Fire Emblem 16's Edelgard is the Worst

I don’t get why so many people sympathize with Edelgard, and even like her.  Because Edelgard von Hresvelg? She is a fucking moron.

First of all, let’s start with the most obvious, glaring fault in everything that Edelgard does: she is the most gullible fucking idiot she possibly could be.  Seriously, with the exception of Byleth herself, it’s like you have to have “CLEARLY EVIL” stamped on your forehead before Edelgard will even consider taking you into her confidence.  First and foremost example?  The Agarthans, or, as she herself calls them, Those Who Slither in the Dark.  Because that’s the title you give to someone you trust enough to watch your back, right?

And oh, here it comes.  Here comes the major, obvious objection you’ll have to this: “But Edelgard doesn’t trust the Agarthans.  She knows they’re using her, and plans to turn against them after she’s won against the Church!”  And yes, you’re right!  That is completely true--Eddy knows that her secret allies are snakes and evil, and she has every intention of turning on them once she has the opportunity.  Great.  Good.  Yes.  Fine.  Point for Edelgard.  I don’t dispute that.  What I do dispute, however, is the assertion that this clears her of being considered gullible, in relation to her alliance with the Agarthans.  In fact, I assert that if anything, this makes Edelgard even dumber.

Because, see, look at it like this.  Edelgard knows she’s in bed with backstabbers, and she’s taking steps to protect herself from their inevitable betrayal, and all that.  Good.  But HERE is the kicker!  It’s the Agarthans that told Edelgard that the Crests are Rhea’s fault.

So, just to establish and clarify: the Crests are inherited traits that signify individuals who have some demonstrable, though usually tiny, bit of divinity (in actuality, less “divine” and more “dragon”) within them, which can manifest itself as special abilities.  The Crests showed up way, way back in the times of yore as, to crudely summarize, the Agarthans’ original stooge Nemesis injected some of his buddies with dragon blood so they’d be stronger, and Rhea/Seiros responded in kind with a couple of her most trusted allies.  As a way to maintain a controlled society wherein a handful of people had slight superpowers and no viable explanation for why, Rhea invented some jazzy story of these folks being blessed by the goddess, which led to the establishing of a caste system of nobility and commoners (in which having a Crest makes you a noble) which would be a plague on Fodland’s society thereafter, as such systems almost inevitably are.  Hell, it’s even worse than most normal inheritance-based nobility systems, since there’s really no guarantee that a noble’s kid will inherit a crest, so your entire family’s fortunes aren’t even guaranteed to survive another generation once you’ve produced an heir.  So there’s more familial bad feelings and in-fighting and arranged marriage maneuvering and such than there already would be, as a result.  And there’s dark shit that goes on behind the scenes sometimes, because the Agarthans like to perform terrible experiments on Crest-bearers to see if they can make them more powerful, which has led people like Lysithia and Edelgard herself to suffer greatly from it.

Basically Crests are just a raw deal all around.

But the thing is, the Agarthans have deliberately led Edelgard to believe that Rhea is responsible for the Crests in Fodlan.  Which is essentially untrue--it was Nemesis, and thus by extension the Agarthans themselves, who are responsible for humans having Crests, and while Rhea did give some of her own allies radioactive spider dragon blood, it was fewer than Nemesis did, and it’s safe to say that she probably only did so initially as a way of countering Nemesis’s actions.  Hell, she might not have even known it was possible to empower human beings with Crests until Nemesis provided the example.  She sure as hell doesn’t seem the type to think enough of human beings under normal circumstances to have had any interest in doing so (although admittedly most of her disdain for the human species seems to have arisen from the fact that 1 of them ripped her mother’s spine out of her and whittled it into a sword).  While the lousy caste system of Fodlan is largely Rhea’s fault, and shame on her for that,* the Crests that provide the foundation and fuel for that lousy system are most certainly not.

And yeah, okay, Edelgard obviously wasn’t there, and the true events of the battle against Nemesis aren’t exactly easy to find an account of, so it would be understandable for her to believe misinformation given to her about that time period...if she was being fed that misinformation by ANYONE other than the Agarthans!  She knows these guys are assholes, she knows that they’re using her for their own gain, she knows that their greatest and most frequently employed tactic is deception...and she just chooses to completely buy the story that Rhea’s responsible for the Crests that Edelgard hates so much.  She knows the Agarthans are untrustworthy, knows they want to manipulate her, and yet decides to implicitly believe them on the 1 subject that they have the absolute most to gain from lying about.

I’m not saying that Edelgard wouldn’t have ended up making war with Rhea anyways, if Rhea had been a strong enough stickler for the Crest system that no peaceful option was available.  But the fact that Eddy just works on the assumption that peace is not an option from the start, the fact that she hates Rhea so personally that she wouldn’t even want to pursue an option beyond war to deal with her...that all stems from a lie that Edelgard was a fool to believe.

And her gullibility does not end there.  Actually, her idiotic trust in Hubert is arguably worse!

Hubert, who looks like Severus Snape did a fusion dance with Loki, is Edelgard’s second in command, her aide, her go-to guy for keeping her plans proceeding smoothly.  She tells him what she wants, and Hubert gets it done.  Edelgard says she wants him to investigate someone, Hubert gets a spy network on the matter.  Edelgard says she wants him to have her armies in place and ready to fight at a moment’s notice, Hubert sends the messages to her generals.  Edelgard says she wants to rule as a just, ethical sovereign, Hubert disregards this and keeps on having inconvenient people secretly killed, including instances when she specifically ordered them not to be.

Yes, that’s right.  Hubert doesn’t just look, act, and sound like he majored in Wormtongue and minored in Jafar, he follows through on it.  The person that Edelgard places the most faith in to bring her dream of a better society to fruition is also the guy who has no qualms whatsoever in acting 100% contrary to the entire point of that dream.  Edelgard didn’t seem to like it very much, earlier in the game, when she witnessed Rhea order her defeated enemies to be executed, rather than show mercy--but if Hubert is just going to go behind Edelegard’s back and do the exact same thing in a similar situation regardless of Edelgard’s official order to show mercy, then as a ruler, what’s the difference between Edelgard and Rhea, really?  It’s like a few months back, when China voted for the UN resolution to condemn Nazism, even while the CCP was (and is still) actively engaged in perpetrating a genocide on its own people that’s so Nazi-like that it’s hard to tell whether the CCP are plagiarizing Hitler, or just trying to make a loving homage to him.  Edelgard, what you SAY about being a morally good ruler doesn’t really matter if what your administration is DOING is ethically horrifying!

At least with the Agarthans, Edelgard’s (insanely stupid) belief in what they tell her is a case of her being manipulated by an outside force.  Hubert, on the other hand?  He’s on her side.  He’s a major factor in how her ideal world is going to be run, because she’s trusting him to carry out what she says.  In deposing Rhea, all Edelgard’s done, in terms of overall national leadership, is replace a politely openly tyrannical and merciless regime with a more secret tyrannical and merciless regime.  She puts her faith in a guy who’s basically Count Dracula’s creepy little brother, and she gets exactly what you’d expect from that, only she’s too gullible and stupid to realize it.**

And that illustrates another point on why Edelgard is an utter dipshit: she is her own biggest obstacle, and it’s frankly amazing that things go as well for her as they do, even in the paths of the game where she loses and dies.

First of all, of course, there’s the Hubert situation, wherein even if she’s successful and becomes the ruler of Fodlan, her government is in practice still a ruthless, heartless, murderous one in which she’s a goodnatured but utterly helpless and inconsequential figurehead, as Hubert breaks a bloody, nightmarish dawn on the better tomorrow she wanted.  But secondly, there’s who she prioritizes as an enemy.

Forget the moral implications of her alliance with the Agarthans, and forget how she’s an idiot for trusting what they tell her.  Let’s focus more on the fact that any fool can see that they’re a far bigger danger to Fodlan’s people than Rhea’s semi-tyranny is.  She knows from firsthand experience that the Agarthans are the kind of monsters who will do anything and everything they have to in order to achieve their goals (much like her trusted advisor Hubert, I’d like to point out yet again), and that includes awful human experimentation that results in the deaths of its subjects most often, and even in its success winds up causing pain and misery in those subjected to it.  And she knows that they’ll do this to anyone, not just her family, since she can recognize that they’ve done it to Lysithia, too.  Those Who Slither in the Dark are a real and terrible threat to Fodlan, as a whole, not just to the Church.

But what does Edelgard do?  She prioritizes making an enemy of Rhea, instead.  If it’s Edelgard’s intent to destroy both the Church and the Agarthans, then she absolutely should have been going after the latter first!  Simple risk assessment: if Edelgard defeats the Agarthans but falls to the Church, then Fodlan continues on as it has, and that’s not great, but Rhea’s reign and sins are a known quantity and Edelgard hasn’t created a worse situation for her country.  But if Edelgard defeats the Church but falls to the Agarthans, she’s left the entirety of her nation wide open and defenseless against a malicious organization possessing none of Rhea’s moral safeguards against excessive, needless, or extreme cruelty to human beings.  And yet, it’s Rhea, not the brutal terrorists and torturers, that Edelgard decides she needs destroy first and foremost.

Not to mention that Edelgard isn’t exactly chummy with her Agarthan allies.  True, Edelgard’s got a great poker face, owing to her being so stiff and poorly-written that she has all the emotional range of Hillary Clinton, or a block of granite.  But it still isn’t exactly hard for any Agarthan representative to glean, from any interaction with her, that Edelgard is not a big fan of theirs.  With their specialty being deception and back-stabbing, the Agarthans are plenty likely to see Edelgard’s betrayal ahead of time, and plan for it.  This isn’t like in the Golden Deer path, when Claude and company show up on the Agarthans’ doorstep unexpected and steamroll them as a result--the only way these assholes don’t see Edelgard’s betrayal coming a mile away is if they’re somehow even less intelligent than she is.  So they’ve got ample time to prepare countermeasures, a fact which is born out by the fact that the epilogue of Edelgard’s path implies that the war with the Agarthans was a long and difficult affair.

Here’s an alternative path Edelgard could have taken:

1. Establish self at monastery academy adequately, and meet with Rhea.
2. Spill guts about Agarthans.
3. Make a big show of helping Rhea to fight the Agarthans.  Knowing the initial movements of Kronya gives the opportunity to capture her and learn the location of Shambhala--her little panic in the game when Byleth’s coming for her ass gives me the impression that Kronya ain’t gonna be hard to make talk.***
4. During this campaign, do all the same stuff as was planned regarding having the Empire’s nobles replaced and forced to obey.
5. Once established as a hero who helped the Church save Fodlan from a secret threat, capitalize off the positive celebrity and the Church’s gratitude to ask that the Church pass a decree that Crests are no longer to be a determining factor in the selection of nobility.  Who knows, Rhea might just be happy enough at finally fully avenging her mom, and at the fact that she doesn’t have to keep such a close control over this whole Crest issue, that she’ll agree.
6. In the likely case that she doesn’t, however, use the occasion to launch an attack, as was planned originally.  Not only will Rhea expect it even less from Edelgard now that she’s been an ally, and not only will the Church have been weakened from its war against the Agarthans, but there will be FAR more discord within Rhea’s potential allies in the Kingdom and the Alliance over the circumstances.  After all, Edelgard has been established as a selfless hero, and even now her betrayal is coming after being publicly denied a request she’s made with the expressed intention of improving society.  She still may not find sympathizers in the Kingdom and the Alliance, but they also won’t be so quick to stand at Rhea’s side as they would have been.
7. Swiftly defeat the Church, capture Rhea, and display mercy to her in her incarceration, insisting that all that is wanted is the opportunity to create a Fodlan where ability rather than Crests determine worth.  With the Alliance and the Kingdom not already at arms over Rhea’s defeat, diplomatic methods of social change may be possible--and if not, they’re at least going to be easier to conquer and annex while not fully united against their enemy, and when their enemy’s victory would mean an improvement in the lives of a substantial number of rank-and-file soldiers and the majority of the citizens.

It requires a few lucky moments, but most of them are the same lucky moments that Edelgard’s existing canon plan relied on.  The main thing I’m trying to express here, is that there was an entirely separate gameplan that could have been explored by uniting with and manipulating Rhea, rather than the Agarthans, who are transparently as evil as Edelgard incorrectly believes Rhea to be.  And this alternate strategy provided more opportunities to change the world for the better peacefully, and gave her potential enemies less cause to unite against a clear villain.

But no, Edelgard’s let herself be convinced by the Snidely Whiplash Foundation that Rhea’s too evil to even bother trying to negotiate with, or treating humanely as a prisoner of war.****  So Fodlan’s transition to a Crestless society is going to have to come at the cost of a bloody, protracted war, at least 1 war crime, and then another bloody, protracted war right after the first.  Because Edelgard is an amoral nitwit.

You know, had Edelgard bothered to look into who her most prominent classmates at the monastery were, a longer but far less violent option for her social revolution could have presented itself.  I mean, consider this: during the same year as her own attendance, Sylvain, Claude, Mercedes, Lysithea, and Marianne are all her fellow students.  Sylvain, who hates Crests with a passion.  Mercedes, whose familial miseries are all founded in the Crest she and her brother bear.  Marianne, who feels that her Crest is a curse upon her existence.  Lysithea, whose future has been robbed by Crests.  Claude, who has an outsider’s perspective on the traditions of Fodlan and can see that there’s a lot about the country that doesn’t work well.  And hell, plenty of other significant figures of the Kingdom and Alliance would take very little convincing to agree that the Crest system is wrong--Felix values personal ability (as evidenced by his single-minded drive for combat perfection) and would thus likely be amenable to the idea of a society where that’s the measure of worth.  Hilda, meanwhile, hates the expectations people have of her due to her family, which is only a step away from the way the world views the holders of Crests.

These are all individuals who would have major influence on the Kingdom and the Alliance once they graduated.  Had Edelgard made a bid to win them to her way of thinking, she almost surely would have been successful, and at that point, she’d have the leader of the Alliance on her side, as well as nobles from the Kingdom who could bend Dimitri’s ear to support her (as Dimitri doesn’t really care 1 way or another about Crests, and his confessional note proves that he genuinely cares about the common people of his nation greatly).  Being at Gareg Mach means that Edelgard is rubbing shoulders with the leaders of nations and the most influential figures below them, and half of them already have good reason to want the same world that she wants.  If she’d made even the slightest effort to capitalize on this amazing opportunity to form friendships and make pacts, there’s every chance that upon graduation, the new leaders of the people of Fodlan would by and large be united in the cause of eliminating Crests from the social structure of their joint nation.  At that point, there wouldn’t be anything Rhea could do about the matter, even if she really did care about the Crest social foundation that much.  What’s she gonna do, declare war on 3 nations at the same time, all of which surround her?

Edelgard’s also a self-defeating dumbass in a few smaller ways, too, all of which are illustrated in the Blue Lion route of the game.*****  First of all, she’s 1 of those morons who remain tight-lipped for absolutely no reason even though it’s only going to cause her a bunch of problems due to misunderstandings.  When Dimitri decides, for some inexplicable reason, that Edelgard must have been responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur, Edelgard makes absolutely no attempt to correct his assumption.  Allowing this misunderstanding to stand makes her Dimitri’s sworn enemy and drives him to relentlessly pursue her death, which will eventually lead to her downfall.  And while she can’t know that this guy in particular is going to be the one to defeat her, what sense does it make to just allow a heated enmity to be formed over the only crime she didn’t commit?  What is there to gain by not saying, “That wasn’t me” even once?  Sure, there’s a good chance Dimitri isn’t gonna believe her, but surely she should at least make the effort, right?

She’s even more stupidly close-lipped later on in the Blue Lions story, too.  Once Dimitri finally snaps out of his tiresome Enraged Goth phase, he sets up a private meeting with Edelgard, because he wants to understand why she’s doing all this, what purpose she had for overthrowing the Church and trying to conquer the entirety of Fodlan, with the intent that perhaps it’s not too late for a resolution that doesn’t end in violent death for everyone on the losing side.  Which is surprisingly levelheaded, decent, and patient of Dimitri, honestly, and good on him for it.

So Edelgard shows up at this private meeting, and...refuses to tell Dimitri anything.  The leader of the opposing army--one which is currently kicking her ass, incidentally; it’s late enough in the story that Eddy’s steadily losing ground to Dimitri’s forces--asks her to explain her actions, clearly hoping that her reasons might be good enough that he doesn’t have to pursue her death.  And all she does is answer with a bunch of vague platitudes about how this will change the world for the better and it’s the way with the fewest possible casualties and blah blah blah.  At no point, at NO POINT, does Edelgard actually give any relevant detail or clarification of what she wants, why she wants it, how this was the only possible way to achieve it, ANYTHING.  She doesn’t explain why she believes Crest-based society and the Church need to be abolished, she doesn’t explain how she concluded that a backstabbing military coup championed by murder-obsessed mental patients like the Death Knight and amoral scumbags like Hubert would be the best way to bring about a just and peaceful world, she doesn’t explain why she (incorrectly, stupidly, gullibly) believes that the Crests are Rhea’s fault...Edelgard can’t be bothered to tell Dimitri ANYTHING beyond overgeneralized, grandstanding vagaries in this entire conversation.

Nor does she even make an attempt--hell, she doesn’t even seem to consider the possibility--to settle this conflict with Dimitri by, I dunno, saying that she’d leave the rest of Fodlan alone if he agreed to revolutionize society the way she desires.  I mean, if what Edelgard really cares about is creating a better world, and truly isn’t just seeking power for her own selfish ambitions, then shouldn’t she make an effort, when her enemy is approaching her with the intent of hearing her side, to offer an alternative resolution to war that will still accomplish what she most cares about?  Especially since, at this point, Dimitri’s army is basically knocking at her goddamn door; there is every reason for Edeglard to believe, going into this meeting, that she will lose this war.  She should be jumping at this opportunity to make her enemy understand how important her cause is since he’s looking to perhaps be the one who’s gonna wind up ruling this nation after all, and even more, she should be scrambling to make the most of this chance to find a solution that might accomplish what she set out to or at the very least allow her social revolution to live on in her Empire, if nowhere else.

But instead of laying her cards on the table, instead of pursuing a chance to turn her greatest foe into an ally and save the cause that she claims is more important than anything else, Edelgard doubles down and refuses to consider any possible alternative route to what she wants to achieve, even as her preferred method is falling apart around her.  Why did she even show up to this meeting if all she wasn’t gonna bother to talk?  It’s idiocy, lunacy, or egotism at work, and whichever it may be, it just proves that much more concretely what a stupid fool Edelgard is.

And there’s 1 more instance in this route where we see that the biggest obstacle to Edelgard’s cause is Edelgard herself.  At the end of the game, when the good guys have finally overcome her armies, stormed her palace, and defeated her, Edelgard spurns Dimitri’s attempt to spare her.  He offers her his hand, and she spits on this kindness as violently as she possibly could by throwing the dagger that symbolizes their former friendship straight at him, presumably aiming for his heart, given how close it winds up being.  This, of course, prompts Dimitri to finish her off, which one can hardly blame him for at this point.

But tell me: if Edelgard truly values accomplishing her goals for a new, better world as much as she enjoys claiming, then shouldn’t she have accepted Dimitri’s mercy?  If creating a more just, righteous society in Fodlan really is her greatest priority, then Edelgard is truly a self-defeating fucktard to provoke Dimitri into killing her.  Even defeated, even imprisoned, even put on trial, Edelgard would at least have some tiny chance of influencing Fodlan for the better.  As a prisoner she could still be in some contact with Dimitri as he begins the process of ruling and rebuilding Fodlan and might have some opportunity to convince him to work to undo or at least lessen the hold of Crests over Fodlan’s social structure.  Had she lived, there’d be no way Dimitri wouldn’t have needed to consult with her on many aspects of his becoming ruler of the former Empire’s territories; she absolutely would have had opportunities to convince him, to beg him, not to let her dream die in entirety.  Even if she were put on trial for her villainy, it at least would provide her with a platform to speak against the social structure of Fodlan and perhaps convince some of the war’s victors that change was still needed.

But no.  She’d rather die and accomplish nothing than to live and strive to accomplish at least a little.  For all the lip-service Edelgard pays to her goal of a free, merit-based society for Fodlan, the truth is that she only cares about it enough to accomplish it 1 way and 1 way only.  If Edelgard doesn’t get to have a better Fodlan her way, exactly the way she wants it, then to her it’s simply not worth fighting for.  What a self-important fucking child.

Oh, and let’s not forget, Edelgard hurls Dimitri’s mercy in his face and dagger in his shoulder without saying a single word about Those Who Slither in the Dark.  With her dies the knowledge of their existence, meaning that the Blue Lions route concludes with the greater villains of the story alive, well, and now able to operate entirely unchecked within the shadows.  Dimitri will take the throne of a land completely and utterly at the mercy of heartless, monstrous villains hidden behind every curtain of his throne room.  She could’ve said something to Dimitri, now the most powerful man in Fodlan, about the Agarthans, warned him, so that he could lead his forces against them while there’s still a chance to end the threat they represent, but nope, she chooses to silently defy him and force Dimitri to finish her off.  Because Edelgard may pretend to love Fodlan and want what’s best for it, but in reality, she’s a sore enough loser that she doesn’t mind condemning its people to the cloak-and-dagger terror and torment that the Agarthans will inflict upon it now that everything holding them back has been eliminated.

Edelgard is not a particularly likable, well-written character overall.  She’s stiff, defined largely by vices like stubbornness and spite, and she manages to somehow be shockingly 1-dimensional even while having more time and character development than just about any other character in the game.  But though her personality and lack of depth make her mildly unlikable, what truly condemns Edelgard as a person and a leader is the fact that she is incredibly gullible, has no sense of priority, chooses to close her mind to all alternatives to what she wants to do and believe, possesses catastrophic taste in allies and subordinates, and prefers complete failure to partial success, even if it means death and great harm coming to countless lives as a result.

Edelgard is the worst.























* Although I do want to say that it doesn’t take much imagination to see the way the Crests in Fodlan turned out to be a case of Rhea making the most of a bad situation she hadn’t been able to prevent, and just not being able to think of any better way to maintain some control over the land.  Frankly, it’s not exactly difficult to conceive the resulting class system being more or less the same even if Rhea hadn’t had any part in its creation, because, as the history of our own Crest-less world bears out, we human beings are drawn to creating these stupid shitty societies all on our own, anyway.  She’s obviously not blameless by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a certain respect for Rhea trying to oversee, protect, and be caretaker to a species of creatures she despises out of love and honor for her mother’s memory, and the fact that she’s not able to do so perfectly can only be held against her so far.  If my own mother had been brutally murdered in her sleep, and had her bones turned into weapons that had been used in attempts to kill me and my siblings, you better believe I probably wouldn’t be as gracious and hard-working a caretaker to the people I blamed for it as Rhea is to Fodlan’s humanity.


** In fairness, if you pursue the support conversations for Edelgard and Hubert, she does get an understanding by their end of what he’s doing.  But this might actually be even more damning, because Edelgard doesn’t actually tell him, or even lightly suggest, to stop pulling this Yakra XIII shit.  The most that comes of this is basically just that she insists on knowing about the immoral acts he performs for her benefit, which, to me, sounds like an unspoken agreement to condone them.


*** This may seem like a slight leap of faith, but I’ll remind you that Edelgard’s canon actions are to wait until the Agarthans launch a nuke to figure out where it’s coming from.  She doesn’t have any real guarantee they’re ever going to do so (or that she’ll necessarily be out of its way when they do) before she finishes her campaign against the Church, so my proposal is no less a case of hoping things just work out than what actually happened in the game.


**** Just 1 more in the long list of Edelgard's fine qualities: crimes against prisoners of war.  Rhea can barely stand by the time she's rescued from Edelgard's clutches, and in most endings never recovers from this ordeal.  And keep in mind, Rhea is a goddamn DRAGON, a living goddess by the Fire Emblem series's reckoning.  She's not a frail, easily harmed being.  To bring Rhea to such a state, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that Edelgard was treating her defenseless prisoner terribly, and quite possibly actively torturing the woman.  And did so for years.  Because that's just the kind of Class Act that Edelgard is.


***** It took a couple years, but I finally found something this stupid route was good for!

...Although I already was well aware that Edelgard is a fucking idiot, so maybe not, after all.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake's Downloadable Content

So, I’m not exactly sure how this all will work, but what I think I’m gonna do is just put this out here now, and then update it later on when new installments of FF7’s unnecessary-but-surprisingly-not-terrible remake come out with their own add-on packs.

I don’t have much knowledge of what SquareEnix is like as a DLC creator in modern times, but knowing what the company's like just in general, particularly when it comes to creating new stories in the FF7 franchise, I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that this is going to be crap.  But hey, I’m always open to, and desperately hoping for, a pleasant surprise.



INTERmission: Oh, THERE it is!  THERE’S the excessive, out of place, completely unnecessary, tone-deaf self-indulgence of Tetsuya Nomura, a man who’s made a career out of being a 14-year-old Fanfiction.net writer!  I knew it had to be somewhere in FF7 Remake.  I didn’t expect it to take as long as the DLC for him to finally rear his ugly head, but Thinks He’s Being Deep Nomura is back, baby!

Was this really what Yuffie needed?  Shallow, forced melodrama induced by a spontaneous villain whose graceless edginess makes Kingdom Hearts villains look subtle and well-rounded?

So basically, this little side-story is the completely superfluous tale of Yuffie happening to be in Midgar during the events of the game proper, but not actually doing anything that makes any difference whatsoever, teamed up with Sonon, a guy whose first line of dialogue might as well have been “I was specifically designed to die so you could have the feelz.”  Actually, no, the possibility that this DLC will never make any difference to anything in the main story is a best case scenario; the far worse probability is that the villains introduced at the end of this DLC, Nero and Weiss, will actually graduate into main plot relevance at some point.  I mean, Nero already clearly escaped from an adolescent’s moody album art doodles, so there’s no reason to think that this DLC will hold him.

EDIT: I'm told by Ecclesiastes that Nero and Weiss hail from FF7: Dirge of Cerberus, and are not original villains invented for this DLC.  Nothing could possibly be a better confirmation to me that my choice to never play that garbage was the right decision.  It only amplifies the negative impact they have on this DLC, though, as their presence means that INTERmission has committed the greatest sin it possibly could: canonizing FF7's abysmally shitty spinoffs.

Beyond just the overall story, purpose, and approach to INTERmission being an attempt to inject some of the excess Kingdom Hearts melodrama that Nomura’s glands produce instead of sweat into Yuffie, I’m fairly ambivalent about this venture.  I have no idea, for example, how I feel about making Yuffie so much cuter and peppier than she was originally.  I mean, it’s nice to have a more appealing character, but it also makes her seem so much less real a person than she used to be, particularly in terms of being a teen.  In FF7, Yuffie felt like an actual teenager--which could be annoying at times, admittedly--but here, she feels like the generic upbeat anime “teen” that typically gets written by people who must have been born 40 years old for all they can accurately represent adolescents.  It does make her more immediately approachable for the audience, I admit, and I actually find myself liking Yuffie probably more times in this DLC than I did in the entirety of the real FF7...but a hell of a lot of personality and uniqueness is lost in the process.*

Also I’m not sure how much of her appeal, for the first half of the DLC, is more due to her wearing a moogle cape and cowl than to anything she actually does herself.  Look, I can’t help being a sucker for moogles, and I’m not gonna apologize for it, either.

Anyway.  Beyond our protagonist Yuffie, the other members of this story’s cast are pretty weak.  I’ve seen vegetables that I’ve gotten more personal nuance and human authenticity from than Sonon, and the supporting NPCs in AVALANCHE are empty.  And yeah, okay, Sonon DOES have emotional baggage with his dead sister, which the writers drop right the fuck out of nowhere and start laying it on THICK once it’s out there, but frankly, it’s so transparently there for the purpose of having him sacrifice himself for Yuffie later as penance that it completely falls flat.  It almost feels a little insulting, how obvious it is that Sonon’s backstory is just a setup for some cheap, manufactured drama for Yuffie.  For a guy who already was giving off a strong Red Shirt vibe, Sonon’s character backstory does nothing to humanize him.  Finally, the villains suck--I cannot overemphasize just how laughable the try-hard edgelords Weiss and Nero are, from what little we encounter of them, and the rest of the time, Yuffie and Sonon are squaring off against Scarlet, who was not particularly engaging as a villain even in the original FF7 and certainly has had no favors done her by the modern take on her character.

Beyond Sonon’s listlessly screaming “I’M GONNA DIE SOON” at you and basically every time Scarlet opens her stupid tiresome mouth, the writing’s also just not great in general.  Yuffie’s new quirky little Dachao Bean thing is stupid and weird and cringy as hell.  The dialogue is often weird and stilted to an almost Xenosaga-esque degree--there’s this moment, going into the Advanced Weapons section of Shinra’s HQ,** in which Yuffie just out of nowhere starts talking about how her dad is a lazy jerkwad, with absolutely no provocation whatsoever, like someone on the team realized they’d forgotten 1 of the boxes on their checklist of what this DLC was supposed to introduce for Yuffie’s character and had to jam it in somewhere last-minute.  It gets all the weirder when Sonon responds to the tune of “Hey dude like maybe chill a bit” and Yuffie decides to just drop it because it’s not her favorite subject.  Uh, then why did you bring it up out of nowhere, stupid?

And sometimes things just don’t make sense.  Why the hell doesn’t Yuffie just kill Scarlet while she’s got her tied up and helpless?  Like, okay, interrogation, fine, but once Sonon seems to be in danger and the interrogation’s over anyway, why the hell not just kill Scarlet, real quick, and THEN run to help Sonon?  It’d be the work of a second, and Yuffie knows she’s the head of the Weapons Division.  What’s the point in Yuffie going out of her way to leave Scarlet alive?  Usually it’s the villains pulling the tired old “refuse to kill their enemy when they have the chance,” but apparently heroes can suffer this same brain fart, when the writers have tunnel-vision.

The peripheral stuff of this DLC isn’t all bad, in fairness.  The scene that Yuffie witnesses between Barret and Tifa after losing Cloud during the second reactor mission is quite good...I almost feel like maybe the characters of FF7R are each written by different teams, and the ones in charge of Tifa, Barret, and Aeris are made up of the people at SquareEnix who have actually played Final Fantasy 7 before, while everyone else are the ones who wrote for Yuffie...and also every single sequel, spinoff, and prequel that FF7’s had previously.  Also, the end of the DLC, which returns focus to the main party as they leave Midgar on foot and take their first real steps of this journey together, is quite good, and a nice finish to this first installment.

Overall, though, INTERmission can only generously be called empty and unnecessary.  It’s a story that didn’t need to be told that stars a character who doesn’t have anything to contribute yet, getting hit with tedious drama she didn’t need instigated by villains who aren’t appropriate to the game originating from a spinoff whose existence shouldn't be acknowledged.  What arguably positive changes are made to her character come at a price they may not be worth, and that dumbass Dachao Bean gimmick is so awkward and overplayed that the rest of this DLC could be the second coming of goddamn Mask of the Betrayer and I’d still be forced to question whether it was worth it.  It’s pretty telling that this add-on’s best parts are the ones that focus on the main adventure and don’t actually have anything to do with INTERmission’s own events and story.

Final verdict?  It’s bad, and you shouldn’t bother buying it.  Frankly, INTERmission’s not even worth the time it takes to play it (or watch a Let’s Play of it, as I did), so I can’t even recommend giving it a go if you get it for free.



Well, so far, I’m neither impressed nor surprised.  We’ll see what future DLCs for FF7 Remake shake out to as the story continues to unfold, but I’m not holding my breath, that’s for sure.















* I do, at least, appreciate that they remembered Yuffie’s crippling, hair-trigger motion sickness.  It’s not much, but it’s the little details of characters being remembered that are sometimes the most reassuring.


** Because we certainly didn’t spend NEARLY enough time in the depths of the Shinra building already during the main game, right?  How great to be back again for another extended visit.

General RPG Music Lists 5: All That and a Bag of Chiptunes

Last year I finally committed to doing a series of rants that I'd thought about making for quite some time, in which I shared all the music I love best from the myriad RPGs I've played, and commented on some of my favorites.  It was a sizable venture for myself (I came close to not making my other rants' deadlines several times because of how much time these music lists took, in fact), but it wound up being a lot of fun as I shared Battle, Setting, and Mood music, as well as all the tunes in between.  From Opening themes right on to the Ending songs, we hit every part of an RPG's soundtrack, start to finish.

Which begs the question, then, of what the hell we're doing here today.  Because there's no RPG music I haven't touched on, right?  No corner of the soundtrack, no moment in the game's course has been neglected.  We're finished, right?

Ah, but that's the fun thing: the totality of a beloved work extends so very much farther than the work's own life does.  The legacy that a piece of media leaves is not self-contained, but lives on in its fans and admirers, and finds new life within their own creativity.  Fascinating settings and narrative threads are explored within fanfiction, characters are recreated with fanart, themes and concepts are debated by fan essays and videos, signature elements are humorously exploited through fan animations...and, of course, character relationships are lewdly experimented with in all of those mediums and more.  And among the numerous characteristics of an RPG that a fanbase will labor upon is most certainly the game's music.

And that's what we're here to celebrate today: the RPG music that has found, in 1 form or another, a life outside of its own origins.  These are my favorite songs that have come as a result of love for an RPG, rather than from the RPG itself, the works of love that have opened musical horizons past what a game's soundtrack itself has managed.

Note: While I will generally refer to the songs on this list by their names (since, being entities outside of their associated RPGs and often transformed works, they no longer accomplish a set 'function' of a soundtrack), the naming system here is not always going to be exactly the same as the original designation's.  I ignore album names, for example, focusing only on the piece itself, and text/emoji that isn't naturally translated to titles is generally ignored.  90% of the time a piece is going to have the same name, but every now and then it won't be the exact same, and I just try to get a basic, commonsense name for it for my collection.



OVERCLOCKED REMIXES

The most common musical fan work, the remix is a broad-term entity that represents any time a fan (or occasionally even an official license-holder) has reworked an existing RPG song into something else.  Sometimes it's a simple affair of enhancing some small elements of a track to more strongly or appealingly accomplish its goal...sometimes a song is sampled and/or reworked so creatively that it becomes an entirely new entity whose origins you can't even really recognize anymore.  Adding vocals to a work, changing instruments and tempo to make a calming town music into a furious battle theme (or an adrenaline-pumping battle theme into a chill vacation groove), expanding a small part of an existing song to become the entirety of a new one...remixes do all kinds of interesting things, and can result in some amazing works.

OverClocked Remix is a foundation of the relationship between RPGs and fans, 1 of the oldest still-standing internet institutions.  For over 20 years, OCR has been a website which displays and applauds fan creativity in masterfully reshaping the music of video games, and some of my all-time favorite music has come from the site.  OCR persists still, and the persons populating the place periodically provide pleasing pieces of musical prowess even in the present.

B+
- Breath of Fire 1 Epitaph of Alan and Cerl Remix
- Chrono Cross Timewarp Remix
- Chrono Trigger Elements of Time Remix
- Deus Ex 1 Only in Novels Remix
- Final Fantasy 6 Land of the Eidolons Remix
- Final Fantasy 6 The Rose General Remix
- Final Fantasy 9 You Are Not Confined Remix
- Final Fantasy 10 Twilight of Ivory Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past The 7 Wise Men Shot First Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Transient Shadows Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Hylia's Fear Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Echoes of Dusk Remix
- Secret of Mana Pure Heart Remix
- Wild Arms 1 Round the Cape of Good Hope Remix
- Xenogears Live from the Yggdrasil Remix

A-
- The 7th Saga Water Remix
- Castlevania Series CastleMania Remix
- Chrono Cross Cosmic Kleptomaniac Remix
- Chrono Cross Time's New Scar Remix
- Chrono Trigger Enter the Frog Remix
- Chrono Trigger Flow of Time Remix
- Chrono Trigger In the Green Gloom Remix
- Crystalis Calming the Angry Sea Remix
- Deus Ex 2 Tears in Rain Remix
- Final Fantasy 9 Filtering Through Memories Remix
- Final Fantasy 10 Journey's End Remix
- Grandia 2 A Deus ex Harpa Remix
- The Legend of Zelda Series A Rose for Zelda Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Requiem for a Damaged Spirit Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Forest of Purple Mist Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Wistful Remix
- Nier: Automata Beautiful Rise Remix
- Pokemon Generation 5 Thy Everlasting Winter Wind Blows Remix
- Secret of Evermore K-Pax for Evermore Remix
- Secret of Mana Desert Snowstorm Remix
- Secret of Mana Footsteps to Destiny Remix
- Secret of Mana Tidal Sequence Remix
- Shadowrun SNES Reborn Remix
- Star Ocean 2 Rena Lanford of Arlia Village Remix
- Suikoden 1 Days Long Passed, Seldom Remembered Remix
- Super Mario RPG Remachination Remix
- Trials of Mana Memories of the Sea Remix
- Xenogears Echoes Remix

A
- Bahamut Lagoon Stockholm Remix
- Chrono Cross Time Circuits High Voltage Remix
- Final Fantasy 5 A Dream of Home Remix
- Final Fantasy 7 Ascension to Cosmo Canyon Remix
- Final Fantasy 7 Mark of the Beatsmith Remix
- Final Fantasy 9 Fixations Remix
- Final Fantasy Series Forest Medley Remix
- Lufia 2 Turbid Guidance Remix
- Pokemon Generation 1 Farewell, Beloved Ones Remix
- Secret of Evermore A Whisper and a Shadow Remix
- Soul Blazer Tears for a Moonlit Knight Remix
- Xenogears Aveh Mountain Breakdown Remix
- Xenogears Ominous Waltz Remix

A+
- Final Fantasy 6 Terra in Black Remix
As little as I know how to describe the merits of RPG music under normal circumstances, I have even less of an idea as to how to laud a remix.  All I know is that this is a truly awesome piece, a perfect meeting of soft significance with penetrating rock, and my second favorite OCR piece of all time (Super Metroid's Zebesian Midnight is the top, if you're curious).  It's stayed at the top tier for over 20 years, and I doubt it's gonna be edged out of that position any time soon.



SEMI-OVERCLOCKED REMIXES

Oddly, sometimes an OverClocked Remix doesn't actually make it onto OverClocked Remix.  See, 1 of the things that OCR will do, beyond just archiving and displaying individual video game remixes, is to organize and sponsor a group of musical artists in putting together an album dedicated to a game, series, or theme.  But while there'll usually be anywhere between 6 to 60 songs on the album, not all of them (usually barely any!) will make it onto OverClocked Remix proper.  I'm unclear as to why this is exactly, but my guess is that it's either a case of not wanting to overload their main page's uploads for a month with nothing but remixes from the same game, or their infamous gatekeeping at work (more on that in a moment).

Even if they don't get onto the website proper, quite a few of these album remixes are pretty great, though, easily as good or better than the majority of songs that DO make the transition from album to the main OCR site.  I do think, though, that for the sake of lessening the glut of remixes in the OCR section here even just a little, I'm going to likewise separate them from the herd.  Make no mistake, though, it sure as hell ain't from any lack of quality, as you'll hear below.

B+
- Terranigma The Path to Lhasa Remix
- Trials of Mana Little Winged Lady Remix

A-
- Chrono Trigger Darkest Omen Remix
- Final Fantasy 6 Remember Remix
- Golden Sun 2 Another Point of View Remix
I like the energy of this piece, taking a lot of the best qualities of fast-paced 80s and 90s music styles to create a catchy, upbeat jam.  I also like its ability to change directions when you don't expect it--living up to its title of finding "another point of view", in a way.  Very cool piece.

- Trials of Mana Facing the Storm Remix

A

A+



GENERAL REMIXES

I have a lot of respect for OCR, and I don't want to downplay that or be negative.  But I do have to say: those standards of entry which I mentioned a moment ago?  The taste and musical expertise of the OCR judges, based on what I've seen get accepted to the site, what I've seen get rejected, and the stated reasons for some remixes' rejections, is highly dubious, to put it extraordinarily generously.  And that was, for some years, a real damn problem, because OCR was kinda the ONLY centralized spot for finding fans' remixes--so the fact that there were a lot of significantly, demonstrably great pieces getting arbitrarily rejected by the same people that opened the door and invited this trainwreck in, was pretty frustrating for those of us who wanted a simple, straightforward option to find all available remixes for a game and decide for ourselves whether we liked them or not.  There was a great site called VGMix back in the day that tried to solve this problem, and I was grateful for it, but unfortunately each of its iterations was short-lived, leaving OCR the internet's video game remix solo act for far too long.

The advent of Youtube, however, has slowly but surely been solving this problem, albeit in an unavoidably disorganized way.  With Youtube, there's no question of any panel of judges with bizarre standards barring the way--anyone can upload anything they like, and while you still have to sift through a mountain of average or subpar pieces to find a gem, those masterpieces are out there, and at least now you know you're accessing all the works available, not just what some outside entity has arbitrarily decided to allow you.  That, combined with a few remix albums and singles hosted/sold on platforms outside OCR or Youtube, and a rare couple arrangement albums sold by the official license-holding companies themselves, accounts for the works below.  And as lucky as we may be to have OverClocked Remix, the great quality of the following music proves that we're equally, perhaps even more, lucky to have alternatives, too.

B+
- Chrono Trigger Battle with Magus Remix
- Chrono Trigger Cafe of Time Remix
- Chrono Trigger Corridors of Time Remix
- Chrono Trigger Lab 16's Ruin Remix
- Chrono Trigger Rising Beast Remix
- Chrono Trigger Wait for Slurp Remix
- CrossCode Temple of Thunder Remix
- Final Fantasy 10 Auron Oboe Winds Remix
- Fire Emblem 4 Chapter 3 Remix
- Sailor Moon: Another Story Ark Remix  (The Ark theme was reused in the Sailor Moon R game, and this track from the OST is a remix of that)
- Startropics 1 Argonia Remix

A-
- Castlevania Series Castle of Shadows Remix
- Chrono Trigger Daughter of Zeal Remix
- Chrono Trigger Schala's Theme Frozenith Remix
- Etrian Odyssey 4 On an Adventure Gliding Through the Skies Remix
- Fallout 4 Some Things Never Change Remix
- Final Fantasy 6 Cast a Lonely Shadow Remix
- Golden Sun 1 The Elemental Stars Orchestral Remix
- Hololive CouncilRys RPG Battle Against Cursed Fauna Remix
- I Am Setsuna Unstoppable Force Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Legend of an Ocarina - Movement 1 Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword Skipper's Retreat Shack (Low Whistle/Oboe) Remix
- Lufia 2 Final Battle Remix
- Lufia 2 Wielder of the Dual Blade Remix
- Mario and Luigi 1 Airflare Valley Remix
- Omori By Your Side Orchestral Remix
- Pokemon Generation 7 The Blade Runner Remix
- Secret of Evermore Hall of Collosia Remix
- Shadowrun SNES Ghouls Revamp Remix
- Startropics 1 Cave Remake Remix
- Startropics 1 The Melancholy 7 Remix
- Undertale Battle Against a True Hero Tieff Remix
- Undertale Neon Depths Remix
- Valkyrie Profile 2 Under the All-Powerful Divine Protection Remix
- Xenogears On a Short Fuse Lately Remix

A
- Chrono Cross She Was Dreaming in the Rain Remix
- Chrono Trigger Schala's Theme Z Remix
- Final Fantasy 9 Veiled World Remix
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Midna's Lament Orchestral Remix
- Shin Megami Tensei 1 Ruins Woodwind Remix
- Shin Megami Tensei 2 Neutral Theme Remix
- Undertale Battle Against a True Hero Dual Remix  (Link avoids unnecessary intro)
- Undertale The Last Soul Remix

A+
- Bahamut Lagoon Yoyo's Theme Arranged Remix
Just simply, utterly beautiful.  The original theme is already a hauntingly lovely piece that epitomizes some of the greatest qualities that Bahamut Lagoon possesses, and yet this remix manages to so easily surpass the original that it truly feels as though this is the true form of this song, the greatest realization of its heart and potential.  Gorgeous stuff.

- Shadow Hearts 1 Heart to Heart Remix
This might be 1 of the greatest examples of the virtue of remixes as transformative pieces that you can find.  This remix is almost completely unidentifiable as a form of the theme for Alice, but it's a great, genuinely engaging and enjoyable tune, far surpassing the original (which was good and serviceable, of course, but nothing special).  Not only that, but somehow, even while clearly being unabashedly its own musical entity, this remix manages to still invoke a sense of the (perhaps tragic) goodness and purity of Alice, yet does so in a way that actually feels more true to the Shadow Hearts duology as a whole in the mood and emotion of its new tempo and instruments.  This is just a masterpiece, it really is.



FAN ORIGINALS

While remixes are obviously the most common and known method in which an RPG lives a second life musically, there is another form that fan music occasionally takes: the fan original.  Sometimes, you see, a fan is so enthusiastic about a game, that they don't just alter an existing piece of music as an outlet for their creative fervor...they outright invent a new track altogether!  Whether it be a theme symbolic of a character that the composer especially identified with, a tribute to a particularly moving setting, a song that evokes the feeling of a particularly powerful moment in the story, a celebration of the RPG as a whole, an attempt to mimic and extend the style of the game's composer, or even a piece that describes a potentiality unexplored by the source material or that shall come to pass in the creator's headcanon, there have been hundreds of original songs created from the ground up out of nothing more than the love of a fan!

80% of them are for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

The startlingly prolific creativity and frequently great talent of the bronies aside, however, there's plenty of other great fan originals to be found out there, including many made for RPGs.  And of the all RPG-related fan music, this may be the stuff I respect the most.  I am a fumbling, graceless, ignorant, rhythm-less moron when it comes to understanding music on any level beyond that of the plebian listener, so I can't speak from any point of actual understanding or experience on the matter, but it seems to me that as impressive a feat (which I cannot manage myself) as it is to envision, compose, and work a remix of an existing song, it's even more impressive a feat (which I cannot manage myself) to envision, compose, and work a song out of nothingness--and the most impressive is to do so out of nothing more than a love of the work and a need to create, with no assurance of payment for your efforts.  And as the songs below prove, there's some damned impressive talent at work here.  I can't wait to see this list expand as this trend continues to expand!

B+
- Fallout 3 Beauty Bleak
- Undertale Hard Drive

A-
- Horizon 0 Dawn Force of Nature
- Kingdom Hearts A Ballad from a Dream
- Pokemon Generation 8 Battle! Golems of Galar

A
- Pokemon Generation 1 Battle! Gym Leader Sabrina
- Pokemon Generation 8 Battle! Galarian Zapdos
- Pokemon Generation 9 Champion Nemona Battle

A+
- Mass Effect 3 Crucible
When it comes to fan originals (ones not based around colorful cartoon equines, that is), the most recognizable and respected name in the business might be Miracle of Sound, and it's because of songs like this.  This is exactly what a song embodying Mass Effect should be: epic, grand, inspiring, galactic in the proportions of both its conflict and its heroism, and yet with an utterly vital component of the personal, human connection.  Awesome, plain and simple.

- Pokemon Generation 7 Battle! Champion Lillie
This is such an amazing battle theme just for its own sake--any RPG could count itself exceedingly lucky to have such an elegant, exciting, significant piece in its soundtrack.  And it only multiplies its greatness with how perfect a fit it is to its concept, that of the presence of Lillie as Champion and the determination and growth that led her to that rightful role.  Honestly, if you can listen to this song and come out of it without a headcanon for Lillie's journey as a trainer which ends with her becoming the greatest Champion ever known, then I just don't even know what to do with you.



SO-CALLED REAL MUSIC

So here's an interesting thing: there are a (very) few songs in my personal collection that are what we typically think of as music--real, official stuff released by bands for the music's own sake, rather than having been made for the specific purpose of being a part of a soundtrack for a game (or cartoon, or anime, or movie, or whatever).  But that doesn't quite mean that the music is inherently detached, to me, from an RPG...because there are times in which I only find and enjoy a song specifically because it was artificially connected to an RPG in some regard.

See, as you may have noticed, I watch...a lot of AMVs.  A whole lot.  Like, every time I finish playing an RPG, or watching an anime, or even sometimes watching a cartoon, I go on Youtube and watch more or less every single AMV ever made for it.  And then a couple times a year I go through Youtube to see what RPG AMVs have been made since my last watching spree.  As a result, even if 99% of it does almost nothing for me, I do wind up listening to a lot of "real" music...although as you might imagine, there's also a lot of repetition; Jesus Christ have I ever heard enough Linkin Park and 30 Seconds to Mars to last several lifetimes (which is to say, in the latter's case, I've listened to 30 Seconds to Mars more than once).  But on rare, rare, rare occasions, I'll come across an AMV that introduces me to a piece of music that I actually do really like, for its own sake, and I go buy it to enjoy on its own.

Some of these pieces of music, however, were so skillfully employed in the AMV I saw them in (or a later one), that they become embellished upon my mind as indelibly associated with the RPG with which they were paired in the video.  So, for our final category, you will find below a listing of all of these songs, as well as the game and AMV (or other fan work) which has tied them in my mind to RPGs forever.  Just for fun.

B+

A-
- 2 Steps from Hell United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Forever associated in my mind with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, thanks to this great AMV.

- Genesis Land of Confusion
Forever associated in my mind with Fallout 3, thanks to this excellent AMV (Disturbed version here, since we can't have nice things thanks to copyright crap).

- I Am Waiting for You Last Summer Event Horizon
Forever associated in my mind with Mass Effect 3, thanks to this great AMV.

- Invocation Array Siren's Call
Forever associated in my mind with Shadowrun, thanks to the incomparably sublime Calfree in Chains mod for Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

- The Rasmus Ghost of Love
Forever associated in my mind with Mass Effect 3, thanks to a great AMV which sadly can no longer be found online.

A

A+



TALLYING

Before we finish up, let's look back on this little series of rants and tally things up, give a few of the really great soundtracks a bit of personal applause for their good work.  Why?  Because I like making lists for no reason, that's why.  I assume you've picked up on that by this point.

First of all, as you may have noticed, I don't hand out an A+ to a whole lot of songs.  Any RPG that manages to produce such a song has a real feather in its cap, in my highly subjective opinion, and deserves recognition for it.  These are all the RPGs who possess at least 1 tune that I love so greatly that I had to give it the very highest marks!

Note: If you want to know which song(s) in particular scored the A+, you'll just have to go back and check out my Music List rants again!  And if you're not sure whether I'm saying that out of the vanity of wanting you to read my writings multiple times, or out of the sloth of not wanting to bother copy-pasting links into this new rant from the old ones, then please feel free to assume whichever scenario makes me more hateful.  Either way you will totally be right.

1 A+
A Dragon's ReQuest; Breath of Fire 5; Celestian Tales 1; Children of Zodiarcs; Dark Cloud 2; Eternal Senia; Etrian Odyssey 1; Final Fantasy Mystic Quest; Justice Chronicles; Knights of the Old Republic 2; Legend of Dragoon; Live-A-Live; Mario and Luigi 4; Mass Effect 1; Mass Effect 3; Nier: Automata; Pathfinder: Kingmaker; Planescape: Torment; The Princess' Heart + Sweet Lily Dreams (1 shared song); Rakuen; Secret of Mana; Shadow Hearts 2; Shin Megami Tensei 1; Shin Megami Tensei 4 Series; Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3; Skies of Arcadia; Star Ocean 3; Suikoden 2; Undertale; Wild Arms 3

2 A+'s
Chrono Trigger; Pier Solar and the Great Architects; Romancing Saga 1; Xenosaga 1; Xenosaga 3

It'll be fun when I finally find the game that can knock it out of the park thrice.

Alright, so that's all well and good, to have had these rants to determine which are my favorite individual songs...but what about the soundtracks as a whole?  Which ones are the "best" in my eyes?  Or rather ears, I suppose.  Well, that's not something I can really definitively determine, since I don't keep score on the scores' songs that would earn a B or lower.  But judging by what music I have scored with these lists, we can at least take a stab at recognizing some of the more impressive soundtracks.

These are the 20 highest-scoring RPGs based on the music I've liked well enough to collect, judged upon a system in which B+ tracks are worth 1 point, A- songs are good for 2, A tunes garner 2.5, and A+ melodies earn 3.

Note: Multi-game and/or series-based songs count for each and every game they show up in.  So, for example, in the case of the Big Boss Battle theme of Tales of Phantasia, ToP and Tales of Symphonia both points for the track, since it appears in ToS as well.  And yes, this gives the slightly lazy Final Fantasy series an advantage with its Main Theme giving bonus points to almost every installment in the franchise.  Look, it's not a perfect system.

Top 20 Soundtracks
20. Ara Fell: 10.5
19. Final Fantasy 5: 10.5
18. Mass Effect 3: 10.5
17. Dragon Fantasy 2: 11
16. Final Fantasy 10: 11.5
15. Suikoden 1: 12
14. Wild Arms 3: 12
13. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest: 12.5
12. Romancing Saga 1: 13
11. Wild Arms 1: 13.5
10. Skies of Arcadia: 13.5
9. Legend of Dragoon: 14
8. A Dragon's ReQuest: 14
7. Ys 1: 15
6. Rakuen: 15
5. Final Fantasy 9: 15
4. Suikoden 2: 15
3. Whisper of a Rose: 16
2. Undertale: 21
1. Chrono Trigger: 26.5

While titles like Chrono Trigger, Undertale, Rakuen, Suikoden 2, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest are no-brainers, I have to admit there are a couple of surprises on that list.  I really never noticed just how many tracks from Whisper of a Rose I've got (nor how highly I regard most of them); it wouldn't have even occurred to me that WoaR would have made the top 20 soundtracks, let alone been the third best!  And while I knew on some level that I liked Skies of Arcadia's and Wild Arms 1's soundtracks well enough, I'd never have expected to see them placing higher than Terranigma, or Suikoden 1, or Chrono Cross, which didn't even make the list.  So it's interesting to see it all broken down like this.

Encouraging, too, for that matter--Ys 1 and Rakuen are both RPGs I've played in the last 3 years, so it's nice to realize that there's still plenty of soundtracks out there for me to discover that I love.



And...that's it for the music.  For real, this time.

While it was always something I enjoyed well enough, for most of my life, I viewed the soundtrack of an RPG as being unimportant window-dressing, in the same sense that graphics and gameplay are--something for which good quality is always preferable, of course, but a feature that shouldn't be able to influence the actual quality of an RPG, as it's a non-storytelling trait.  In the last decade, though, I've slowly but surely come around on this matter, and I now recognize that music does play a role in how good an RPG is.  Because, well, although it may be difficult to find an example where less-than-stellar music had any substantial impact on the narrative power of an RPG scene, there have been countless moments in this genre's span in which the weight and emotion of background music has noticeably enhanced the scene and/or setting for which it was created.

I guess I now recognize the music of an RPG as the ice cream on a pie--what's truly important, of course, is the pie itself (the storytelling elements), and a great pie absolutely stands perfectly well on its own.  But there's no denying that the right ice cream on that pie can result in an already great treat becoming even better.

Unfortunately, I really don't have any proper understanding of the mechanics of music, nor its history, culture, or really anything else about it, beyond just knowing what I do and don't like to hear.  So my ability to rant on this part of the RPG scene is almost nonexistent, beyond vague attempts to grasp a broad point.  That fact inspired me, as much as any other factor, to do this series of rants this past year, because even if it's just more of my subjective, generalized fumbling, these music lists have given me a chance to actually make some statements about this part of the RPG experience, and express my appreciation for the music of my favorite genre in terms I have comfortable understanding of.

And I guess that's all I have to say.  Thanks for bearing with me on this largely self-indulgent matter, heh.  It's been fun!

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.