forces Gabranth to capitulate to his power and choose duty over virtue, ending Drace’s life, leaving him disillusioned and embittered.

But more than serving Gabranth’s somewhat garbled character development, the fate of the Ministry of Law carries a subtext relevant to the game’s flirtations with conflicts of power and duty. The Judges find themselves in an untenable position that demands uneasy compromises between their virtue, their duty, and their loyalty; they cannot satisfy all three, and their fates reveal the measure of their choices: it’s easy to identify with Drace, who acts from a pure heart to strike at the villain before her, but she makes the terrible folly of casting away the dignity and legitimacy of her duty to the Ministry of Law and engaging in a contest of raw power with Vayne: power personified! She immediately loses this struggle, and her life; as Vaan would say, she protected nothing through her sacrifice, and forfeited any future in which she could have done more good. What’s more, her absence further tightens Vayne’s already firm grip on the Ministry as a tool for the enforcement of his whim, and her brazenly lawless attempt on his life clearly demonstrates the state of crisis and treachery that Vayne uses as the pretext for his autocracy— a clever and subtle, if quite rare demonstration of Vayne’s supposed capacity to arrange events such that he emerges all the stronger come what may. Bergan is a much clearer case; he is awed by the majesty of power, and thereby the awesome power of His Majesty, Lord Vayne, and has no regard for that power’s supposed obligation to suborn itself to any higher limiting principle. In the moment, Bergan seems well rewarded for his barbarism, as his own greatly enhanced power is demonstrated in brutal fashion against Drace. But his fate leaves no room for quibbles: a mere tool co-opted and discarded, his mind taken, his soul twisted, and his compromised flesh used up and left to rot… handily foreshadowing the like fate of his master.

Zargabaath, meanwhile, chooses his duty to the Ministry despite the clear offense to his virtue. It’s easy to damn Zargabaath for his seeming cravenness, and I’ve taken my shots at him. But Zargabaath outlasts his peers, and alone outlasts the dark days of Archades to see his honor and his duty at last realigned; he effectively serves as Ondore’s counterpart in the final battle, accepting the cease-fire as commander of the Imperial armada and at once pledging his own life to avert the disaster threatened by the failing Bahamut. Having Zargabaath alone survive the war seems an effective means in itself of demonstrating, if nothing else, the low cunning of keeping your nose down, but if not for Basch suddenly taking the mantle of Gabranth in place of his brother and apparently leading the Ministry of Law under Larsa, Zargabaath’s endurance would have demonstrated (and I suppose still demonstrates) the survival of the institution of the Ministry, and the necessity of keeping its cogs oiled in anticipation for just such a moment long awaited. Yet together with his noble gesture on behalf of the people he only a moment ago fought to subjugate, I wonder at the decision to have Balthier render his offer unnecessary, and his long-stymied virtue demonstrated only in word, not deed. Having Zargabaath go through with his sacrifice would give his sudden turn more weight rather than suddenly taking the wind out of it, but it would also give the audience the karmic retribution and redemption through death that most of them subconsciously crave, and it would at last wipe the slate clean for the Ministry of Law, to be reborn solely under the righteous guidance of Basch-branth… in theory, anyway.

The threat Vayne poses to the Ministry and the Senate is a microcosm of the threat he poses to the balance of Ivalician politics writ large. Outside Archadia, political and military figures like Marquis Ondore or Al-Cid Margrace always speak of their aims in terms of working within a large and complicated network of actors and interests; it’s precisely for the need to assuage what passes for the Ivalician international community of Ashe’s heritage through the implicitly trusted and respected word of an ancient, independent, apolitical institution that we seek out the Kiltias. But just as Vayne overawes the Ministry, the brazen massacre at Bur-Omisace leaves a stunned Ivalice at a loss how to cope with truly arbitrary power they cannot match.

For above the Judges, our main villains play a much grander game.

Dear Doctor Cid seems the most outspokenly ideological of our foes; it’s his words that delineate the putative higher principles for which our foes wage their war. It’s from Cid we take that oft-repeated phrase, “putting the reins of history back in the hands of man.” Quibbles about their means aside, liberating mankind from the machinations of the self-styled arbiters of capital-H History seems a worthy enough goal that our party comes to pursue it in their own way. Does Cid mean it? Nope. By my lights, Cid, who seemed much more personally and morally aligned with Venat than the somewhat transactional and skeptical Vayne ever was, reveals unabashedly at the Pharos a fascination with replacing or becoming the Occuria, not merely ousting them. The struggle against our Undying overseers is revealed not as a liberating revolution, but a coup d’état. Through Cidolfus Bunansa, the game suggests an important lesson regarding ambitious men preaching the glory of man: they tend to have a glorious man in mind— and buddy, it ain’t you and it ain’t me.

Though lacking his entertaining bombast, Vayne has a lot more going on under the hood. In fact, of all the characters in the game, I find Vayne the most complex and interesting of all. In classic character writing fashion, our villain darkly mirrors our hero, Ashe. We, the audience, understand that the convenience of the Occuria’s promise of a virtuous crusade in their interests that will just so happen to deliver on her personal desire to avenge Rasler and the naked eagerness with which they pander to that base gratification demands great scrutiny, all the more as they seem so eager to short-circuit Ashe’s own growing skepticism by this very appeal to her base wants. Likewise, Vayne finds himself at the head of a revolution for the liberation of mankind that will conveniently see him enthroned hegemon of the nations of man. Ashe… for whatever reason… overcomes her temptation to let her personal ambitions too cleanly align with her greater cause; Vayne embraces the convenience.

But what makes Vayne more interesting to me lies beyond his ambitions; that want of power is what Cid and Venat ultimately seek in Vayne, but by necessity they seek it through his beleaguered yearning for a righteous cause. As his impatience with his co-conspirators reveals, the core tragedy of Vayne Carrudas Solidor is that he is ruthless, but not remorseless. From the day he submitted to his father’s command to stain his hands with his own family’s blood, he has believed that stain indelible and his honor irredeemable. Our few early glimpses of Vayne as a charismatic and amiable statesman aren’t merely a false face worn by a consummate schemer, but a look at the man Vayne could have been in another life. Even as he genuinely, almost wistfully admires the naïve purity of Larsa’s optimism and nobility, he no longer believes himself capable of virtue and he accepts that there is no deed too black to further stain his own conscience and thus no great price in honor to be paid for a greater good bought with atrocities. The Emperor wagers ever more of his own soul to the St. Petersburg Game proposed to him by his presumptive friends and allies, more and more believing the next wager his only path to the only stakes that could justify his life: a world that men like his brother may safely inherit from men like him. In the end, Vayne’s fate hardly differs from Bergan’s; though Vayne would agree he must bear the full responsibility for his actions, I believe Cid and Venat were exploiting Vayne from the first.

But Venat was exploiting them both. As difficult as it is to tell what the game is trying to say sometimes, its stance on Venat is crystal clear: Venat is an unspeakably evil being, even more manipulative than the other Occuria and far, far more ambitious and dangerous. Whatever her reasons for spiting Gerun and the Occuria may have been, the sanctity of human freedom has nothing to do with it.

If Venat thought the Occuria’s system unjust, and wanted humanity to determine their own fate free of meddling, why did she not merely destroy the Sun-Cryst immediately? She seems to indicate to Vayne at the end that this was all it really would have taken. The invasions, the Bahamut, the scheming and plots and, above all, the manufacted nethicite… All irrelevant to the goal of “putting history’s reins back in the hands of man.” Far from foreclosing the threat of nethicite and its seductions, she commoditizes it while seeking to usurp the other Occuria’s monopoly on it. The average observer from Landis or Bhujerba, if they didn’t know any better, might conclude that Venat’s actions are aimed less at working against the Occuria or liberating humanity and more squarely focused on building herself an unstoppable army commanded through human proxies or thralls. To play favorites and keep nethicite a secret, sharing it only with your champions, is exactly what the Occuria have been doing, and that’s exactly what Venat does: pick a human agent to accomplish your will, and empower them to do so.

The game speaks of nethicite, and of power generally, not merely as a tool to be wielded but as a force possessed of its own will and its own aims. Those who seek to wield nethicite— to wield power— are likewise wielded by it, we are warned. Venat embodies power itself, lending a mythic personification to this idea that power is not merely wielded by man but seems to wield men to its sole instinctual end: always to grow, to consolidate, to spread like a virus while rationalizing every action nullifying the merest constraint conceived upon it. She seems to want only for a human scion through which to reign, just as the Occuria always have. To Cid, she offers the fruit of knowledge unjustly denied by presumptive gods who fear man becoming like gods themselves. To Vayne, she offers the whole world at the cost of only his sin-sick soul.

This is Venat’s real dream. To let man rule the world, yes. And to let the want of power, through nethicite, to rule their hearts. And, through nethicite, to rule man. This, certainly, is one of the game’s greatest coups: the emergence of Venat as a Satanic figure, ruling through subtlety and lies, through temptation and the perversion of truth. What’s more, it is so thoroughly, beautifully Ivalician: those who seek and love power can only be ruled by it, and one who is slave to ambition can never truly be free.cf. Delita, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Mewt I honestly cannot praise this enough. I love this.

The unsettling likelihood that some sort of idea or theme might actually underlie Final Fantasy XII forces me at long last to breathe aloud a question we were all more comfortable mumbling rhetorically:

What is Final Fantasy XII about?

An obvious answer presents itself: freedom! It’s the one idea that all of our characters, ally and enemy alike, yearn for in one way or another. The battle for freedom underlies the events of the game from beginning to end, unifying the mundane, brute struggle against our worldly oppressors to the philosophical and moral questions of mankind’s place beneath the Occuria and the temptations of the nethicite and the awesome power it holds. Now, with that settled, we can f— waaaait a second, I’m not totally satisfied with this answer.

For what sort of freedom are we really fighting? Well, in the most ambitious good-faith reading of the game, I’m tempted to say that the truest freedom of all is liberation from the ensorcellment of a spurious greater good that marshals our every action to moral compromises, whether or not they’ll ever deliver the omelette as the eggshells stack up. It’s in this sense that we can directly compare our heroes and villains: the internal virtuous struggle that Ashe transcends and to which Vayne succumbs signifies the martial struggle in which they’re engaged and determines its outcome. I think this reading neatly inducts Final Fantasy XII into the fraternity of its Ivalician forebears; while squaring Final Fantasy Tactics Advance with its fellows can be difficult to accomplish honestly, I think each of the games can be fairly read in their own way to glorify heroes— Ramza, Ashley, Marche, and now Ashe— who show their mettle by rejecting the stultifying moral compromises and temptations that prove the prevailing passions of their harrowing times.

Ashe not only turns down the opportunity to gratify her naked vengeance by cleansing Archadia by fire, but rejects the opportunity to unify Ivalice under her standard for what very well might have become a golden age of the sort we’re assured Raithwall accomplished. Raithwall is something of a spoiler to many angles through which we can attempt to read the game, as the text never so much as hints that the epoch of peace and prosperity that he brought about through the means we are obliged to deplore was anything less wondrous than what it seemed at first glance, nor Raithwall himself any less a ruler than he is remembered— but for his servitude under the Occuria, which history omits. But if we merely take Raithwall at face value, it not only squares with our present lens on the game but renders the message even more bold in its preference for virtue without compromise. It suggests that mortgaging her soul to the nethicite and yoking mankind yet again to the Occuria is too high a price for the assurance of the peaceful, prosperous future at stake— even if that cost is wholly moral or philosophical, as it seems to be in the absence of any more tangible sacrifice apparent for the patronage of the Undying!

Even wretched Gabranth relays this message to us through the example of his fall from grace; I have to suspect that his growing anguish results to great extent from the budding awareness that his brother was more free condemned to a cage of iron than Noah ever was within his prison of steel named “Gabranth.”

This interpretation holds tenuously together until the finale. Then our party shoots it to fucking pieces by pointlessly deceiving our own allies for the sake of our ingress to the Bahamut and resolving the war itself through like deception, thereafter burying the uncomfortable truth of the war, nethicite, history, etc. for the good of sparing the common rabble the unpleasantness of complicated matters we can’t trust them to handle… to include the fate of our very own Basch fon Ronsenburg, pointlessly condemned to forswear himself and suffer the final humiliation of recapitulating his brother’s cardinal sin, taking his identity and deceiving the world for the sake of easing his new Archadian liege’s accession to power. Let lightning strike me if Basch was not interred beneath an Occurian outhouse so the gods could continue to piss and shit on his grave till the end of time.

If not this lofty conception of freedom centered in personal virtue, then what sits at the heart of the game? Well, it’s not quite as sexy, but one can’t dismiss the value of a very immediate conception of freedom from domination in the merely martial sense. To its list of odd similarities with Valkyria Chronicles, may this game add a hearty blood-and-soil fervor for the sovereignty of the Westphalian nation-state? And the sacred right and duty of small, old, culturally rich nations to contest bitterly the imperialist whims of nuclear-armed autocracies to their northeast focused on seizing the ancient capital pretextually to combat some ideological corruption but factually driven by the immediate want of valuable resources and strategic geography and the deeper longing to recreate the fallen glory of a bygone regime?

Well… maybe? I can square Ashe and Vayne’s personal and mental struggles as more intimate reflections of this struggle, just as before. The liberation of man from the dictates of the Occuria serves as the moral high ground from which Archadia’s liege wages his campaign, but in doing so he himself serves as the most clear and present danger to the nations of men upon Ivalice, not only seeking to dominate them but presenting a real threat of annihilating them like Nabudis, and as we are warned he threatens to annihilate Rabanastre if need be. This oxymoron reflects Vayne’s personal and spiritual compromise to none other than an Occuria fixated on dominating Ivalice. Ashe, meanwhile, resists the temptation to visit ruthless destruction on the homeland even of her worst enemy, and stands at the end prepared to risk her life for the cause of her nation’s freedom from domination.

I think this sidles a little closer. It falls down only in the main cast, half of whom are criminals who flaunt the sovereignty of the nation from within; Balthier and Fran have both forsaken their homelands, and fight not for hearth and home. No sooner is Dalmasca liberated than Vaan and Penelo take to the skies as outlaws… in some non-specific, kid-friendly way I’m not sure is even supposed to be illegal but for the “pirate” epithet. We never see the two kids scoop up an heiress somewhere in Dorstonis so Vaan can negotiate a ransom while Penelo practices obscure bangaa torture techniques she learned firsthand from Ba’Gamnan. With Basch yet again pressganged into service of a nation not his own, only Ashe remains as the sole heartfelt Dalmascan patriot… not a long leap to make when your family name is Dalmasca! This is very much unlike Valkyria Chronicles, romantically endeared as it was by the Gallian Volksgemeinschaft.

Which brings us to another possibility: the personal, individual freedom from domination by any higher power that the fantasy of sky piracy is meant to evoke. Naturally, Balthier most embodies this; he is sworn to no nation and lives for himself and his best friend/pet, yet comes to fight for a righteous cause once he comes to recognize it. Vaan and Penelo follow in his footsteps, following the liberation of Rabanastre with their own liberation from any hold over them. Complicating this is Fran’s unabashed regret at forsaking the incurious solitude and stasis necessitated by her familial and tribal traditions, and her earnest rebuke to her sister to avoid her fate by accepting the same. This reading also makes Basch’s life history’s greatest practical joke, which I’m okay with. But for Ashe, we seem to need to make a significant exception to our intuitive sense of this romantic sense of freedom and specify that it entails no obligation not to exert authority over others. This would likewise basically let Doctor Cid or Venat off the hook in this respect; hey, if you can be personally free and reign as autocrat, why not? This still relegates Vayne to their confused patsy boytoy.

But I’m fine brushing that aside for the most part. Despite my insane, pedantic compulsion to try and mesh every detail together into a harmonious thematic framework, I’m actually not too bothered by using monarchs to helm a story about freedom, however defined, in its broad strokes. Frankly, it’s just wise storytelling. Any audience implicitly understands the mystery of the Fisher King, a mythologized conception of how the worth of a monarch is reflected in the fate of their kingdom. Archadia is imperiled while its diseased emperor wastes away, and it threatens the whole world when a villain takes the throne. When the… noble, wise… sure… Lord Larsa takes the throne, we know times will be good again. Likewise, Dalmasca languishes as its throne sits empty, and is returned to splendor when a strong, righteous queen is crowned at last. In fact, one of my very favorite examples of visual storytelling in Final Fantasy XII carries across this idea at the very beginning of the game. Dalmasca paeans the wedding of Ashe and Rasler, and we see her gowned in white at the altar of Rabanastre’s cathedral. The time of joy for Ashe is a time of joy for all the kingdom. As events turn, Rasler is slain and the kingdom is imperiled; at its darkest hour, we see Ashe once again at the altar, arrayed in mourning black. When the kingdom is subjugated, Ashe is said to have died… though of course she lives, biding her time in obscurity to one day rise again. The cryst-clear message from the very start is that Ashe is Dalmasca, and that their fates are one.

It’s rather beautiful, and it only really becomes a problem if you’re trying to make personal liberation a core theme of a game premised about returning an absolute monarch to her throne, which the game seems to be attempting to some extent. I guess in 706 Old Valendian, freedom really isn’t free, and the cost is your sanity.

You also skirt some serious risk if you’re trying to use royals to make some kind of vague point about the danger of power. Which the game is trying to do. The game frames Vayne as an immense threat in part due to his dismantling of every check on his power over Archadia, and Venat as an altogether more directly dangerous Occurian threat than her counterparts in Giruvegan due to her disconnection from their society and its presumptive obligations to their own internal heirarchy and mores. The game, though skeptical of power generally, seems to regard power constrained by whatever means— law, tradition, faith, societal norms and communal and personal virtues— as the far lesser threat compared to truly arbitrary power exercised by a self-styled supreme leader… or supreme being, as it were. Odd, then, that while lost Landis was a republic, Rozarria seems to be run by a large and robust network or noble dynasties, little Balfonheim is an autonomous anarcho-syndicalist commune, and even Archades was at least nominally under the direction of an elected Senate which was much more powerful possibly within living memory, the two governments most concentrated and least constrained in their executive functions were Nabradia and Dalmasca, which derive their monarchic authority only from their lineage from Raithwall and have no separate governmental bodies nor even persons with whom to share even the merest authority over the lives of their subjects. Despite the logical necessity of their existence, we never hear a whisper of any noble class or branch families which could credibly lobby for their own interests against the throne. No, when I said above that Ashe was Dalmasca, I was being poetic but I did also mean it in the strictly literal sense: she is the entire Dalmascan state.

Let’s better our lives by ignoring this, as the game does. For the game deals with the idea of power and its temptations only partly through tawdry titles and games of thrones and whatnot. The main locus of power in Final Fantasy XII and in Ivalice, in the literal and thematic senses, is the practical expedient of cursed nuke crystals.

With nothing but the sinister framing of nethicite and the repetitious insinuations of its subtle, seductive manipulations to motivate this decision, the principle moral dilemma of Final Fantasy XII becomes *sigh* nothing more than the twelve hundred thousandth JRPG nuke taboo allegory. It’s not worth asking why Ashe can’t just hold a nethicite chunk in one hand, fly up into the air, and just start blasting lasers out of her other hand, fighting alongside the Resistance fleet as a one-woman capital ship while her awed Rabanastran subjects below stare up her miniskirt. The audience is left to assume, invent, extrapolate, infer, and rationalize the dire consequences of yielding to the supremacy of nethicite. As usual, the audience’s bare intuition of some narrative or thematic cliché substitutes for the groundwork of, you know, actually writing that part of the story.

Rejecting the nethicite leaves the cast and the audience squared up to the conundrum long hanging over the narrative: how do you oppose a foe wielding the dreadful power of nethicite with none of our own? *shrug* Ashe might not have any of the personal or practical skills necessary to head the Dalmascan state, but there’s basically nothing she can’t kill with a katana. You know, it’s the simplest thing in the world for every cut-rate JRPG to contrive some claptrap explaining how three teenagers and maybe an elf or a robot can beat some ancient invincible god-being with the power of goodness. You can take the literal brute-force route of turning the power of friendship into a cogent directed-energy weapon that melts the bad guy’s flesh right off his bones; the really creative titles find a way to demonstrate that the actual character traits revealed, honed, discovered, and earned on the long road to the finale become instrumental in prevailing. The very best games find a way to do both. I’ve fed Final Fantasy X a raft of shit for having basically this exact same problem, but I’ll at least give them token credit for pinning the vague, undersized fig-leaf of rallying Jecht’s last fading spark of humanity over the tumescent impossibility of defeating an invincible whale monster by hurling sports equipment at its scapula.

The lack of any clever workaround or some alternate resolution rooted in the character of the participants, ally or enemy, to bypass or minimize the raw power looming over us for the entire game yet again reduces our foes to pathetic schmucks we should be deeply embarrassed to have been outdone by multiple times. But in this instance, it also reveals the moral quandary permeating the narrative as a farce. All that strutting and fretting about the stage, our Termagant in tears, over jack diddly! Bathos.

Yeah, I get it. I accept, resignedly and without feeling, that nethicite is, by its nature, just too wicked, too dangerous, or too corrupting to be used responsibly, even by a 19-year old girl on the near end of the bell curve. Although, now that you mention it, this raises a very uncomfortable, very urgent inconsistency.

Did you not see our army of motherfucking demons?

Our party, without the merest shred of trepidation and with no apparent firsthand consequence, enslaves and commands a cadre of the most fiendish creations ever to scar reality with their existence: The Espers, better known players of Final Fantasy Tactics as the Lucavi.

While not called so in this game, “Lucavi” is a Russian word for the devil, and this is all too accurate a name for the creatures. Each was created for some necessary purpose, yet each was somehow corrupted into a twisted perversion of their former selves. In the end, they rose up against the gods who created them to usurp dominance over Creation. If you believe that a man may be judged by their enemies, behold the foes of the Occuria.

Each of the Lucavi are designed or named either for demons and fallen angelsBelias, Zalera, Hashmal, Shemhazai, and Adrammelech or after the final bosses of previous Final Fantasy games.Chaos, Zeromus, Famfrit, Mateus, Exodus, and Ultima The first of two exceptions is Irish folk hero Cúchulainn, who was… well, not what a modern audience might think of when they read “hero:”

“The first warp-spasm seized Cúchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front… On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child… he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat… The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.”

—The Tain

You’re welcome for the most metal thing you’ll read all day.

The other exception is Zodiark, an intentional outlier that represents more of an eldritch existence beyond good and evil.

Ultima is the leader of the Lucavi, and she herself is, like Venat, a direct analog to Satan, much resembling a Christian angel and being described as one of the most beautiful, majestic, and powerful of all the gods’ servants. She commanded the revolution of the Espers against the Occuria, and was cast down upon their defeat. Her final attack is the Eschaton, the end of days.

The Lucavi are more than just a background element of Ivalician lore; they are the driving force behind the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics, in which their repulsive nature is demonstrated to its fullest extent. They drive all Ivalice into war, seeking to use the thousands of slaughtered innocents as a blood sacrifice to resurrect Ultima, who had been slain in ancient days… Days which, as of 706 Old Valendian, were soon to come! But more on that soon.

Canonically, the party finds, defeats, and enslaves each of the thirteen Espers. Fitting servants, I suppose, for our cast of rebels against the Occuria’s dominion.

Inexcusable. Beyond the pale. There is nothing the game can assert about power, about corruption, about responsibility, that is not dashed to splinters by the party seeking out and dominating the most vile, sinister, manipulative creatures in our world, who, themselves, were and would remain emblematic of the corrupting, damning lure of revenge, of wrath, of destruction, of ambition, of avarice, of, in a word, power, magnificent and terrible.

Everything the game so thoroughly condemns about nethicite is so pathetically hollow, sharing the screen with these beings, which the party commands almost as an afterthought. I want you to look at Penelo, at that innocent face, and say to yourself: This girl is the master of Adrammelech, the Wroth, who betrayed his holy masters and lived as a lord of Hell, leading a horde of ravening fiends against his creators. And then I want you to picture her sitting on its shoulders, holding fast to its horns as it hovers aloft, bladed wings beating the air to a tempest, raining lightning upon our shrieking foes as they flee, bellowing blood-curses at a Creation it despises. And, from this demonic vantage, chastising Ashe thusly: “Nethicite is scary, Ashe. Don’t trust those no-good Occuria!”

In fact, I can’t help but believe that it is the party’s very reliance on these creatures— and, more to the point, their negligent mismanagement of them— that changed the world in ways they really, really should have seen coming. Having perused the timeline of the setting, I can come to no other conclusion that the party’s outrageous defiance of the Occuria and their absurd negligence regarding the Espers resulted in, without hyperbole, the end of the world as they knew it.

I’ll explain.

Eons ago, when Ultima led her assault against the Occuria and lost, they were, in punishment, bound into glyphs. Whoever possessed these glyphs would, in turn, become their masters, and great and powerful people in legend, such as Raithwall himself, were said to command them from age to age.

707 Old Valendian. The time, though we are told is much decayed from the height of Raithwall’s rule, will be remembered as a golden age. This is the time of magicite as a commodity, of airship fleets arriving and embarking from every point of the map, of great metropolitan cities that reach to the sky, with people of every race walking the streets in harmony.

The six people who had defied the gods and won, had, in their travels, found and mastered these glyphs and the creatures imprisoned by them. They thought very little of this. One of them, however— Famfrit, the Darkening Cloud— had, for a time, been commanded by Dr. Cidolfus Demen Bunansa, who seemingly had it contained within a shard of crystal. Given that Doctor Cid was the architect and master of nethicite, it is presumable that the creature was contained within nethicite.

As a byproduct of the destruction of the Sun-Cryst, the sky continent of Lemurés is rediscovered, and with it, Auracite: a type of magicite useful for the binding of spirits, from which the creatures contained within could be commanded. It would be speculated that even the Espers could be commanded in this fashion, but they, as with any creature, could only exist as an echo of their true self and power when called forth in such a form.

Many years pass. The heroes of that era grow old, and die. If they had any understanding of the power that they held in the Espers, or had made any effort to provide for the custody of the Glyphs after they themselves were gone, they are not remembered by history.

After a time, in a kingdom unknown to the heroes of Rabanastre, a young king, seeking to expand his power even further, attempted to summon a demon of incredible power. He succeeded— somewhat. Unable to command the creature, it slew him, and set out at once to destroy the entire world. However the king had attempted to bind them, Ultima, and with her the Lucavi, were not only present in the world but freed from their glyphs’ imprisonment.

The Cataclysm of the demon and its brethren usher in an age of destruction unequaled in history. In time immemorial, the gods themselves fought these creatures, and defended humanity and the young world from their like. This time, no gods appeared to do so.

A means to combat them was found in time, however. If one of the demons was defeated, it was possible to seal its spirit away in a shard of Auracite. Twelve warriors set out on this quest, and succeeded in sealing away the demons. They were remembered as the Zodiac Braves, and these shards of Auracite, the Zodiac Stones, were kept by the Holy Ydoran Empire as treasured relics.

It was understood, however, that the demons were not destroyed, but contained. One who possessed the stones could, perhaps, summon the creatures once again— yet to do so would require one to merge themselves, body and soul, with the creature; with the ancient glyphs that had bound them in the world gone, this was the Espers’, now the Lucavi’s, only means of manifesting physically in the world, though the stones themselves could still grant their wielder great power even without this ritual.

It is around this time, only about a century after the life of Ashelia Dalmasca, that a man named Ajora Glabados would be born.The timeline is fuzzy here; Ajora may have been alive during the events of Final Fantasy XII, but the events of his life detailed below must have occured some time after the advent of Lucavi which wouldn’t occur for at least decades after the game. Ajora would found a new sect of the Light of Kiltia religion which, following the death of its Gran Kiltias and the terrible Cataclysm that had followed, was all but dying out.

Though his legend was inflated and falsified by those that would later deify him, Ajora did indeed possess remarkable powers, and had gathered many followers around him in the Holy Ydoran Empire. One of these followers, Germonique, discovered that Ajora was also spying on Ydora, and passing along information to all of its enemies, apparently trying to foment some grand conflict for reasons understood only by him. He also discovered that Ajora was gathering the Zodiac Stones, and intended to use them to call forth the beings contained within, which Germonique, misunderstanding, believed were the Zodiac Braves.

The Holy Ydoran Empire, finally with the evidence they needed to move against the troublesome would-be prophet, arrested him, and had him hanged. The prophet’s vengeance before dying was terrible, and Mullonde, the seat of Ydoran power, the last great bastion of Golden Age pre-Cataclysm technology and culture, was annihilated in a great tidal wave. At terrible cost, Ajora, in truth the host of Ultima, Angel of Blood, was slain.

Over a millennium later, man is alone in Ivalice. The other races are long since gone, and go unremembered. Humanity itself was said to have nearly been wiped out at one point, but no one can remember quite why. Researchers of eons past often find great masses of machinery that no one alive has ever seen, all fallen and destroyed as if in a short time, even in one great moment. Even more rarely, the machinery can activate in the presence of a magickal stone… but who would ever have such a fanciful thing as a magicked stone?

Most puzzlingly, there are sometimes excavated masses of ships in lands no water is known to have ever covered. Many have strange protrusions like fins and propellers, but know one knows what these could have been for. In jest, it’s said that maybe they had flown to where they were.

Idle fantasy.

The extraordinarily powerful Church of Glabados is ever-present, and keeps an active, benevolent hand in the affairs of the nations of Ivalice, dedicated to the memory of their founder, the ineffable Saint Ajora. Into this world, Ramza Beoulve is born.

One hundred years. This was what Dalmasca’s stubborn streak bought humanity. This was mankind’s liberation from the tyranny of gods.

One hundred years.

The conclusion concludes next week.

The Rocketeer —PLEASE—STAND—BY—