Mass Effect 2's Thermal Clips

Mass Effect 1 was an inventive, awesome experience that opened a new science fiction world to its audience, one with the best kind of unlimited potential for the imagination to take hold of and explore.  It was more than just a space opera (though it was an excellent specimen of such), it was also a game that captured the exciting beauty inherent in interstellar exploration, the real-world majesty and promise of the cosmos that we as a species are still girding ourselves to engage in.  It was inevitable that ME1 would have a sequel...and while Mass Effect 2 was a far cry lesser than its predecessor, it was certainly an excellent and worthy continuation, and great in its own right.  What separates ME2 from the first game isn’t any particular failure, simply more a case of being unable to quite recapture the same magic that Mass Effect 1 seemed to effortlessly immerse itself within.  Less a shortcoming than just a different direction and perspective.

But Mass Effect 2 does have actual, demonstrable flaws.  And 1 of its more famous ones is the addition of the thermal clip to the game.  Basically, it’s like this: in Mass Effect 1, the firearm technology is so incredibly advanced that guns don’t actually use bullets any more.  Instead, you just stick a rod of metal in the firearm, and the gun’s inner workings shave tiny pieces off the matter, and use that as ammo, because with the technology of mass effects, every weapon can be a goddamn railgun, and that means anything solid shot from its barrel is more powerful than any conventional armament, even tiny metal shavings.  What this basically means is that all guns in Mass Effect 1 have limitless ammo, since you can stick a single rod in there and have enough ammo to perforate half a city.  The guns’ll overheat if you just keep firing them nonstop, forcing you to let them cool for a bit before continuing to fire, so it’s not like you can just run around reenacting Contra, but still, the benefits of guns that have essentially limitless ammo are fairly obvious.

And then, in Mass Effect 2, firearms "advance" again, as the technology of the Geth is reverse engineered, and now guns require thermal clips to fire.  Basically, while the ammo is still technically infinite, guns now refuse to fire if you don’t have a functional thermal clip in them to deal with the heat they generate, and you have to keep replacing these clips if you want to keep firing.  So, technically different from having limited ammo, but in practice, exactly the fucking same.  I think the explanation was that the Geth attack convinced the civilized galaxy that they wanted guns that could keep shooting faster for longer before needing a break due to overheating, or something, because the Geth’s own armaments had a very fast rate of fire thanks to this thermal clip system.

Riiiight.

This is not a new subject to criticize.  As explanations for gameplay limitations go, this one rates somewhere between the absurdity of why Fox couldn’t use his blaster in Star Fox Adventures, and that time EA tried to convince us that linear games don’t sell well any more.  Fans have been complaining and pointing out the utterly irrational stupidity behind this change from the moment ME2 hit the shelves.  Bioware’s decision to prioritize a gameplay mechanic they wanted more highly than what was right or natural for their story is well-documented.  And I’m not here to repeat it--the decision to switch from guns with infinite ammo to guns that stop working until you shove a new ammo-analogue into them is so transparently, obviously idiotic that there’s no damn need to; the only way you could possibly not figure it out yourself is if you happen to be a Bioware writer yourself.

So what am I here to do today, then?  Well, I’m here to point out the absurdity of the logistics of this change.

See, when the galaxy’s decision to switch to guns with limited ammunition is lambasted, the criticism is almost always based on how stupid and nonsensical it is to believe that a community of rational, thinking beings would consciously completely abandon weapons with limitless ammunition in all their military endeavors.  But what no one seems to realize is that this isn’t just a failure in storytelling from that angle--it’s also an outright plot hole.  Beyond how dumb it is, the galaxy’s universal adoption of the thermal-clip-based firearm is a logistical impossibility.

Consider the following facts for a moment.  A: In every firefight Shepard gets into in ME2 (and ME3), he can retrieve the thermal clips from the corpses of his fallen opponents.  B: The only guns Shepard has any option to obtain in ME2, period, are the ones that depend on thermal clips.  And most importantly, C: The events of Mass Effect 2 take place 2 years after those of Mass Effect 1.  A and B mean that, by all observable evidence, essentially all armed individuals in the galaxy are using the new thermal-clip-reliant guns (since the models of ME1 did not have thermal cooling capabilities adequate for the new weaponry, or else there wouldn’t have been new weaponry, so Shepard can’t be collecting thermal clips from enemies using the guns from ME1).  This is a conclusion generally backed up by the games themselves, too; I’m using A and B to prove a point that’s already implied anyway.  And when combined with C, this means that within the span of 2 years and no more than that, the entirety of a galaxy’s civilizations completely rearmed themselves with an entirely new stock of guns.

There are more than half a dozen different space-faring civilizations in Mass Effect, and every 1 of them had their entire military completely swap out their old firearms for new ones, uniformly and universally.  And not just their military, but their police, their security guards, their bodyguards, and anyone else whose job entails the possession and potential use of a firearm.  On every official level, military to law enforcement to civilian, a complete overhaul of weapons inventory has occurred   Think about that--think about the logistics of manufacturing literal millions if not billions of handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and so on to completely rearm every Council Race’s military entirely.  Of transporting those millions of guns.  Of retraining all users of these firearms, who are used to working with weapons without a thermal clip mechanic.  Of, for that matter, manufacturing billions of spare thermal clips for those weapons, then transporting them, stocking them, and storing them, for thousands of separate gun-using groups within each species.

It’s legitimately not possible.  If the Council Races had started rearming on the day that Sovereign got wrecked in Mass Effect 1, there’s still no conceivable way that by the time Sleeping Beauty pulls his ass off the lab table, resumes saving the universe, and starts working on hitting that Quarian booty, the entire civilized galaxy has thoroughly replaced every firearm in circulation and reserve.

And that’s generously giving the entirety of the 2 years to this process, which is infeasible in and of itself.  There’s no way that reverse-engineering the Geth weaponry was done immediately, even if the Council scientists were able to get a head-start thanks to Shepard’s general exploits in ME1.  There’s no way that the process wouldn’t be delayed by debate and discussion on every level of the Council and the races within it.  There’s no way every single institution using firearms would be immediately willing or even able to foot the bill to completely change out its inventory.*  A private security firm or a police department isn’t gonna need the latest tech for every single agent and every single operation they undertake--and that’s not even accounting for the usual capitalistic reticence to ever pay for new equipment if it’s in any way possible to avoid it, even when that new equipment is needed.  There’s no way the firearms’ designs would be immediately hashed out and able to be manufactured from the very start, even if the Geth tech had been reverse-engineered on Day 1.  There’s no way the manufacturing facilities wouldn’t need some time to be set up, and the lines from production to transportation established.  Even if it were somehow rationally possible for the entirety of the civilized galaxy to rearm itself entirely in the span of 2 years, it wouldn’t actually have those full 2 years to do so!

And it only gets worse when you consider that most of Mass Effect 2 takes place in the uncivilized frontiers of the galaxy, outside of Council space.  Are you trying to tell me that in addition to all the legitimate, official institutions of the galaxy fully restocking themselves with the latest weaponry, every single mercenary outfit, crime organization, and terrorist cell also went out of its way to acquire enough brand new guns for their every single member?  The thugs operating in the back alleys of Omega, they’re outfitted with weapon technology that’s on the exact same level as the highest military special forces operatives?  The Batarian Hegemony exists as a hostile faction proudly separated from the rest of the galaxy’s races, which has no reason to care about the threat of the Geth to the races of Council space,** but they’re 100% on board with following the Council’s decision to completely change the way all personal firearms work?  And then they somehow acquire and voluntarily adopt this outside technology, and even stick to the same schedule for this overhaul?

The fact is that when the chips are down, when all is said and done, the writers of an RPG or other work have a bunker they can crawl into when it comes to a character making illogical or uncharacteristic decisions.  George Lucas, the fucktards in charge of Star Trek: Picard, whoever was writing Shion in Xenosaga 3, every creative mind on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise past the first movie, and definitely Bioware, they’re all very fond of this little impenetrable defense: they’re the writers, and what they say goes.  No matter how out of character, no matter how outright stupid, there is nothing technically impossible about most badly-written character decisions.  So the irrationality of the galaxy as a collective whole abandoning infinite-ammo weaponry entirely in favor of the heat sink system we see in Mass Effect 2 may be truly staggering, and every critique made against it may be completely legitimate, but Bioware’s writers can still dive into their little panic room, the same one they keep on hand for when someone so much as glances inquisitively at Dragon Age 2’s Anders, and insist that thermal clips are just what all the military experts across the galaxy unanimously agreed on, and in the end, that can’t be disproven.  Bioware even used this fact to mock its detractors on this point through the banter of Conrad and Shepard later in ME3, with Conrad pointing out how illogical the decision was and Shepard just coming back with “well that’s what the smart people wanted so I guess you must be wrong, buddy.”

But the logistics of basic possibility?  That’s a different matter.  It doesn’t matter how many battle experts Bioware tells us agreed on changing the system when the scope of that change simply could not be accomplished.  And that’s why I’ve always been surprised that on the many, many occasions when the thermal clip thing is criticized, the arguments almost always seem to be purely based on the irrationality of it, and never mention the fact that, beyond its stupidity, it’s also outright and obviously impossible.  Because it’s the latter point of debate that Bioware can’t just wave away: there is not even the faintest possibility that every corner of the civilized and uncivilized galaxy could have changed their armaments as thoroughly as they’re shown and said to have in the 2 years between Mass Effect 1 and 2.  The thermal clip system isn’t just stupid, it’s impossible, and it represents a failure on Bioware’s part.















* There’re thermal clips to be found during a mission in Mass Effect 2 in which Shepard has to put down some Geth that have reactivated and taken control of a Quarian vessel.  So apparently, we’re supposed to believe either that Tali didn’t happen to notice that every Geth arm she shipped home to be analyzed was holding a gun, or that the Quarians, famous scavengers who as a species can barely afford the duct tape that’s holding half their ships together, splurged on outfitting themselves with brand new guns.  Or maybe the Quarians just purchased a bunch of thermal clips, for guns they can’t afford.  It’s all equally ludicrous.

And that’s not even getting into the outright plothole that is Jacob’s Loyalty mission.


** For that matter, why would the merc groups and criminals care about their weapons being designed to better fight Geth, either?  Everything they intend to use their guns for is going to involve non-Geth targets.

General RPGs' Poison Status Ailment

The most common status ailment in RPGs, besides KO/Unconscious/Dead (which sort of doesn’t count anyway), is probably Poison.  Silence, Petrify, Paralyze, Bleed, Confuse, Sleep, they’re all popular and common enough, but when all is said and done, if your RPG has status ailments, the only 1 that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see within their ranks every time, is Poison.  Hell, the Poison status ailment will even show up to RPGs where it’s completely redundant--Mass Effect 3, for example, already has a Burning status ailment which gradually lowers HP, but it still has Poison, too, to do the same thing.  Poison is as much a bedrock of the RPG formula as swords, menus, and lazily using "The Legend of" as a way of getting out of creating a real title for the game.

Too bad it doesn’t really make much sense most of the time.

See, here’s the thing.  99% of the time, the Poison status effect causes a character’s HP to deplete by a set amount each turn.  Sometimes it can kill a character, but more often, it’ll bring them to 1 HP but never take them below it.*  Either way, though, Poison’s main thing, and almost always its only thing, is a gradual lowering of HP.  Which...really doesn’t have much to do with real, actual poison.

I mean, yeah, you can look at a process of gradually lowering HP as a case of having a poison gradually killing you.  And to be sure, gradually worsening your physical condition is definitely what poisons generally do.  But you could more effectively simulate that through a condition like Final Fantasy’s Countdown status ailment, wherein your character just straight up dies after a set number of turns.  Because, honestly, the symptoms that poisons generally induce really just don’t connect to the idea of constant HP loss.

Here are the most common effects of poisoning upon the human body in real life, according to familydoctor.org: Nausea and/or Vomiting, Diarrhea, Rash, Redness or Sores around the Mouth, Dry Mouth, Drooling or Foaming at the Mouth, Trouble Breathing, Dilated Pupils or Constricted Pupils, Confusion, Fainting, and Shaking or Seizures.  Quite a nasty little list, isn’t it?  And I think it’s only fair to add Paralysis to that list, because I believe that list is more about ingested poisons, and not toxins that have been introduced into your system by venomous creatures, which is actually the more common cause of Poison status in games.**  And from what I understand, paralysis is a common and very dangerous part of a LOT of venom.

But really, when you look at that list, not a lot of it really seems like it lines up with constant HP loss.  I mean, when you get right down to it, HP loss is pretty easy to define, in terms of its representation in RPG combat: it represents standard, traditional harm upon one’s person.  When an enemy punches, stabs, slices, burns, freezes, melts, electrocutes, crushes, or does some other form of basic, wounding damage to a character, HP is lost to show that damage.  So a status ailment like Bleeding, or Burn, those make a lot of sense as ones defined by a continuous loss of HP, because bleeding represents an ongoing harm that continues to lessen the body’s ability to function and stay alive, and when you’re burning, well, the fire causing the pain and damage is ongoing until it’s put out.

But Poison’s symptoms?  They don’t really seem to add up to the same sort of basic harm that HP loss implies.  Even if it’s a debilitating internal matter, that sort of thing still seems more akin to other status ailments that affect characters’ abilities to act, rather than outright ongoing damage.  I guess nausea and vomiting work for HP loss in a couple of special cases like the Loathing and South Park games, where Disgust is an actual elemental force as much as Fire and Ice, but that’s as far as it goes, really.

What they ought to do is fully commit to the relative newcomer, Bleed, to be the constant HP-draining status ailment for RPGs, going forward,*** and rework Poison into an entirely new thing.  Like, they could make Poison into something really cool as status ailments go, transform it from the mild annoyance it’s been into 1 of the nastier, more powerful inflictions to suffer from.  What they could do is, each turn a character has Poison, they suffer a varying status effect associated with real-world poisons and venoms.  They might be paralyzed this round, or be silenced to simulate their throat closing up, or have a 40% penalty on physical attack damage as they suffer from seizures making it impossible to swing a sword correctly, and so on.  And then the next round, a new symptom of poisoning hits the character...but there’s only a 30% chance that the previous round’s symptom disappears, so as time goes on, these ailment symptoms continue to stack and make the character more and more incapable of fighting.  And you could even have the element of a descent in condition toward death, the way the original HP loss was presumably intended to imply, by having a rule that once a character’s accumulated 4 or 5 symptoms, they die.

That’d be kind of interesting, right?  And it’d certainly give Poison a bit more bite as an ailment, which seems more realistic to me.  Ingested or injected toxins ain’t generally something you can solve or temporarily delay by gritting your teeth and slapping a bandage on yourself.  Poison should be a status ailment with enough gravity that you want to make a priority of curing it.  I say leave the inconvenience of HP drain to Bleed, and make Poison the serious threat that it realistically should be.



















* Which is itself something that makes no sense.  Why in the world does Poison in RPGs so frequently refuse to be the factor that kills you?  If someone in real life is brought to the brink of death by poison, and that poison isn’t done running through their system, then it sure as hell isn’t gonna just sit back and wait for them to recover a bit before continuing about its business; it’ll just keep going and finish you off.  But apparently whoever designs the poisons in RPG Land is a downright gentleman about their debilitating toxins.  Of all methods of attack, you wouldn’t think that poison would be the one that insists on giving you a fighting chance.


** And since we’re on the subject, this makes Poison unrealistic in yet another way, since most enemies induce the effect in ways that make it venom, not poison.  I mean, mushroom enemies that release spores in the air that you breathe, sure, poison.  Mages that cast a spell that inflicts the status ailment, alright, poison.  But bites from snakes, spiders, and demons?  Stings from bees, scorpions, and jellyfish?  Wounds from assassins’ daggers, darts, and arrows?  That should called Venom, not Poison, if we want to be technically accurate.

I guess there ARE a few games that distinguish the 2 (Aldorlea Games titles, with their insatiable lust for collecting and inventing status ailments, frequently have both Poison and Venom).  But even they usually just seem to use the distinction as a way of making a more powerful version of the Poison status ailment, rather than distinguishing Venom by its origins and delivery.


*** And if they really want multiple HP-loss status ailments, they can always take a page out of South Park: The Fractured but Whole’s book and have Bleed and Hemorrhage be separate status ailments to accomplish this.  Not to mention that Burn still does the trick, too.

Final Fantasy Tactics's Faith Stat

The Faith stat in Final Fantasy Tactics is weird and doesn’t make much sense, when you think about it.  I mean, at first glance, it seems sensible enough--a stat representing the power of belief to influence the effectiveness of magic spells.  Magic being a highly indefinite force, what with the whole it’s-literally-magic thing it’s got going on, there’s no particular reason why its power shouldn’t have some basis on how strong its user’s and target’s belief in it, or the divine being it theoretically comes from, is.  And with FFT being a game whose events and setting are so specifically steeped in the actions and truth behind an organized religion that also serves as a world power, it certainly makes sense that Faith would be an appropriate stat to add to the regular mix.  Right?

Except for the fact that Faith isn’t a static, unchanging stat.  While it doesn’t change according to leveling up or changing job classes, like most of the rest of the stats in FFT, it is possible to intentionally raise or lower a unit’s Faith stat through the use of certain combat abilities.  And there’s even a quirky little feature in the game for when a unit’s Faith hits 95 or higher--that individual will decide, at that point, to leave the party due to religious convictions and seek out a higher calling with God.

And if the potential for a character’s Faith to be changed exists, and exists in the capacity that it, in even so small a way, ties to the narrative (rather than just being a strictly battle-mechanic number), then everything about Faith kind of makes no sense, upon any scrutiny.

So let’s assume that Faith indicates just how fully convinced an individual is that God, Ajora, and the general hoopla of the divine and supernatural exist, with 100% being completely and totally convinced, and 0% being an outright, full-on atheist.  This is a reasonable interpretation given that Faith is used, in battle equations, as a percentage (thus 0 is none and 100 is full), and the actual maximum a unit can get is 97 (only Ramza, since he can’t actually leave at the 95 mark) and the actual minimum a unit can get is 3 (except Worker 8, who naturally and permanently has 0), falling within the range of the perspective that it's a percent situation.  It’s also reasonable to interpret Faith as being about belief in God and Ajora and higher powers and so on, given that having a 0 is regarded as Atheist status--it wouldn’t be called that if it was about not believing in anything intangible; atheism is generally associated with a disbelief in religion first and foremost, after all.  This being the case:

How the fuck is it rational for any party member in the game to maintain a low Faith score?

Because I don’t know if maybe they just didn’t notice this, but at a certain point in Final Fantasy Tactics’s story, Ramza and company are fighting real, actual fucking demons, and dealing with events, relics, and beings that very clearly indicate that Ajora was a real person, and that several manners of crazy divinely magical shit went down around him in the past.  Even if Ajora turned out not to be the saint that people thought he was, how exactly can the people following Ramza around rationally simply not believe very strongly in the spiritual when they’re watching the stones of religious yore summon demon lords from Hell and create miracles like restoring life to the dead?

How does a party member with a Faith of 49 watch Rafa use a divine stone to call her brother’s soul back from the heavens and into his body, witness a guy who’s been a roof corpse for at least an hour sit up good as new, and still remain more a skeptic than not that there are higher powers in the world?  Hell, how does Malak himself maintain a Faith score of a measly 31 after this?  Does this asshole just open his eyes after the will of God in Rafa's hands hauls his soul back to the corporeal realm, and his first thought is, "I think there's a better than 2/3 chance that I staged this whole thing about dying.  Can't pull the wool over MY eyes, Me!"

How exactly can your belief in the beings from the scriptures not be pretty damned solid as 1 of them holds you up with 1 hand, beats you raw with 3 more, and tells you to start a New Game, because your save file is his bitch now?

But let’s take a step back.  Maybe that’s not exactly what Faith indicates.  Maybe Faith isn’t necessarily a non-specific belief in God and Ajora and the powers beyond the ken of mortals.  Maybe Faith is supposed to indicate how much a character buys into the teachings of the Church of Glabados, specifically.  It’s not just their faith in God and all His jazz, but also in how God and said jazz are depicted, interpreted, and documented by the organized religion of Ajora.  That’s also a reasonable perspective, since the messages for a unit whose Faith is high enough that they’re leaving the group, and the warning messages for when that point is approaching, by and large show the individual doubting Ramza’s cause because it doesn’t jive with the teachings of the church (or doubting that Ramza can achieve anything through combat when the scriptures preach peace and faith as the ways to heal the world).  We assume, now, that the Faith score directly ties to a unit’s belief in the teachings of the church of Ivalice.  That being the case:

How the fuck is it rational for any party member in the game to maintain a high Faith score?

I mean, as the game goes on, shouldn’t the Faith scores of Ramza’s party start dropping drastically?  What with, y’know, this being the group that’s specifically laboring to expose the lies of the church and the truth of the past events regarding Ajora the false saint?  I dunno, maybe I’m just crazy, but I feel like if someone found hard evidence that Jesus was actually the son of Lucifer, and that his daily routine consisted of poisoning wells, kicking kittens, and being acting CEO of Ubisoft, that might lessen just how much stock the person puts in the Catholic church.  Ramza is holding a book in his hands that proves that Ivalice’s messiah was actually the prototype for Randy Pitchford, and that doesn’t lower his Faith in the church a single point?

Or maybe it’s a different scenario.  Maybe Faith is just a belief in the supernatural as a whole.  Sure, God, Ajora, all that junk is in there, but Faith also covers how much a character buys into magic, ghosts, statements made by Pete Hines, vampires, Santa Claus, the ability for the average citizen of the United States to retire, leprechauns, luck, superstition, and so on.  Faith is exactly as the definition of the word implies, signifying a belief in everything that isn’t immediately real and tangible.  This is, of course, backed up by the fact that the Faith stat directly influences how effective magic is when it is cast by or cast upon a character.

But if that’s true, how can anyone’s stat stay low after any battle with a mage?  What, you don’t BELIEVE that your buddy next to you just burst into flames as a mage pointed at him and shouted a catchy little slogan about it?  A lightning bolt just popped a squat on your ally’s head, he fell down dead on the ground, and that’s, what, a coincidence?  Your white mage wants to do something about the fact that your skin’s draping off you like old wallpaper after your last encounter with a samurai, and you’re gonna say “nuh uh all that hocus pocus is a scam!” rather than clap your hands and declare that you do believe in fairies, if by “fairies” they mean “not being bisected”?  Does a low-Faith character just watch the battlefield around her and genuinely think half of what’s going on is an elaborately staged bit of LARPing?

For that matter, ghosts are enemies that you can actively encounter in the game.  Animated skeletons, too!  And squaring off against a lame-ass vampire is an unavoidable part of the main story of FFT.  If Faith describes belief in the general supernatural, how does any unit’s score in it not rise when a ghost comes up to them and punches them in the face?  Does a party member with a Faith of 49 or lower just stubbornly insist, in this scenario, that there’s an above-average chance that his tooth just decided to dislodge itself?

And forget just fighting mages and ghosts and such.  How exactly does it work when you make a low-Faith character into a mage?  How exactly does a black mage not particularly believe in a spell when she herself casts it and sees the spell do exactly what she intended it to do?  Like, imagine if in the first film Luke asked Han Solo, “You don’t believe in the Force, do you?” and then after Han affirms this, Obi Wan pipes up with a “Yeah me neither.”  While he’s opening Han’s mini-fridge with his mind and floating a cold one over.  That’s what’s happening when a low-Faith character gets put in a magic-using role.

It’s not even consistent, really.  I mean, yeah, Faith will have an influence on the success of any and all abilities that count as “magic” by the game’s technical reckoning, but there is shit in FFT that doesn’t technically get calculated as magic which so clearly is magic.  Holy Knight abilities, for example, work completely independently of the Faith stat.*  Meaning that when Agrias swings her sword, shouts a strangely pithy yet abstract catchphrase, and calls forth a spectral blade up from the earth to give her enemy the worst kind of enema, it doesn’t matter whether or not the foe especially believes in magic ground knives, he’s still not gonna be sitting right for a good long time afterward.

I’m sorry, but how is it exactly that you can atheist away a lightning bolt when a dude in a robe summons it down onto your head, but when some hottie swings her sword to bring it down, THAT one you can’t just shrug off as superstitious nonsense?  I’ll give you that a few of these non-Faith-but-clearly-magical abilities are difficult to dismiss as fake--it would be hard to claim that Meliadoul’s Shellbust Stab is all in your head when the armor it broke is currently sitting in pieces around you--but plenty of these unique unit abilities are quite clearly just as unreal as the actual magic in the game.  More so, really, because things like fire and ice and lightning actually are real, physical phenomena, while I’m mostly sure that glowing broadswords sprouting out of the dirt like crabgrass are not.  Unless moles developing and launching tactical sword warheads is a regular and documented happening in Ivalice,** someone with a low Faith count should be way less doubtful of a spell evoking some fire, which is a thing they’ve seen before, than just about everything in Agrias’s arsenal.

And I haven't even gotten into the fact that monsters and animals also have Faith scores.  So depending on what exactly we believe the Faith stat to represent, at least 1 of the following is a cold, hard fact: that ghosts and animated skeletons in Final Fantasy Tactics are not fully convinced that they themselves exist, that demons in Hell don't completely buy into religious lore that is their own literal past, and/or that every random goblin, panther, and bird in Ivalice has given thought to the matter of, and formed a distinct personal philosophy regarding, the feasibility of a higher power and its presence in the works of man.

Yeah, it’s not a bad idea in theory, but in practice, Final Fantasy Tactics’s Faith doesn’t make much sense.  It’s capable of influencing the game more than just the battlefield alone (in that characters with too much will leave to pursue devotion to God), and it’s not unchangeable by human action, so we can safely regard it as a dynamic trait rather than solely as a battle stat...but once that’s done, as soon as we start thinking about FFT’s Faith at all, it becomes clear that the way it works doesn’t make any sense.





















* Which in and of itself makes no sense; of ALL the Job Classes in the game whose abilities should have some interaction with the Faith stat, shouldn’t a Holy Knight be 1?


** Which if it is true, then what are all these idiots doing worrying about stuff like royal succession, societal upheaval, and the invasive incursions of the devil into reality?  They clearly have bigger issues demanding their attention.