La Pucelle Tactics's Priere's Strange Role in the Nippon Ichi Canon

Does the way that Nippon Ichi uses Priere in its classic multiverse strike anyone else as a bit weird?

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Priere is the protagonist of La Pucelle: Tactics, a demon-hunting heroine who leads her companions on a journey to save the world in a pretty cut-and-dry RPG adventure.  LPT moves forward with a recognizable momentum that from the start is clearly aiming for the typical good-conquers-evil the-day-is-saved conclusion that it arrives at.  From start to finish, Priere is depicted as the heroine of the tale, and while I was extremely disappointed with the direction her promising character went in, there's never any arc or event in the game, at least that I can recall, in which the fact that Priere is a good guy is thrown into doubt.  She starts her adventure, she follows it to its conclusion, the world is saved, the game is over and its story told.  Simple, straightforward matter.

Well, almost.  There IS an optional, alternate ending to LPT in which, after defeating 100 demon overlords, Priere becomes one herself, due to, I dunno, overexposure to them or something.  It's a very quick, concise little ending thing, barely more than, say, the numerous little fake-out endings of Nier: Automata, or accepting the dragon's offer to keep guarding the door to the demon world in Breath of Fire 2 rather than going in to permanently resolve the situation, or the various alternate endings to Chrono Trigger achieved by defeating Lavos earlier than intended.  This matter of Priere becoming an Overlord is spontaneous, brings the main plot to a halt, and is presented as essentially a bad ending, albeit a secret one.  It's pretty clearly just there as a gag.

…Except that the multiverse of Nippon Ichi treats this as the canon conclusion of Priere's story!

See, every time Priere shows up as a crossover guest event in the rest of Nippon Ichi's games, it's always as a demon Overlord.  She's been a recruitable crossover easter egg character in like 4 of the main 5 Disgaea titles, and an optional boss in the odd Disgaea out, and every time, it's very distinctly been Overlord Priere, not Beat The Game Normally Priere that's shown up.  Nippon Ichi's made sure there's no ambiguity about it, either; these little crossover events come with small scenes and interactions with Priere to set them up, and it's stated outright that Priere is famously known for being an exceptionally powerful demon overlord who's always eager for a fight against a strong opponent.  If she's got dialogue during these appearances, it's terse and aggressive, focused almost exclusively on a desire to fight and destroy adequately strong opponents, which most certainly doesn't align with Priere's personality through the standard course of her adventure to its expected end.  And it's consistent across the Disgaea series (which is essentially the backbone of the classic Nippon Ichi multiverse, mind you); there's no appearance of Priere in any game after her own that involves any non-demon version of her, at least not to my knowledge.  From the moment La Pucelle: Tactics concludes, Nippon Ichi only utilizes Overlord Priere.

I mean, is that not just really peculiar?  After going through the all the work of writing an entire, full adventure from start to finish, creating and developing (albeit poorly) the character of its protagonist, and having that game take its place as 1 of the company's formative, foundational RPGs that strongly defined all that would follow it--I'd argue, in fact, that LPT influenced Nippon Ichi's RPG heyday far more strongly than their first notable title, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, did--the company basically just decided to disregard the expected conclusion of Priere's adventure that the game presents to the player, and canonize the peculiar, out-of-nowhere joke bad ending, instead.  Hell, as far as I know, the fate of Priere's world is officially unknown in Nippon Ichi's cross-games canon, but in all likelihood, the heroes failed with Priere absent and all was lost, and the dialogue Priere has in Disgaea 5 certainly seems to point to that conclusion.  The company actually went and invalidated the entire story of LPT, basically just ended that world on a whim!

That's crazy!  I mean, how often do you see an RPG developer just up and outright say, "Bzzzt, WRONG ANSWER!" to their own game's established intended ending?  I can think of a couple of times, but Shadow Hearts 2's canonizing SH1's lesser normal ending was a clever and tricky matter of retconning its own retcon to confirm SH1's best ending as canon after all, and Valkyrie Profile 2's complete slash-and-burn of the art and majesty of Valkyrie Profile 1's entire story was a horrible move that betrayed just how careless and incompetent SquareEnix is with their creations and writing (as if more evidence was needed).  Shadow Hearts 2 had creative and artful strategy, while Valkyrie Profile 2 was a catastrophe created by feckless and ignorant morons--but smart or stupid, these were choices made with a storytelling goal in mind.  By all appearances, Nippon Ichi torched Priere's story and world on a lark.

Oh, and they didn't drag their heels about it, either!  They committed to this in Disgaea 1, the very next major RPG they created after La Pucelle: Tactics.  That's strange in its own regard; the dust had barely settled on La Pucelle: Tactics's adventure before Disgaea turned it to, well, more dust.  Just about the only part of this situation that could make me wonder whether Nippon Ichi might have done this as anything more than a momentary whim is how much of a hurry they were in.

And yet, what's even weirder about this situation is how easy it is, ultimately, to just take in stride.  I mean, if it were announced that the canon ending to Radiant Historia was actually 1 of the dead-end bad endings, I and anyone else who had enjoyed the game would be furious.  Can you imagine how livid players would have been if Bioware had come out and revealed that the secret game over ending you can get if you sit and wait out the timer in the Arrival DLC was actually the official ending to Mass Effect 2?  Just think about the reaction the gaming public would have had in a crazy reality where there had never been any more Star Fox games past the first, because Nintendo had arbitrarily decided that the joke ending where Fox gets transported into and trapped within another dimension where he fights a giant slot machine and then just keeps flying forever out in space was actually the real way that Star Fox 1 had ended.

But Priere's story being cut off just so she can be a recurring superboss in Disgaea?  The erasure of the final act of La Pucelle: Tactics's story, the sentence of a Bad End to its world?  Eh.  I feel pretty indifferent, and it doesn't seem like it's ever bothered all that many other players all that greatly.

My guess is that it's just kind of a case of not much being lost by reducing Priere to nothing more than crossover fodder.  Like I said, LPT, and especially Priere's role in it, was a disappointment to me.  The game's story was generic and uninspired, ultimately fixated on a love story that was thoroughly unconvincing and didn't really have anything to say.  Early on in the game, Priere immediately seemed like she was going to be 1 of the most likable and fun protagonists I'd ever encountered at the time--but her potential and personality were completely neutered well before the Overlord joke ending had a chance to cut her development off.  The plot demanded that Priere be diminished to a tiresome, lovesick idiot coward whose only thought, feeling, or character trait was having a spontaneous, completely inexplicable crush on Croix and trying to hide that fact for some reason--I've got more respect for that gutless emotional wimp Allen from Xenosaga than I do for in-game Priere--and the plot bent over backwards to fixate on this above anything else.  Aside from the fact that Eclair was a likable character, does waving a hand and making Priere's established personality and the final quarter of La Pucelle: Tactics disappear really ruin much of anything that was worth having?*  I can't help but feel that the lack of outrage I've ever seen at Disgaea's reshaping of Priere's canon is a confirmation that most people just kind of feel the same as I do on the matter.  Even among those I've known who did genuinely and bafflingly like La Pucelle: Tactics, I've never heard any serious complaint about Nippon Ichi's bizarre decision to essentially undo it for no particular reason.

It's still a really wild move when you think about it, though.  La Pucelle: Tactics was 1 of Nippon Ichi's major works, a formative moment in its early days as it began to get its foothold as a big name of 2000s RPG developers, and the company just turned around as fast as they could to obliterate the original, expected story of its heroine and instead embrace a weird, easter egg bad ending as its accepted canon.  Truly weird to me.












* Not, for the record, that I think that what Nippon Ichi's done with Priere is any sort of improvement.  Swapping a level of stupid, silly, uncompelling, doubtable romantic drivel on the level of Final Fantasy 8 out for a generic, tiring, thoroughly worthless obsession with fighting strong opponents to gain and prove one's own strength is a lateral move, at best.  Priere's gone from a fusion of the lovesick parts of Squall and Allen, to just being the shitty Dragon Ball Z Vegeta archetype.  Barely even THAT, really; multiple occasions of her Disgaea appearances have barely suggested sentience being left to her.  I get that the Overlord ending of LPT occurs because she was going around annihilating 1 demon after another over and over again, which I guess implies a fixation on combat and leveling up, but come on, Nippon Ichi basically supplanted everything Priere was, including what personality she had underneath the romantic garbage, with nothing.  I guess that the conversation she has with Killia in Disgaea 5, where he (refreshingly for an anime/game character) points out that power is a means, not an end, does develop her ever so slightly on this new personality path, but it doesn't seem like she ever went any further as a person over the course of Nippon Ichi's titles.