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If you wanted to make a fun, un-challenging version of this game, then you could simplify everything. Rather than asking the player to remember that Rabanastre is the capital city of Dalmasca, you could just say that Dalmasca is a city-state. Most of the other countries \/ capital cities could be similarly merged. This would greatly reduce the number of proper nouns the player has to keep track of. You could take all of that front-loaded political setup and cut most of it, and move the rest to the second act. This way, the world would be simplified into “Bad Guys vs. Good Guys” rather than “Arcadia versus Landis, Nabradia, Rozaria, and Rabanastre of Dalmasca on the Galtean Peninsula”.<\/p>\n
But this writer doesn’t want to make a cartoon world. They want to make a world brimming with verisimilitude. It needs to be large, complex, and nuanced. Just like the real world.<\/p>\n
Fine.<\/i> Commendable even.<\/p>\n
But then our heroes get captured and thrown into a free-range “prison” that wouldn’t feel out of place in an episode of Phineas and Ferb<\/em>.<\/p>\n Oh, and on the way out they just happen to bump into the most sensitive political prisoner of the Archadian Empire. By accident<\/b>. His keepers just happen to show up and deliver a villainous monologue to explain his current predicament for the benefit of the audience. And then they depart, leaving him – a political prisoner who they have no reason to keep alive – completely unguarded. The party is able to walk right up to his cage and have a chat with him, and nobody seems even a little nervous that maybe there might be some guards or soldiers around. Even better, this prisoner is suspended over a trap door to hammerspace that allows the party to effortlessly vanish from the guards.<\/p>\n The prisoner is Basch, who betrayed the good guys in the opening cutscenes. Except no! That was his evil twin! Now let’s walk out of here through this passage that nobody bothers to guard because it’s haunted by skeletons.<\/p>\n Oh, but this is a <\/i>super-serious world for grownups<\/i><\/b> and you should totally be willing to absorb all of these Silmarillion-level setting details and all of these dates and geography, and shame on you for wanting the author to keep things simple for your dumb ass<\/i>.<\/p>\n Once you put in the work and sort it all out, you realize none of it makes any damn sense.<\/p>\nA Prison for Your Mind, but Not The Rest of You<\/h3>\n
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\nDespite being in “prison”, our “heroes” are allowed to hang out together, they can wander around freely, and their gear is stored in an unguarded side-room along with their priceless MacGuffin. The bad guys show up and loudly reveal their intentions and plans within earshot of our heroes, who can then leave the prison by just… walking out.<\/p>\nYou Can’t Dumb it Down, Because It’s Already Stupid<\/h3>\n
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\nThis is my main gripe with this story. It is complex, challenging, brimming with detail… and (occasionally) too stupid to think about. It doesn’t just invite your curiosity, it demands it<\/i>. It demands that you put in the effort, that you pay attention, and that you should memorize lots of proper nouns even if the author isn’t coaxing you along with cheap tricks like “stakes” and “emotional investment”. But then once you finally get this giant mass of data into your brain and hammer it into some sort of shape so that you can follow the arguments everyone is having about who was betrayed by what evil twin in the name of which convoluted scheme to enact a plan to accomplish something that was going to happen anyway…<\/p>\n
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