{"id":54040,"date":"2022-03-18T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T10:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54040"},"modified":"2022-03-17T08:26:20","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T12:26:20","slug":"ff12-sightseeing-tour-part-10-the-chess-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54040","title":{"rendered":"FF12 Sightseeing Tour Part 10: The Chess Match"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week The Rocketeer takes us through some cutscenes where that scamp Vayne murders his father the Emperor and mischievously dissolves the senate, thus making himself the autocratic ruler of an expansionist military empire. What a rascal<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this series I’ve been trying<\/a> to make the case that this writer is maybe not as incompetent as they seem. This is hard to prove. Maybe impossible.Other people have pointed out that the author has done good work elsewhere. That’s nice, but that’s not really how we discuss “the author” around here.<\/span> At some point we have to give the author the benefit of the doubt that the good parts are good on purpose, and the bad parts are bad due to problems other than the writing, like cut content that leaves holes in the story, shifting scope and direction that necessitates 11th hour rewrites, fluctuating team composition that pulls writers away from jobs before the work is done and polished, or large-scale coordination problems where individual ideas work in isolation but are incompatible with each other. But then a reasonable reader might ask me: What has this writer done to deserve this benefit of the doubt? Why don’t I just declare them incompetent and have done with it? It’s not like I’ve shied away from that sort of condemnation<\/a> in the past.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Case Against<\/h3>\n

A bit late in the series, but I think we've found our 'everything is fine' joke image for this retrospective.<\/div>
A bit late in the series, but I think we've found our 'everything is fine' joke image for this retrospective.<\/div><\/p>\n

If you’re looking for evidence that the writer was a dangerous lunatic that shouldn’t be allowed access to a word processor, you don’t have to search very hard. Back in Part 2<\/a>, The Rocketeer thoroughly demonstrated that the assassination of the king of Dalmasca – the inciting incident that kicked off the supposed character “arcs” of Vaan, Ashe, and Basch – was an illogical disaster. It wasn’t a good scene with one or two plot holes. It was a clumsy scene that confuses the player on the first viewing, utterly dissolves when examined in retrospect, and continues to create ongoing bafflement and incredulity on the part of the audience, right when the story is still trying to get off the ground after the ass-backwards introduction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While none of the subsequent scenes can attain that same level of sublime awfulness, we get many smaller failures that are similar in kind. Ondore’s betrayal \/ xanatos gambit<\/a> to spring Ashe from prison by having the entire party thrown in with her is yet another scene where nothing makes sense at first, and then makes no sense in a different way once you know the facts. In one scene Ashe says she doesn’t want the throne yet because that would lead to war, then in the next scene she’s talking about how the only way to avoid war is to take her throne. She lies to Balthier – effectively swindling our alleged sky pirate – so she can attain proof of her lineage, and then once she has it she goes to Jahara and tells them she has no such proof.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I suppose that some<\/b> of these failings could be explained away with the excuse of development tribulations. But can we really blame all<\/b> of this on shifting schedules and changing plans? I can understand why scene A might contradict scene C because scene B wound up on the cutting room floor. And I can understand if D introduces ideas that aren’t properly paid off because E and F were merged and radically reworked. But like… Part A should still make some kind of sense in isolation, shouldn’t it?\u00a0<\/p>\n

You could give the project a few more million dollars and another six months, but I don’t care what you add to the plot, nothing short of a rewrite is going to fix the scene where the bad guys murder a king who is trying to surrender to them, blame it on some enemy captain, and then murder their only witness. Unless you reveal the whole plan was just Larsa dicking around for a little recreational chaos, you can’t really blame this manifest incoherence on “we didn’t have time to write a scene that wasn’t ludicrous, pointless, and baffling”.<\/p>\n

The Case For<\/h3>\n

This is a really good scene. Too good to be an accident.<\/div>
This is a really good scene. Too good to be an accident.<\/div><\/p>\n

Having said that, a lot of these other scenes are really good! The exchange where Basch and Vaan talk about his life as a street rat is great. So is the conversation Vaan has with Ashe in Jahara. These are sober, well-written scenes with organic dialog, moments of character growth and revelation, and absolutely solid<\/b> cinematography. A hack writer isn’t going to “accidentally” make something this good by just flailing around.<\/p>\n

This is also a rare Final Fantasy game where I can believe in the villain. Vayne has the same soft-voiced preening delivery that Seymor did in Final Fantasy X<\/i>, but Seymor was very much a stock anime antagonist that wants to fix the world’s problems by killing everyone<\/a>. That’s fine, I guess. I’ve seen worse<\/a>. But Vayne? Vayne is an interesting guy. He can barely be bothered to oppose the good guys, and when he does show up in their adventures he doesn’t make a lot of sense. But his machinations within Archadia are pretty good.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vayne’s mocking quote of his father, “And so house Solidor lives on,” after murdering the old man is both poetic and wonderfully obnoxious. He’s not even trying to look smug and his face is still irresistibly punch-able. <\/p>\n

The Good, the Bad, and the Sloppy<\/h3>\n

Oh, Vanye!<\/div>
Oh, Vanye!<\/div><\/p>\n

I still can’t figure out what happened to this story. Some parts are brilliant and some parts are a mess, and the messy parts don’t feel like the stump left behind by hastily cut content. They just feel sloppy and confusing. But after obsessing over this for way too long, I have noticed one curious detail…<\/p>\n

The brief personal scenes where our party interacts with each otherVaan and Basch in the streets of Rabanastre, Ashe and Vaan on the bridge in Jahara, and to a lesser extent the scene where Penelo expresses some vague affection for Vaan out in the Giza Plains.<\/span> are great. And the scenes where the bad guys are scheming and betraying each other are great. Either group is fine in isolation. But then the two groups interact and everything falls apart. Nobody’s motivations are clear,Why is Balthier giving a handkerchief of no value to Penelo in the middle of getting arrested? Why is Vayne keeping Basch alive? Why is Vaan running around claiming to be Basch in a city where making such a claim is both laughable and a good way to get your throat cut? Why is Basch pulling out his sword?<\/span> plans don’t make sense,Vayne’s plan to frame Basch for the murder of Raminas, Basch’s (Ondore’s?) plan to rescue the princess by getting captured, and Vayne’s plan to stop Ondore and Ashe from working together by asking the former to announce the death of the latter.<\/span> the action is driven by contrivance and happenstance,On two different occasions, characters are in shackles and yet somehow take the latest magical rock out of their pocket just in time for the bad guys to see it.<\/span> the cinematography is suddenly and inexplicably muddled, and everything just feels… off<\/b>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And when we back up and look at the story on a macro level, we find similar inexplicable gaps. This week our heroes visited a quasi-religious oracle who could see the future, and he told the party to seek out the Sword of Kings. Laying aside questions as to why it took us this long to visit the clairvoyant sage who is sympathetic to our cause,Really? This guy was lower on our list than the mask dudes and the Bunnygirl village?<\/span> what are we supposed to do with a sword<\/b>? I can’t claim to understand nethicite, but it seems to be involved with things like nukes and doomsday lasers. Those are not the sorts of threats you want to engage at melee range. I get that you can use the sword to destroy nethicite. But if I somehow have the martial strength to get within sword-swinging distance of enemy nethicite, then I could just as easily pick that shit up with my primate hands and walk away with it<\/b>. This magical super-sword just means that – assuming I somehow miraculously overpower this vastly superior enemy – I’ll have a way to destroy the weapons I capture rather than turning those weapons against our enemy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that’s assuming I can get close enough to the heart of their superweapon to touch it with a sword! It also ignores that these rocks seem to act like nukes and the story suggests that perhaps using the sword as intended would cause it to blow up in our face.<\/p>\n

Okay Luke. You’ll need to fly your X-wing down this trench to reach this exhaust port. Then just put your ship in park, climb out, and stab the space station right in the blowhole with your laser sword. And then maybe try to stand way, way back. How far back? Oh, I dunno. But I’d jog away from the moon if I were you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0
\nSo scenes where main characters are bonding with other main characters are great, even if these moments are too few and they exist as vignettes instead of forming arcs. And moments where bad guys are scheming with other bad guys are also great. But whenever the two sides attempt to move the plot forward by planning or acting against each other, everything falls apart. Cutscene-driven stories are almost a quarter of a century old by now, and in all those years I have never seen anything quite like this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We’re coming to the end of my analysis. Rocko has many weeks left, but I’ve said just about everything I have to say about this game. I have a couple more entries left, and then I’m going to go quiet and let the Rocketeer prosecute the rest of this on his own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week The Rocketeer takes us through some cutscenes where that scamp Vayne murders his father the Emperor and mischievously dissolves the senate, thus making himself the autocratic ruler of an expansionist military empire. What a rascal.\u00a0 In this series I’ve been trying to make the case that this writer is maybe not as incompetent […]<\/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-54040","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\/54040","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=54040"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54053,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54040\/revisions\/54053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}