{"id":54227,"date":"2022-06-01T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T10:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54227"},"modified":"2022-06-01T06:26:10","modified_gmt":"2022-06-01T10:26:10","slug":"a-travelog-of-ivalice-conclusion-midlight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54227","title":{"rendered":"A Travelog of Ivalice, Conclusion: MIDLIGHT"},"content":{"rendered":"

The basics of a character arc are these: you establish what a character is like, you develop some motivation for changing, and then you demonstrate this change. These can really be anything; the immature young man who overcomes a great challenge by learning to take responsibility for his actions, the big city office lady who learns to make time for herself with the help of a flannel-clad stud from her rural hometown, or, uh… alright, it’s usually one of these two things, but in theory<\/em> a character arc can encompass any sort of character change you can imagine.<\/p>\n

Character arcs can be useful tools for engaging the audience emotionally. We see a character struggling with their conscience, and the emotional stakes creates tension. Their vulnerability humanizes them, lends them depth, and engages our sympathy. There’s a part of us that yearns for them to succeed in their inner struggle even more strongly than we want them to overcome the physical threat presented by their enemies, and tying these struggles together lends urgency to the emotional stakes and poignancy to the mundane conflict. Creators also use these changes to teach the audience and convey a moral or message. We see the suffering characters endure and the mistakes that they make when their spirit is disordered, the power of the feelings and forces that clarify their conscience are proven, and we see the worth of their new values demonstrated through action, marshaling positive change within and without.<\/p>\n

A conflict of character sits at the very heart of Final Fantasy XII, with the emotional and narrative tension of the whole story resting upon it: a young woman, gripped by bitterness and grief, risks cashiering her soul by giving in to vengeance and destruction. As the climax looms closer and closer, the minds of the audience are focused on this single looming question:<\/p>\n

Why is Gabranth the only character in the game with a complete character arc?
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Gabranth begins the game as an uncomplicated villain. He does bad things in the name of the Empire and puts on a scary tough guy act. Later, the game humanizes him, gives him a sense of nobility and duty not so different from his brother’s. His service to the Empire, and to Vayne specifically, compels him to commit repellent, dishonorable acts, setting his loyalty against his virtue. This inner turmoil threatens to tear him apart, and eventually he resolves the conflict by turning on Vayne for Larsa’s sake.You might remember this arc from when it belonged to Beatrix in Final Fantasy IX<\/span> Granted, he basically already threw away his loyalty to Vayne and to the Empire when his disgust and compunction drive him to beg his enemies to overpower and destroy them, but we can still identify the basic framework!<\/p>\n

Malformed character arcs litter the rest of the game, eerily looming empty and incomplete like North Korean hotels.<\/p>\n

You could almost claim Reddas has a complete character arc; we can infer the personal change he’s experienced from witnessing the dread power of nethicite at Nabudis, and he embraces this new motivation to the bitter end at the Pharos. But from the sound of it, he may well have been tricked by Cid into using the Midlight Shard, or at least had no idea what it would actually do. We have no idea what he was like before the events of the game other than that he was a loyal Judge Magister; what would serve as his arc is already closing in on its endpoint by the time we meet him in Draklor, conveniently eliding all of his growth and change. Likewise, we witness the end of Vossler’s fall from grace, but the appearance of a change in his character is partly the product of his duplicity; if Dalan’s implicit doubts about Vossler’s loyalty are to be taken at face value, he’s either already given up on the Resistance in the timeskip after the prologue at Nalbina or will soon turn coat offscreen at some point we can’t really nail down.<\/p>\n

Much the same can be said for Balthier. At the Phon Coast, we learn with Ashe that Balthier has already undergone a significant character change before the game began, unseen by the audience, for which his primary motivation seemed to be his personal frustration with and estrangement from his nethicite-obsessed, apparently mad father. But the Balthier we<\/em> know is an arrogant, greedy, self-involved jackass, the kind of guy who doesn’t stick his neck out for others, has the absolute chutzpah<\/em> to call himself the leading man (implicitly categorizing the people around him as second bananas in his story), and is mostly concerned with living beyond his means. At the end of the game, Balthier’s theoretical arc is completed when he risks sacrificing his own life to save Rabanastre from the falling Bahamut.<\/em> Did he realize that the limelight of being the leading man comes with the responsibility to play the selfless hero from time to time? Oh, sorry, I left my projector on; I have no idea what this abrupt character change is supposed to demonstrate. What, in the interim, are we supposed to infer motivated this change? Feel free to invent whatever you want; I’ve moved on.<\/p>\n

<b>Balthier:<\/b> ''Well, fuck you, too, buddy.''<\/div>
Balthier:<\/b> ''Well, fuck you, too, buddy.''<\/div><\/p>\n

Moved on to Vaan, that is! Why yes, our\u2014 and I won’t put thirty seven sets of sarcasm quotes around this like I should\u2014 main character, who begins the game with big dreams and big talk of becoming a sky pirate, escaping his lowly life under Archadia’s heel. Later, his indecision and directionlessness becomes apparent, and he eventually comes clean with Ashe: he embraced escapist daydreams as a coping mechanism for his disempowerment, and for the first time, feels a sense of capacity and responsibility to make real change and face off with Empire in earnest. Why, these seem like the beginning and middle of a character arc! The stage is perfectly set for Vaan to, ah, fade into the background and allow Ashe to grasp the reins of the story from now to the credits. If I didn’t respect myself I might lend some partial, dubious credit to the convenience of resolving Vaan’s inner conflict in a way that lets him sublimate into a wordless combat asset. Hey, did you see the way Bergan’s guts sprayed out when Vaan hacked him open? I guess he was really serious about fighting the Empire! Ultimately, of course, Vaan takes the Strahl<\/em> and becomes a sky pirate in earnest, resolving the… ah, pretextual dream he grew out of in the interim? Wait, did we mix up two different script drafts here? Because one of these arcs has no ending and the other has no middle again! Vaan fulfilling his dream by succeeding Balthier and becoming a real sky pirate after proving his mettle is a fine enough story arc, it’s just missing the entire process of becoming a sky pirate. Remember all those scenes where Balthier, after his initial, typically arrogant and dismissive rebuttal, slowly warms to Vaan and reluctantly teaches him how to fly the ship? Because we really need some scenes like that to establish that Vaan has placed his hands on the controls of the Strahl<\/em> at least once in his life before Balthier entrusts him with vouchsafing the party away from the Bahamut<\/em> and into the largest, fiercest air battle humankind has ever witnessed. The point, of course, is not the dry fact of whether or not Vaan has any more knowledge than the average cactoid how to fly the ship, although we might like to know that he does. What matters is the emotional stakes, the character question; we’ve already taken a different answer and tabled the matter long before the game suddenly springs this on us as if it were the resolution to Vaan’s character.<\/p>\n

And I’m not even gonna bother touching Fran giving the right seat to Penelo. I mean… what the fuck.<\/em><\/p>\n

Speaking of Fran, she might be the biggest mystery of all. I’ve never been able to square what we see of her story, in which she emerges briefly from Balthier’s 10 o’clock to throw cold water on her younger sister’s curiosity by expressing her disillusionment with the world and her regrets at leaving the narrow cloister of her village, with any possible message I can infer, however tenuously, we are meant to take from this game. An Olympian eisegete might manage the superhuman leap from this mystifying glimpse into Fran’s character to some sort of conclusion that reconciles her regrets into some sort of growth or lesson. But while my abilities don’t extend that far, the absence of any such conclusion in the game we’ve actually got before us is well within my narrow vision.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the pinnacle: Princess Ashelia Dalmasca. It’s fine for every character in this game not to have an arc except Ashe.<\/em> It’s fine for every character in the main cast and beyond to just have some basic personality or motivation\u2014 hopefully some that play well together and are entertaining and endearing to watch\u2014 that reflect some lesson or motivation for Ashe to internalize on her way to becoming the character she needs to be for the plot to resolve correctly. <\/p>\n

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Ashe is traumatized by the loss of her family and kingdom, and desperate for vengeance. She has the opportunity to take revenge on the Empire with the power of nethicite. She chooses not to. Clever readers will notice the missing element: we never see a clear character reason for the change in her thinking. Yes, every person she meets from Kerwon to Kalamazoo guilt trips her for her bloodthirst and warns her that nethicite is fucking evil, but if there’s any lightbulb moment where she actually sees the wisdom in forbearance, it flew right over my head.<\/p>\n

Why does Ashe choose not to use the nethicite? The thing that seems to force her at long last to literally cast it asideYep, still bitter about dropping the Dusk Shard on the floor!<\/span> is seeing Rasler’s ghost egging her on to take it. Is Ashe pissed that the Occuria are using a hologram of her dead husband to very obviously manipulate her rage and grief? Does Ashe even realize it’s not really Rasler? A character with a double-digit IQ would know, but I don’t have an answer to this question.<\/p>\n

Hey, what if they leveraged Ashe’s relationship with Rasler to motivate this change? Oh, we never saw her relationship with Rasler and have no idea what he was like or what they saw in each other.<\/p>\n

Hey, Yuna and Tidus, maybe take some notes on romantic tension from this classic scene, you frauds.<\/div>
Hey, Yuna and Tidus, maybe take some notes on romantic tension from this classic scene, you frauds.<\/div><\/p>\n

At the Phon Coast, we just see a flashback where they’re out on a balcony and Ashe says, \u201cI’m into you,\u201d and Rasler replies, \u201cI’m into you, too.\u201d We’re supposed to be copying Star Wars, not the Star Wars prequels! What if Ashe is pondering the intoxicating power of nethicite and she flashes back to that scene, and she and Rasler are arm-in-arm laughing about how much they hate sand, and suddenly Rasler’s countenance tightens, he gazes out to the horizon and says, \u201cB’nargy, if anyone ever tries to pressure you into using a cursed death rock to commit genocide, just remember: it’s a trick by creepy ghost angels that don’t really care about you. And I’d never want that life for you.\u201d Ashe doesn’t really understand, but she nods, and makes a JRPG young couple flashback promise not to forget. Then Rasler leans in real close and whispers into Ashe’s ear, \u201cThe second you turn eighteen I’m gonna f[REDACTED]\u201d<\/p>\n

Not the most elegant or clever motivation, but we’ve got nothing! It’s not that deciding at the very last moment, apparently from the collective browbeating of everyone in Ivalice but the Occuria and Gabranth, doesn’t make logical<\/em> sense, in the same way that we can assume<\/em> that Vaan learned from Balthier to fly an airship entirely offscreen. Sure, maybe it just took exactly that long for the lesson to sprout in her rage-addled brain. But once again, we lack any clear structure to Ashe’s character growth that communicates her evolving emotional state, much less allows us to invest emotionally in it.<\/p>\n

But unlike every other character, the pride of place that Final Fantasy XII grants to Ashe’s character, the centrality of its resolution to the narrative and emotional stakes, withers the core of the story. The desultory, gratuitous quality of her maturation decrees the mien of the climax itself. It just… happens.<\/p>\n

Now, I have a question for you that I’m sure Fran has asked Basch several times: do you like coffee?<\/p>\n

Parched. Still can't read.<\/div>
Parched. Still can't read.<\/div><\/p>\n

It’s a perverse miracle that, despite its labyrinthine intricacies, Final Fantasy XII manages to seem underwritten<\/em> compared to its predecessors. It’s obvious from the outset that Final Fantasy XII is missing something common to its forebears\u2014 missing it sorely indeed. From at least Final Fantasy VI, the games of the Final Fantasy series have broken up the action with the occasional chance to just pal around with your fellow party members for a moment: take stock, read their sense of the situation, or express their feelings. These might seem more like connective tissue for the story than muscle, but I think we can credit Final Fantasy XII with demonstrating just how important these little moments can be.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about moments like arriving at Cosmo Canyon in Final Fantasy VII: everyone splits off at the entrance and goes to do their own thing. Walking around the location, you can see how your other cast members choose to spend their time, and whom they choose to spend it with. After choosing a few of them to participate in the next scene with you, everyone convenes around the campfire and shares an introspective moment; to proceed, you have to go around the circle, sit with each of your fellows, and just listen to them share their feelings with you about where you’ve come from and where you’re going, narratively and emotionally. In Final Fantasy X, Yuna’s little guardian corps would frequently break off and loiter around the area, either at the beginning of a new location or to provide a breather amidst a long section of exploring and fighting. Once again, the game leverages your control of Tidus in these sections to reinforce his role as your window to this world and these characters, learning about them and growing with them as one. Open your ears, I’m about to heap some rare, if backhanded praise on Final Fantasy VIII: as terribly used as I think the characters are in the story, Final Fantasy VIII might use these moments more effectively than any other game in the series. You have moments like Irvine ineffectively putting the moves on Selphie as she’s too fascinated by the train ride to pay him any mind; in a good example of how FFVIII goes a step further and tries to give your party members quality time with one another rather than defining them all through their hub-and-spoke relationship with the protagonist, this is an early step in Irvine eventually moving past his sad attempts at womanizing and slowly growing closer with Selphie until they’re clearly an item near the end of the game.<\/p>\n

These moments, especially when they herald the start of a new area in the older games, did also serve a mechanical function, nudging the player to take the opportunity to switch up their party if they needed and subtly cluing them in that a long gameplay section was starting and they might want to take a leak, or leave it until tomorrow evening, or whatever. But they also helped set the pacing of the game, adjusting the tempo and varying the player’s activity and focus. Just as some quiet, slower paced time in otherwise action-heavy games can be important for relieving (and rebuilding) tension and providing a welcome switch-up of the player’s task, a game can be very well served by taking a break from characterizing its cast through their participation in combat and cutscenes and just let the player take it easy and catch up with their companions over a nice cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

Final Fantasy XII is completely devoid of these coffee breaks. Once a character joins the party, they effectively cease to exist outside of combat and cutscenes. There’s a moment that most players of Final Fantasy XII would likely be hard-pressed to recall that I find absolutely fascinating: when Vaan learns that Penelo has been kidnapped, he seeks out Balthier and Fran to beg passage on their airship. When he finds them, they’re sitting together in the tavern. <\/p>\n

Look! Look at it! He's at the table and everything! I can't sit still!<\/div>
Look! Look at it! He's at the table and everything! I can't sit still!<\/div><\/p>\n

CAN YOU EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE IT?!<\/strong> Oh, you don’t understand what’s so amazing about this scene? It’s the only moment in the entire game, in the environment, not in a cutscene, where we see how our party members spend their time outside of traveling in a small group harvesting monster parts semi-automatically. They sit in the bar together. Buddy, it ain’t much, but it’s all I have to hold on to.<\/p>\n

Do you ever wonder about this pathetic fiction that Vaan is supposed to be our “viewpoint character,” whatever that’s supposed to mean? Couldn’t the game have slipped some flimsy joists under this soggy floor by using Vaan as our means of interacting with our party, just as past games had done with much more fully-defined characters like Tidus or Squall? Why, at the beginning of some new area or some new beat of the story, can the party not take a little breather, put the kettle over the campfire, and enjoy a nice cup of coffee before taking off on the next leg of the trip? Wander over to Ashe, see what’s on her mind? How’s Penelo holding up after getting kidnapped by lizardpeople? How’s Basch acclimatizing to life outside of an oubliette cage? Fran, is there anybody in there?<\/p>\n

And nevermind Vaan’s direct interactions with everyone. These are opportunities for visual and environmental storytelling. If Fran and Balthier are always together and apart from everyone else at first, and later we see Fran spending more time closer with Penelo and Balthier with Ashe, that tells us things! If Basch is always standing ramrod straight, scanning the horizon and playing his role as Ashe’s guardian, that’s important! And rather than just talking directly with Vaan, we can always invoke our right as JRPG main character to just rudely eavesdrop on the other characters as they talk to one another. About what, you ask? Well, “anything” would be a start.<\/p>\n

Again and again, every time I go to the text to try and find evidence for what’s going on in the characters’ heads during the big moments, I have to return to the same few handful of scenes, perhaps only one or two conversations in the entire game for most of them, and often I can’t patch together a complete answer. Nevermind quality time; we badly need quantity<\/em> time with our characters. Even just a few lines here and there as the journey develops and we crest each big hill could go a long way to providing a more complete understanding of our cast, their personalities, their motivations, and a more granular development of their attitudes and feelings as they approach the more expensive moments when that development is tested. Previous games tended to use the airship as a hub for this kind of thing in the late game; the much-mentioned Strahl<\/em> has no gameplay interior and serves as a mere interface item.<\/p>\n

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What’s distinctly lacking is personality and, dare I say it, charm. Games with worse plots than Final Fantasy XII have earned at least a partial pass on the strength of their charm. You generally get more personality by the time you’ve passed the character select screen of an arcade fighting game than you’ll squeeze from the turnip of Final Fantasy XII’s entire first act. I’m not so foolish as to believe that Final Fantasy XII would be improved by just filling space with something<\/em> and assuming that it would serve as an improvement over nothing; in fact, I’d argue that Final Fantasy XII is a pretty solid example of what you get when you fill a game with just “something.” But you have to sow to reap more than dust.<\/p>\n

Like many other things in the game, we can only assume and project what that might have been. It’s not necessarily easy to imagine how these characters would spend their quiet time with each other, as we’ve got nothing to extrapolate from. Could Fran have teased Ashe about Al-Cid’s advances, a conversation that could fork either into “poop or get off the pot” as Fran implies she might be interested if Ashe isn’t, or inadvertently breaching the subject of Ashe’s relationship with Rasler, souring the lighthearted moment by making clear how much bitterness Ashe is carrying inside? Could Balthier have realized too late and to his aggravation that Vaan has tricked him into teaching him about flying the Strahl<\/em> despite his strenuous refusals by cleverly stroking his ego? Has Basch drawn a hand turkey for Ashe, who promises to put it on the fridge but then throws it straight into the garbage when she thinks he isn’t looking but he was? Is Penelo chatty and fawning with Ashe, who unsubtly bristles at the commoner’s overly familiar manner before being won over by her sunny and earnest demeanor? Do Balthier and Basch openly despise each other for being the people they are, conflicting Vaan, who sees the person he’s fantasized about becoming in Balthier but increasingly recognizes the man he’d like to grow into in Basch? Does Fran keep asking Basch if he likes the taste of coffee, and sympathizes with how long he must have gone without… coffee… locked up all alone for so long, because she knows what it’s like to go too long without strong… hot… coffee?<\/p>\n

Sorry, I think I got off track there. But I hope I’ve made the message clear: I’d like to get to know these characters. I’ll never get that chance, because the game never gave it. Would it have saved the plot? Nope! But some glue and glitter might have helped it end up on the fridge, even if only out of the lenience that a sense of heart and charm can earn.<\/p>\n

The conclusion continues next week.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The basics of a character arc are these: you establish what a character is like, you develop some motivation for changing, and then you demonstrate this change. These can really be anything; the immature young man who overcomes a great challenge by learning to take responsibility for his actions, the big city office lady who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ffxii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54227","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\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54227"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54363,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54227\/revisions\/54363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}