{"id":53711,"date":"2022-01-28T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53711"},"modified":"2022-01-28T14:19:57","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T19:19:57","slug":"ff12-sightseeing-tour-part-3-are-you-going-my-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53711","title":{"rendered":"FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 3: Are You Going My Way?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Rocketeer recounts how our heroes escaped from prison and then bumbled around town trying to find the plot<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This disastrous opening has left our writer in a terrible position. The main characters are out of prison and are finally free to do what they want… except they all have different goals, none of which align with what the player cares about, which is doing something about this dastardly Empire that just took over.<\/p>\n

Balthier is a sky pirate, and Vaan wants to be a sky pirate, but this isn’t a game about sky piracy and that’s not where the author wants to go. Also, Balthier doesn’t like Vaan, doesn’t need his help, and doesn’t care to teach him the finer points of sky-piracy, so the whole “sky pirate” angle doesn’t help us.<\/p>\n

Basch and Vaan want to “do something” about the Empire, but Vaan still has a grudge against Basch so they can’t work together. Meanwhile, Basch needs to clear his name with the resistance.<\/p>\n

Bathier has no immediate goal, and Fran’s only goal is to follow Balthier around.<\/p>\n

Penelo has no goals whatsoever, she hasn’t met the rest of the party, and she’s never expressed any interest in our ostensible main plot of fighting the Empire.<\/p>\n

So everyone in the main cast is either directionless, enemies, or working at cross-purposes. The next section of the game is a chain of cutscenes designed to untangle this horrendous mess and get our heroes all pointed in roughly the same direction. The author accomplishes this with Penelo’s kidnapping. This works… eventually<\/b>. It’s just that it takes some time to get all the pieces in place so that the plot can begin inching very slowly forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n


\nThis means that we’re still<\/b> dealing with the fallout of this story’s horrible introduction. Not only was the “evil twin” plot corny and cartoonish as hell, and not only was it (as Rocketeer pointed out last week<\/a>) nonsensical beyond reckoning, but it created headaches down the road because now Basch and Vaan have no reason to team up except that the plot needs them to.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Matrix<\/h3>\n

In the past I talked about how bad writers make bad stories by failing to see the inherent complexity in a story<\/a>. Maybe the writer sees the lobby fight from the Matrix<\/a>. “Oh, that’s cool! I should have a scene in my movie where my heroes shoot a bunch of people and the walls fall apart. That’s badass!” But what this “writer” is overlooking is that the Matrix just spent an hour and forty minutes coaxing the audience to the edge of their seats.When it comes to movies that obviously tried to imitate the Matrix without understanding The Matrix on even a basic level, I always want to cite Ultraviolet<\/a>. But I can’t, because I’ve never made it more than 15 minutes into the film. I don’t know what the next 75 minutes are like, but those first 15 are pretty cringe.<\/span><\/p>\n

The movie has created enormous forward momentum by setting up multiple ideas and getting the audience to care about them. We have:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Personal stakes – our friend Morpheus<\/li>\n
  2. Broad stakes – the fate of humanity!<\/li>\n
  3. Mysteries – Is Neo the One? If not, then who is? If he is, then what can he do?<\/li>\n
  4. Love – The love story between Neo and Trinity isn’t an exemplar of the form, but it’s serviceable enough. We have two potential lovers who are about to battle side-by-side against impossible odds. Speaking of which…<\/li>\n
  5. Impossible odds – How will our heroes survive assaulting this massive, unkillable enemy, at the apparent seat of its power?<\/li>\n
  6. A great villain – If you don’t want to punch Hugo Weaving by the hour and forty mark of the Matrix, then you are Gandhi.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So yes, that scene had great special effects, superb choreography, brilliant cinematography, a slick presentation, and a bangin’ soundtrack, but it also had a Saturn V rocket worth of potential energy underneath it thanks to all the work the writer did in the previous scenes.<\/p>\n

    When I complain about “bad writing”, I’m usually complaining about this sort of thing, where a writer will mindlessly copy a scene or idea without understanding what made that idea work in the first place.<\/p>\n

    The thing is, these are not the failings of Final Fantasy XII<\/b>.<\/p>\n

    You Look Like You’re Having Fun<\/h3>\n

    This guy is here to ruin your nation and look fabulous doing it. I actually really dig Vayne. His haircut isn't as openly antagonistic as Seymour's, but he's still got that special FF villain magic of spontaneous audience contempt.<\/div>
    This guy is here to ruin your nation and look fabulous doing it. I actually really dig Vayne. His haircut isn't as openly antagonistic as Seymour's, but he's still got that special FF villain magic of spontaneous audience contempt.<\/div><\/p>\n

    This story is not the product of a clueless writer. Yes, this story is very broken in several ways, but this isn’t the result of a hack shoving random things together. The overall thrust of the war and the conflict between these various countries is actually really interesting. It’s just that there are these huge fault lines running through the thing, preventing it from holding together.<\/p>\n

    Having Bathier be a sky pirate is a fun idea and very on-brand for a Final Fantasy game. Having Vaan be an aspiring<\/b> sky pirate is a cool motivation and a great way to bring these otherwise disparate characters together. Except, none of it really pays off and it’s kind of at odds with the central premise of overthrowing this evil empire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Having the evil empire frame our greatest warrior and use his disgrace to cover their own treachery while simultaneously weakening their rivals is some next-level Machiavellian shit. Except, as presented the plan to frame Basch makes no sense. If this made sense – or if it even came close<\/b> to making sense – it would make us both respect and despise Vayne. When we saw him, we’d think about how much we were looking forward to beating his ass, instead of just thinking of that one music video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Having our future queen teetering on the edge between wrath and restraint as Ondore teaches her to play the Great Game is an inspired idea that was literally ahead of its time. A decade after Final Fantasy XII, the Game of Thrones TV show demonstrated that this idea was lightning in a bottle. It would have been a joy to play as a member of Ashe’s entourage, trying to keep her alive in a world teeming with foes and betrayers. It would have been exciting to watch her friends try to nudge her away from vengeance and towards wisdom, even as the scheming empire makes us all long for vengeance. But no. Ashe isn’t playing Game of Thrones. She isn’t even playing musical chairs. She’s just walking around glaring at things and refusing to make decisions. (Or will be, once she enters the story.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

    So if it wasn’t a lack of talent, then what was<\/b> the cause of this mess? What shattered this story into a dozen irreconcilable pieces? Who do we blame for so much wasted potential?<\/p>\n

    I don’t actually know, but I’m going to keep bringing it up anyway because it drives me crazy. We’ll come back to this topic once we have a bit more of the story under our belt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This week, Rocketeer recounts how our heroes escaped from prison and then bumbled around town trying to find the plot. This disastrous opening has left our writer in a terrible position. The main characters are out of prison and are finally free to do what they want… except they all have different goals, none of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53711"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53724,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53711\/revisions\/53724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}