General RPGs' AMVs 19

Another year, another look at a good handful of high-quality AMVs!  Let’s see what we have this year.



FIRE EMBLEM

Fire Emblem 16: Everything Black, by Dilatory
The music used is Everything Black, by Unlike Pluto.  Great scene selection, spot-on timing, an interesting mix of game to music that brings new meaning to the song...this is already a great AMV even before you count in the excellent use of Fire Emblem 16’s own audio.  Everything Black is a great song for its adaptability to the front or background of the sound landscape, and Dilatory takes advantage of this with deft, pleasing precision, letting the music take its place in the foreground when it needs to, and then letting the sound effects of FE16’s scenes cut through it to help bring its beat to life.  It’s a far too rare occasion for an AMV creator to have the courage and/or innovation to let the game’s own audio be part of the work, and for them to accomplish this so well.  Superb AMV, here.

Fire Emblem 16: Heritors of Arcadia, by SBG Lucina
The music used is Heritors of Arcadia, from Fire Emblem 15.   I don’t usually count it when an AMV uses the game’s own music, but I guess music from a different game is fair even if it’s from the same series.  SBG Lucina’s displayed a good bit of skill with this video for pairing scenes of the game to the lyrics, and the game itself to the song.  I haven’t played Fire Emblem 15 yet, so I can’t speak from a knowledgeable position, but I can’t help but suspect that SBG Lucina has proven, with this work, that Heritors of Arcadia is a more emotionally and narratively fit song for Fire Emblem 16 than it is for the FE it was created for.

Fire Emblem 16: Nemesis, by LaTeddyNecto
The music used is Viper, by Brand X Music.  This is awesome.  There is nothing more than can or should be said.  Elaborating would only be circling this fact, ineptly fixing needless other terms onto a truth that stands by itself.  Awesome.


HORIZON

Horizon 0 Dawn: Brave, by Matthew Fritsche
The music used is Pearl, by Kari Sigurosson.  This is another of those tribute-style AMVs, primarily focused on Aloy and her story through the events of Horizon 0 Dawn.  It’s grand, moving, personal, and edited well, bringing together the gentle quiet and high fury of both game and music to skillfully tell Aloy’s story to us and laud both her and the work as a whole.  Solid stuff!


THE LEGEND OF ZELDA

The Legend of Zelda Series: Get Evil with Ganondorf, by LaTeddyNecto
The music used is Let’s Groove, by Earth, Wind, & Fire.  This?  This, my friends, is perfection, and we are all blessed to be alive to see it.

The Legend of Zelda Series: Kriptonita, by Toretilo
The music used is Kryptonite, by 3 Doors Down.  Well, it may be a bit arrogant for Toretilo to claim in the title that this is the best TLoZ AMV, but there’s no denying that this is a pretty awesome one.  From the opening with the Majora’s Mask forms playing instruments appropriate to the song right through to the finish, this AMV does a great job of matching its visuals to the tone (and lyrics, when they come in) of the music, and serves as a fun, endearing, and well-constructed tribute to the series as a whole.  You gotta respect it for the breadth of its scope alone--sure, the video focuses primarily on more aesthetically pleasing and mainstream installments in the series, but it makes it a point to include the older and more obscure ones, too, and makes sure they’re just as relevant and well-placed as all the rest of the clips.  I mean, my goddess, they’ve got the infamous Japanese commercial in there, even!  I also like that it serves not only as a tribute to the series as a whole, but also to the bond between Link and Zelda, too.  I wouldn’t call this the greatest TLoZ AMV I’ve ever seen, but I think it’s at least got a good shot at being the best tribute AMV to the series, and either way, it’s a darned fine piece of work.


MASS EFFECT

Mass Effect 2 + 3: Bonds, by Jedi21366 and/or CT-N7
The music used is Dead Island, by Giles Lamb.  I know, it’s another tribute piece for Mass Effect, but damn it, it’s just a game where this kind of music video works, and works well.  Heartfelt, solemn, reminiscent, Bonds is exactly what you know it’ll be: a great AMV exploring and lauding the connections of Shepard and his comrades, that signature element of Mass Effect that more than anything else makes it unique and wonderful, and reminding the watcher of just how great a story it was.*


THE WITCHER

The Witcher 3: Stand My Ground, by Maestro GMV
The music used is Stand My Ground, by Within Temptation.  In spite of having some typography AMV elements, this video is a solid work, 1 of those good, basic AMVs that brings together a fun, cool sampling of the game to a song whose style and lyrics enhance it.  Good stuff.










* Besides the ending.  Which was horrible.  And should always, always be corrected.

Final Fantasy Tactics's Mages

As a general rule, I think that Final Fantasy Tactics’s battle system was constructed extremely well, to the point that you could call it masterful.  But it’s certainly not perfect, and nowhere is this more evident than with the role that magic plays in the game.

Basically, FFT did mages dirty.  They’re mildly useful very early in the game, and they theoretically lead somewhere great in the late game, but overall, the way that magic works, and the laws of movement and turn order, hobble spellcasters for the majority of Final Fantasy Tactics, and through essentially all the stages of the game when you most need your team to be fully reliable and functional.

First of all, let’s talk about the biggest problem: charge time.  Magic takes time to use.  Once a mage decides they want to cast something, they have to stand there, motionless, until the spell activates.  That’s not so terrible when it comes to the beginning magic, but the more powerful the spell, the longer it takes to charge, and that alone more or less nerfs this type of combatant, for 2 major reasons.

Reason 1: your mage is defenseless and exposed the whole time.  Now granted, any unit that acts is stuck sitting around until their next turn, so it’s not completely different, but the thing is that the mage hasn’t actually acted yet.  When your knight walks up to an enemy and hits them, then ends his turn, well, he’s done his damage, he’s gonna sit there until his next turn, and that’s that.  But when your mage’s turn consists of beginning to charge up an attack (or healing spell, or status spell; whatever the case), that means that he only has actually helped your battle strategy at all IF he finishes charging the spell and casts it.  If an enemy uses your knight’s exposed status to kill the knight, well, at the least, the knight contributed to your cause by having gotten his licks in first.  But if an enemy takes advantage of the fact that your mage is sitting with his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care, that can mean that said mage dies without having done anything for you.  I’m pretty sure the FFT enemies are smart enough to know to target opponents who are charging whenever they can--they sure as hell seem to always know as much when I play, at least--and even if they don’t and who they attack is purely randomized, mages can’t take as many hits as most other combatants can to begin with, so they still have a higher than average chance in this scenario to croak before they finish casting.

And it’s not like killing a mage is the only way to stop them from finishing their casting sequence.  Sleep, Stone, Confuse, Stop, Toad, Silence, Disable, any of them successfully hit the mage while he’s charging up and he’s all done.  Hit a knight with that shit, and maybe he’ll be inhibited going forward, but again, at least he got his attack in beforehand.  And the fact that Silence is a status ailment that affects magic but not physical abilities just makes the situation worse, because mages even have 1 more status ailment that disables them than everyone else has.

Also worth noting is that the most powerful and thus slowest spells can have such an obscene charge time that the same mage’s turn comes up AGAIN before he/she’s finished casting, meaning that you’ve actually spent 2 turns locked in place for the same 1 action.

Second reason?  Enemies aren’t polite enough to just stand around and get hit.  As a general rule, enemies in Final Fantasy Tactics use their turns to act AND move, and I’m relatively sure they recognize when they’re in the spot that’s about to get nuked by Fire 3.  Yes, your mage can specifically target an enemy, not an area, but it’s still a problem--the whole point of an area of effect ability like most of FFT’s magic is to hit as many enemies as you can, so if the guy you’re targeting decides to take Green Day to heart and walk alone down the Beoulve-ard of Broken Dreams, then the spell you thought was going to blast 2 - 5 enemies is only gonna hit the 1 now.  Additionally, there are times when you want to target a specific area of the landscape rather than the enemy themself (if 2 baddies have a space between them, for example, you could target that space and catch each one in the peripheral area of the spell’s effect), so again, if they can leave before the spell takes effect, your turn is wasted.  This is all well and fine early in the game when level 1 magic is effective since that doesn’t usually take long, but once you hit the point that second level spells or higher are (or at least should be) the standard, having a long charge time severely inhibits your mages’ ability to hit the enemies you want, in the numbers you want.*

Oh, and this doesn’t help when it’s curative magic, either.  Because just as enemies aren’t gonna stand around, so the same is true of your own characters.  If your knight’s turn comes up before the white mage is done charging a healing spell, then your knight has to choose between risking running into the fray again while still injured, or wasting turn time waiting for the healing.  Yes, just selecting Wait without acting or moving will speed the knight’s next turn up, but it’s still losing time that may be important; FFT isn’t an easy enough game that you can always afford to delay your turns.  And again, yeah, you can target your ally to be cured specifically so the spell will follow, but if you were trying to get multiple allies healed at the same time (which is largely the point of using a curative spell instead of just a single-person potion), then that’s not ideal.

Additionally, healing magic’s at a disadvantage with charge times in the sense that the more dire the need for it, the less time an ally has to wait for it.  The more hurt a companion, the stronger the healing they need; the stronger the healing spell, the more time it takes to cast; the more time an ally has to wait, the greater a chance they’re gonna sustain further enemy attacks.

The second most damning flaw to mages also functions as the other reason that the moving-while-being-targeted situation isn’t ideal, whether it be ally or enemy.  It is thus: if your ally is in the area of your black mage’s Ice 2 spell when it goes off, then that’s too damn bad, because Ice 2 does not play favorites.  Cure 3 takes its Hippocratic Oath seriously, so if an enemy is its area of effect, it’s healing your foe just as surely as it’s healing your ally.  By and large, area of effect spells affect everyone in that range, regardless of their allegiance.  And these areas cannot be adjusted.

This cripples the tactical use of magic.  If an enemy unit and your own are standing next to each other, then any mage that wants to cast a spell on the enemy has to either target the area near the bad guy to avoid hitting an ally (which, depending on charge time, gives the enemy the chance to just move), or make the decision to hit both friend and foe, if you can’t move your unit out of the way in time.  But even if you can manage your own allies, that doesn’t mean the enemy can’t, if he’s being directly targeted by the spell, move up next to your party members so they’ll get hit in the blast.  And it’s far worse with healing magic--the allies who usually need healing the most are the ones who are actively trading blows with enemies, often attacked on multiple sides.  If you want to heal them with magic, you may be forced to also heal your foes at the same time--you might be distributing more healing to the opposing team than to your own!

And of course, to continue the trend of the most powerful magic in FFT also being the most useless, the highest level spells often have even bigger areas of effect.  So when you combine that with the obscene amount of time it takes them to charge up, giving enemies the ability to move wherever they want, there’s a damn high chance that if your mage actually manages to live long enough to fire it off, it’ll either hit nothing, or several targets you don’t want it to.

So yeah, we have charge times that range from inconvenient to completely untenable, and area of effect logistics that ensure magic is either as much or more a danger to your team as it is an asset, or so much trouble to set up for success that it’s not worth it to you, as a person with finite time on Earth, to bother.  Surely that’s enough handicaps to give to 4.5** of the 20 job classes in the game, right?

Oh, not hardly, my friends.  Square’s got 1 more crusher to deliver: attack spells can be blocked.

Yeah, that’s right.  In addition to everything else they’ve got going against them, spells in Final Fantasy Tactics have to roll dice just like everyone else when it comes to whether or not the attack will hit.  For all the effort you put into arranging the timing and positioning of the spell, taking enemy turn order into careful account and forming your strategy on which units to advance where...there’s a decent chance the enemy is just gonna lift his shield up and deflect the electrical deathray you just custom ordered from Zeus’s Etsy.  Even when you can balance every other factor holding your mage back, he/she might just goddamn miss.

I know that Tactics isn’t the first in the Final Fantasy series to have a mechanic for evading magic--FF6 famously is bugged that magic evasion is the ONLY evasion stat that gets factored, in fact--but it really did not need to add this drawback to an already painfully ineffectual arena of combat.  It’s 1 thing for a monk to have his/her punch deflected--the only setup to that was the monk walking up to the enemy and throwing hands; there’s only so much of your battle plan that can go awry from a single, immediate 1-target attack failing to land.  But when you’ve got a spell whose timing and target area has to have been planned out, and accounted for with actions taken since, not being able to 100% guarantee it’s even gonna land is a huge burden.  I’m used to status ailment magic being unreliable in RPGs,*** but outright attack magic is supposed to be fairly dependable!

And we’re still not done!  Those are the big 3 reasons why magic is so damn problematic as a whole in Final Fantasy Tactics, but there are still more, smaller factors that drag it down further.  For starters, the actual casting range of mages is pretty limited.  They can only target an individual or spot of land a few paces away with most spells.  And in different circumstances, this might be a pretty okay attempt at keeping a mage balanced, because it wouldn’t be very fair if they could just sit at the other end of the map and safely sling spells willy-nilly, but when the magic requires charge times and the enemy can see it happening, forcing a mage to be within a single turn’s walking distance to any potential target of their spells does not increase their life expectancy on the battlefield.  Even by 1998, technology had still evolved to be smarter than the average villain (or writer, for that matter) of Dragon Ball Z--as stated previously, the bad guys aren’t just gonna stand around waiting for your black mage to finish charging up his KamehameFire4, so forcing said mage to get closer than COVID regulations recommend to begin casting just makes magic that much more unwieldy to use.

Next smaller factor: the Faith stat.  Let’s say that, against all odds, everything goes according to plan with your casting of Ice 2--your caster didn’t get Silenced halfway through, the enemies couldn’t change formation fast enough so you’re still hitting 3 of them at the same time, and none of them are quick enough on the draw to use a shield to inexplicably stave off a sharpened block of ice the circumference of 3 men crashing down on them.  Well, you still are not necessarily guaranteed a decent damage payout!  Because a lot of the damage the spell will inflict will depend on whether or not your enemy believes it should.  A higher Faith stat means that your ability to cause harm with and be harmed by magic is increased, while a lower Faith stat means that magic has less effect on you, and your magic has less effect on others.  You CAN permanently raise or lower characters’ Faith stats, but it’s a long process of small gains or losses over turns in battle, so if you don’t resign yourself to the hand you’re dealt as far as your characters’ Faith scores go, you’ve got some tedium ahead of you.  Either way, there won’t be much you can do if you happen to go up against an enemy with a low Faith score protecting him from your magical offenses.

Now, in theory, this shouldn’t be too much more than a basic balancing factor similar to Magic Attack and Magic Defense, just rolled into a single stat, right?  Sure, I guess, in the case of attack spells...but it affects healing and status ailment magic, too.  So while having a character on your team with low Faith is beneficial in the sense that they can shrug off magical offenses, it also means that cure spells won’t do much of anything for them.  As if white mages didn’t already get the shit end of the stick in this game.  And of course, if your enemy happens by chance to have a low Faith, that also makes the prospect of getting a magically-induced status ailment to stick harder than ever.

Don’t have to worry about that shit with the Brave stat, I’d like to add.  More Bravery means more physical damage dealt by attacks, but it doesn’t increase the amount of physical damage taken.  So that’s yet another mitigating complication you have to compensate for with magic in FFT that other abilities and even just normal physical attacks aren’t obstructed by.  Once again, we see that magic’s ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force...of a spear getting rammed through your ribs.

Another thing: if you want long-range attacks with accuracy, you don’t HAVE to resort to a black mage--you can just get an archer, or a gun-using class.  Archers’ve even got a charging feature, too, if you’ve really got a hankering for that standing-in-place action.  And unlike a black mage, your enemy doesn’t need to have accepted High Velocity Object as his personal lord and savior for the arrow to work to its fullest effectiveness.  Worth considering also is the fact that not a lot of the enemies you’ll encounter in the main quest battles in the game--which are the tough and unavoidable ones, mind you--have elemental weaknesses, so that potential advantage of black magic doesn’t amount to much more often than not, and thus physical attacks like the archer’s are rarely noticeably less effective than any elemental source.

Meanwhile, if you want ranged healing, you don’t HAVE to resort to a white mage--you can just get a chemist.  Hell, they’re 1 of the beginning job classes.  They can throw a healing potion or a status ailment remedy at whoever needs it, and they can do it right now.  As in, the time that the healing is actually needed.  They can’t heal more than 1 person at once, but on the other hand, throwing a jar of heal juice into an ally’s face means that nearby enemies aren’t going to accidentally get a free magical bandaid just because they were invading your ally’s personal space.  And again, unlike the magical version, your ally can get as existentially inquisitive about the nature of potions as he likes without it affecting their ability to reassemble his bones.

Even in the 1 arena in which magic should have the advantage on a Chemist, that being curing KO, it really doesn't, thanks to Faith--Phoenix Downs items are very limited in that they only bring a character back to life with a few HP, so the healing magic Raise and Arise, which restore far more HP when getting allies back on their feet, ought to be a better option, yes?  Except that your ally's Faith stat could potentially cause the revival magic to miss--and that's a real bad thing to have to gamble on in a game where leaving a character in KO for too long results in permanent death.  Yeah, apparently combatants in Final Fantasy Tactics are so dedicated to their level of belief in higher powers that they'll decline a second chance at life out of principle.  I actually witnessed a moment in 1 of Icy Brian's streams in which a knight of the Church had a low enough faith stat that his employer, a high-ranking church official, was unable to successfully cast Arise on him.  This knight fought literally to the death for the sake of a religion that he is so adamant in his refusal to believe in that he'd rather bleed out and die than accept it as true.  Can't nobody convince me that a a reliable Phoenix Down isn't the superior option after I see something that absurd.

Hell, even the oracle and, to a certain extent, the time mage have a simple, effective alternative available not too terribly far into the game, in a sense.  He may not be able to do anything but Disable and Immobilize, but Mustadio can at least inflict those 2 from a distance with an okay success rate, and frankly, Disable covers almost everything you particularly need from a status ailment by itself.  And these abilities activate instantly.  AND, once more, your enemies’ current level of belief in their own limbs doesn’t much affect whether those limbs have been rendered inoperable thanks to a bullet.

So it’s really not like the mage job classes offer much in the way of strategic advantages that other classes in the early-to-mid-game don’t.  Time mage’s Haste and that’s about it.

Lastly, this is a pretty small one, and normally it would just go with the territory, but it’s worth noting that the standard detriment of mages’ shitty weaponry isn’t helping the situation any.  Sure, in most games, it doesn’t really matter that magic-users tend to go out of their way to equip themselves with the least effective weaponry they can find or invent (40% of the entries on my Stupidest Weapons list are the equipment of spellcasters; for Ajora’s sake Norma put the fucking bubbles away and buy a goddamn switchblade or something).  But when your magic use is as hampered as it is in Final Fantasy Tactics, having a decent backup for damage-dealing sure would have been helpful.  It’s not too big a deal since you can still equip another ability to a mage, so you can at least stick another job’s more useful abilities onto them, but still, being able to rely on a properly damaging weapon in a pinch--and pinches come up an awful lot if the turn order just isn’t in your favor--would’ve been helpful.

Okay.  So, with all of that said, and magic fully proved to be goddamn useless in Final Fantasy Tactics...

...There is a way to actually make magic work for you, which gets around almost all of these problems.  Sort of.  No, it’s not the Short Charge support ability--while obviously very handy, that one requires enough job points that it’s inconvenient to have to wait for, and uses up the support ability slot that could be used for other skills that aren’t just making up for a deficit.  Other units get to use their support ability slot to add to their combat prowess, but mages are stuck wasting it on something that just makes their 1 and only combat purpose closer to strategically feasible?  Making up a little of the mage classes’ lost ground is not the same as a legitimate battle strategy.  Not to mention that even halving spellcasting time doesn’t make the most powerful spells’ charging time especially viable.

No, I’m talking about the job class that FFT mage apologists**** will point to as the ultimate defense for magic in the game: the calculator.  The calculator basically can cast any magic spell that the unit knows from previous experience as a mage, but will cast it instantly.  AND the spell will affect targets anywhere on the map, according to conditions you select from a list--for example, you can pick Height and 5, and any character at a height on the map that’s a multiple of 5 will get hit by the spell, or you could go with Level and Prime, and any character with a level that’s a prime number is the target.  While this is no guarantee against an ally getting hit in the crossfire (or an enemy getting healed by accident), it’s a hell of a lot more reliable than charging areas of effect that anyone can just dance in and out of.

With the calculator, you can (probably) heal the party members who need it, WHEN they need it.  You can (probably) throw Bolt 4 at your enemy, and not simply have to hope that his grandson will still be standing in the same area of the map when it finally finishes charging.  You can (probably) make a difference to the battle without having to put the team’s squishy member so far into the middle of the fighting that you’d swear he/she was trying to be the nougat center of a candy with a battle-hardened shell.*****  And while the calculator is so damn slow to act that it’s practically like waiting for spells to charge anyway, and has a surprisingly low magic attack stat, you can always take the class’s abilities and stick them onto 1 with more appropriate stats, so that’s not really any significant detriment.

So that’s that, then, right?  The calculator is great.  Redeems FFT’s whole damn magic system altogether, right?

...Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

See, here’s why I said that this way of making magic useful only sort of gets around all the problems.  As great as the calculator is, it’s also a job that requires a hell of a lot of build-up to get.  You have to level up the black mage, white mage, time mage, and oracle several times each to get the calculator unlocked, which takes a decent bit of time--more time than most other classes might, in fact, for the fact that those classes are so damn useless that they negatively impact your ability to effectively fight as a team.  Then, once you have the calculator, you have to devote a lot of time to learning the class’s jobs before it’s actually useful--the whole point is to have enough factors to choose from that you can find combinations that will cause spells to target units you want while not hitting others, so you need at least most of the Calculator’s abilities to make it work for you.  Which, considering the poor speed of the class, is even more time-consuming a process than it is for any other class.  And finally, even when all THAT is done...if you want your calculator to be using the big boy spells like Holy, Cure 4, Meteor, Petrify, etc., then he has to have advanced far enough in the associated mage classes to have unlocked them.  You want to drop precision Ice 4s across the battlefield?  You still have to take the time to level your black mage skills up accordingly.

So where does that all leave you?  Well, generally speaking, unless you’re just grinding nonstop (which isn’t a valid argument for the calculator's utility, since grinding nonstop will make ANY character combat-viable anyway) on random battles, you’re probably only going to have a fully realized, completely viable calculator late in the game.  Which, first of all, is an issue because by the late game you can have dual-wielding monks running around and any other fully tweaked job class combination you desire anyway.  Where you really need job classes with an edge is in the early and especially mid game periods--and that’s when you’re stuck with regular mages and, at best, a calculator whose options are still few enough that he/she is really only slightly better than a standard mage.  The calculator may very well be 1 of the most powerful and useful ability sets in the game, but it’s still an endgame job in an RPG whose endgame gives a LOT of options for overpowered units, and the paths that lead to those other units involve job classes that will actually make that journey to the endgame easier, rather than more difficult.

The second issue with this cost of time is that, by that same time, you’re most likely going to have some or even all of the following characters on your team: Agrias, Meliadoul, Beowulf, Mustadio, Worker 8, and Orlandu.  Mustadio, as discussed, is able to Disable and Immobilize enemies from a good distance, immediately.  Meliadoul’s basically a ranged, damage-dealing Knight, meaning that any time you’re fighting human enemies, she can both destroy their weaponry and other equipment from a distance, instantly, AND deal damage at the same time.  Worker 8 has a terrific ranged attack.  Beowulf has a whole set of oracle status ailment abilities that activate instantly.  Agrias has got a small but extremely effective set of ranged, area-of-effect attacks that activate instantly (and may cause a status ailment, to boot).  And that crazy son of a bitch Orlandu’s got everything Agrias and Meliadoul have, can heal himself with Gafgarion’s instant ranged draining attack, and comes with a weapon that automatically gives him Haste--there’s a damn good reason the boy made my and everyone else’s list of the Most Overpowered RPG Characters ever.  And ALL of these characters’ powers work regardless of their target’s Faith stat, take far less time to learn these abilities than any single mage unlocks his/her full potential, and (aside from Mustadio) can take a hit better.

I mean, that’s not to say that the calculator is useless by comparison--the instant powerful healing magic is something that no specialty character duplicates, and just because Orlandu’s sword constantly doses him with caffeine, that doesn’t mean the rest of the party can’t benefit from a Haste spell or 2.  But it does mean that it’s difficult to logically argue that the effort and time spent creating a battle-ready calculator is worth the result, when you can fill your team with viable alternatives--sometimes better alternatives--that the game’s giving you for free.  When you’ve got Orlandu, Beowulf, Agrias, and the other specialties coming to you eventually anyway, what really counts in determining how useful a job class is in FFT is whether it’s useful (or whether the path to it is useful) during the period of the game before uniquely powerful story characters are being passed out like lies in an official Activision statement.

And since that’s the period in the game in which the calculator’s path incarcerates you in the frustrating world of FFT’s magic system, I strongly contend that the class is not, in fact, the redeeming savior that a lot of players think it is.  You can make magic in Final Fantasy Tactics useful--but you basically have to go specifically out of your way to do so, taking time and effort to achieve the same effectiveness that comes naturally with other, easier options that are actually useful all along the way.

Fun fact: When I set out to write it, I thought today’s rant was going to be a quick one!  Yes, I really am that naive and stupid.





















* Granted, you can employ status effects to keep enemies immobile, but that would basically mean you’ve got 1 party member whose job is specifically to make up for the shortcomings of another.  Not to mention that for most of the game, the major status ailment job is another mage, who brings the same problems to the table.


** Summoners count as half here because they’re the only ones whose spells distinguish friend from foe.  But they’re still as hurt by the charge times as any of the others.


*** Although frankly, that one’s another major pet peeve of mine.  In fact, I’m surprised I haven’t written a rant about this already.  Probably gonna do so sometime soon, now that it’s in my mind.


**** Shut the fuck up it’s my blog I’ll make up any term I want to.  So nyeh.


***** Look, not every analogy is a winner.

General RPG Valentines 5

My friend Ecclesiastes and my sister are always deserving of many thanks for the incalculably many and important acts of assistance they provide to make my rants the best they can be, but at no time of the year is this appreciation more deserved than my Valentine rant.  You 2 honestly have done more for this series of rants than I have, and there's no better day of the year to say that I love you both.  Thanks bundles for always helping me out with the creation of these stupid things that I so greatly and strangely enjoy.



I love Valentine's Day.  Always have, always will.  But in spite of my affection for the holiday, I'm still gonna insult its honor by associating the following images with it.  And because it's the second month of the 2022, we're celebrating with 22 Valentines today instead of the standard 20.  Because that makes a huge difference.  Enjoy!

And of course, much though I love Valentine's Day, I also love being a curmudgeonly grump.  So, as always, to go with our earnest RPG professions of love and affection, here are a few RPG expressions of...less tender feelings.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1's Marche's Wish Theories

I seem to have been getting quite a few ideas lately from (what passes for) my social interactions.  I did that Fallout rant based on a Youtube comment, that thing on Shadow was born of a running gag during 1 of Icy Brian’s streams (and there's actually more to come on that front), and now I’m recycling a conversation I had with the eternally esteemed Ecclesiastes.  Clearly this means that I’m out of my own ideas for rants, should actually try interacting with other human beings more often, or both.  Either way, thanks for yet again dropping a great rant possibility into my lap, sir!



So, Ecclesiastes came to me the other day with a question that had been nagging him for a bit.  Requesting that I recall good old Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1, he reminded me that the story of the game is essentially that the Gran Grimoire, a powerful magical book, transforms the real town of St. Ivalice into a fantasy world, as a way of fulfilling Mewt’s desire to be reunited with his recently deceased mother and have his family be complete and happy once more.  In the process, the Gran Grimoire also grants those who were close to Mewt that afternoon their own desires--Mewt’s dad Cid regains his confidence and sense of purpose as he becomes a Judgemaster, and, of course, benefits from his wife now being alive again,* Mewt’s friend Ritz (who was bullied for her white hair) now has naturally pigmented hair, and Mewt’s new friend Doned (a sickly boy who cannot walk) is made healthy and given full autonomous mobility.  While the Gran Grimoire has rearranged reality most notably for Mewt, everyone who had been near him the day he found the book and chanted the words he found within it has been given a gift, and we can reasonably work under the assumption that this gift is the thing which each person desired most.

Except for our protagonist, Marche.  While Marche gets to take part in the fun of adventures in Ivalice as much as any of his peers, there is no obvious boon tailored to his needs that has been given to him, as has been to the others.  And this seemed peculiar to Ecclesiastes--to quote him, “What does Marche get?  Are those other changes partly what Marche wished for, if indirectly?  Did he not have an easy desire for an outsider to guess at?”

I gave the matter some thought, and soon had a working theory.  I then almost immediately discarded this perfectly functional theory for a crazier second one that came to me which I liked way more, because I am capricious.  But let’s start with the initial theory anyway

So, first theory is simple: Marche does have a wish granted by the Gran Grimoire, but because the desires in his life are much less keenly felt and extreme than those of the others, it’s a subtle enough boon that neither Marche nor we the audience really pick up on it.  

Basically, looking at Marche at the beginning of the game, I can only really figure 3 possible major avenues of desire from what we know about him altogether.  They are:

1. Wishing that his brother Doned’s situation was better.  This is a noble, selfless wish, which at least partly seems true to Marche’s character, and also has no competition from a stronger, selfish wish, so it’s reasonable to think that this is probably the strongest wish Marche possesses, at least given what information we have on his life.

2. Longing for the comfort, security, and belonging of home.  This selfish desire is the second most powerful desire we can reasonably attribute to Marche, and the one most relevant to us.  I’ll explain it below.

3. Wishing that the life situations of his new friends Ritz and Mewt were better.  This selfless want is ranked lowest, because he only just met Ritz and Mewt, but it’s reasonable to assume that it’s there and a relevant part of Marche’s heart, particularly if the Gran Grimoire decides to grant their wishes at the time of Mewt showing it to his friends (since, at that moment, Ritz and Mewt’s difficulties are fresh in Marche’s mind).

So, looking at those wishes, we can see that 1 and 3 are both granted by the Gran Grimoire anyway, and are seen and presumed to be the results of Ritz and Mewt’s own hearts more than Marche’s.  So let’s look at the only wish we can really infer Marche would have which is not already taken care of: 2.

Marche has just moved to a new town, and while it doesn’t seem to be a terribly traumatizing experience, it clearly does weigh on him, as it would for any kid.  The concept of “home” is an exceptionally important one to us as a species, a vital component of a healthy mental landscape, and all the more pronounced for a child, to whom the world is still very large and foreboding in many ways.  It’s safe to say that the only relevant selfish desire Marche would have is to be “home.”  BUT, that doesn’t HAVE to be an exact location, necessarily--think of the concept of “home” that we all need as a box on a form, upon which we stamp an image of a specific place and the people associated with it.  For all intents and purposes, that IS “home” because it’s on our form, but technically, it’s just the representation we’ve given to the concept, the stamp we’ve put there.  What’s important is what the box itself requires--security, comfort, belonging, etc.  The image stamped there can be swapped for another; most of us have more than 1 “home” in our lives.

What I’m getting at is that the Gran Grimoire doesn’t have to just recreate Marche’s old house, school, and friend group to satisfy the desires Marche has as a kid who’s moved to a new place.  It just has to make him feel comfortable, happy, and like he belongs, to a reasonable degree.  Furthermore, given that Marche seems to be very big on the “face the reality of your problems instead of hiding from them” thing, a direct recreation of his old neighborhood probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.  So how did the granting of this wish manifest itself?  Well, first of all, the catch-all clause of safety in most of Ivalice applies as much to Marche as anyone else, so the security thing is covered automatically.

More to the point, though...I think Montblanc is the Gran Grimoire’s manifestation of Marche’s desire.  Montblanc runs into Marche almost immediately in Ivalice, quickly and easily forms a friendship with him, and acts as the kid’s guide to this fantasy world, without asking anything in return.  Additionally, he invites Marche into his clan, and stands by his side no matter what.  Montblanc is a pillar of loyalty and friendly stability to Marche (even when Marche decides to stand against the very foundations of the world and unravel it completely) and a trustworthy guide to the new and unfamiliar, and his appearance and immediate friendliness to Marche are so convenient that it would be absolutely no stretch of the imagination to interpret them as divine providence.  And for a child wishing for the sensation of “home” he has recently lost, what could be better than a new friend, a guide to anything and everything unfamiliar, and a welcoming clan to make a new home with?

So that’s my first theory: A, that the only significant wish that Marche, as a new kid in town, could have for himself involves recapturing the comfort of being at home somewhere, B, that recreating his old home isn’t necessary so long as a new one could be made to adequately take its place (and, again, that Marche’s own personality would make such a recreation doomed to failure), and, thus, C, that Montblanc is the representation of that wish being granted, in being someone who provides friendship, guidance, and a place to belong to for Marche.  We and Marche himself simply don’t realize this from the outset because it’s a substantially less attention-getting method of granting a wish than dyed hair, an homage to Dr. Strangelove ditching the chair, or Death having to go backsies on reaping someone.**

Pretty decent, right?  Seems reasonable enough, fits the character, explains everything tidily.  Good theory, if I say so myself.  We all satisfied with it?  Great!

Now throw that shit out the window, because it’s boring and this next shit is where it’s at!

What if it’s not that Marche is the only one who doesn’t get a wish granted?  Instead...what if he’s the only one who does?

Okay, well, actually, that’s a fun tagline, but it’s misleading.  More accurately, my theory is that the book is granting all of their wishes, but Marche’s is the only one that is actually important, and supercedes all the others.

Alright, so, here’s the problem with my first theory: while it is absolutely reasonable to infer that the only great wish that Marche could have to be granted that isn’t already covered by the others’ wishes is related to his being a new kid, it is, nonetheless, something we mostly have to infer for ourselves.  It’s an assumption based on people as a general rule, rather than specifically on Marche himself.  While he displays enough mild hesitation and seeking behavior for it to be logical to believe he has issues with being the new kid, you could also easily and just as logically believe that he’s handling the situation pretty well.

But there are a couple of personal qualities that we do KNOW that Marche possesses, from observation of him throughout the course of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1.  The first is that he cares for the well-being of others, being a decent person.  And the second is his most defining trait: an uncompromising belief in facing reality when it is unpleasant.  This isn’t a contradiction of his empathy, but rather a function of it, because he recognizes that what happiness you can receive from escapism is not real, cannot and should not last, and is less whole than the happiness and life worth you achieve by facing your griefs, accepting them, and moving forward.

So given that these are 2 of the strongest and most demonstrable personal qualities that we can see in Marche as a person, I ask: what if, when looking at the Gran Grimoire, surrounded by Mewt, Ritz, and Doned, children who all are bearing such burdens of pain that Marche has recently witnessed (and in Doned’s case, has long known of), the greatest desire in Marche’s heart, at that moment, was that the people around him could be happier?

No specific wish.  No contract of “I, the undersigned, do knowingly beseech any and all deities or entities, objects, or other beings of divinity within range of observation to extend their godly, magical, or occult abilities and experience to the effect of perma-dyin’ yon shorty’s hair pink, yo.”  Just an undefined but strongly-felt keening that the people before him could be relieved of their suffering over the inescapable misfortunes of their lives.

What does the Gran Grimoire do if that’s Marche’s wish?  Oh, certainly, it’s already planning to whip up a Palet Special*** for Mewt, give Doned his walking papers in a good way, and do the ol’ palette-swap for Ritz, but none of that is going to grant Marche’s desire.  Because Marche’s desire wouldn’t be for a false, escapist happiness for the others, it would be for the more real, lasting, and healthy relief to their suffering that results from accepting and coming to terms with problems, and moving forward.  Again, not something that he could put into words, but whatever ability the Gran Grimoire has to read Marche’s heart would surely find desires for his friends’ happiness clearly distinguishable from the versions of happiness that his friends were themselves thinking of.

So what’s the Gran Grimoire do?  It creates Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1.  Not just Ivalice and its fun and games--I mean, it creates the events, the story, the adventure as a whole.  The book sets the stage, and acts on that stage as antagonist in the form of Remedi/Li Grim, for Marche to go on the journey that forces his friends to face reality and come to terms with life.  The story of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1 is, in fact, the unfolding story of Marche’s wish for Mewt, Ritz, and Doned to make peace with their lives and be happier.

There’s no conflict between Marche’s desire and the wishes of the others.  Mewt still gets his mom and functional family, Ritz gets her hair, the Scarecrow gets his brains, and Doned gets his health.  They just don’t necessarily get to keep them.  And in the process of losing those gifts, they gain an acceptance and potential for happiness that functions as a better replacement.

There’s also no conflict in the fact that this situation forces Marche to go out and accomplish his wish himself (as opposed to the rest of them being given by the Gran Grimoire outright).  Because, really, an immediate, magical fix that changes the others’ minds and hearts to be happier, if such a thing is even within the Gran Grimoire’s power, most likely wouldn’t be a way that Marche would approve of or accept.  Going out and facing the hard realities of the situation in order to get to a better place is definitely an on-brand style of wish fulfillment for him.

Heck, if we look at the game’s story as a stage set by the Gran Grimoire with the intention of helping the kids get to a better place with Marche’s help, certain other details start to slide into place, too.  Montblanc’s friendliness and initial guidance could be the Gran Grimoire’s gently putting Marche into place for the events to come--had he not been a part of Clan Nutsy and just been left to his own devices, Marche very well might not have met up with his friends at all (or at least not for a long time), and he wouldn’t have had the manpower of a clan backing him up on his quest to revert the world to what it should be.

There’s also the detail of Ritz’s situation.  While there are decent personality-related reasons for Ritz to have an all-Viera clan and be besties with Shara, it’s hard to completely ignore the fact that her closeness to Shara is a major part of what helps Ritz come to terms with having white hair in the real world.  1 of my favorite scenes in FFTA1 is of Ritz and Shara’s conversation toward the end of the game in which Shara tells her that the Viera (who Ritz clearly has grown to greatly respect from having worked with them) consider white hair in humans to be a blessing, and leads Ritz to realize that she considers the Viera’s white hair to be beautiful, which helps Ritz finally accept that white hair doesn’t have to be a curse, and in fact could be seen as something wonderful about her, since it’s something that connects her to a people she respects and loves.

It certainly is a fortuitous circumstance that Ritz just happened to be adopted into a clan consisting entirely of members of a white-haired race, who can show her through example just how strong, beautiful, and admirable such a woman can be.  Lucky enough, in fact, that it really isn’t hard to see the hand of the Gran Grimoire in this, putting Ritz in the position of being surrounded by exactly the kind of people she’ll need to be able to come to terms with the trait that’s caused her such misery until now.  While not a direct argument for it, I think it’s reasonable to say that Ritz’s situation and the process of her finding acceptance and happiness in her lot is, altogether, a decent piece of supporting evidence for the idea that the Gran Grimoire has created FFTA1’s stage with the intention of granting Marche’s wish for his friends to find a lasting and real happiness with their lives.

Now, Ecclesiastes did conjure up a point of dissension with this theory.  As he says, “in the introductory battle, Mewt has a single point of magic power, so it's apparent that he's the one who set things in motion. It doesn't mean Marche couldn't have shaped the magic after it woke up, but that goes further into "you can't disprove it" territory than I'm comfortable with.”  Now, myself, I view a lot of the stuff within combat scenarios as highly negligible as far its influence upon or representation of a game’s story elements, so this doesn’t really bother me at all to completely and totally disregard.  I also don’t really see it as an obstacle anyway, because even in a scenario where Marche’s desires are just along for the Gran Grimoire’s ride that Mewt summoned, that really doesn’t mean that it’s not Marche’s wish that has the most significance and effect--the other kids’ desires, Mewt’s included, can be accomplished as a precursor to Marche’s.  The only scenario where this magic point really disproves my theory is one in which Mewt’s wish is the only one granted by the book, and it’s HIM being kind to Ritz, Doned, and Marche that gives them hair pigment, health, and (maybe) Montblanc.  Which is a scenario I’d say has a lot more weight from the viewpoint that it’s Mewt’s book and incantation than anything to do with a single combat stat, anyway.

But anyway, that’s pretty much it, 2 theories to explain why Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1’s Marche doesn’t have a noticeable gift granted by the Gran Grimoire when all the other kids did.  Take’em as you like; I’m personally quite fond of the second.















* This could just be a happy result of Mewt’s wish, though, and nothing drawn specifically from Cid’s heart.  He wasn’t 1 of those gathered around the book during that early scene, and Mewt’s desires would almost certainly be not only for his mother to still be alive, but for his family as a whole to be emotionally healthy and stable.  The fact that Cid does not initially remember, in the new Ivalice, his life in the real world, even though all the kids do, lends credence to the possibility that he’s just happily along for the ride of Mewt’s desires...although, Cid has, in the real world, taken up drink since his wife’s passing, from what I remember.  That kind of drinking problem is almost always connected to a desire to forget about one’s pain and troubles, so his memory loss in Fantasy Ivalice could still be a result of his own wishes being granted by the Gran Grimoire, an amnesia he would have actually desired.  It’s impossible to say whether the Gran Grimoire’s actions with Cid are a case of it fulfilling his own desires, or whether they’re simply an extension of Mewt’s wishes which just happen to be a pretty perfect representation of what Cid would have wanted anyway.

Totally irrelevant to the rant, or anything else, of course, and the result is the same regardless, but hey, wasting time talking about unimportant nonsense has never been something I’ve been afraid of.


** Another possible reason that this wish’s granting is so much more muted than the others could also just be the fact that it’s probably the least strongly-desired wish of the group.  Aside from the fact that the fact that wanting your mother not to be dead is generally going to be a stronger wish overall, Marche has had at least some of his fears at being a new kid assuaged by the point that the book could be scanning the kids’ hearts.  After all, a significant part of the fears involved in moving to a new place are social ones, anxiety over whether you’ll be able to make new friends and fit in.  Well, at that moment, Marche has made new friends, 2 of them.  Certainly he has just cause to still have social anxiety still (as his new friends are not going to help him fit in completely, and we’ve had a decent demonstration so far that bullies are going to be a problem in his future), but a decently significant part of Marche’s natural desire for belonging has been satisfied with Ritz and Mewt’s new friendship.  Thus, the potential strength of the wish within him that the Gran Grimoire would grant is likely less pronounced than it could be, and as a natural result, its fulfillment is subtler than that of the other kids’.


*** Figure out that reference, oh ye who claim to be RPG fans.

The Outer Worlds's Downloadable Content

On the 1 hand, my expectations for add-on content are understandably low.  On the other hand, the last game whose DLCs I experienced was Pokemon Generation 8, and it’s kind of hard to imagine that even a single member of Obsidian’s team could possibly have cared less about any part of The Outer Worlds than Game Freak cared about their own product.  Hell, I think most of the pedestrians who have happened to walk past the building housing Obsidian’s offices have probably put in more work on The Outer Worlds than any writer in Game Freak’s employ put into Pokemon Generation 8.  So there’s a good chance these things’ll at least be a step up from last time.



Peril on Gorgon: I found this DLC a bit puzzling to me, when I looked back on it.

See, it’s a good, solid DLC, overall.  It’s got a lot of little details that I noticed, enjoyed, and appreciated while going through it.  It starts off in a pretty interesting way.  There’s a fun temporary companion that can give SAM some specific dialogue interactions (which are just way too lacking in The Outer Worlds overall).  I like the moment that the game gives you a persuasion dialogue option to use Parvati’s romance with Junlei to get through an obstacle.  It’s cool that there are several additions to the stuff on the ship that you can find and collect.

And the add-on also has positives that are much more important than the above little details, too.  It’s a sizable venture, with a map the equal in size and exploration of any of the main game’s major areas.  The story is long and involved enough that you could probably get away with calling this an outright expansion.  Companions will all comment on the situations you find yourselves in, the same as they would for the main game’s quests, and as an additional nice touch, you can check in with them at various stages of the adventure to have them weigh in on the relevant developments of the story.  And the story as a whole is a decent one, exploring regrets of past sins, the tumultuous relationship of an emotionally estranged, yet not fully disconnected, mother and daughter, and, as always, the casual cruelty and inherently self-destructive mindset of corporations and the rich.  There are even aspects of the story that are outright elegant, really--I really enjoy the fact that the DLC’s (supposed) antagonist’s failure to stop the Stranger can be seen to boil down to a lack of ability to competently orchestrate their actions and hire adequate subordinates, subtly connecting to the idea, later on, that the antagonist needs the “lesser” mind that they have always dismissed as not brilliant enough, to organize and handle logistics for them.  That probably sounds vague and uninteresting because I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but it IS cool, really!

But what puzzles me a bit is that while I can objectively say it’s a good DLC, I have to admit that I’m personally only kinda lukewarm on it.  I don’t dislike it or anything, but...I guess that I just don’t connect with it very strongly because a substantial part of this DLC’s emotional essence is rooted in the relationship between Minnie and her mother, and it just doesn’t really speak to me or draw me in.  Maybe Lillie and Lusamine in Pokemon Generation 7 spoiled me, I dunno, but I just don’t feel a lot of what I think I’m supposed to in this story of familial love, regret, resentment, and the divide between mother and daughter.

Additionally, I’m not sure I really get much from the purpose of the DLC.  The basis of Peril on Gorgon is eventually revealed to revolve around the existence of the marauders in The Outer Worlds, with the add-on revealing what creates them, and eventually culminating in the question of what the solution is to them and/or their creation.  And that’s nice, but at the same time, it sort of feels like a question being answered that we as an audience weren’t really asking...I don’t think anyone really questions the existence of raiders in Fallout, because the setting itself is enough of an explanation for them, and we likewise didn’t question marauders in The Outer Worlds, because while the physical nature of the setting may not be anywhere as terrible as the post-apocalypse, Halcyon’s pervasive crushing corporatism is explanation enough for why a number of people might mentally snap and begin to live as violent, feral psychos.  Raiders are raiders in Fallout for a number of reasons, sometimes by choice, sometimes by unfortunate circumstance, sometimes by madness, and the world of Fallout being such that it creates this kind of mindless evil is sensible and consistent with the series’s themes and environment.  That the marauders of The Outer Worlds are to be explained away by a single, overarching reason for their existence, just a single outside factor that eliminates questions of responsibility and limits the scope of their stories drastically...it feels like a rather clumsy and shortsighted narrative decision.

Not helping anything is the fact that the cause behind the marauders, and what it narratively makes them as a whole, strikes me as a case of The Outer Worlds finally going beyond mere homage to Firefly/Serenity, and becoming straightforward plagiarism.

So, my verdict is a muddled one here.  Peril on Gorgon is good--but it’s not as good as it should be, wants to be, and thinks that it is.  Peril on Gorgon might really work for you--but I, personally, couldn’t make enough of a connection to really get into it.  At $15, it’s a pricey DLC, but at the same time, you’re probably going to get around 15 hours out of it, and there’s really nothing about it that’s an outright problem or shortcoming.  I guess I tentatively recommend it at full price, and if you can get it on sale, then my recommendation stands on much firmer ground.


Murder on Eridanos: Oddly enough, I feel like Peril on Gorgon had greater ambitions and tried much harder to be a meaningful story...but I personally enjoyed Murder on Eridanos more.  The premise of this one is a fun change of pace, as the Stranger signs on to investigate a murder and figure out whodunnit, against the backdrop of a fancy hotel on a resort planet with a corporate-controlled fruit plantation and a spaceport run by basically the mob.  It’s a decent little story of investigating leads, finding oneself being drawn into a larger plot than was previously expected with a shadowy figure lurking just behind the entire time, culminating in a big plot twist and a final showdown.  It’s basically The Outer Worlds taking a lighthearted stab at Film Noir, except without the Noir at all because everything’s about colorful cereal berries.  Even got a Femme Fatale and everything.  Who, BTW, I won’t be naming, because spoilers, and whatnot.

What’s weird, though, is that Murder on Eridanos is as enjoyable as it is.  Oh, sure, there are plenty of moments and details that are unequivocally good and great--Felix as Bad Cop with Bertie is an absolute treasure, and once again I’m very pleased that the companions’ presence is as strong in this adventure as it was in Peril on Gorgon and in the main game, for example.  But there’s a lot about this add-on that falls flat, too.

For starters, it never really feels all that much like an actual murder mystery kind of adventure...the investigations and interrogations of suspects are pretty underwhelming stuff that’s obviously just fodder for providing more sidequests than actually building a murder mystery narrative.  There’s no intrigue, no one seems like a legitimate suspect but the perpetrator himself (and even then, it’s more for it being the most likely “twist” than anything related to deduction), there’s no strong central detective entity to tally up and ponder over the evidence and alibis and such...hell, not that this is all that important in and of itself, but even the aesthetic of the DLC gets in its own way, with its vaguely garishly colorful setting being quite good for the sci-fi adventure parts of the story, but not the promised detective premise.  If Obsidian was sincerely trying to create a murder mystery DLC here, then they were clearly completely and totally out of their element...and if they didn’t actually consider the murder mystery aspect of the DLC to be all that important to it, just a starting point, then unfortunately, they devoted way too much of the adventure’s time to the quests that are theoretically related to sleuthing.

Next, it is, frankly, really disappointing that when the Femme Fatale I mentioned enters into play on your side, all she does is stay in the hotel room while you do all the remaining legwork.  I mean, for real, what is with that?  For the first 70% of the DLC, she’s pursuing her own investigation, out there running down her leads and doing the work, with you always a step behind...and then when you finally do catch up with her, and join forces, she just retires to the suite and lets you do all the rest.  She isn’t even doing a commenting-from-afar thing like, say, Sylens in Horizon 0 Dawn, or the navigator in a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona title.  Considering her behavior before you caught up to her and the way she’s personally invested in the murder mystery, for the Femme Fatale not to be out in the field with you is a case of insanely poor writing.  Like, Anders-in-Dragon-Age-2-contrasted-to-Anders-in-Dragon-Age-1 levels of antithetical character behavior.  

She isn’t even there for the climax, for Norgorber’s sake!*  The entirety of Femme Fatale’s character is based around her emotional connection to the deceased, and yet she just passively sits out the showdown with [SPOILER]’s killer in a hotel room a mile away!  What the actual fuck?

Lastly, the conclusion of this add-on is rushed as all hell.  Once the main quest is finished and you’re on your way out, there’s little interaction to be had with Femme Fatale and Sederick (who are (potentially) the 2 remaining major figures of the DLC’s plot).  There’s no dialogue changes for almost any other important characters to reflect that the situation has been resolved (which, for Bertie and Spencer Woolrich, is especially neglectful if Femme Fatale made it out of this DLC alive).  The spaceport area of the map remains infected, even if you followed the story path of fixing that issue.  I can only assume that the developers were working on a harsh deadline, and man does it show.

With all that said, I reiterate that Murder on Eridanos is generally pretty fun.  It doesn’t have ambitions of significance the way Peril on Gorgon did, so I do respect the first DLC more, but at the same time, Murder on Eridanos manages to rise well enough above its flaws to be an enjoyable romp that will deliver a fairly satisfactory hit of more Outer Worlds fun for fans.  Now, it is flawed enough, and to less enough purpose, that I definitely don't recommend it at its $15 asking price, the way that I kind of did for Peril on Gorgon.  But if you can get it on sale for half off, maybe even at $10, then Murder on Eridanos is probably worth it.



And that’s all, at least for now--I’ve heard some people theorize that there might be more add-ons in The Outer Worlds’s future, but all reliable accounts I can find indicate that this is wishful thinking.  So, then, how did this game do?

Eh.  Okay, I guess.

Which still is something of a win, when it comes to add-ons, particularly considering that my last experience with a DLC was Nintendo extending the unworthy life of Pokemon Generation 8 further.  Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos each represent some of the lower moments of The Outer Worlds, and one might have hoped for far better from Obsidian just on principle, but there’s no denying that these content packs are better than average DLCs, at least.  No doubt I’ll reflect quite fondly on them when I play whatever terrible add-on I next encounter.








* And don’t go trying to tell me that there are any gameplay considerations that would rationally prevent her being involved.  It might’ve been too tall an order to coder Femme Fatale in as an actual party member, but as PAM in Peril on Gorgon demonstrates, it’s possible to have a non-party ally hanging around in any given interior location.  Easily could’ve done that here for at least the last dungeon of the DLC.

General RPG Lists: Greatest Romances

Time really does fly the older you get.  It seems like it wasn’t all that long ago that I was re-publishing this list because I’d hit the 200 mark of RPGs, and that seemed like it should warrant 10 places rather than 5.  But apparently that was 7 holy fuck that’s right 7 years ago, and I’ve doubled the RPGs I’ve played by this point.  And while the genre still is sadly not exactly bursting at the seams with deserving romances, because a good love story is the only thing that RPGs fumble with as often as writing a halfway decent villain, we’ve at least certainly hit the point that this rant should be lauding a few more of’em.  So we’re starting 2022 off right, with the Top 15 greatest RPG romances to date!

Ahem:



Y'know, when I went about deciding which couples would make it to this list, I found something out that greatly surprised me: there really weren't many strong contenders. For a genre that throws at least one major love story, or at least a romantic interest, into the strong majority of its games, there's not many RPG romances that are worthy of note. Most of them are either pointless and silly/inexplicable, or just rather generic and/or under-developed. I mean, where in the world does La Pucelle Tactics's Eclair and Homard's side romance come from? Do the romantic hints between Breath of Fire 3's Ryu and Nina serve any plot- or character-related purpose at all? Are we really meant to care about Tales of Phantasia's Cless and Mint's attraction when it's so bland and unconvincing? And how is it that, going back to La Pucelle Tactics, Prier and Croix so perfectly manage to combine all the problems above and have a love story that is pointless, silly, inexplicable, generic, AND under-developed all at once?

Still, there are definitely some good ones out there, too, and that includes several that didn't quite make it to this list. It just surprised me that the number was comparatively small to how many were available to choose from. Here, though, are the ones that I think are sweet and emotional enough to soften the heart of even the grumpiest of haters.

Spoilers, naturally, as love stories in RPGs are usually pretty heavily tied into the general plots.

UPDATE 12/12/24: Argon, Aurellia, Fluorine, Garnet, and Hinoki (A Dragon's ReQuest) have been added; Beast and Belle (Kingdom Hearts Series) have been bumped off.



15. Arueshelae and the Commander (Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous)

Arueshalae’s journey to change her nature for the better, and to finally determine what she dreams of, is a wonderful and natural companion to the sweet, authentic deepening of her feelings for the protagonist into tender love.  It’s a genuinely lovely romance that makes you feel warm and content to witness that’s so right for who Arueshalae is and wants to be that her character arc actually feels incomplete without it; Arueshale and the Commander are simply meant to be together.


14. Duchess Catherine and the Nereid (Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle)

While the majority of this couple’s interactions are simply the cute but largely insubstantial adorations of an amorous mermaid who can’t talk and just seems inexplicably smitten with Catherine, the final stage of this romance takes a sudden, very unexpected turn for the heavy and emotional, and establishes an abiding, unbreakable love across the distance of time and impossibility.  Within a short time, we see that Catherine and the Nereid, to even their own surprise, share the kind of bond powerful enough to inspire a person to die in place of the one she loves.  Powerful enough to inspire a person to devote the rest of her life and all her efforts to the benefit of the one she loves, even when she herself will never even be able to see the fruits of this labor.  Powerful enough to mean that a person simply can’t bring herself to live without the presence of the one she adores.  And powerful enough that the true depth of their devotion to one another is something that exists beyond what time and mortality can tear apart; it’s at their most distant that we see the greatest depth and authenticity of how much Catherine and the Nereid love one other.*


13. Dorothea and Manuela (Fire Emblem 16)

Since they already topped a similar list, I see no reason not to simply quote myself on the matter of Dorothea and Manuela:

From start to finish, the Support conversations between Dorothea and Manuela flawlessly extol to the viewer the perfect chemistry between them, as peers, friends, and so much more.  In the 2 of them we see a combination of women who inspire and better each other just by being themselves, without resorting to viewing one another as greater than each truly is--as much as they are about having such profound and overwhelming respect and affection that they’re each a role model for the other, Dorothea and Manuela’s interactions are also about acknowledging one another’s shortcomings and loving her no less for them.  Their sequence of conversations tells a heartwarming story of Dorothea chasing after the woman she loves and has always been inspired by, the one she wanted to stand alongside, and a moving and touching story of Manuela finding someone, finally finding someone, who loves her (and always has) for what’s good and great and important about Manuela, regardless of the small shortcomings that come with that.

It’s a wonderful, warm joining of 2 people made for each other, each seeking the exact kind of love that the other can give, and who hold onto one another as a source of personal inspiration to better themselves.  And the A Support is just beautiful, 1 of my favorite scenes of tender love in all of RPGs.  Whoever wrote Dorothea and Manuela’s relationship, I hope you got a damn raise, because you raised the bar and gave me happy butterflies in my tummy.


12. Argon, Aurellia, Fluorine, Garnet, and Hinoki (A Dragon's ReQuest)

Polyamorous relationships present all kinds of interesting opportunities, but, as might be expected with so complex and frankly uncontrollable a state and emotion as love, they're damned tricky to successfully make work, both in the realms of writing and real life.  But you CAN find the ways to genuinely make a romantic relationship between more than 2 people work, and in storytelling, it can make for a refreshingly different and no less compelling story of love.  I'm really pleased that most of the exceptionally few which I've encountered in RPGs have actually been very earnestly, passionately written by creators who clearly believed in their legitimacy.

Now as far as this particular 5-way love story (honestly closer to 6, really, as Chelisera's affections for the girls are treated as quite legitimate), Imma just quote a little someone I like to call "myself" here, as I like how I summed it up in my 2024 Annual Summary:

The love story of Hinoki and her companions is a long, engaged, and determined one that elegantly links the women in her life to her in genuinely touching scenes and dialogues that emotionally develop these superlative characters and their bonds with one another, while displaying each’s individual and nuanced social psyche.  The love stories that entwine in this polyamorous tapestry highlight and are born from shared histories, deeply rooted wants and insecurities, tender gestures of caring and understanding, personal traumas, moments of great internal courage and adventurousness, and undeniable chemistry.

Making it even better is the fact that this isn’t just a harem-esque polyamory centered around a single figure that all the others love (not that I don’t adore much of Duchess Catherine’s love life in Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, mind)--it starts that way, with Hinoki as all the other women’s central figure of affection, but A Dragon’s ReQuest carefully, expertly brings Hinoki’s paramours together with their own moments and connections of love as time goes on, with each new couple in this love polyhedron discovering ardor for one another in their own, unique terms.  And no lack of effort or conviction is given to these “side” romances, either--Fluorine and Garnet’s feelings for each other are treated with the same respect and importance to them as people and as a couple with which each’s romance with Hinoki is treated, for example.  Honestly, one of most poignant scenes in the game (and one of my many favorites) is devoted to one of these "side" couples, the scene in which Fluorine and Aurellia allow physicality to finally find a way to connect and foray into new emotional territory together.  It’s lovely.  The whole game-spanning multifaceted love story of the main characters of the game is lovely.


11. Octavia,  Protagonist, and Regongar (Pathfinder: Kingmaker)

Right from the start, I thought it was really cool that the writers for Pathfinder: Kingmaker not only included options to pursue a polyamorous relationship in the game, without treating such pursuits with any disdain, or acting like they were a less legitimate emotional bond than the others in the game.  They didn’t treat the polyamorous romance like a punchline, they didn’t introduce it solely to argue that it’s dysfunctional or wrong or unnatural, they didn’t imply that it’s inherently something perverted.  Owlcat Games just wrote an actual love story for Octavia, Regongar, and the Queen/King of Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

And it’s really good!  While the other love stories of PK are no slouches (Nyrissa and the Queen/King came pretty close to making this list, too, in fact), this one is a fearsomely interesting and natural connection.  It establishes a pre-existing relationship between Octavia and Regongar that carries forward because of how genuine their feelings are, but is inherently flawed and out of balance.  But when the Queen/King is introduced as a third member of this relationship, we watch as she/he grows from a casual fling to someone that both Octavia and Regongar begin to sincerely love for her/his own sake...and in that growth, we also witness the Queen/King become the piece that’s been missing from Octavia and Regongar’s puzzle.  The game’s protagonist is the right kind of person to help Reg and Octavia each individually with their emotional conflicts and issues, guiding them to be better, happier versions of themselves--the right kind of person to be loved by each, for their own sake, you see.  And she/he’s also the right kind of person to help Octavia and Regongar to work out the issues in their relationship that keep them from being able to fully accept and give the love they feel for one another--the right kind of person to be an equal part of their relationship, someone who balances it and brings it to a greater level than before.

It’s a narrative balancing act of essentially writing 3 love stories: 1 with Regongar, 1 with Octavia, and a final 1 with Octavia and Regongar, all of which coordinate into a single emotional whole.  And it’s just great.


10. Maxim and Selan (Lufia 2)

Two people being together. It is, apparently, one of the most terrifying possibilities imaginable to a game writer, a scenario that frightens even the most hardened and stalwart creators of entertainment of all kinds: portraying a happy, reasonably stable couple. I mean, think about it--how often do you ever see what happens AFTER the main characters in an RPG (or practically anything else, for that matter) have hooked up? Yeah, not too often. The whole game’s spent building up to it one way or another, and then they only actually get together near or at the very end (if even then!), leaving no time for the audience to actually see the relationship they’ve been waiting for. Even in a game where you can complete a romance earlier than that, like, say, a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona title, or 1 of several different western RPGs, the love story’s subplot usually pretty much wraps up after the characters get together.  You may get a few pieces of dialogue or even a very small scene as the game goes on that acknowledges that the characters are romantically involved, but the actual story of it is more or less done.

And that’s nice, and all, but, y’know, there’s more to relationships than just the build-up. There’s also the, y'know, relationship.

That’s what Maxim and Selan show us, and I think that they do it very well. While the actual act of them getting together is a bit generic, and a little rushed in some ways, the latter 2/3rds of Lufia 2 portrays them as husband and wife, reinforcing their devotion to each other and their son as the game goes on, showing their affection in a way that generally denotes the kind of confidence and trust they have in one another and one another’s feelings.

And in another refreshing take on this idea, once they’re together, all the forces of the universe that the writers can summon up don’t immediately start conspiring to tear them apart. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when folks get together before the story of a movie or show or comic or whatever concludes, it’s almost inevitable that some contrived, overblown drama is going to force them apart again, because as I said, writers are terrified of having a couple be a couple.

But again, Maxim and Selan buck this trend. They stand firm in their love for one another, and the writers don’t dump a load of stupid, unrealistic emotional bullshit on them to change that. But they’re also not static--the relationship has its hurdle to overcome, making it still enjoyably dynamic. It’s just that the hurdle is a TEST of their love, not an obstacle meant to by the writers to weaken it. Maxim and Selan are touching, realistic, and very competently refreshing.


9. Bastila and Revan (Knights of the Old Republic 1)

It's surprising how well this works, honestly, because Bastila often kind of annoys me (as does any typical blind follower of flawed Jedi philosophy). However, she and Revan (male, Light Side Revan, I mean--regardless of how players want to play the game and interpret things, that's what's cannon) have a romance that develops itself at a relaxed, but steady pace, where you can actually see and understand the growing attraction instead of just having it thrust at you for a few seconds here and there, as is often the case in RPGs.

What really sells it, though, is later on, when the love they've built is tested and endures--as Revan talks a corrupted Bastila back to her senses, and she slowly returns, you really get convinced of how strongly they feel about one another. Not because TEH POWAH OF LOVE ALONE CONQUERS ALL, mind, but rather because it's love that lets Revan know Bastila so well to be able to convince her back. He doesn't just say some stupid crap like most RPGs would that amounts to "Hey baby I know you're all into this ultimate power destroying the universe thing, and that's cool and everything, but you and I had a crush on each other once and THAT'S MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT." Revan talks to her and reminds her of what she used to want, who she used to be, and shows her the strength of the things she held important before--and also, as PART of that instead of its entirety, says that he wants her to come back to him because he loves her. It's like he loves her, instead of loving being in love with her, I guess, which is what I usually see with these games. And when the scene is over, and Bastila's soul has been saved and she admits that she feels the same for Revan, feelings that have had to persevere against the code of both the Sith AND the Jedi, you genuinely feel, wow, they really, truly do love each other.


8. Carmina and Duchess Catherine (Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle)

If this romance had started off better (to put it bluntly, Carmina is horny and forces herself upon Catherine in a shared dream, with Catherine's willingness being questionable at best, even if it's all glossed over later and made out to be something Catherine enjoyed to some degree), it would have been higher up on this list, because it is frankly just absolutely beautiful once it's properly gotten started. The love story of Catherine and Carmina’s got it all. They share their histories and personalities with one another, they share a touching chemistry, they’re each willing to give absolutely everything up for the other (Catherine’s willing to make herself the enemy of the most powerful adventuring group in the world for Carmina and to use every resource she has to protect her, and/or go with her to the lands of the Dark Elves (the Drow, essentially, which any Dungeons and Dragons player knows is not a pleasant prospect for a human), Carmina’s willing to restrain her natural inclinations of evil for Catherine’s sake and give up on returning to her home in order to be with Catherine, etc), there’s a very touching aspect of Catherine’s taking a leap of faith in trusting her love to Carmina, and generally I’d just have to say that everything about Carmina’s and Catherine’s romance is emotional, moving, authentic, and natural.


7. Ai and Yu (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4)

You know, given how bland, rushed, and utterly unconvincing the rest of Yu’s romantic interests in SMTP4 are, it’s rather amazing how well they did with Ai. It’s also surprising that it can work so well when one of the individuals concerned is mostly a Silent Protagonist (characters who don’t actually engage in dialogue with other people don’t tend to be terrific at interpersonal relations). But Ai and Yu's romance is a sweet one that's nonetheless worldly and realistic, which I like, and she's the one romantic option in the whole game for whom the love aspect of her Social Link actually seems to make a difference to its course and her overall relationship with Yu.

What I mean by that is, unlike the rest of the love interests in SMTP4, whose Social Links stay the exact same until the very end when the option to romantically engage with the person is shoehorned into the second-to-last scene, the course of her Social Link events changes depending on Yu's approach to the idea of romancing Ai. For a true romance with her, Yu must care enough about her as a person, and understand who she really is enough, not to hastily dive into a relationship before she’s ready. When Ai first proposes the idea of entering into a romantic relationship, Yu actually turns her down, not because he’s not interested (assuming here that we’re talking about a player who wants him to successfully romance her, I mean), but because she’s not ready for it, still too caught up with the superficial to know who she really is and what she really wants. He’d rather wait until she knows him well enough and understands herself well enough to KNOW that he’s who she wants to be with.

It thus becomes so much sweeter, so much more right, when, after Yu has helped her to rediscover who she is and understand the importance of being true to oneself, she finally asks him again, not as a girl still obsessed with appearances but rather someone more in touch with herself, if he wants to be with her, and he can say yes. You don’t get many instances in RPGs (possibly ANY, I’d have to think about it for a while) where a romance isn’t just approached directly all the way. If there’s any hesitation between RPG characters on whether they love each other, it usually comes in the form of trite denial of their own feelings, not a case where one person cares enough about and understands well enough the other to know they’re not emotionally ready for such a thing.

And Ai really sells it at the end of the game, too.  On Yu’s last day before leaving town, the other romantic options in the game basically tell him, “It’s been fun, Homeslice, maybe we can do this “being in love” thing again some day long from now when it happens to be convenient.”  Ai, by contrast, makes it clear that she’s never gonna give Yu up, never gonna let Yu down,*** just because he’s going away for a while, telling him that she’s very ready to pursue a long-distance relationship with him.

Overall, the romance between Ai and Yu shows surprising depth and realism for an RPG love story, and it really seems set to last.


6. Shepard and Tali (Mass Effect 2 and 3)

I hate to do another cop-out here, but honestly, I feel like I got most of this right the first time I mentioned it in an Annual Summary rant, so I’m just gonna say what I did there. Tali is adorable, sweet, and caring, and the chemistry between her and a Paragon Shepard is excellent. I like the fact that they've known each other for a fair amount of time before hooking up in Mass Effect 2 (she’s a non-romanceable crew member in ME1), too, giving the impression that this isn't some whimsical attraction that will fade, but rather a strong connection formed from a great understanding of each other.

What I really love about this romance, besides just how strong a chemistry and realism their connection has--few characters seem to so perfectly mesh with and bounce off of Shepard's personality as Tali does--is that there's a strong element of sacrifice involved with it...basically, a member of Tali's species is put at mortal risk when he/she removes his/her environmental suit due to their extremely weak and finicky immune system, meaning that such activities as sex (in the traditional sense, at least) are dangerous. Shepard knows all about Tali's species thanks to Tali's time in his crew in ME1, so for him to pursue a relationship with her, he's knowingly choosing a partner that he can't regularly make love to in any normal sense, so, as he more or less says himself, he’s choosing to be with her because he feels that on an emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual level, she's worth giving that up for. And of course, Tali takes a huge risk by deciding to make her and Shepard's first time natural, with her removing her suit--she does what she can to lessen the danger, but she's still endangering her life to show how much she loves Shepard.

Stupid? Well, yes...but romantically stupid.


5. Bhaalspawn and Viconia (Baldur’s Gate 2)

This assumes a protagonist who is good and honorable. You can court Viconia while being an evil guy, and she’ll actually be far more enthusiastic about the idea, but it’s not very interesting or satisfying to do so.

While Baldur’s Gate 2 goes to good lengths to create an in-depth and touching romance for all 4 of the love interests of its protagonist, the Bhaalspawn, Viconia’s love story is the one that’s truly touching and compelling, one that really gives her great character development in the process. It’s basically a tale of love’s redeeming power, with Viconia’s growing respect and affection for the main character creating an internal struggle within her as her harsh and evil philosophies wage war with the ever-growing emotional connection she has with the Bhaalspawn. She at first shrinks back in fear and revulsion from her growing feelings, trying to force them and the protagonist away from her with her typical venom and finding that she can't destroy her emotions so easily. It's good stuff, and when the romance picks up again during the Throne of Bhaal expansion campaign, it only gets better. With acceptance of her love for the protagonist comes the opportunity for Viconia to better explore her own conflicting inner nature, all culminating in the protagonist helping Viconia to change herself for the better, to change her philosophy of life from Evil to Neutral. It’s a massive personal achievement for her and, if my limited knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons is correct, a significant achievement by the rules of the universe itself. All in all, it’s a very touching and quite impressive love story, both penetratingly romantic and inspiring in its portrayal of love’s ability to improve those it touches.


4. Aigis and Makoto/Kotone (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, Q1, and Q2)

Another strange couple to make it onto the list, for a couple reasons. The first is that in SMTP3, there are several girls for the main character, Makoto, to get together with, and likewise several boys for the other potential main character, Kotone, to date, and neither Makoto's nor Kotone's relationship with Aigis is technically acknowledged as one of these romances. The second is that Makoto and Kotone are a silent protagonist--at least, in their own game; they DO speak and reveal personality traits in the SMTPQ spinoffs.  And silent protagonists are not exactly known for their stirring speeches on undying love...or any other subject. And the third, of course, is that Aigis is a battle robot, which, despite what Xenosaga players may fervently wish, is just not an ideal mate for a living being.

But this relationship really is very touching, far more so than the other, "real" romances of the game (although I did like Mitsuru's, I'll admit). Aigis, who is a fantastic character as a whole, seeks to make sense of her existence and come to understand and embrace her limited humanity, and Makoto or Kotone helps her in her search for herself. She's already absolutely devoted to him or her, and from that devotion and the time she spends finding herself with his/her aid, you can see her love for him/her grow in proportion to her self-discovery. In a sense, her identity as a human being instead of just a machine is directly linked to her immense love for Makoto or Kotone, and as she comes to be more and more an individual who can feel, so too does she become more and more an individual who can love. Of all the final romantic Social Link scenes that you see in the game, in which the love interest involved invites Makoto or Kotone to their room, gives him or her a gift, speaks of how much he/she's changed their life for the better, makes their love for Makoto/Kotone known as best they can, and then spends a long while alone with him/her (this last part is where you're left free to interpret, although let's be real, it's pretty definitely meant to imply love-making), it's Aigis’s which is the most spiritually touching.  She does the same as the other girls or guys, and reaffirms her love for Makoto or Kotone (which she confesses earlier, and earliest of all the other romantic interests), and then has him/her take out her main memory chip doohickey, the tiny piece of her circuitry that makes her who she is. In this way, by leaving his or her fingerprints on this piece of her, Aigis is asking the one she loves to forever leave a mark of him- or herself on her very soul.

I admit that the protagonist's side of things in this romance isn't especially noteworthy (although done well, considering the no-talking limitations and the fact that Makoto and Kotone seem like pretty mellow folks to begin with (at least in SMTP3; Q2 reveals that Kotone's actually pretty chipper)).  But Aigis is so convincing in her affections for Makoto and Kotone, and her character development, which I mentioned is closely tied to this love, is so great, that it makes this whole thing one of the most beautiful love stories I've seen in the genre.


3. Tidus and Yuna (Final Fantasy 10)

Tidus and Yuna  really have something special in their game. The way each shows his or her affections for the other is beautiful, and also a believable, real aspect of love that other RPGs rarely get at all into. I don’t mean the little glances and words and bland FMV water-smooch scene; that obvious stuff is what you'd expect. No, what really sells this love to the player is how Tidus and Yuna are so intimately touched by the other, so deeply moved by love, that they take on aspects of the one they love, becoming, as truly heartfelt lovers often do, akin to a single entity, entering into a union of emotion and spirit. Yuna's incredible devotion to the people of her world, so great that she was fully willing to become a sacrifice to give them a few years' peace and, more importantly, continued hope, never diminishes, but by Tidus's influence, she also comes to question the world as he does, to defy tradition that is wrong or makes no sense, which leads to her deciding to stand against her world's people in order to save them. At the same time, Tidus, while never losing his characteristic disregard for dogma and tradition when they oppose what's reasonable and right, becomes able to understand the kind of devotion Yuna has, the strength it takes to willingly die so that others can live better lives, and becomes, himself, a sacrifice to save her and the world she loves. While staying true to themselves, they become alike to each other, complimenting one another in love. It's really pretty damn cool, and very touching.


2. Gabby and Marine (Quantum Entanglement)****

...I swear Large Battleship Studios isn’t paying me to do this.  Saint Bomber really is just this good.

Gabby and Marine’s story is a marvelous example of a romance that has both a compelling love-at-first-sight fated-to-be dimension to it, and the care, effort, and skill invested into their interactions that really sells you on its authenticity.  The subtle but undeniable way that Marine and Gabby’s feelings deepen for one another--or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those feelings settle comfortably into where they’re meant to be--over the course of QE is touching and genuinely enjoyable to witness, and everything about how they interact with one another, supporting each other, connecting and re-connecting, realizing the perfect ways their personalities fit into the grooves of the other’s...it’s easily 1 of the most organic and genuine love stories I’ve seen, and the strength each woman derives from the devotion and support of her partner in turn uplifts the player, reminding him or her of just how powerful and wondrous love can be, as it reaches across lives to entangle 2 souls meant to be as one.

Hell, you know you’ve done something truly right with your love story when I write an entire rant just to heap praise upon it.  Check that one out if you want a more comprehensive look at why Gabby and Marine are an insanely wonderful specimen of romance.


1. Dagger and Zidane (Final Fantasy 9)

I have a habit of topping these rant lists with an example that's not so much original in its founding idea as it is a fantastic execution of a supposedly tired cliche (Grandia 2 being the best RPG, Ryudo being the best hero, and so on). And that's the case here. Dagger and Zidane's romance is not something you haven't heard of--it's a story of a lovable rogue winning the affections of an upper-class, proper woman (almost always a princess). It's usually good for a nice, lighter love story with some laughs (who doesn't love Han Solo and Leia's bickering in the original Star Wars trilogy, I ask?), but it's not usually something really stirring and deep.

Well, Dagger and Zidane make it that way. They start out about the way you might expect--Zidane's feelings for Dagger don't really extend much past the "Oooh, pretty" stage, while Dagger usually has enough sense not to take him seriously. But where most stories would just have them trade witty dialogue to simulate attraction, or possibly not even do that much, Dagger and Zidane's relationship grows throughout the entire game. As he comforts her when she's hurt and lost, stands by her, protects her, and helps her in whatever ways he can, and shows himself over and over to be a pure, noble man who helps people and innately understands what's right with almost childlike simplicity, Dagger comes to appreciate Zidane for his excellent quality as a human being, taking him more seriously as he proves that he is serious in his affections for her, and falling in love with him slowly, carefully, but completely.

And Dagger also wins Zidane's love just as well. What starts off as a mild attraction that probably doesn't exceed anything he feels for any random pretty lady crossing his path becomes a devoted, full-blown love for Dagger as he spends time with her, listens to her, comes to know her and understand her more and more. His interest in other women dwindles as he becomes fascinated with better knowing the one in front of him, and his appeals for her affection become less playful flirting and more genuine wooing as time goes on. Theirs is a love of labor, a romance realistically developed slowly and in detail, an attraction that draws them almost reluctantly into a deep, intimate connection of souls. These two are truly self-made soul mates, and well deserve to be at the top of this list.


Honorable Mention 1: Alice and Yuri (Shadow Hearts 1 and 2 (Mostly 2))

I like to put in these Honorable/Dishonorable Mention picks just to find a different perspective on the list's subject. It's fun. And so, we have Alice and Yuri. Specifically, from Shadow Hearts 2.

Now, SH1's portrayal of Alice and Yuri's love is nice enough. I can believe it and it'll make you feel as warm and fuzzy as any other reasonably decent RPG romance. But it's Shadow Hearts 2 that really portrays just how incredibly in love with Alice Yuri was. The funny thing is, though, that Alice isn't in SH2--she's dead. Yuri's love is seen in his mourning for her. We see his utter inability to find a place in his world without her, and realize that she, as the love of his life, gave his existence meaning. Although he can appreciate and fight for morality and friends, in the end, he feels empty, protecting a world because his beloved Alice loved it, yet has now left it behind. He can't even conceive of loving another person no matter how earnestly they may feel for him, he can't find a reason to keep doing what he does, and he would much sooner die than live without the memories of her. There are scenes in SH2 regarding Yuri's love for Alice, and how much she loved him, that are some of the most touching, heart-wrenching moments in the entire RPG genre.

Shadow Hearts 2 shows through Alice and Yuri an incredibly moving story of romantic love, after its end, and it deserves a mention here.


Honorable Mention 2: The Hero of Halferville and Persi (Shadowrun The Caldecott Caper Mod)

The Caldecott Caper is an unofficial fan work, so I can’t really give it an official place on the list.  But to deny this romance the due recognition of its excellence entirely would be an absolute sin, so at the very least, we can offer the mod’s creator, Cirion, an Honorable Mention.

The romance between the protagonist of The Caldecott Caper (later referred to as The Hero of Halferville) and the character Persi is poignant, sweet, and lovely.  It’s a genuine portrayal of a fast-forming but true bond between soulmates, and even if the rest of The Caldecott Caper weren’t awesome, this romance would be reason enough to play the mod.  And credit where it’s due--Cirion’s ability to write a love story is great pretty much every time he exercises it, not just with Persi (there’s some tough competition from Arelia’s romance in the following mod adventure, Calfree in Chains).  The love stories to be found in the Calfree Trilogy are amazing, beautiful connections of affection and passion that make your heart flutter in romantic sympathy, and make no mistake, Persi and the Protagonist aren’t just here in the Honorable Mentions out of pity--they’d probably have placed fifth on the list above, right between the Bhaalspawn and Viconia, and Aigis and Minato.  And Arelia and the Calfree in Chains protagonist would’ve probably placed only a few spots below them, for that matter.  I sure as hell hope that Cirion is a writer for the game industry or has plans in place to enter the field, because he’s damn good at what he does.



Always a fun time, to revisit this list.  1 of my favorite narrative subpots is a quality love story, and even if the RPG industry’s lagging a little behind on producing good ones, when it gets it right, it gets it right.  At any rate, I’ll see y’all again in another 7 years when I update this rant once more!















* The concept of love so indelibly inscribed into the souls of those engaged within it that it reaches across and cuts straight through intangible infinities like time, space, reincarnations, and non-existence is a recurring theme with romances written by Saint Bomber, it seems; the couples further up on this list that he’s created have loves that similarly defy the impossible and reach across iterations of infinity.  We love to view the concept of love as something that exists as a universal, cosmic power unto itself, that can exist beyond the ravages of any obstacle, and Saint Bomber knows how to work that angle beautifully over and over again.


** Look, it's a fine romance and I have nothing particular against how it's done, but going from confused and awkward acquaintances to terrific friend-crushes in the space of a single musical number just doesn't give this relationship the development time it needs.


*** :D

...Also, it has taken me more than 10 years to realize that another reason why this pairing is totally the true romance of SMTP4 is because the characters’ names are phonetically “You” and “I”.  I mean, that’s either gotta be intentional, or it’s the kind of cosmic coincidence that implies a higher will guiding the course of fate, and either way, Imma take it as proof that these 2 are meant to be.


**** Linked because finding this title is more complex than a single basic Ecosia search.