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

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

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Prier 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, Prier 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 Prier 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 WAS an optional, alternate ending to LPT in which, after defeating 100 demon overlords, Prier 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 Prier 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 treated this as the canon conclusion of Prier's story!

See, every time Prier 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 Prier, not Beat The Game Normally Prier 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 Prier to set them up, and it's stated outright that Prier 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 Prier'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 Prier 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 Prier.

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 Prier's adventure that the game presents to the player, and canonize the peculiar, out-of-nowhere joke bad ending, instead.  The company actually went and invalidated the entire story of LPT, basically just packed it up and tossed it out 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 Prier's story 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.  It's like they were in a hurry.

And this, all of this, is just how the situation stood before the rerelease, La Pucelle: Ragnarok, actually doubled down on Prier becoming an Overlord.  Hell, "doubling" doesn't even begin to cover it; this is basically a 20x modifier being applied, here.  The remake actually offered a 4-chapter alternate ending route in which Prier wrestles with the darkness in her heart, overcomes it, then wrestles with it again later, and is like 95% of the way to overcoming it again when suddenly she just gives up and goes with it.  Prier becomes a demon, beats up all the good guys, stops the villain, Croix dies in her arms, and Prier is never seen again by her friends and family.

Yeah!  Yeah, that's actually what fucking happened!  Nippon Ichi took the joke bad ending they'd made canon, looked at it, and said, "Oh, no, wait, this won't do.  What were we thinking?  This, the canon conclusion of La Pucelle?  Crazy!  It's not nearly depressing enough."  From the dialogue we get from Prier in Disgaea 5--hell, from the fact that there IS dialogue with her, really--it is quite clear that Nippon Ichi's mainline series considers this new, updated version of Prier becoming a demon lord, this incredible bummer that concludes the colorful, oft-comical tale of a brash, spunky girl with a heart of gold in naught but despair and loss and loneliness, is canon.

Nippon Ichi actually went to the trouble of drafting out a 4-part saga just to turn a joke bad ending into a legitimate tragedy.  Adopting Demon Overlord Prier was no longer just a spur-of-the-moment joke that got out of hand, they deliberately went back to it and applied themselves to putting it on record.  Sure, you can play out the game to the ending it was originally intended to have instead, go ahead, knock yourself out, but as far as Nippon Ichi's concerned, following the script of La Pucelle: Tactics as it was written is some wild made-up lunacy, hogwash, what-if speculation, fanfiction.

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?  Or if they'd officialized the Dragon Age 1 DLC where you play as a Darkspawn and the good guys lose?  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 Prier'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 tale?  Eh.  I've always felt pretty indifferent, and it doesn't seem like it ever bothered all that many other players all that greatly.  And even with the remake having expanded the joke Bad End into a full 4-Act drama, it still hasn't seemed, over the years, like it especially upset anyone.  In fact, there was so little audience aversion to this matter that I didn't even KNOW that the remake had evolved the Demon Overlord ending; I found out about the new content via a comment on this very rant, went back, watched the new content, and then Frankensteined together some new paragraphs to account for the remake's stuff.  So if this rant seems notably choppy and disjointed, it's definitely still mostly because I suck at writing, but this time it's also partly because of the new stuff being crammed in.  But anyway, the point is, audiences had so little objection to Nippon Ichi canonizing a bad ending to La Pucelle that I went 17 years without even hearing enough discourse and scuttlebutt about it to clue me in that it had been renovated.

My guess is that it's just kind of a case of not much being lost by reducing Prier to nothing more than crossover fodder, nor even in suddenly ending her tale in tragedy.  Like I said, LPT, and especially Prier'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, Prier 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 Prier 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 Prier--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 Prier's established personality and the final quarter of La Pucelle: Tactics either disappear or warp into disaster, really ruin much of anything that was worth having?  Heck, a fair bit of the updated story of Prier's descent to demonhood represented the first time in dozens of hours that she'd had a chance to be a character in her own respect rather than just a plot device for a shitty overbearing romance.*  Even if the expanded Demon Overlord path led to a depressing end, it was kind of nice just to be reminded for a bit that Prier did in fact at 1 point possess a personality of her own.

I can't help but feel that the lack of outrage I've ever seen at Disgaea's reshaping of Prier'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.  And then they stretched that out into a full-on bad ending, that they continued to wholeheartedly back instead of the main, originally intended, tonally consistent ending of the game.  Truly weird to me.













* Very fitting, by the way, that the thing which tips the scales and gets Prier to give into the darkness in her heart is someone mentioning Croix and her getting all panicked about not being able to save him.  1 moment she's confident, heroic, cool Prier, then the next second she's distraught and insecure as she completely disregards the value of everyone else around her, all because Croix entered into the conversation.  If that isn't just a perfect microcosm of 90% of what's wrong with La Pucelle, I don't know what else could be.  Every bad turn really can be traced to this stupid crush of hers.