Each mainline Final Fantasy game stars a different set of protagonists in a different setting (some of the games, especially the more recent ones, get spin-offs which are direct sequels, but we’re not talking about any of those today). These protagonists often have super cool roles in these settings, things like ecoterrorists, mercenaries, mercenaries but in high school, sky pirates, necromancer priests, and sky pirates again. Sometimes the game actually fulfills the promise of the premise: There is an arc or side quest or something where you get to actually be a mercenary or sky pirate or whatever. Sometimes the protagonists’ cool job is purely an informed attribute, something we never have the chance to actually do in gameplay.
This post is an examination of which Final Fantasy games nail the promise of the premise of its characters and setting and which ones fail. The basic idea is that if the game says “you play as Balthier and he is a sky pirate” then there had better be a part of the game where I do sky piracy. Final Fantasy games are basically never primarily about doing the job the characters already have when they join the party, but if I wasn’t going to do any sky piracy then you should not have included a playable sky pirate. Slightly related, although this one comes up less often, if it seems like the setting revolves around one or a small handful of really cool people or roles, then I had better get to actually do those at some point. Like, it’s fine if we never get to do any sky piracy in a game where there’s a single airship full of sky pirates who serve as antagonists in a specific location and don’t come up before or after, but if the setting is a bunch of floating islands and the main tension of the setting is the Imperial Sky Navy chasing down rebellious sky pirates then I had better get to do some sky piracy even if none of my characters start as sky pirates.
It doesn’t matter if the game has a mandatory plot arc or a skippable side quest that explores the premise, but I do have to make a subjective assessment of whether or not the premise is “fully” explored or not (except sometimes I don’t because the game helps me out by featuring no gameplay relevant to the backstory whatsoever). Also, particularly in later games, each character often has a wildly different backstory and place in the world, so the game might nail some of them and fail others.
Final Fantasy’s cast size expanded much faster than its gameplay diversity, and this was a common trend throughout the JRPG genre at the time, so a lot of this post is basically just deducting points from very old games for not being 15 years ahead of their time (although the later games are contemporaries of the Yakuza series which puts a lot of emphasis on its main plot and still absolutely stuffs itself with all kinds of minigames that evoke experiences which have absolutely nothing to do with being a Yakuza, which was a weird design choice but also lots of fun and proves that this kind of thing is possible in principle). The point here isn’t really to ask whether the assorted dev teams did a good job, though, but rather to ask the question: Do you really get to play as a gambler king in Final Fantasy VI (no)?
Final Fantasy I
You play as the Warriors of Light, customizable protagonists whose only defining feature is being destined to save the world from Chaos and his Four Fiends. The only backstory the protagonists have is that they are destined to be the protagonists of the plot, so, nailed it. The game (as with many others in the series) would still be improved by more side content, but nothing about the protagonists suggests what that side content would be.
Final Fantasy II
You play as the fantasy knock-off Rebel Alliance in a war with the fantasy knock-off Galactic Empire. The three main protagonists have different personalities but the same backstory: Civilians from the city of Finn who flee after the Empire takes over and join the Rebels.
Other party members join only for specific plot arcs, so while Leila is a pirate with no pirate gameplay and Ricard is a wyvern rider with no wyvern raising/riding gameplay, they’re guest party members who are only in the team for the duration of plot arcs that directly deal with their schtick. There’s no wyvern raising gameplay but you do fetch a wyvern egg from a dungeon, and for a guest party member, I’ll give that a passing grade. Gordon, Josef, and Minwu are all rebels from specific parts of the world ruled by the Empire, but none of them are doing anything more interesting than being rebels.
Gordon comes close because he is also a prince, but in terms of adding royal glamor to the party, all he really has to do is be present. Even if his kingdom weren’t occupied by Imperial forces, his schtick is that he’s a coward who abandoned his kingdom and now seeks to find courage to reclaim it and atone for his mistakes, a premise that is carried perfectly well by regular combat gameplay. It would be different if, like, he mismanaged the economy or was a foolish military commander or something else that might benefit from some kind of 4X gameplay (which would be a Hell of a thing to add as a minigame regardless), so the only thing he needs to deliver on his premise is to bleed blue from his wounds while fighting the Empire.
I do wish the game had leaned more on Imperial patrols rather than random monsters for its bestiary (there’s a throwaway line somewhere that the monsters are somehow caused by the evil emperor’s magic, but they don’t really feel like an occupying force so much as just ambient monsters that must exist because video games). They still could’ve had a bunch of weird monsters in the game, just used them as mounts or beast companions for the Imperial war machine rather than being vaguely associated with the Emperor’s dark magic. There are several dungeons that are stocked mostly or completely by Imperial troops, though, so they didn’t completely drop the ball.
Final Fantasy III
Once again you are playing as the Warriors of Light. Totally different setting and presumably totally different Warriors of Light, but like FFI, the premise of the characters is mostly that they are going to be in the main plot. The remake adds some more specific personalities to the four protagonists, I think, but I never played it and from some quick research it looks like you’re still just a bunch of orphans with extra destiny, so the premise is the same, characters just have specific personalities now.
FFIII does introduce the job system, though, which is frequently bad at fulfilling its promises. The Summoner does not add new party members to the battle, but rather casts spells which are merely fluffed as coming from some other entity. The Geomancer casts spells that are themed as altering terrain, but have no permanent impact on the map because the combat system is not at all equipped to handle that. Some games are better at these than others (Final Fantasy Tactics has good Geomancers, for example, and both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII have good summons in concept, although their combat utility is questionable).
Final Fantasy IV
In Final Fantasy IV you play as Cecil, a dark knight of an evil kingdom who later seeks redemption and becomes a paladin. His dark knight->paladin journey is a huge part of the main plot.
Rydia is a summoner and summoning still isn’t very good, but that’s unchanged from the problems it had in III, and in any case the mechanics of summoning actually do make it into the main plot (Cecil kills Rydia’s mother’s summoned boss monster, which kills Rydia’s mother, and the intense antipathy Rydia feels for Cecil is very relevant to his redemption arc).
Yang (no not that one) is the leader of a bunch of monks, but the impression I got is that he is their leader because he knows the most kung fu and is passing on his teachings to the others. So, while he does lead an organization, the key to his premise is that he beats up monsters with his bare hands, which he does in gameplay all the time. Some kind of additional management minigame is not required to express this premise.
Edward von Muir, on the other hand, is a prince who wishes he could run away and be a bard instead and gets his wish granted when Golbez burns his kingdom down and kills his father. It is a plot point that Edward is bad at managing the economy and thus not well positioned to take over once his father dies, a major concern before Golbez showed up and gave them bigger problems, and since Edward does help rebuild the kingdom in the epilogue (rather than, for example, declaring that his love of music is simply no good for ruling a kingdom and telling the people to hold an election instead), I think a side quest and/or minigame where Edward runs some kind of music-related business (an instrument shop or a traveling mini-orchestra with a few quirky side characters to play the trumpet and cello in the background or something) would’ve helped bring that story home.
Edge, also a prince, doesn’t really have any character arc relating to kingdom management, so like many other princes in the series, his princeliness is there to contribute the glamor of royalty to the party, which he does automatically by being present in it. He’s also a ninja, though, and doesn’t really do any ninjing. He fights with ninja-flavored powers, but he never does any sneaking around or infiltration or assassination. Adding that to the game would be a big deal, but also this game has twelve characters in it. If there wasn’t room in it to add ninja gameplay, couldn’t it have just had eleven characters instead?
Tellah is a wizard who was once master of all magical arts, but who forgot most of his spells after retiring. I would’ve appreciated some side quests to unlock specific spells (and I never did finish the game, so maybe this actually happens, although early Final Fantasy games were very light on side quests), but this is at least minimally satisfied by the fact that Tellah levels up.
Cid is an airship engineer and while that gets talked about a lot, there is no airship engineering/piloting/combat minigame, even though the character of Cid seems to be begging for one.
Kain, Rosa, Porom, Polom, and Fusoya all have cool powers, but they get to use those cool powers in combat so that premise is satisfied.
Final Fantasy IV mostly gets itself into trouble because it has so many different playable characters. As just a parade of cool outfits to cycle into your party, twelve is a lot, but not too much to keep track of. If you want these characters to really deliver on the idea that you can play as them, rather than just being in their general vicinity, problems start to stack up in a hurry. Some of the characters are just there to be representatives of their people in the fight to save the world and others have a premise that mainly relates to Cecil’s arc as the main character. If you wanted a story tightly focused on Cecil, though, you would cut out basically everyone except Kain, Rosa, and Rydia (plus Fusoya, probably, although he is a very late addition to the party – and this is all according to my research, because I never got that far in this one). Tellah, Yang, Polom, and Porom are at least mostly or completely able to express their premise in combat gameplay, but they also add some unnecessary bloat to the cast list. Edge, Cid, and especially Edward suffer pretty badly from being characters who do stuff that could’ve been gameplay but isn’t, not even as a side quest or minigame. And it’s not like any of these three are especially contributing anything to a more tightly written version of the game, either (how many princes need to lose their parents to Golbez before we get that he is bad news?).
For that matter, Cecil’s redemption arc could’ve had more gameplay hooks than it did. The start of the game as Golbez’s dark knight could’ve involved being given a map full of villages to intimidate in various ways, and then after you become a paladin there could’ve been a side quest to make amends with them in ways relevant to the nefarious things you’d done earlier, slaying a monster you’d unleashed or helping to rebuild a church you’d burned down or whatever. So, like, you start with a side quest that is a Risk map with the instruction to go and do imperialism to all these places, which becomes unavailable after you desert the Empire early on, and then when you become a paladin it becomes a quest to go and undo imperialism to all those places. Most of the lesser party members in FFIV could’ve been guest party members or NPCs whose stories were told through that format. As it is, you mostly watch Cecil’s journey, rather than meaningfully participating in it, but at least it does get a lot of main plot attention.
Final Fantasy V
For the most part you’re playing as characters whose most interesting attribute is that they are adventurers and whose most interesting adventure is the one they are on right now to save the world. Bartz is basically a professional protagonist, Lenna is a princess on a quest to save her kingdom, Galuf is an amnesiac whose mysterious past seems to be tied somehow to the whole magic crystal crisis, and Krile is a magically talented woman who became an adventurer to track down her missing grandfather Galuf. All perfectly good motivations which are relevant to completing the main plot either directly or, in Krile’s case, because that’s what Galuf is doing.
But Faris is a lost princess (Lenna’s long lost sister) turned pirate who joins the party less than a quarter of the way through the game, remains in the party the entire time, and you never get to do any kind of piracy with her.
Faris’ piracy is used to introduce her as an antagonist early on in the game, but you do not subsequently get to do any piracy nor does sailing around involve any kind of seafaring logistics, nor do ship battles involve any special combat using your ship instead of or in addition to your regular characters. There’s no side quest for digging up buried treasure or for defeating rival pirates until Faris is the Pirate Queen of the Seven Seas, and there’s no main plot arc where a navy captain comes for revenge and thus complicates Faris’ new quest to save the world. The part where Faris is a lost princess is relevant to her dynamic with the rest of the party and a couple of plot points, but the part where she became a pirate is pretty unimportant.
Also, she has a pet sea dragon and while that does come up once or twice, having a pet sea dragon is cool as fuck and having its participation in the game be as a glorified key used to unlock a glorified door and then it dies tragically does not really constitute a proper exploration of the cool shit you could do with a sea dragon buddy. You should be able to, like, take the sea dragon diving to search for sunken treasure ships and feed it different types of fish to give it cool powers or something.
Final Fantasy VI
By this point in the series it seems like the goal was to include as many playable characters as possible, an impulse that seems to have culminated in Chrono Cross having over 40. Final Fantasy VI limits itself to merely 14 main party members, but this is still way too many. Much like Final Fantasy IV, there is a version of this game in another universe somewhere that boils itself down to just the characters most directly relevant to its main plot, but the game we got buries you in so many characters that the plot struggles to accommodate them all and the gameplay frequently doesn’t even try.
Terra and Celes are ex-imperials who never do any imperialism, Locke is a thief or self-proclaimed treasure hunter who does barely any thieving or treasure hunting, Edgar is a king who does no kinging, Relm is an artist who does no arting, Gau is a feral child with no survival gameplay, and Setzer is a gambler with no gambling gameplay. It’s not strictly the case that these characters have literally no gameplay or story attention on their premise (although sometimes it is), but it’s all pretty token. I’d be inclined to give, for example, Locke’s lack of a treasure hunting or thievery side quest a pass if the game weren’t buried under characters who contribute nothing that they couldn’t have done as an NPC besides being an extra sprite on the battle screen. Other characters are better served, like Cyan, a king’s bodyguard who guards people’s bodies, Shadow, a mercenary who you actually have to pay money to hire, and Sabin, Edgar’s brother who is specifically not the king of anywhere.
The size of the cast does come back, since there’s a part in the World of Ruin where you run around hoovering all of them back up, which means every character cut from the party is one less episode in that arc. The characters you’re running around talking to in the World of Ruin didn’t have to be party members you’re recruiting, though (especially since the massive size of the cast compared to the maximum you can bring into a single battle means that you reach the point where you no longer miss your party members for the mechanical role they played less than halfway through the process of reassembling the whole crew). So far as the question of whether these characters’ schticks are meaningfully playable, the answer for almost all of them is “no.” It’s a huge cast of characters who may as well have been NPCs to a party that consists of Terra, Locke, and Celes.
Final Fantasy VII
Despite having a hefty nine characters in its cast, Final Fantasy VII manages to deliver on most of the premises it has, mainly because its premises are usually motivations for fighting Shinra first and foremost. Final Fantasy VII’s biggest problem, then, is that you stop fighting Shinra almost completely after Midgar, at which point you’re chasing Sephiroth instead. You haven’t even finished recruiting all the characters yet and their primary motivation to join the party has expired! The characters don’t need a bunch of individual fixes to serve all their weird concepts the way some of them do, though. Rather, the game just needs the gameplay between Midgar and the Aeris-kebabing to lean more into fighting Shinra and less into chasing Sephiroth. Sure, the climax is still an encounter with Sephiroth where Aeris tries to use the power of Holy to stop him and gets shanked, but let him lurk in the background more during the buildup and have the emphasis be on AVALANCHE rebuilding itself on the Western Continent to fight Shinra.
Something also could’ve been done with Cloud being a mercenary, maybe some kind of mercenary hunt system similar to the hunts in Final Fantasy XII, but there’s something to be said for not doing this both because Cloud was a mercenary for Shinra and isn’t in that line of work anymore and also because Cloud was a bargain bin mook mercenary who’s cosplaying as one of the elite super soldier mercenaries, so it actually makes a good deal of sense that he’s not actually doing any independent mercenary work. On the other hand, hunts are a good way of extending the optional boss fights, which are a great side quest in Final Fantasy games which are frequently held back by the problem that they are only available in the last like ten percent of the game.
Final Fantasy VIII
Like Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII’s characters are pretty much all tied to a single premise, rather than being a grab-bag of different character concepts united by a common enemy (or, in some cases, a string of contrivances designed to stuff extra characters into the party because someone thought it would be a good idea to include as many playable characters as the art team could make cool designs for). Also like Final Fantasy VII, its main problem is that it doesn’t do very much to express that premise in gameplay or even in the plot.
In Final Fantasy VIII, you play as cadets at high school for mercenaries, and the first plot arc is about a field exam for graduation. Mercenary high school remains your home base afterwards, but you do neither high school stuff nor mercenary stuff except in that your hook into the main plot is initially that you’ve been hired for a political assassination. Every single character in the party is a SeeD mercenary except one, the woman who hired you for the assassination as part of the main plot, and the initial Dollet battle is a perfectly good blueprint for how SeeD missions could go, the game just needs more of them as an optional side quest.
FFVIII even already has SeeD rank (although they’re just numbered 1 to 30 when some evocative names could’ve helped – admittedly, 30 is a lot of ranks to name), which in the game is increased by taking multiple choice tests. Briefly emulating the drudge-work of a school or job can help with immersion, and the tests are short enough that they can serve that purpose without becoming interminable (although that does depend a bit on how many of them you take in a row), but the problem is that FFVIII has no cool SeeD missions to do outside the main plot, so the quick simulation of drudgery is the bulk of the SeeD-related content, especially after the first disc, when the initial assassination attempt fails and things become quickly unhinged. The main plot getting unhinged is a Final Fantasy staple, but that does mean any attempt to deliver on the promise of the premise within the main plot has to be wrapped up before the unhinging. In FFVIII, you have exactly three SeeD jobs, two of them are in the prologue and are perfunctory (you capture a summon and participate in one battle as your graduation exam), and the third is the assassination attempt, which fails, and then that failure derails you into a personal conflict with the target that totally overshadows future mercenary work. Having other monster hunts or military engagements to participate in as side content would’ve fixed this.
Bonus points if you get to change back into the SeeD outfits while on official SeeD business (as opposed to undercover assassination jobs, like in the main plot), because those things looked amazing and it makes me so sad that you only get to wear them for a single episode of the story.
If you really want to shoot the moon, let there be enough military conflict between minor nations in certain corners of the map (ones that don’t need to be in a specific nation’s hands for the main plot) that you can actually shove borders around by accepting missions from different employers, and you can decide whether you want to use that power to end wars or perpetuate them. This would also help the problem plaguing a lot of Final Fantasy games where the world map is presented as very much a map of all the major landmarks (plus any smaller locations that happen to be personally relevant to your party) in the world, and not only are there six or fewer countries on the planet, some of them have no sign of civilization whatsoever. A mercenary war minigame would make it easy to stuff some extra nations and locations onto the map without having to find a role for each of them in the main plot and thus dragging it out past the length its narrative can actually support.
Final Fantasy VIII is also, I think, the first game to have a collectible card game minigame built into it. This is surprisingly evocative of being in high school, but probably wasn’t worth the effort when they could’ve been focusing on things more directly relevant to the setting’s main premises. Maybe someone on the team just really wanted to be making a card game so they shoved it into FFVIII? No one seemed to particularly mind, at any rate.
Final Fantasy IX
FFIX was pitched as a return to the SNES era, a magepunk fantasy rather than the cyberpunk fantasy of VII and VIII. It also has a cast reminiscent of IV and VI: A grab-bag of characters tied together by circumstance more than a common enemy or common origin.
It’s only got eight characters, though, and a good deal of those characters are just adventurers whose concept is perfectly well expressed by the adventures of the main plot. Zidane and Vivi have secret backstories, Garnet is a runaway princess, and Amarant has a grudge with Zidane in particular, but they’re all adventurers. Steiner is Garnet’s royal bodyguard and he stubbornly refuses to give up the job just because Garnet’s run away. Quina’s a weird monster whose motivation is to eat as many different kinds of food as they can get their hands on, and in combat they have weird monster powers, so premise executed.
The setting does have an emphasis on airships: Zidane is a sky pirate, and he and his crew’s airship goes down in flames after the attempt to kidnap Garnet (who is conveniently trying to run away anyway) goes awry. They are then forced to make their way outside the reach of Garnet’s mother, the queen, on foot. The stakes of the plot quickly get much higher than running away to become a sky pirate, but it would’ve been nice to have mechanics for airship engineering/piloting/combat so that there could be an airship piracy side quest focusing on them. Especially since Zidane’s adoptive family is his sky pirate crew, and you kind of just ditch them for the playable party instead.
Final Fantasy X
Like Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X’s party is built around the central premise of its story. Unlike those two games, that central premise remains valid through the entire game. The party isn’t just a random collection of people who fell in with each other, but the formal entourage of Yuna, a necromancer priest with the power to call up martyred spirits as monstrous summons, on a pilgrimage to all the temples of her religion in order to complete a ritual to sacrifice herself in order to defeat (however temporarily) a kaiju called Sin. Viewpoint deuteragonist Tidus falls in with them by what seems like coincidence but later on turns out to be the machinations of martyred spirits trying to kill the kaiju once and for all and thus put an end to their millennia-spanning war with it.
You can tell from those two characters that Final Fantasy X’s plot is really weird, but then everyone else in the party is just another one of Yuna’s guardians for her pilgrimage. Wakka is also a professional underwater soccer player, which is weird, and Auron has a mysterious backstory with both Tidus and Yuna’s father and a mysterious agenda relating to the main plot, and Kimari is considered a runt by the other lion people even though he’s the tallest party member, and Rikku does machines, but they’re all in it because they’re Yuna’s bodyguards, and the main plot is about traveling from one end of the island to the other, solving puzzles to complete rituals at temples in order to unlock more martyr-summons for Yuna, and also there’s an entire second video game inside this one where you play underwater soccer.
That “mini”game is not well regarded, but I think that’s an issue of some of the details of its execution, not its concept or mechanical foundations. This subplot is set up as “Tidus leads the underdogs to victory” kind of thing, but then the tutorial match is also the emotional climax, you’re playing against what’s actually a pretty powerful team of opponents, and if you want to get good at the side quest afterwards you do it by ditching all the losers you start with to trade them out for better players you can discover while exploring the game world. Final Fantasy X put in the work to have Wakka and Tidus’ weird character concept expressed, and the result is a game that’s perfectly fun to play by itself – but also one with a terrible introduction where you have to betray the themes of its plot to win, so, uh, not surprised it didn’t catch on.
Final Fantasy XI
Because it’s an MMO with a customizable protagonist, the premise is that your character will do the gameplay, so it can’t fail to deliver on that. In Final Fantasy V, Square gave us a playable pirate and no piracy and that is their fault, but if you show up to Final Fantasy XI with a character whose main schtick is being a traveling carnival performer who fights with a combination of fire dancing, knife juggling, and pratfalls, and who dreams of ringleading the greatest circus the world has ever seen, then the lack of relevant gameplay for that premise isn’t really Square’s fault.
I would totally play that video game, though.
Final Fantasy XII
Main cast is down to six and yet we still have one character whose relevance expires less than a quarter of the way through the game and two others who are pure cruft (Vaan for the first and Penelo and Fran for the second). Penelo has no reason to be in this video game, Fran’s premise is basically “eye candy” and, I mean, I guess she succeeds, Vaan’s premise is that he’s a guttersnipe hoping to become a sky pirate, which gets some story focus early on and gets paid off through the hunt side quest, while Ashe and Basch’s premise is carried by the main plot. Unfortunately, the writers on this one are shooting way above their weight level in terms of political intrigue, but undeniably the attempt was made to have the main plot deliver on Ashe and Basch’s premise, so the problem isn’t that they needed a rebel knight side quest.
Balthier is where they drop the ball. He also has some ties to the intrigues of the main plot, and like Ashe and Basch, he is served poorly by it but that’s a separate issue. Balthier is an imperial nepobaby who ran away to be a sky pirate, free to make his own destiny. “Sky pirates” are, in this setting, not necessarily literal pirates, just general fixers with the high mobility that comes from having your own airship. Vaan gets the title because he’s a monster hunter with a bunk on Balthier’s ship, and if Balthier were more involved in the monster hunting (especially in a way that suggests he is, however reluctantly, taking Vaan under his wing – a relationship that would justify Vaan’s continued presence in the party after they escape prison with Basch) then it would suggest that Balthier’s usual sky piracy is also in being a very mobile monster hunter.
Parts of the main plot suggest that Balthier gets up to tomb robbing (although it’s also possible that Raithwall’s Tomb is the first one he’s ever pillaged, but I’m trying to wring character details out of Balthier right now, work with me), and that could’ve been a side quest that extends optional dungeons the same way hunts extend optional bosses. Many hunts are used as the vehicle for an optional dungeon as it is.
And it’s hardly the first time it’s come up, but you could also have Balthier be a literal pirate in the sky, with an airship engineering/piloting/combat minigame about raiding ships and stuff. The airship is one of the iconic elements of Final Fantasy, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to make it a recurring gameplay mode.
Fuck, bring back the collectible card games and have a side quest where Balthier is a card shark but instead of Poker it’s for Magic: the Gathering. The game’s lore has given it all kinds of options for paying off the “sky pirate” premise and it went with none of them. There’s enough hooks here for an entire open world game.
Final Fantasy XIII
Infamously, the characters in this game are mostly bad. Two of them are Pulse l’cie, which gets paid off when you finally get down to Pulse, but it takes thirty hours to get there. That would be fine if those thirty hours weren’t a completely linear corridor run populated by characters who seem to go out of their way not to be interesting. Except Sazh. Sazh is cool. His premise is just that he’s a regular guy who got roped into magical bullshit in a desperate bid to save his son, though, so that gets paid off just by being in the party.
Hope’s…well, he’s a bad character, but he’s also a sidekick to Lightning, which means if we paid off Lightning’s premise, we’d pay off his, too. But Lightning’s premise is that she wants to save her sister, and the inciting incident is that she failed, which happens before Hope latches onto her. And then the plot just kind of bumbles around, looking for something to be about.
Snow has two good premises and they walk past both of them. His first premise is that he seems to be leading a resistance movement against evil theocratic enforcers. Later on we learn that this resistance movement is just a street gang of petty delinquents who just barely took up armed resistance against the government because of the recent crisis, and also that while the government’s response to this crisis does not speak well of them, they don’t seem to be overtly dystopian outside of that. Like, the crisis that initiates the game isn’t a common thing. As we learn when we get to Pulse, the Pulse fal’cie have been totally defeated to the point where there’s nothing left of their civilization. Discovering one in some forgotten infrastructure of Cocoon isn’t something that happens, like, ever. That they respond with prison camps for everyone nearby is grounds for a revolution, but Snow’s revolt is crushed instantly and he then makes inept efforts to rescue his crush (Lightning’s sister), and when that fails he bumbles in a slightly different direction from Lightning.
Snow’s second premise is that his delinquent gang could’ve been some kind of actual thing. The actual plot renders them totally irrelevant less than a quarter of the way through, but a subquest about random delinquency would’ve been something. Do some graffitti, have a street race, I dunno. This game is generally in desperate need of more gameplay variety and player control of any kind, so I’d be willing to accept Lightning taking up private detective gigs on the side or Hope being a theater kid with a side quest where he goes around to different karaoke bars hoping to get discovered. Really, anything to break up the corridor run.
Final Fantasy XIV
Same deal as XI, MMOs win automatically.
Final Fantasy XV
We have now exceeded the realm of my direct experience. I never played this game even partially. Its premise is that you are a prince on a road trip and that’s already a problem because if you aren’t a runaway or undercover or whatever, then you have the resources of an entire kingdom at your beck and call if anything goes wrong, so either being a prince obviates the experience of being teenagers on a road trip or else being on a road trip obviates the experience of being a prince with enough fame and power to roll over problems like running out of gas or scrambling for concert tickets before they sell out without even noticing them. It’s by no means impossible to pull this off, but I’m skeptical.
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