FFXII is made of love and win

[cephalopod]

I am re-discovering my love for Final Fantasy XII. It is deep and powerful, like a river that is deep and powerful, but it is also perverse. Like a deep, powerful river with Ultros in it.

FFXII is the sidequesty-est game that ever sidequested a sidequest. In a very real way, the main storyline is a sideline to all the other neat junk you can do. When you can complete the 'real' story in about 40 hours of gameplay but spend 200+ hours messing around with other stuff and still have delicious niblets you haven't even touched, the real story is officially Not That Important.

And when some of these sidequests actually combine to form entire mini-plotlines that have nothing to do with the main story and are frequently cracky as hell, I am in heaven. I am never happier than when I can discover a bit of in-game info by doing something I have no business doing. This is a seriously major thing for me--most of the time I spend playing any RPG is spent avoiding/frustrating/messing with the main story. NPC X says "Oh, Heroic Protagonist! We're so glad you're here! A fire-breathing dragon is just about to come over that hill...you have just enough time to visit Weapon Shop before it arrives!" and that's when I select the > "I'll be right back!" option and fuck off to the next continent to pick radishes or something. The absurdism of it tickles me so--I know that dragon can't attack the village while I'm gone. What does the dragon do instead of attacking, in the month of game-time I spend doing something else? What do the villagers do? How do they feel when I finally come back?

There are vast treasure-houses of story waiting in the gaps between what the plot wants you to do and what the game allows you to do.

FFXII, after a couple of plot points are out of the way, is made up almost entirely of those gaps.

Gaps with cutscenes and hidden romances and fuckup moogles and Gilgamesh. Eeeeee!

Comments

[kiwikiwi]

Yesssssss, I loved that about FFXII

Now, if you like that sort of thing, take the XII experience and multiply it by like, 100, and you get The Last Remnant.

They don't have an internal clock. So you can play it for infinity guilt-free hours. Infinity hours of sidequests.

[cephalopod]

But but but! If there's no clock, how will I be able to measure the ridiculous quantity of time I have delayed the incredibly urgent thing that was supposed to happen?

[kiwikiwi]

YOU MEASURE IT IN SHEER AWESOME and the joy that comes of having about 10 times as many cities and locations to go to than you will ever hear about for plot reasons.

and mainly you find them by exploring everywhere.

BUT YES. IT WAS VERY SAD WHEN WE FIRST REALIZED we do like seeing just how MUCH time we're wasting. |D

(it is my belief that they put the FFXII team on Last Remnant, without the shackles of "the die hard ff fanboys ARE NOT PLEASED 8|")

[cephalopod]

Dude, that sounds so...so good. Like you could be the Majestic Savior of the World and then one morning you wake up and decide that's not how you roll anymore and you're going to go off and, like, find the best crab salad sandwich.

And then, ten years later, after you've had plenty of delicious sandwiches and maybe run a shoe shop for a while and gone on beach vacations and gotten really good at drumming, THEN you decide it might be nice to save the world and off you go and do it.

[kiwikiwi]

ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE

but given the other in-game rescipes you'd be making some sort of lovely flaky italian pastry out of a giant horse-demon with no skin. :|b

but you could totally make a living out of that >->;

[cephalopod]

SKINLESS HORSE DEMON PASTRY MMM

...criminy, isn't and_cupcakes intended for just such a purpose? I gotta work up a recipe.

[cypher]

WE KEEP MEANING TO MAKE VILE PLANT KEBABS which I'm pretty sure are an actual game food, and then we could post them and it would be awesome. :3

[cephalopod]

Oh man oh man. Bacon-wrapped avocado chunks on a stick, grilled. It looks like something you pulled out of a shoggoth's trachea BUT SO GOOD

Is there a specific plant that is a Vile Plant?

[cypher]

Yeah, they look...sort of like stubby, short Ents with oversized human skulls on top, and then they have long leaf-arms that the smack you with. :3

[cephalopod]

....and you....you EAT them? And this is totally cool and normal and there's like sauces?

holy crap, xeno and cannibal kinks pinging all over the place.

[cypher]

So, the frog rabbits? That you have in your party?

There's a feral, albino variety of those. And you eat THEM, too.

[cephalopod]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[subtext]

Can I interest you in a marzipan frog rabbit dessert with a disturbingly red berry sauce, comrade? :D

[kiwikiwi]

Ooou, marzipan.

Although, given that they're albino, probably something with white chocolate and raspberry would be appropriate, too...

[cephalopod]

...dude. MERINGUES. WITH LITTLE PEAKS FOR EARS

[subtext]

Or for a savoury, white steamed buns with little eyes and ears!

The possibilities are really fabulous here. I like them ALL.

[subtext]

Ooh, almond bark is like white chocolate but cheaper and really easy to melt. One could make a raspberry filling and pour it into the spoonback-hollowed bellies of little gutted white candy beasties lying on their backs! With red-hots for eyes?

[cypher]

What Kiwi said about Last Remnant. "Important meeting of the Congress, you say! About to start? Fascinating! ...We'll just be jaunting off to discover three dungeons and two cities on the other side of the continent, where people want us to do silly things like play tag with ghost children in the desert!"

Also there are giant fish men. :3

[cephalopod]

And all the time you're doing that, the Congress is sitting around drumming their fingers on tables and exchanging significant looks and occasionally having dirty sex in the janitorial supply closet!

[cypher]

Man, so long as nobody is getting it on with Duke Jackass. >->

But yeah. you try to leave town and your little frog rabbit says "where do you think you're going? Congress is about to start!" but then you ignore him and go have magical adventures and take quests from conspiracy theorists and stuff. Congress can get stuffed anyway. :D

[cephalopod]

The combination of Congress getting stuffed and a...frog rabbit...is potent. I am officially sold on this thing.

[cypher]

The nonhuman races are all pretty rad. party frog rabbit. He's like...waist high on a human. Watching them walk (or hop) around is pretty crazy adorable.

...there's one who tries to hire you to bring him the Necronomicon.

[subtext]

Want want want!

I feel silly for confessing this, but I'm always terrified to go off and do side quests when the game tells me I don't have time. I meekly bow to my imaginary questgivers and go do what I'm told, just in case this time the game really will go on without me-- as if there is a hidden countdown timer.

I feel like should know better, as a student of game design, AND YET. What if this time they decided that you really do only have 100 turns to find the King? I'm pretty sure I didn't actually have a turn-based time limit to finish Baldur's Gate, say, and I know you don't in Neverwinter Nights because I know how that world uses event triggers, but Tunnels of Doom (which I played from a 5.25" floppy disc in the 80s) did impose an arbitrary time limit. You really were on a countdown timer! When I worry about this happening to me in modern games, am I being oldschool, or naive? Did I just miss out on basic epic quest RPG training 101? It seems like FF-style RPGs, with their wealth of side quests and discoveries that are jewel-like little rewards in and of themselves, represent the opposite of turn-based time limits. I like this idea, I really do, but I may need a little moral support telling the NPCs no.

[cypher]

traumatizing true story: Kiwi and I were playing Champions of Norrath, and we got to this bit where we had a sub-quest, "please bring me the magic potion that will heal my mortal wound," to go along with main quest "oh and defeat the troll at the bottom of this dungeon." The dying elf makes it really clear that he doesn't have much time! he's dying! woe!

Sure, we think, you're dying in video game time. We'll get to it. We find the potion and everything, and then just sort of fuck around, finish the other stuff before we get back there.

...and the elf says "thank you for trying, but it's too late for me," and dies on us. ;;





I promise nothing like that happens in LR, though. And sidequesting/side-area-exploring is really, really helpful to make you badass enough to take on the next bit of the story.

[subtext]

*wibbles* See, that is precisely what I'm afraid of, and I'd have felt bad all day after that. Maybe all week. I can't walk by dying elves, it's like a strange weak spot.

Thank you for the Last Remnant reassurance. XD

(There are a lot of dying elves who urgently need aid in various games. I wonder if it's a trope, and if anyone writes fic about it as catharsis or subversion or...)

[cypher]

Hah! Some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, perhaps: that elf is prettier and more graceful and more popular than the player will ever be, and yet still somehow at the player's mercy.

I am reminded of a book I read once where an elf winds up stranded in New York and gets mugged in the first chapter. Really, the author said somewhere, who doesn't want to see that happen just once?