the zodiac ache

King of Posters
21

ok, just to clarify my position a little bit here:

  • it’s not about authorial intent to me per se so much as “the game as it exists has big problems, mostly around its storytelling” and I’m not particular about who exactly that gets blamed on

  • I tried playing through it again four or five years ago and gave up in the literal narrative desert around when you meet fran’s tribe, so my impressions aren’t purely fixed from a decade ago

  • I’ve played final fantasy 9 and Chrono Trigger and the other ones that are generally beloved for their storytelling at least once in the past six or seven years too and in those cases I found that the writing and characterization actually held up better than I expected, so to the extent that these are just final fantasy games and they’re all messes in their own right, it seems silly to me to ignore that this final fantasy game which does a hell of a lot of other interesting stuff completely fumbled what was typically its main appeal, and it obviously could have been better, because there are plenty of examples of everyone involved having done much better work, such as it is.

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the tumult of its consumerist appeal is and has been thoroughly unignored; there is no universe in which its “hell of a lot of other interesting stuff” has been exhausted to the point that it’s taken for granted.

also: and maybe i just can’t make this make sense to anybody besides me:

as someone whose general position on final fantasy is “every single one of them is good, let’s work backwards from that premise”, i don’t think the writing has been the ‘main appeal’ (certainly not the most frontal success) of one of them [for me] in 20 years.

it’s not that i don’t want these games to be good at what they’re going for, it’s that i don’t really care about their ability to be canonized as Great, Digestible Entertainment Products. there will always be enough nerds in the world to complain about a plot hole or whatever. or, just, like: they don’t all have to be good at the same thing. ff9 is very specific to itself. so is ff12. i’m glad that it is. i’d like criticism to more often meet a thing on its own terms.

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I guess in part I’m just willing to accept that:

  • big living cities and worlds are widely accepted game design elements at this point, and would have been thus without FFXII

  • gambits are not widely accepted game design elements, and might have been if FFXII had succeeded in other respects, but it’s clear to see where it failed

  • every final fantasy is absolutely not good and they are mostly only valuable as great, digestible entertainment products

I’m not sure how much more valuable probing we can get out of this one, to be honest. the music and art teams did great work and can be acknowledged on their own terms (and, in terms of their careers, probably were). but I honestly don’t think I care about final fantasy as found art or whatever, if that’s the primary argument in favour of “overlook these failings.” of course the parts of the game that are mostly unsullied by the overall narrative weaknesses, like the high-level hunts, are pretty darn cool, but any of those demands an investment of dozens of hours and their great success is mostly just balancing the game within this framework that we have other examples of.

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I’m also a really dismissive person

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I used to believe this because viewed piecewise, the narrative, mechanics, what-have-you don’t hold up as best-in-class, and FF’s commitment to being slightly-weird but not very.

As I’ve eased into Professionalism I’ve started to see value in not challenging assumptions around each individual mechanic; or, there’s a reason Link doesn’t feel as good to move as Mario, there’s a reason Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is more enervating than fun, etc. Breeziness and the gestalt of experience is where I think JRPGs live and die.

More than anything I’d compare them to dimestore pulp. It needs a high-concept, it needs to move, it doesn’t need to have staying power or be particularly well-crafted. I think they meet similar audience needs: escapism, abnegation, fantasy; I think there is a very bright line between fantasy as myth and fantasy as escape and the critical language surrounding escape is different.

In games we use critical language very similar to that of reclaimed-pop used by AV Club and its diaspora; nearly all games are trash by the standards of other media. But I don’t think we have a strong language around escapist fantasy.

Maybe we can best analyze these games by the language of their fans

The Web Shrines

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Nah it’s true that Every (clap) Final (clap) Fantasy (clap) Game (clap) Is (clap) Good (clap)

I mean I cant stand the first one but maybe I’ll come around eventually. I feel like, as popular as the series is, it actually doesn’t get enough credit in more “sophisticated” circles. Similar to how a lot of pop music makes a shitton of money but is derided by people with “taste.” Especially starting with 7, I’m in awe when I think of how ballsy Square has been with every single one of them, doing shit that no one ever asked them to do or even wanted them to do. I don’t think I would put any game in the series in my imaginary “top 10 list” or even top 25 list but the series is good as hell and I love it.

EDIT: @BustedAstromech you said it way better than me while I was still typing this. Agreed 100%, especially about “Breeziness and gestalt of experience”

DOUBLE EDIT: oh fuck i forgot about 13

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I didn’t :lilskip:

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28

I believe you! And I’d love to know what your framework is for saying it’s good (i’m not being sarcastic), if only so those hours of my life can be retroactively reclaimed.

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I agree with all of this but I think it actually supports my argument too?

like – I don’t think that obviates them needing to be good in light of the time commitment they’re asking for and how anodyne they are generally.

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looks like someone needs to pick up a copy of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy

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btw, as far as I know he didn’t touch OB64 or Tactics Ogre Advance; Quest made those without him (kind of amazing that they decided the best thing for them to do as a studio was make sequels to a couple SNES games they’d let Matsuno direct when he was 28, but no argument here) after he and Yoshida and Minagawa (director of Magical Chase!) got poached for FFT.

also, have you played SNES Tactics Ogre yet??? it’s really good!!! it’s way better than the PSP version!!!

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I like FFXII because it’s a game that did and still does happen to align with a lot of my tastes. i’m not as articulate as the rest of you but i will try to explain my complaints with the game.

Coming off Vagrant Story, which has a strong and tight little narrative of the like that is unsurprisingly mature for a video game, I was very excited about what this game could be. I did’t really want Matsuno to direct FF12, I wanted him and his creative team to make another cool thing of their own. But hey, why not give the guy lots of money and let him make a thing that he thinks is cool? I was on board with that.

I find final fantasy games to be interesting becuase, as it’s been said, they’re fun, dumb spectacle. But woah, here’s an opportunity for a Final Fantasy game to be something that might be truly competent and be about more substantive things and not a silly blender of pop.

the number one root mistake is that they didn’t let matsuno do exactly what he wanted, and that’s why Vagrant Story was so tight and cohesive. Matsuno is an auteur. i recall (but don’t have a link) to a comment matsuno had said himself that the project was design by democracy, and that wasn’t something he was used to. i can only imagine how this approach shaped the project even at it’s initial stages.

i think the game thematically explores really interesting stock, but the delivery and content left a lot to be desired.

You can feel matsuno’s influence strongest in the early hours, and that’s when I feel the game is at it’s best. there’s never another dungeon like barheim passage, where if certain enemies eat the electricity the lights go out and tough enemies appear (i wish they had made this dungeon much harder). The first area you go to has a dry and rainy season that completely changes your access to it and the kinds of enemies that appear in it. As the game goes on less and less of this thoughtful stuff happens and it just becomes a story about going from place to place. Dungeons become route, areas become static, the story becomes spaced too far apart. i kept playing because i liked the world and was happy to see more of it, plus making gambits/character building was fun and the bestiary is fantastic.

The judges are greatly misused. there is a particular one-off cutscene in the game that gives you a look at the politics between them, and this scene disappointed me because it was really good. why was i forced to spend most of this game behind the wheel of a dumb boy who was shoehorned into a narrative he had no place being in? the game expends a lot of narrative energy on simply justifying why vaan and penelo are still there periodically. after a while you get this feeling that the game is spending most of it’s time on the least interesting characters.

even with the core cast very little development or interaction happens between them, you don’t get the sense that they are growing closer as an unlikely band.

(nitpick: if vaan and penelo are street orphans, why do they have such freaking nice clothes? basch goes through three outfit changes in the first two hours, why can’t they have some trashy clothes and then get some nice ones when they set out on their journey or something?)

sorry this is all over the place but i spent too long writing it and i’m posting it now.

(should we break this off into a thread or are we done)

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33

You don’t have to front Booji we all know you got the steelbook because it’s gorgeous inside and out:

FFXII_Steelbook.jpg1920×1080 240 KB

edit-Okay you deleted that post but I saw it anyway mwahahaha.

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Yeah, I’m just arguing that they fail our normal critical analysis tools, so we need different ones to understand how they work on their audience. I’m arguing that you can judge Chrono Trigger as lacking in its upgrades, battle system, narrative depth, and still need to answer why it’s so damn good.

btw, as far as I know he didn’t touch OB64 or Tactics Ogre Advance;

That’s my understanding, and it illustrates how difficult it is to do narrative in a Matsuno style. Er, I guess not as much as Matsuno dropping the narrative ball does a few time.

That book looks very useful, Tulpa.

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can I also talk about how I’m irritated that they went with “the zodiac age” because nothing in this game has anything to do with zodiac anything and as far as I can tell they just cherrypicked that from “what people liked about FFT, maybe” but fighting wiegraf’s transformation as a late-game optional boss to get a bonus summon feels completely off-brand in practice

you’re not supposed to do a tribute to a guy and set him up to fail at the same time

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i mean, square doesn’t even understand why people still like their games, much less what those games are even actually about

i will say that i do like how the steel book has a nice matte finish, and the cover art without any text or logos on it is pretty nice. way better than those old steel books that were cheap aluminium and just felt really dumb as a form of packaging.

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they shoulda shipped it with a picture of matsuno taking xanax on the cover

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38

I’m less articulate than any of you, so I’ll just bullet this.

Bad things about FFXII:

  • There are gambits missing. For example, if I know that the enemy has nothing left to steal, why doesn’t Vaan know that? Why can’t I program him to do something else in that instance (don’t know if that’s one of the ones they added for the remake, but there are other examples as well.)
  • The gambit system is solvable. Actually, I guess all jrpg combat systems are solvable, but the gambit system just shines a spotlight on that fact. It is as if you are plugging gamefaqs directly into the game.
  • In the second half of the game the story pacing gets really weird and it starts to feel that the story segments are just cinemas between dungeon levels.
  • As a result nothing gets developed much at all. There are interesting themes in the game, but they are introduced and resolved without fanfare in short little cutscenes.
  • After a while the narrative scaffolding becomes very apparent. The six playable characters are obviously paired: Fran and Balthier, Basch and Ashe, Vaan and Penelo. This extends to the colors and designs of their costumes. It’s too clean. And on a related note
  • So much of it is derived from Star Wars. Like, to the point where it’s a problem.

Good things about FFXII:

  • It feels good. In a meditative way. It’s very smooth. You play it in a state of detached engagement. It’s not putting you to sleep, but it’s not stressing you out either. You just kinda let it happen; nudge it from time to time. I like that.
  • There are lots of things to hang out with in the game. Like that Baanga that was mentioned that casts protect on you. And all the non-hostile creatures wandering around. There’s also a guy named Tomaj in the bar in Rabanastre. I like that name.
  • There are some really good notes in the story. Like the revelation that Ashe’s marriage was arranged and that her fixation on her late husband is more idealistic than romantic. That’s a cool detail. And I like the iambic gods. They’re cool and distant and they expand the scope of the world in a way that few videogame rpgs manage.
  • It looks good.
  • It sounds good.

My feeling as far as all Final Fantasy games being good is that, in fact, all Final Fantasy games have been ruined. I’ve said this before, I think: FFX would have been great as a story about a real-world soccer star who gets sucked into a fantasy world and joins a fantasy-world soccer team. It would have been hilarious. But somebody worked it up and made it a story about a fantasy-world underwater fantasy sports star who gets sucked into another slightly different fantasy world. What is that? There’s no friction there. FFXIII is deep down a post-singularity story where both the humans who made the computers and the computers who run everything have forgotten who came first. It’s ironic. But you have to dig pretty deep behind the anime sheen even see it.

FFXII should have been a solid political fantasy story, and there’s a lot of that still extant in the game, but somebody couldn’t keep track of the narrative and decided to use Star Wars to prop it up. The result is a big disappointment, because, more than maybe any other modern Final Fantasy, the good parts are really, really good. That doesn’t make the game good though; I mean, I like it, but good?

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39

I think this is also what I like about ultima online. this and a strong sense of place I think are two of my favorite things in videogames

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dev team all in the office at 10pm on a Tuesday yelling “I’m Captain Basch!” in between doing shots

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