It’s been a grueling, emotionally charged journey. You began it a courageous and naive hero who struck out to save the world, against all the odds...it seems so long ago, like another lifetime. The hardships of your quest have changed you forever, both the suffering and the joy of perseverance making their indelible mark upon who you are and what you can accomplish...but though you started this thing alone, you didn’t remain so, and you could not have made it if not for the commitment, the heroism, and the support of the unlikely fellowship of allies around you now. Strangers once, the months of traveling together and relying upon one another, and the burdens upon each of you being shared unconditionally with one another have forged a brotherhood of strength between you all beyond the capacity of language to define. Months of standing together against cataclysm and villainy, of supporting one another through world-shaking events, have made these companions your comrades, friends, family, and so much more beyond that.
And now, you all stand before the doors of your final antagonist’s personal chambers. The weight of the world is on each and every one of you, but you know these people around you, and you know that they can carry that responsibility to a one. You reach forth to push open the doors of destiny...
Then suddenly Steve shows up and he’s all like “HEY guys, got an empty slot in the party for one more!? AWWWW YYYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHH LET’S DO THIS BROSEFS!”
I’m sure we’ve all been there at least once, as regular RPG players. We go through nearly the entire game, picking up story-relevant characters throughout the first half who relate in some meaningful way to the game’s events, getting to know them and forming our perceptions of the cast and game as a whole through their interactions and roles. Except then, way later, nearly at the end of the game, a last party member shows up, so tardy that his or her presence feels at best like an afterthought, at worst like an intrusion. Frequently it’s an individual who has been, until this point, an adversary of sorts, so the fact that they’re joining the party seems meant to be a “oh, cool surprise” sort of thing, like Magus in Chrono Trigger. But not always; sometimes someone just joins the party right near the end of the game and they’re not really any different from any other given character, like Chester in Tales of Phantasia.
It’s not always quite as extreme as the scenario I described, admittedly. The dog in Shadowrun: Hong Kong, for example, is added to your party so late in the game that it’s puzzling, but you do have a few more missions in which to use him; he’s not made available only before the final battle. The Banner Saga trilogy’s Alfrun, Eirik, and Valgard join the party in Chapter 17 of a story that totals 22 chapters as a whole, with less than a quarter of the whole adventure (and half of that last quarter follows a different group, so they’re actually only involved in essentially a latter eighth of the trilogy) to go, but it does mean that they’ll be around for a couple chapters as combatants and personalities to interact with the rest. Peppita and Mirage in Star Ocean 3 are even worse; they’re finally made available in, what, the last 15% of the game? But still not the last-boss exaggeration of mine, I guess.
Valkyrie Profile 2 only awards you Lenneth as a party member for the final dungeon, which is awful (though not nearly as awful as what it’s gonna do at the end of that dungeon), but even as incredibly late to the party as this member is, the last dungeon is still not just the final battle. Likewise, Sonya Shulen might only have avoided going down in Suikoden history books as a villain by the narrowest margin, but she’s still recruitable for a final dungeon rather than just the final boss. While Magus only joins you once all the compulsory narrative of Chrono Trigger is finished, there’s still enough major story sidequests before the final battle that you could say he’s there for the last quarter of the game, or so. Adri may be such a late addition to the party in Cris Tales that she joins you on the welcome mat in front of the final boss's door, but at least opening that door is still a matter of going through 4 separate mini-dungeons, and there's also an extra bonus dungeon thrown in there for the hell of it. Even though that slacker Hanzou only joins the first Shining Force in the last chapter of the game, that still leaves him with a whole 5 battles in which to offer you his assistance. Wooooo yay. And going back to The Banner Saga, the character Bastion can take part in even fewer encounters than that! But still technically more than 1, I suppose.
But even if it’s not always as bad as the scenario I described, there are a few RPGs for which I wasn’t exaggerating. I Am Setsuna’s Fides, who inspired this rant, quite literally does only join you exactly before the final boss of the game.*
Yeah, thanks for the timely assist, asshole, I don’t know how we would’ve made it without you.
I really don’t understand what the reasoning is behind this trope 90% of the time. First of all, it’s a dumb move for a genre so primarily built around character interactions, development, and dynamics as a vehicle of storytelling. Yes, sure, Magus has had a major part in the game’s events thus far, so he’s been around as a character to the extent that he can be. But for most cases, the game doesn’t have enough time to tie these last-minute characters emotionally to its whole in any memorable way. Alfrun, for example, has a lot of exposition and dialogue with other characters during her brief time in The Banner Saga’s main events, and she certainly has her own personality and history of note, but without having been involved in any previous chapter of this epic’s many trials and tribulations, she feels, at the end of the day, like a helpful, likable, but ultimately disconnected outsider to the game’s actors. Useful and important, sure, a part of the team, no. Chester basically has just enough time in ToP’s waning story to establish a weird love-hate, very unconvincing romance thing with Arche, and very little else. And it’s a huge shame for a character like Sonya, because the dynamic of her having been in love with protagonist Tir's father (whom Tir killed during Suikoden 1’s story) and resenting Tir for it, yet being willing to join his side of the war for the good of the nation, could have provided a lot of really great material to work with had she been recruited early enough to capitalize on its potential.
Second, these last-minute characters are a dumb move for a medium built around devising and fine-tuning one’s method of playing. Why does Lemon (what a dumb name for an antagonist-turned-hero, or, really, just about anyone) in Shining Force 2 join you just a few battles before the game’s over? You’ve had almost the entire game to get a feel for the units at your command by then, you’ve built them up and equipped them with what agency you’re able; you know the fighting force’s strengths, abilities, and limitations, and understand how to work with and around them. And then, right at the end of the game, you’re thrown 1 more potential tool, and you suddenly have to decide whether you want to ignore him in favor of the full team you’re familiar with, or utilize him for his unique and useful qualities, but consequently have to determine which of the characters you know and crafted within your team must be left on the sidelines as a result.
In a game where party selection substantially affects your gameplay strategies thanks to the variety of cooperative techniques party members have with each other, and where there’s a decently significant element of customization when it comes to battle skills, what is the damn point of I Am Setsuna’s Fides? Yeah, I spent the entire game becoming familiar with and fine-tuning the other 6 party members to work as a unit exactly to the play style I want, but why not throw all that out of the window and take this new guy out for a test run right as the game’s ending? Because that makes lots of sense.
I’m not asking for an RPG’s entire cast to be assembled and rarin’ to go by the time the game’s opening is finished. In fact, that can even be a little boring--Wild Arms 1’s cast was pretty lackluster to start with, and not having any hope of seeing more party members come and liven things up later on didn’t help. Being able to look forward to the personalities who will join a quest, and the circumstances around their recruitment, is a fun part of RPGs. But I think it’s probably a good rule of thumb that by right around the halfway mark of your game, the whole party should be formed, because past that point, characters’ stories should be heading toward resolution, not just starting, and their relationships to one another and the plot should be well on their way to the final, cemented overall dynamic. And past that point, it stops being a novelty and starts being an annoyance to start tweaking your gameplay strategies and dynamics around all over again to test out and potentially incorporate this new dimension. RPGs should start operating on university rules here: you show up late for class, you don’t get in.
* Okay, okay, so you CAN, after getting Fides, exit the final dungeon, and there are a few very short story sidequests to engage in before the final battle, similar to Chrono Trigger, which is almost certainly intentional, given the influence CT clearly had on IAS. Unlike CT, though, you’re never given any narrative nudge or even hint that there’s anything more left to the game than the last battle...and most of the endgame sidequests are just talking to someone, beating a special enemy, and calling it a day., so no matter how generously you want to view the situation, it’s really not very different than how I described it.
Sunday, November 8, 2020
General RPGs' Last Minute Party Members
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I usually like last-minute party members, personally. There's way too many factors for me to just say that developers shouldn't incorporate new playable characters after the first half of a game. For instance, the old Fire Emblem games constantly add party members because of the permadeath; for some gamers, the new recruits can be essential from a gameplay perspective. I can't say I'm mad about any Suikoden games having late-game party members. For me, most of the appeal of the series is recruiting party members, so the second half of a Suikoden game would be much worse than the first if party recruitment stopped entirely. If anything, the Suikoden writers just need to make sure that the most important party members tend to join earlier rather than late (of the 106 Stars of Destiny, only around 15-20 ever matter to the main narrative, from my experience with the series).
ReplyDeleteRPGs also handle character development (gameplay-wise, that is) differently. In some RPGs, late party member recruitment isn't much of an issue in terms of gameplay since the skill advancement is fairly simple. A game like Final Fantasy IV introduces new characters quite frequently since spells are mostly learned through levelling up; in contrast, Final Fantasy V is all about its job system, so it makes sense for the party to remain the same throughout the game (and it comes up with a dumb plot contrivance to make it less annoying for the one character change that happens around two-thirds the way through FFV).
As far as writing goes, new party members will vary a lot, too, in terms of how they're written. Characters don't need to actively be in the party in order to develop or interact with the rest of the cast. That's why I think a lot of antagonists work well as late game recruits; they interact with the party early on by opposing them, and simply having them join the party later on can be a resolution to a character arc (that's what happens with Leo in Lunar 2, and Magus from Chrono Trigger is another solid example). In Final Fantasy Tactics, characters actually receive more development before you recruit them (characters like Agrias and Orlandu mysteriously vanish from the main plot as soon as they're recruited, since all non-Ramza characters can die in any battle). Hence, in Final Fantasy Tactics, characters have a better chance of having a good arc if they're a late recruit. Most modern Fire Emblem games develop characters through support conversations, so the number of support conversations they have is more important than when they join, generally speaking. Meanwhile, it doesn't really matter when any character joins the party in Chrono Cross; the party members in Chrono Cross receive virtually no development, regardless of who they are or when they're recruited.
Besides what I've written, I always just like new bonus characters who appear late as rewards. Umaro and Gogo don't really serve the plot of Final Fantasy VI in any way, and they don't need to be recruited at all, but it's just fun that you can recruit them at all (and then probably never use them, at least in Umaro's case).
If the purpose of the very late recruits in an older Fire Emblem game is to make up for previous characters' permanent deaths, though, then why include perma-death to begin with? I mean, it's basically establishing an extra degree of difficulty for the sake of challenge, but then adding a crutch to make up for that extra difficulty, even though the difficulty was a conscious choice justified by its own nature.
DeleteAs for Suikoden, sure, the character recruitment is a strong draw for the game, but there's still a point at which it just starts feeling empty due to how last-minute the character is joining. These are the 108 Stars of DESTINY; it feels rather bizarre for a character's presence to be the stuff of fate and history yet unwritten when they show up so late that there's not enough story left that they can contribute to it.
And yes, characters can have significant roles even before being added to the party, but it's still frequently lacking compared to other characters. Leo and Magus do indeed have large roles to play in their games before they join the party, but those roles are big for NPCs, not for party members - you get to know many times more about Magus in the scene in which he is recruited, and from even his reluctant and limited interactions with the others, than you do from his role in the game up to that point, and the same is true of Leo - Leo may have his whole learning-to-doubt-his-orders character arc for the first half of the game outside the party, and it's decent enough I guess, but it's far less involved than the character arcs of Ronfar, Jean, and Lemina, who ARE in the party, and their consistent presence allows for frequent, simple interactions with one another that personalize and develop them in ways Leo doesn't have access to at that point. Only after he's actually in the party does Leo become more rounded-out as a character and become involved in meatier character development scenarios that bring out as much of his potential as he has to offer (which admittedly isn't much; this IS Lunar 2, after all).
Admittedly, Leo is an odd example anyway, since he joins up, if memory serves, more around the halfway mark, maybe 60% of the way through, the main quest, so I wouldn't really call him a last-minute character anyway. But the point is made just as well with him anyway - his pre-recruitment involvement may have been decent, but it's when he has the most narrative focus the game can offer him, as a party member, that he's best utilized as a character. So for a character who actually DOES join really late, they're going to have less opportunity to develop to the potential they should, even, in many cases, when they've had a good bit of a role in the game prior.
I acknowledge the logic of a lot of what you're saying, but I do still stick by what I've said in the rant: this practice is a negative overall.
The late-game characters in old Fire Emblem games are never as good as characters recruited earlier. The late-game characters are a concession to help make things more manageable. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how much these late recruits help, since I always reset a Fire Emblem game with permadeath if I lose a party member. Either way, when characters are recruited in Fire Emblem games don't usually have much impact on their development. In older Fire Emblems, none of the characters are substantially developed; in newer Fire Emblems, character development often occurs in support conversations, which exist outside the main narrative (so, how much of a character's scenes you see depends on how much time you're willing to spend grinding out support conversations).
DeleteI guess I never found recruiting characters to be empty in Suikoden games. I do think that many of them are fairly underdeveloped, which is not surprising for games with such large casts. I also think that Konami got better with giving appropriate screen time to the casts in the series. The main figures in Suikoden V are all introduced early, while Suikoden III does a nice job of segregating its most important characters into three groups.
Both Leo and Magus are kind of odd examples. I wouldn't say that Leo's character arc is that much less involved than the other characters, but, yeah, he shows up twice in the party briefly before joining permanently in the final dungeon (he joins in the epilogue, too, so he's in the main party for the last 20% of the game or so).
Magus is a strange example since the player doesn't need to recruit him. If you think he shouldn't join, you don't have to let him. I like how you can tie up a few loose ends for Magus by recruiting him, but I especially like how Magus never feels like he really belongs in the group. He can't do any Double Techs with the other party members, and you have to go out of your way to make him party of any Triple Techs (it isn't worth it, in my view). He acts like an outsider both in the story and gameplay after joining up.
Anyway, I probably have two main disagreements to the idea that party members shouldn't join after the game is half over. One, I don't think that every party member needs to be fully fleshed out in every game. Some might just sort of be there (like Quina in Final Fantasy IX), and I'm okay with that, so long as other characters, especially the main character, are sufficiently developed. Two, I'm generally opposed to any kind of "rule" for writing games. Part of what I enjoy about late-game recruits is that their recruitment can be surprising (I definitely didn't think Magus would join in Chrono Trigger), and games are less surprising, in general, if everybody does things the same way. And, in a case like this one, I simply don't think that every writer has done a bad job of handling late party members.
That said, some character-centric games definitely demonstrate how problematic having characters join late can be. The Tales series is all about party member interactions, so it can be an issue if party members in those games join late. Haru joins late in Persona 5, and a lot of fans have complaint about how half-baked she feels next to the rest of the cast (I'm not sure if Persona 5 Royal: Buy Our Game Again rectifies this issue, since I've only purchased the original Persona 5).
I may be misremembering - didn't Leo join you after all the plot twist shit goes down and you have to re-gather all the party members? Or did he only let you borrow the keys to his car? If it's the latter, then yes, even considering the (decently sized) epilogue and the bits where he joined temporarily in the main quest, he would count as a last-minute character, as you say.
DeleteI guess we just have different minds as far as what a character in a party should be. I don't like party members who are just sort of there; Quina is, to me, 1 of Final Fantasy 9's few flaws (although it is, in fairness, still able to interact with other characters and the plot well enough to serve at least some sort of interpersonal role; Quina's at least not, say, Noel from Star Ocean 2). Like, a game like Suikoden, sure, throw me some superhero squirrels without any real explanation if you want; the whole "everybody does their part even if it's minor" thing is a part of a large country-based story like that so it works (while Sonya, whose narrative design has a lot of weight and potential, SHOULD have more time to develop than she gets). But in a more standard-sized party like FF9, in a game where the characters are essential factors and interactors in the story, Quina's not what it should be. I still think surprise-joiners like Fides and Magus could have been pleasant surprises had they joined while there was still enough game left to flesh them out with interactions and even a character arc or 2.
Yeah, Leo just gives the keys to the Dragonship Destiny in Act 2 of the game; he only joins the party briefly on two occasions before joining permanently right before the final dungeon. I'd say he's a permanent party member for maybe 20% of the game, if the epilogue is included.
DeleteAnd it seems we do disagree about what party members should be. I think that party members should do three things: provide something to the story, interact with each other, and be useful in battle. I can forgive some other failings if a party member is really great in battle, which is the case with Quina. I also think that Quina adds a fair bit of humor to Final Fantasy IX, though; I love the scene where Quina "marries" Vivi, and I think the game gets a fair amount of comedy out of how little anyone cares about Quina. Zidane and the gang often forget about Quina entirely and ditch him/her, and I like how Zidane is pissed off when he gets paired with Quina during the elemental shrine segment of the story. To me, Quina is a self-aware example of the person who doesn't belong in a group who isn't much liked by everyone else. Quina doesn't actively annoy me and I regularly include Quina in my party, so he/she is fairly low on my list of worst party members.
And, personally, Amarant is easily the character I despise the most in Final Fantasy IX. I don't like him much as a character, I don't think he adds much to the story, I don't believe his interactions with the rest of the cast are very interesting, and I don't like using him in battle. He also happens to be a late addition to the party, so, in my opinion, he's an example that proves your point in this rant. Then again, I also think that the first five party members in Final Fantasy IX (Zidane, Dagger, Vivi, Steiner, and Freya) are its best characters (albeit, I'd gladly trade Steiner for Beatrix in a heartbeat), so I'd say that the game, in general, proves your point.