<\/div>Here, we smack down some cockatrices. What is a cockatrice? I’ll let the game tell you.<\/p>\n
\u201cLo, the mighty cockatrice, proud-feathered sphere, known as much for its ill humor as its dire rotundity. The great naturalist MerloseAn obvious name reference to Vagrant Story, but not the same character; the events of Final Fantasy XII are ancient by the time of Vagrant Story.<\/span> once remarked: \u201d<\/i>…live they in the sands and other arid climes, whereabouts they moveth in a rolling fashion most peculiar. Subsist they principally on small creatures and vermin &c., for the incapacitation of which they disgorge a sticky saliva, thence devouring captured morsels only when appetite moves them. Swollen sacs containing airs are found under the surface of the skin, these lifting the creature upon drafts unseen, whence to espy suitable prey.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The writing in this game is in this faux-Elizabethan style that’s fancy enough to sound period-appropriate but not actually too archaic in vocabulary. Everything in this game, the dialogue, the item descriptions, flavor text, bestiary entries, is in this style, and I goddamn love it. It’s very nearly as endearing as the accents in Chrono Cross or Fallout 4<\/a>. Actually, the only characters that don’t speak this way are Penelo and Vaan, because being disappointingly incongruous is their entire character concept.<\/p>\n
\nI admit a personal weakness for it, but even beyond that it really does rattle me how much attention to maintaining this air the game goes through, and how it packs flavorful writing into every nook and cranny it can spare. See, FFXII was born feet first, and that experience (and the oxygen deprivation) informed the rest of its life. Even when games have good writing, they tend to focus on the structure and large strokes, and it’s rare that they have so much time to spend on the little touches. FFXII took a big ropy shit on its story, narrative, themes, and characters, and then blew all its spare effort on tiny setting details and flavor. Every NPC has a line or two about the setting or their motivations, every location has a history behind it, every throwaway loot item has an origin and purpose, all related in that pitch-perfect antique style.<\/p>\nThis game may have put most of its themes in the food processor and left the thing on fucking pur\u00e9e, but maybe the only one that they really nailed is that humans, for all their power and ambition, are small and short-lived. They share a gigantic world with things far, far older and grander. The writing, and the way in which it props up the setting, has a two-fold purpose, then: it makes the world feel larger than its playable borders. It creates the illusion of purpose and motion where there isn’t. (The open world helps a lot too, but I’ll dive into that later.) When you walk into some dusty crypt, the walls give off the sense that they’ve stood long before you were born and will endure long after you die, completely indifferent to your passing. When you hunt down some powerful creature, there’s a palpable sense of having found out something rare and truly mighty, and killing it carries a weighty feel of finality. The sum of these thousand small touches is a sense of an ancient but living history, whose surface we can only tap at, the contents and actors of which would raise our hair and baffle the limits of our conceptions. In short, it feels Ivalician.<\/i><\/p>\n
But Hiroyuki Ito just can’t raise wood if he isn’t fucking up something that could have been decent, so of course a mighty portion of interesting tidbits are walled off in the most tedious and bass-ackwards way they could justify: the bestiary. Sure, of course the bestiary makes sense as a spot to cram flavor text… for monsters,<\/i> sure. You get that above description for cockatrices after you bring one down, same as for any other creature in the game. But if I wanna know more about the hot patch of dirt west of Rabanastre, I arbitrarily have to kill eight more of them. Getting these secondary bestiary entries is time-consuming, and of course there’s no indication which ones are actually worth finding out. Maybe it’s the flavor text for the area you’re in. Maybe it’s a hint at what kind of rare loot that enemy carries, or maybe it’s a completely unhelpful allusion to how to unlock certain bazaar goods. (Bee tee dubs, bring a raincoat once I go off on the bazaar, it’s gonna be a fucking Gallagher show.) So in practice, one either spends a billion goddamn hours killing the sixth palette swap of the wolf-model to find a blurb about how platinum armor fucking sucks<\/a>, or disregard the entries and miss out on all the decent flavor text that would otherwise round out the fourth featureless desert you’ve slogged through.<\/p>\n
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