I wrote an article about whether or not Final Fantasy games deliver on the promise of their characters’ and settings’ premises, where frequently the answer was “no.” The idea was that certain characters being playable party members evokes an idea that you get to do or be that character in some meaningful way, but you don’t, particularly. I think Final Fantasy VIII is the best exemplar: The premise is that you are cadets at a mercenary high school that teaches you how to fight wars and hunt monsters. This informs a small handful of early quests that set up the main plot, but once you accept an assassination contract on the main villain your mercenary high school credentials cease to be relevant, and by the 1/3rd-ish mark of the game your original motivation for going after the main villain has been swamped by personal motivations and a weird amnesia backstory. That last part is for the best (well, not the amnesia part), you want the stakes to get more personal and character-driven as the game goes on, but nowhere in the prior parts of the game is the premise of mercenary/monster hunter high school paid off.
I mentioned during the article that one reason some of the games ran into trouble, especially IV and VI, is because they shoved every cool character they could think of into the party, massively exceeding both the maximum size of the party in any given battle and the space they had to really develop those characters’ concepts, with the end result that the protagonists of your Final Fantasy game are like 60% Darkest Dungeon characters: Cool character designs with interesting mechanical functions, but a paper-thin backstory and nothing that evokes that you are playing as them in particular. That works great for Darkest Dungeon, where high turnover in party members is a key part of the premise, but in Final Fantasy games we are supposed to get to know these characters and they should have some opportunity to actually do the things they’re supposed to be about.
I also mentioned that peak character crowding came from Chrono Cross, which has 45 playable characters. Now, expecting Final Fantasy to pay off the premise of its characters was already unreasonable to ask of the developers, since the state of game development as both a technology and an art form just wasn’t that advanced and everyone understood that if you had a pirate captain in your party, that didn’t mean you would get to actually play as a pirate captain. It meant you would get to hang out with a pirate captain while doing the main plot. Not only was that still the state of the art when Chrono Cross came out, Chrono Cross also has such a flabbergastingly large cast list that you can’t plausibly do justice to most of the character premises because there are just too many.
But as a design exercise, I’m gonna try anyway. It should be a doable project when all I’m doing is giving a one-paragraph overview of what kind of side quest could be used to evoke the project, since I don’t actually have to design the damn thing. So the basic premise here is, imagine a version of Chrono Cross with way too much money and development time which creates a unique side quest for every single character’s ultimate weapon, including the ones who already had side quests for ultimate weapons, if I decide those side quests didn’t do the job properly.
We’re also going to be doing these characters in rough order of recruitment, so you can more or less follow along with the main plot along the way, although it may get kind of disjointed especially towards the end, when there’s few new characters to recruit and what ones do first become recruitable that late are usually the bizarre side characters with nothing to do with the A, B, or C plots of the game.
Serge is a freebie. As the protagonist, his backstory and concept are at the heart of the main plot. In the real game he gets his main weapon as the result of a side quest that is purely about other characters, but for this concept he should get his side quest when he becomes Serge again in Fort Dragonia, before you enter Chronopolis. If you’re not familiar with Chrono Cross, then don’t worry about it, the point is that Serge gets his ultimate weapon from a mandatory step of the main plot near the end.
Poshul needs to be a later recruit. I mean, honestly, Poshul needs to be cut from the game, because she’s an annoying gimmick character. But also she really needs to not be a party member during the initial dimensional displacement, because Serge needs to be alone when Kid shows up, since the whole point of that scene is Kid showing up to help you out when you’re confused and alone while being confronted by a bunch of government goons. Poshul should join with Leena afterwards (although recruiting her is a whole other thing we’ll talk about later). None of that is anything to do with what kind of side quest might best be associated with her, though, just that she both makes the early game much easier yet also absolutely ruins its tone.
But okay, let’s assume you recruit Poshul with Leena. Poshul is your talking pet dog, so in the absence of an Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate style crime-solving minigame, her thing should be digging up buried treasures. While you’re walking through Fossil Valley, she sniffs something out, you dig it up, and there’s a couple more locations you can do the same. Then when you get all of them, some pirate or thief or something who’s been burying all these treasures tracks you down for revenge because you’ve been stealing all his stuff.
You could also do some kind of Tamagotchi pet thing, where you have to keep her fed and take her for walks and teach her tricks. That sounds weird, but with 45 characters’ worth of side quests to cover (an amount much greater than any actual video game should have), we’re going to get into some weird ideas far outside the game’s main premise in order to stretch to cover everyone, especially since I want everyone to be as unique as possible (I’ll bet “this character has a nemesis who is a miniboss” would work for half these guys, but that wouldn’t be very interesting). Since Poshul is a minor side character who, in all seriousness, should just be cut from the game, I don’t mind slapping some very strange mechanics on her, like the game’s clock keeping track of what date you’re playing so that it can keep track of how many days in a row you’ve fed/walked Poshul, which builds up Poshul’s trust in you, and then you can spend that trust on teaching her tricks, which includes her three special techniques usable in combat, and then you can take Poshul to a dog show and win it to get her ultimate weapon. I’m aware that being a fancy dog is not really how Poshul is portrayed, but giving her a thing where she’s a tough mutt who always wanted to be a fancy prize-winner helps to justify her character, and in any case she’s a gimmick character with no connection to the plot so her personality can be shuffled around without impacting anything.
Leena is Serge’s girlfriend in his home world, but has never met him before in Another World. Your first quest in the game is getting komodo scales for Home Leena so she can make a necklace, and it’s while you’re doing that you get time-whammied into an alternate timeline. When you first get stranded in Another World, Serge finds Another Leena and asks her what’s going on and she doesn’t recognize him. Another Leena still has a crush on Serge, and she really hates Kid, on account of Kid is a crass criminal. Leena will only join your party if you reject Kid. Leena isn’t a joke character like Poshul and making the only way to recruit her be to turn down Kid is dumb. Sure, there’s good reasons to turn down Kid (the game starts with a premonition about Serge betraying Kid and stabbing her to death, and you might reasonably be trying to avert that by refusing her offer to travel together after she saves you from the government goons), but there’s also good reasons to accept her offer (you are in desperate need of a second party member). It’s important that Leena not be with Serge when he first encounters Kid (and that Poshul not be there either – in the game as it exists, she gets unceremoniously (though satisfyingly) punted out of the scene by minibosses who turn out to be pretty easy to beat up).
So the obvious side quest here is an extension of that main quest where you get komodo scales for Home Leena: You pick up date gifts for Another Leena from killing various monsters with pretty body parts, or by using the game’s crafting system to commission some jewelry for her, or by just dumping lots of money on someone with a specific romantic knick-knack tucked away into one of the game’s settlements. The first one of these should be available at Cape Howl, the location where you first meet Kid, because that way it’s impossible to get it before meeting Kid, which means you can then give it to Leena to recruit her, and if you get all of them, you unlock her ultimate weapon. Attach some kind of dating sim gameplay to it if that feels like it would make it pop rather than make it drag, your standard “memorize facts that the character brings up and reference them in dialogue options later” kind of thing.
To keep things gated until the endgame, we can have the ultimate weapon come from taking Another Leena to meet Home Leena after giving her all the romantic gifts. Home Leena is not pleased, but there’s something romantic in the idea that Serge, confused and isolated in another world, reached out to Leena’s time clone to try and rebuild a relationship with her. While I like this scene, the more I think about it, the more it seems like a bad idea to gate ultimate techniques/weapons to the endgame.
Mechanically, they’ll have to be adjusted somehow so having an ultimate weapon early doesn’t completely break the game, but in terms of gameplay pacing, you don’t want the side quest for all 45 characters to first be completeable at basically the same time. Players might put it all off until right before the final boss anyway, but they should at least have the option to space them out over the course of the game.
Mojo is a bizarre and unhinged side character, but unlike Poshul, he’s fun and I’m glad he’s in the game. In Home World’s Arni Village, where Serge lives, there’s a man who’s happily married and a successful fisherman with lots of trophies. If you talk to him, he’ll give you a shark tooth. In Another World, Serge drowned as a child (that’s why there’s no Another Serge), and that man developed an aversion to the sea. He gave up fishing, took up amateur occultism, and became a reclusive weirdo who never got married. If you show him the shark tooth you got from his Home World version, he gets angry, and then Mojo – a giant occult poppet idol thing-y – comes to life to tell him that his vibes are all wrong, seeking dark power when Mojo is an idol of love and good fortune. Mojo then joins Serge’s party basically just because that other guy is a buzzkill but you guys seem alright. In the game as it is, unlocking Mojo’s final technique requires you to unlock the ability to shift between Home World and Another World at-will so you can take Mojo back to the Home World fisherman version of the guy, then come back to the spooky occult cellar in Another World and talk to three specific cat statues in a specific order.
This is technically a side quest, and for a gimmick character like Mojo, it’s plenty enough, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, we can do better than this vignette. The first way of going about Mojo’s side quest is by giving the Home World fisherman guy (he doesn’t get a name in the game, the closest thing is “Kiki’s dad”) a bog standard fishing side quest, and if you catch the legendary turbo-fish or whatever, you can bring Mojo to talk to him to unlock his ultimate technique or weapon or whatever.
The other way is to go is to expand on the cat statues thing and have a side quest about retrieving occult artifacts. On the one hand, this threatens to be pretty similar to Kid’s side quest: You are going to places and acquiring stuff. It even seems like the kind of thing that would have more puzzle locks than straightforward combats, although the Viper Manor stealth mechanics will probably be heavier in Kid’s content and thin or absent from Mojo’s. There’s definitely ways to make “ancient temple of occult artifacts” feel different from “rich guy’s heavily guarded estate,” and to keep this post from sprawling more than we already are, I’m just going to say “less Burgle Bros and more Forbidden Desert” and leave it at that. There’s definitely room for this on the map at Earth Dragon Isle.
Regardless, you can make an argument for doing both. Mojo’s character arc is that he is actually supposed to be the idol of dark power that the amateur occultist thought he was. He has an evil aura and his special attacks are all curses and also, y’know, kill people. If you do his side quest in the game as it is, Mojo admits that he’s supposed to be a vessel for hate, but decided he wanted to be a harbinger of love instead. You could lean more into this by having this scene after completing both the fishing side quest and the occult archaeology side quest, with the former having interactions with Home World fisher version of Kiki’s dad while the latter reveals more about Mojo’s intended purpose, and at the end Mojo admits that the dig is right about his intended purpose but after hanging out with fisher-dad he’s more convinced now than ever that he wants to bring love to the world.
We’re past 2,000 words and haven’t even left the Arni Village section of the map, so I’ll post this now because if I make it all one big mega-post then I’ll run my buffer completely dry while composing it. Next time we recruit a bunch of thieves.
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