Pokemon Generation 8's Laziness

Man, even by Pokemon’s low standards, Game Freak really, really phoned it in on Generation 8.

Look, I knew, deep in my heart, that Generation 7 was going to be a singular, happy outlier.  A 1-time miracle.  I know I did that rant in which I expressed hopeful optimism that the themes and quality of Sun and Moon’s writing represented the first step to the series evolving into something compelling, and I did hold that hope in my heart, but realistically, I never did expect to be vindicated.  Sometimes a Lufia 2 happens.  You just have to be happy when a Wild Arms 3 drops out of the sky, because you won’t see it again.  Every now and then, a game comes along whose high quality makes it a bizarre outlier in the rest of its series, and you just have to enjoy these Dragon Quest 8s when they come along and accept their passing.  I get that, and I did not expect Pokemon Generation 8 to continue 7’s remarkable, out of character quality.  I fully expected that, when Sword and Shield came, we’d see a return to the usual bland, shallow, careless writing that has typified the Pokemon experience since Red and Blue.

What I really didn’t expect was that Game Freak would manage to be even lazier than that.

When you play a typical Pokemon game, there’s a plot.  I mean, sort of.  There’s a general stab in the dark at a plot, at least.  It’s not always good, but it’s there.  Maybe there’s a team of bad guys out there stealing Pokemon for the sake of crime.  Perhaps there’s a group of exceptionally stupid morons fighting each other to completely needlessly rearrange the planet’s continental feng shui.  Could be that there’s a bunch of pretend animal rights activists who are actually basically just Team Rocket with a better PR department.  Possibly there’s some guy trying to undo the universe, become God, and then remake all of creation as he sees fit.*  But whether it’s barely written, badly written, poorly written, or unexpectedly sort of halfway decently written, there IS a story going on in the Pokemon titles prior to 7.  There’s a narrative in which the protagonist of the game DOES become involved, throughout the game’s course, and plays a sustained role in resolving.

Generation 8 decides to take a different direction with things, and actively tell you to mind your own goddamn business whenever the subject of the plot is brought up.

Seriously!  During the course of Sword and Shield, there are some events** going on in the background, which you will occasionally...well, the term “cross paths with” implies way too close a facsimile of involvement.  Let’s say instead that there will occasionally be times during Generation 8 in which you can see from a distance that something is actually happening in the region.  But without fail, every time this happens, you’re told by a nearby NPC not to worry about it, and just concentrate on your stupid, generic badge-collecting journey.  It’s like every single person in the region is a cop parroting the cliched “Move along, nothing to see here,” line, throughout the whole game.

Think about that for a second!  Just, like, really take in the fact that Pokemon Generation 8 is a game that makes an active effort to excommunicate the protagonist from the plot.  Because with the exception of a few moments of learning some vague, generic snippets of lore for the region with Sonia, whose archeological and investigative skills are more on par with those of a bored tourist than a professor’s assistant, that is the entirety of the Sword and Shield experience right up to the final 2 hours or so.  It’s a game that excludes the player from its story.

Imagine if the first 70 minutes of Star Wars was just watching Luke walking to Tosche Station for those power converters.  Occasionally he’ll see some distant indication that there’s an intergalactic war going on, but every time he notices it, Uncle Owen (Leon) pops up out of nowhere and says “Don’t you worry none about all that hoo-hah, boy, you just mind your own (Com)beeswax and keep gettin’ on over to Tosche Station. Power converters are ALL that should matter to ye, ya blue milk-swillin’ chump!”  Interspersed by a rare visit from Obi-Wan (Sonia), who’s just there to sprinkle a couple historical factoids about lightsabers and the Force around.  Oh yeah, and for some reason Jar Jar Binks (Hop) is always around.

And then, finally, in the last 11 minutes, Luke gets to fly an X-Wing and blow up the Death Star, but only after Uncle Owen had had a go at it first and widened the exhaust port, and only with Jar Jar jammed in the cockpit with Luke to help pull the trigger, thus significantly lessening the scope of Luke’s accomplishment.  Because Arceus forbid Generation 8 gives us a break from Hop or stops Lickitunging Leon’s ass for a full 2 minutes.

At the very least, I guess it’s a unique approach to treat the interaction between plot and player like that of popular girls excluding some kid they disapprove of in elementary school.  Not quite what I meant when I said I wanted more creativity in the writing for this series, though.  Just...imagine being so incredibly lazy and incompetent that the effort of writing a story as mundane and careless as Pokemon Generation 1’s plot is STILL more work than you’re willing to do while on the clock for the better part of 2 years.  Imagine looking at the bare outline you’ve made for a story, and deciding that it is also the final draft.

This isn’t the only stupid, annoying flaw of Pokemon Generation 8, of course.  Hop is an uninteresting, boring, pointless waste of space.  A mechanic of having random-encounters try to chase the player down is annoying; the whole point of tall grass in Pokemon is that the player has some agency in deciding whether he/she feels like catching more Pokemon at that moment.***  Bede is basically the antagonist version of a fart--unpleasant to experience for a couple seconds, and yet, in spite of how unlikable he was, utterly and completely forgotten a few moments later.  Even considering that the player is basically shoved violently away from him at every opportunity, Rose is still surprisingly empty and boring, and Eternatus may be the least remarkable Legendary Pokemon to date.  The new Pokemon themselves, for that matter, are the saddest bunch of blah since Generation 2.  The post-game content is tiresome, stupid trash--I sincerely don’t give a shit about Hop’s self-esteem, the villains are shallow, dithering morons who put Dr. Wiley to shame when it comes to immediate and insincere defeated groveling, and is it just me or does Sonia get disproportionately bent out of shape about the betrayal by her intern when the intern is brand new, has a generic character model, and doesn’t even have a name?****

Plus, of course, there’s Leon, who is a happy-go-lucky dipshit well worth a rant all on his own.  Expect that one in the very near future.

Nonetheless, even if Generation 8 is otherwise a meaningless, unappealing mess as a whole, what truly stands out about it and makes it the worst entry of the series is this baffling, lazy, utterly counter-productive exclusion of the protagonist from their own adventure.  Some players complain when an RPG railroads them from 1 plot point to the next; Sword and Shield, by contrast, railroads the player into the middle of nowhere, away from their destination.  Generation 3 might have been dumb as hell, Generation 1 might have been stale and threadbare, Generation 5 might have been a cowardly betrayal of its own premise...but in none of them did the Champion of the region essentially hide the story behind his back, hold the protagonist away by the head, and sneer “Stop thinking about nerdy shit and go play some more sports, dork!” for the whole game.  Pokemon Sword and Shield is a true testament to sloth, a waste of time defined by its writers’ uniquely assertive take on avoiding the labor they’re paid to perform.





















* Is it just me, or did the stakes with Cyrus seem wildly higher than they were for any other conflict in the series?  It’s like a real RPG villain had to make ends meet and took a side gig with Nintendo in his free time.  Seriously, the guy just basically is Hikawa from SMT3!


** Although I would like to take the opportunity to mention that these events are NOT especially big or interesting.  It’s basically a business guy, Rose, freaking out about the fact that there might be an energy crisis 1000 years in the future, and the region’s star athlete, Leon, telling him to chill the fuck out about it.  Not so much because Leon believes that there’s enough time in the coming millennium to find a solution to the problem, as would be reasonable, but more because Leon doesn’t want to delay Sports! for even a moment to deal with the issue.  You can bet your butt(erfree) that Leon would give not a tenth of a shit more about this issue if the lights were gonna go out in the region the next day.


*** Credit where it’s due, though: it IS a good thing that we finally see the random encounter Pokemon on the main screen.  In a series that’s all about catching the Pokemon you want and avoiding the ones you don’t like (or avoiding duplicates if you’re out for a half-of-Noah’s-Ark approach), that’s a pretty great quality-of-life feature.

...Of course, you wouldn’t think it’d have taken 25 years to figure out how to give the player this small, obvious piece of autonomy, but hey, cut Game Freak a break, we can’t all be as technologically advanced as Chrono Trigger was in 1995.


**** Although I suppose I have to at least acknowledge that the post-game adventure represents the first time in this game where you’re actually allowed to be a part of the plot.  Yeah, apparently it took until the game was over for Nintendo’s writers to feel like opening a word processor.

Pokemon Generation 8's Downloadable Content

I can’t even fathom how boring this is going to be.  DLC is already the part of a game least likely to be interesting or worthwhile, in my experience, and Nintendo especially has a bad track record with it.  And that’s DLC for games that are otherwise good to some degree.  What will a less engaging piece of Pokemon Generation 8 even look like?  After the main game, my expectations are low enough that I might count it as a win if The Isle of Armor isn’t entirely a minigame about laundering your underwear and The Crown Tundra isn’t a snow shoveling simulator.

Then again, who knows?  Maybe Game Freak hunkered down, got serious, and actually gave an honest effort to making these DLCs, to make up for the blahpocalypse they’d foisted on us with the main game.  We live in a world where shrimp can make implosions as hot as the sun with their punches and Alex Kurtzman hasn’t been literally torn apart by a mob, so clearly anything is possible.



The Isle of Armor: I’m sorry, Nintendo, you want me to find how many Diglets?  I thought you just said 150.  It sure looked like 150.  But I know that’s impossible, because if you were asking me to find fucking 100 fucking 50 fucking Diglets, you’d trigger a Gold Skulltula episode in me and I’d have to charter an international journey to your offices to murder every last 1 of you.

For real, though, here’s the deal: this DLC is boring.  Shocker, isn’t it?  Something related to Pokemon: Generation 8 isn’t especially compelling?  Truly a surprise.  Basically, the entire plot of this add-on is that you travel to a little island, join a dojo, become a master at said dojo, and raise a martial arts bear Pokemon.  And if you’re thinking to yourself that most of that premise sounds like it’d have trouble filling the expected time and content of most games’ tertiary sidequests, then congratulations, you’re too smart to work at Game Freak!

Not that a small premise can’t be entertaining, of course.  With the right cast and the right content, anything can be a compelling story; hell, Non Non Biyori made a gripping sports anime scene out of a recess game of knocking rulers off a desk.  Unfortunately, however, the content of your rise to the top ranks of the dojo is mostly uninspired time-padding sidequest errands, given by and connected to by-the-numbers NPC characters and a mildly annoying antagonist whose personal story is facile and forgettable.  All so that you can be the top dog at some mom-and-pop dojo that they keep touting as a place Leon trained at.  Yeah, because that’s a ringing endorsement.

And then later, Hop shows up.  Yaaaayyyyy.

I will give The Isle of Armor a bit of credit on the point of Kubfu, or at least for the concept behind it.  Eventually you’re given a little martial arts bear Pokemon called Kubfu, and tasked with completing sidequests that are designed to build a friendship with him/her.  This is actually a really good idea!  It’s a totally different avenue to acquiring Pokemon, wherein the process is you going to the trouble to do things to build a real, creditably positive relationship with the creature that you’re going to expect to fight for your benefit.  The idea of approaching Pokemon collection as something that’s at least somewhat a 2-way street, of earning their trust and friendship rather than just magicking them into a tiny ball without consent and moving on, is a great direction to take.  One which you’d THINK the series would have started implementing decades ago to try to prove its bullshit about trainer-Pokemon relations not being inherently immoral!  The idea that you’d actually have to earn Kubfu as a companion, create an emotional basis for his/her willingness to fight for you, is definitely a step in the right direction.

Sadly, the actual process of this is uninvolved and insubstantial.  And, as the stupid Let’s Player I watched* demonstrated, there is absolutely nothing stopping the player, once Kubfu’s personal journey is over with, from just sticking him/her in the PC and forgetting about him/her forever, which really does undercut the lasting impact of the journey of friendship you both went on together.**  Obviously that’s a matter of what the player decides, but seeing it happen before my eyes did kinda lessen what slight hold the story of Kubfu and Gloria’s blossoming friendship had upon me.

Still, as I said, the idea behind the Kubfu part of this DLC is a good one.  If Game Freak had actually given it the slightest effort, it might even have been good!  But they didn’t, nor did they appear to try at any other part of The Isle of Armor’s story, and so this DLC is as bland and purposeless as the rest of Generation 8.  Don’t waste your money on it.


The Crown Tundra: This one is kind of funny.  Not intentionally, mind you; writing jokes takes effort and effort is a foreign fucking concept to Game Freak.  But it’s funny in the sense that the whole thing feels kind of like an exasperated, frustrated parental meltdown.  It’s like Nintendo's just so fucking tired of hearing the players whine about being dissatisfied with this subpar game, and this whole DLC is the company’s response of, “Fine!  FINE!  You win!  What do you want?  You want Legendaries?  GO AHEAD!  Take them, take them all, just take every goddamn one, I don’t even care any more!” as they grab Rayquazas and Mewtwos out of a sack and hurl them at the players’ faces.

The possibility that the Legendary Pokemon pandering overload in this DLC is an actual temper tantrum notwithstanding, I guess I would say that The Crown Tundra is the best thing about Pokemon Sword and Shield.  Not because it’s good, because it unequivocally is not, but because this is the first time that something in Pokemon Generation 8 has had a real, honest-to-Arceus plot in which you’re an actual participant.  It’s not exactly much of a story, basically boiling down to “help a has-been Pokemon trick a horse into letting him sit on it, and then track down some more Legendaries because some helicopter dad’s daughter ditched him on their family vacation and he’s lonely.”  But hey, even that crap still at least involves the protagonist being a legitimately important figure in the DLC’s events, so it’s a step up from having Leon tell you “Stop thinking about stuff and just go play sports, nerd,” every time you so much as think about trying to get involved in the main game’s plot.

Not helping matters is the fact that the major figures of this add-on are generic and boring as all hell.  Like, even Honey, Mustard, and the antagonists of The Isle of Armor had more personality and nuance than Peony, Peonia,*** and Calyrex.  Appropriate to Game Freak’s lack of interest in their work, Peony seems to be written under the assumption that cramming artificial enthusiasm into a person, and nothing else, is all you need to create a character--it feels kind of like someone who thinks the only thing you need to do to make an argument more convincing is to talk louder was the one to write Peony.  Peonia, meanwhile, is just basically the exaggeratedly weary sigh of a teenager made into a human being of its own, and Calyrex is little more than an exposition machine for himself.

I guess I can at least respect The Crown Tundra for the fact that the largest part of its story involves a quest to help Calyrex, a Pokemon, regain status as the famous forest king of local myth.  This involves directly interacting with Calyrex, including having him outright speak to you, and ends with Calyrex voluntarily becoming your Pokemon as a show of gratitude for your assistance in restoring him to his former glory.  Having a Pokemon consciously be the central figure in a plot arc, and having it regularly speak to the protagonist, is a hell of a huge step in humanizing Pokemon as a whole, and the idea of a Pokemon’s joining you by its choice instead of just because you decided to beat it within an inch of its life and trap it in a ball, is something that this series could really benefit from further exploring.  The fact that we’ve had both Calyrex and Kubfu, in a row, treat the act of becoming a kept Pokemon as voluntary, something that’s earned rather than demanded, could be a promising sign for this stupid series actually getting ready to develop into new directions with its storytelling.  Or it would be, if Nintendo hadn’t already disappointed similar optimism previously.  Still, it’s at least a decently respectable approach in the here and now.

Oh, right, there’s 1 other thing this DLC adds, that being the Galarian Star Tournament.  Basically, it’s an elimination tournament of team Pokemon battles with all the Gym Leaders and some other notable figures from the game and its add-ons.  The cool thing is that you can pick any partner you want!  Oh, but not her.  No, no, not her, either.  Um, and not him, obviously.  What’s the matter with you?  By “any,” Game Freak clearly meant “either Marnie or Hop, no one else.”  Duh.  What, you thought it might be mildly diverting to fight together with someone other than the most obvious characters you’ve already been teaming up with all game long?  Well too fucking bad; you can only do that after you’ve beaten the tournament once already and have absolutely no remaining reward- or story-related reason to go through it again.

Why?  Because Game Freak low-key hates you in a very passive-aggressive way, that’s fucking why.

Anyway, yeah, The Crown Tundra is boring and you shouldn’t bother spending your money on it.



Well, as expected, the verdict on Pokemon Generation 8’s add-ons is not a positive one.  I do think it’s safe to say that they’re probably some of the best content that the game has to offer, but much like the statement that My Hero Academia is 1 of the greatest shonen animes to date, this is less of a compliment to the 1 thing as it is an indictment against everything it’s compared to, to somehow be less than what is clearly garbage.  Nintendo keeps up its unbroken DLC losing streak with Pokemon Sword and Shield.















* You didn’t actually think I was going to PAY for these things, right?  I may not learn my lessons fast enough, but I do still learn them.  I’m not paying for another Nintendo DLC until I can verify ahead of time that the solitary character trait of 1 of its main actors isn’t just the way she sighs.


** It’s actually kinda sick, really.  The majority of becoming besties with Kubfu involves bringing him/her to various different scenic spots, seeing the world together.  So you can be both the person who opened Kubfu’s eyes to the joys and wonders of the world all around him/her, and the person that forever takes that away from Kubfu as you incarcerate him/her in a corner of a PC box.


*** At first it struck me as kinda weird and laughably vain that Peony basically named his daughter after himself, but then I remembered that people do this all the time in real life.  But then I remembered that I also think it’s weird and laughably vain when the real life people do that, too.

Final Fantasy 6's Shadow's Fear of Commitment

You know, looking back on it, I’m not sure that Shadow was quite as cool as we thought he was.

By all outward indications, of course, Shadow is really cool.  The guy’s covered head to toe in black, with that cool bandana thing; I can’t think of a single character that so succinctly, effectively pulls off the “ninja” aesthetic as Shadow does.*  He’s got a mysterious and dramatic past, which we only get glimpses into.  He’s an assassin-for-hire.  He’s got a trained killer dog that’s at all times about 2 seconds away from ripping someone’s throat out.  The guy appears for all the world to be a total badass.

But appearances deceive, and beneath that cold attitude and the ninja outfit, you will find a man with a raging, out-of-control phobia for commitment.

Seriously, Shadow is the most unreliable flake ever.  You know that bit in Scrubs, where JD keeps ditching Kim in order to get out of having to have a serious talk with her about their baby?  That’s basically Shadow the moment anyone possesses any expectation whatsoever of him.  The guy flees commitment like a frightened animal.

Oh, oh, okay.  I see the expression on your face.  I mean, I don’t, but I totally see the expression on the face that I’m imagining you have (you handsome devil, you).  You don’t believe me.  “You’re exaggerating again, Arpy,” is what the quirk of those gorgeous lips nestled beneath that debonair mustache tells me.  You think I’m making mountains of mooglehills again, huh?  Alright, then.  Let’s take a look at Shadow, all he does, and, more importantly, all that he leaves undone.

Our first major encounter with Shadow is during Sabin’s little story after the main party gets split up on the raft.  Seeing that Sabin is alone and lost, Shadow takes pity, for some reason, on the creatine colossus that can literally hold up an entire fucking house all by himself, and offers to help the guy make his way through this inhospitable area on his quest to reunite with brother and pals.  And full credit to Shadow, this is very nice of him...also completely at odds with the only thing we’ve heard about him previously, that being that, according to Locke, he’d slit his mama’s throat for a nickel.  But hey, I’m not gonna look a gift party member in the mouth, and not just out of respect for social distancing.

The thing is, though, at any given time, Shadow may decide, at the end of a battle, that he’s done playing tour guide, and run off.  This can occur (and has, to me) as early as the very first random encounter you have!  Even if Shadow doesn’t just up and run off at random, he’ll still ditch the party once Sabin and his new pal Cyan reach Baren Falls, far early of Sabin’s actually achieving his stated goal of catching up with his friends.

Now, I don’t, in fact, hold this initial Shadow outing against the guy.  This whole venture is a freebie that Shadow’s throwing Sabin out of the goodness of his heart, and, barring an unexpectedly early exit, Shadow’s helping Sabin with an all-out frontal assault on an entire military base, and escaping a moving train full of ghosts.  Hell, Shadow will join Sabin in fighting a goddamn phantom train while running in front of it!  That’s a heck of a job to perform gratis for a total stranger--if my own family asked me to help them fight an oncoming train in hand-to-wheel combat, I’d sure as hell charge them for the service, and that’s just a regular train, let alone a phantasmal locomotive ferrying the departed to the afterlife.  That shit takes balls of steel; Winston was a goddamn Ghostbuster and he still froze like a him in headlights in the same situation!  I think that, with all the shit that Shadow has put up with for Sabin by that point, the refusal to follow him in diving headfirst off the cliffs above a waterfall is entirely reasonable.

But let’s look at Shadow’s next appearance in the game, and the point at which his inconstance becomes a problematic and defining character trait.

After the battle for Narshe, the party heads to the west, and stops by a small town, where Shadow is hanging out.  If the party has at least 1 open slot, you’re given the option to hire Shadow on as a companion, for a sizable but generally affordable 3000 Gil.  Reunited with the badass merc and his killer pup once more, hurrah!

Until this ninja bitch randomly decides he’s earned his keep and decides to fuck off.

Yes, once again, Shadow’s fickle loyalty can display itself at any time at the end of battle.  The guy can leave the very first time you run into a random encounter, I’ve seen it happen!  And unlike the first time around, he’s not here out of the goodness of his heart; you paid for his services!

I’m sorry, Shadow, did the act of fighting exactly 4 bees with the help of a mage knight, a master samurai, and the most powerful sorceress in the entire Final Fantasy series really take you to your limit?  Was the random encounter with a pair of wolves just not worth multiple thousands of gil?  “Oh shit, I know I said I was the best of the best, but I didn’t realize you guys were gonna be going up against a couple of vultures!”

And if anything, it might actually be a good thing for him to run away sooner than later, because at this point in the game, changing the party at all requires you to go all the way back to Narshe.  If you get halfway through Zozo when Shadow suddenly remembers that he left the oven on, you find yourself with a choice: You can press onward, which is going to be difficult as Zozo is fairly challenging even to a full party, or you can go all the way back to Zozo’s exit, and then make a trek over half a continent to pick up Shadow’s replacement.

I dunno about you guys, but I haven’t personally worked many jobs in which it’s an understood and acceptable thing that its workers can, at any time, just decide to go on home and still expect the full day’s wages.

But hey, okay, we all knew Shadow was randomly unreliable in these early stages of the game.  From this point on, however, his presence in the party will be plot-mandated, so that means an end to his lack of commitment, right?

Not really.  If anything, I think it only gets worse from here!

Shadow’s next role in the game comes when the Returners and the Empire have teamed up to search for the Espers that had fled after rampaging through Vector.  The Empire hires Shadow to accompany them all and assist in the search efforts.  Here’s how that goes:

A: Shadow dodges answering Terra’s questions about love on the boat ride over, unable to commit even to a conversation.
B: While the party’s staying at the inn, Strago comes asking for help in the middle of the night because his granddaughter is trapped in a house on fire.  Shadow declines, remembering an article he read somewhere about the importance of getting a full 8 hours of sleep each night.
C: Realizing that his dog is less of a chickenshit than his owner and has left to help with the whole child-burning-to-death situation, Shadow begrudgingly goes off to save the day after all...on his own, that is, not with the party as a whole, because even when he’s working with the team, he’ll be damned if he works with the team.
D: Upon the party finally figuring out where the Espers are hiding, Shadow separates from them, saying that he’ll keep searching for the Espers in his own way.

Let’s just review that last one, shall we?  Shadow has been paid by the Empire to do 1 single thing: find the Espers.  That is the entire purpose of this mission.  It is the reason he has been hired.  So what’s he do the moment there’s a legitimate, likely lead?  He bails.  The very second a successful end to the job he’s been paid for is in sight, the man backs away from it faster than SquareEnix retreats from a good idea.  It’s like he has a mortal terror of satisfied employers.***  It’s kind of hard to blame the Empire for roughing him up off-screen afterwards, considering that he basically took their money and then actively avoided accomplishing the assignment he’d agreed to.

Which I’m not even fully convinced actually happened, at this point.  Terra and Locke see that Interceptor got hurt, and just assume that it means Shadow was attacked by the Empire.  But we really only have Shadow’s own word for that, when the party catches up with him on the Floating Continent.  But let me ask you this: if the Empire really had stabbed him in the back and left him for dead or whatever, would he be in a condition to join the party at full HP when they find him shortly afterward?  If he’d been badly wounded on the Floating Continent, by far the most dangerous and difficult area of the game up to this point (one could make the argument that it’s the most difficult dungeon of the game, period), would he really be able to just lie there on the ground for an hour or 2, completely left alone by the ferocious local fauna, until Celes and company happen by?  Something doesn’t add up about all that.

You want my theory?  I think Shadow dumped some tomato sauce on Interceptor, told him to go find the rest of the party knowing that they’d be so hopped up on Empire-hate that they’d just assume the worst (and probably thinking that this was also a great opportunity to ditch the commitment of pet ownership), then proceeded to kick back to finally enjoy some alone time with no one whining about stuff like “saving the world,” and “my granddaughter is burning to death,” and “contractual obligations.”

Conspiracy theory aside, however, what can’t be denied is that the Floating Continent once again displays Shadow’s inability to commit.  Sure, he’ll join the party for the ride, but when the heat’s on, he up and runs off again--when the group’s about to confront Gestahl and Kefka at the end, Shadow steps aside, spouts some melodramatic drivel about not deserving to fight alongside them because he’d sold his assistance to the Empire before, and runs off.

Okay, buddy, first of all?  That is a fucking stupid reason in and of itself, because if they had any objection to your prior allegiances, they’d probably have voiced it in the last 2 hours you guys have been running around this place.  It’s also all the dumber because, while the player can have whoever they want in the party, the plot of the game at this moment has a heavy preference for Celes being present, so Shadow is basically telling a former general of the Empire that his having taken a single, no-strings job to afford Interceptor’s preferred Killer Kibble brand makes him too dishonored to work together.  Furthermore, that assignment he took was the same one that Locke, Terra, and Celes were taking part in, except they didn’t even have the distancing factor of getting paid for it!

And lastly...Shadow?  Pal?  Amigo?  Compadre?  We’ve just established that you never even attempted to do the job the Empire hired you for, so technically, your slate’s still clean.  Get your ass back in the party you weasel.

But no, the party just wordlessly lets him run off.****

I wouldn’t be half surprised if, at the end of the Floating Continent sequence, while the whole place is coming apart, Shadow actually just happened to be strolling along contentedly, feeling pleased with himself that he had finally managed to ditch the Returners for good because surely they had already taken off, and then he comes up over a hill, and his heart drops as he sees them patiently waiting at the end of the fucking world for him and realizes that he’ll never be rid of these jerks.

Even Shadow’s mysterious past is all about him flaking out!  His old partner, suffering from terrible wounds, asks Shadow to finish him off?  Shadow runs off.  He shacks up with some lady who saved his life and puts a baby in her?  Shadow runs off without a word of explanation.  Oh, I’m sorry, no, he delivers his excuse to the woman’s dog about how his daughter'll be soooo much better without him.*****  As bullshit as his rationalization for skipping out on the party at the Floating Continent is, at least he told THEM about it, not their pet.  Then the dog decides to follow Shadow and become Interceptor, rather than stay with his proper owner, because apparently Shadow’s fear of commitment is so pronounced that it’s actually contagious.

The meme about Dad saying he’s going out to buy some cigarettes and using it as an opportunity to ditch his family?  Shadow manages somehow to be worse.  Than the meme.

Finally, once Kefka’s been defeated and the ending’s rolling, Shadow finishes his part in this tale true to form: he runs off from everyone else, tells Interceptor to take a hike, and finds himself a nice little corner in which to die, determined to enact Operation: Give Me NPC Status Or Give Me Death, which he didn’t get a chance to follow through on back at the Floating Continent.  Perhaps, as the game implies, this is the fitting and contented end to a man troubled by his past who has finally found a way to do something powerfully good to atone for his mistakes and is ready now to die as he should have years ago.

Me?  I think Shadow’s just so appalled at the fact that he actually accomplished a task expected of him, to the employer’s satisfaction, that he can’t bear to live with it.

Now obviously, this rant has just mostly been for laughs.  It’s basically an extension of a running joke that I had fun participating in during an old friend’s stream and wanted to perpetuate a little here.  This isn’t like my early rant on Locke, which was (and still is) entirely in earnest--I do actually like Shadow and think he’s a decent enough character.  Still, there is a bit of a pattern of commitment-avoidance there, and his excuses for running off all the time legitimately are illogical and dumb.  Also, it's hard to strongly deny that he's a kinda shitty person in regards to Relm and her mother.  So...yeah, mostly tongue-in-cheek today, but maybe also a decent bit of earnest criticism, here, too.
















* And this is a finer line to walk than you’d think.  With the bloated social preoccupation with ninjas that sank its teeth into the world at large 50 years ago and never, ever let go, the whole ninja thing is so overplayed that it’s actually really tough to design one that’s not so distinct that it looks like a generic anime character more than an actual ninja (Strider Hiryu, Izuna, and don’t even get me started on the entire Naruto series), or so simple and standard that it just comes off as a disposable henchman from a bad (read: any) 70s made-for-TV movie.  It’s kind of laudable** that Shadow manages to actually look like a ninja, but doesn’t just look like Ninja Brian, or Snake Eyes, or John Peter McAllister, or any given extra from the crappy season of Daredevil.


** Even more so when you consider Amano’s usual difficulty in drawing any character other than Anemic Shirley Temple In Her “Unfinished Goth Sketch” Phase.  Although, as always with Amano, the majority of the credit for the character’s true look should go to the saint(s) who translated his “I’ll put an excessive and confusing amount of detail into everything BUT the very character I’m being paid to create” doodles into actually functional sprites and in-game facial profiles.


*** Yeah, I know from the development perspective, Shadow needs to clear out so there’ll be room for Relm to join the party in the next dungeon.  But there are other, far more rational reasons why he could be leaving the party; it didn’t HAVE to be “now that we know where our targets will be, I’m going to deliberately go somewhere else, yet still pretend that I’m earnestly searching!”  The immediate reason that comes to mind, like the off-the-top-of-your-head-really-freaking-obvious-and-rational reason, would be that Shadow’s going to go find the other search team and report that they’ve got a lead.  Wouldn’t that make some basic, simple sense?  It’s a rational decision to coordinate both teams in such a way, he’d be the perfect guy for the job since he’s got a dog that can track down the other team, and it even provides a passive explanation for how everyone reunites in Thamasa once the Espers are found--that didn’t NEED explanation because it’s so minor a detail and you can easily just extrapolate Locke and Terra fetching the other team in the time between scenes, but still, having Shadow leave to report to General Leo and company would have been a natural lead-in to a scene that was gonna happen soon anyway.  But no, instead we get him basically just lying to us.


**** Again, I feel the need to point out that I do understand that Shadow’s not being here does NEED to occur.  The party needs a space open, after all, for Celes to suddenly fill if she’s not already there (not sure why they didn’t just make her a required character for this area instead, though, would’ve been sensible enough that she’d insist on being present to confront her former boss, and forcing some level-gaining for the character who was going to be the required protagonist for the following 5-ish hours would’ve been a good thing), and Shadow’s story role needs to be him showing up at the last moment to hold Kefka back.  But, again, this could have been easily accomplished by just having Shadow give a different stated reason for leaving.  The party just got done with a boss battle against Atma Weapon--why not have Shadow suddenly collapse, the battle having reopened the wounds that the Empire had (allegedly) inflicted on him earlier?  Or point out that he’s best utilized for sneak attacks what with the whole ninja thing, and run off to find a different path to launch an attack from so he can help the party more tactically?

I mean, in fairness, I’d probably still make fun of him in this rant and say these were just excuses.  But at least it’d seem like he was putting some sincere effort into flaking on them, instead of telling a group 25% populated by individuals who have previously collaborated in some form or another with the Empire that his own half-hearted cooperation stains his honor too much to help them.  The guy can’t even commit to finding a good excuse.


***** Big thanks to Ecclesiastes for informing me that, in the GBA remake of FF6, Shadow specifically states that it's his daughter that he's heroically walking out on.  Until this moment, I had just assumed that "the girl" referred to in the original SNES version was the woman who found him, and that he potentially had been unaware that his trumped up pretense of nobility was half-orphaning a child.  But as it turns out, even after I had already decided to write a rant about Mr. Abandon (Relation)Ship, Shadow is still more irresponsible than I'd believed.