FFXII: Revenant Wings (13) – Ch. 6 – Fran Is Whelmed

Last time on Let’s Play Revenant Wings, we scurried around playing sidequests in the shattered remnants of the Skysea. Now, at last, it’s time to catch up with the leading man and his long-suffering copilot!

Their ship, the Strahl, has moored beneath a vertical village named “Heaven’s Vigil”:

The strahl tucked under a cliff at the edge of an island

The northern sky island is called Arda, Heaven’s Pillar. “Arda” is from Tolkien, although in his world it means, well, the world.)

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Final Fantasy VI, Ep. IV: The Esper Strikes Back

And we’re off! We head to the southern continent (map) to infiltrate the Magitek Research Facility in Vector, capital of the must-be-evil-since-it-has-no-name Empire.

Setzer's airship, the Blackjack, zooms through the night

Our goal is to rescue the Espers who are being drained of their power as fuel for Magitek.

I love seeing how Final Fantasy rings changes on its ever-accruing mythology from game to game. The draining-Espers idea evolved from Cid’s innocent mistake in FFV, in which the machines he created to amplify and collect power from the Four Crystals of Light inadvertently damaged them. FFVI fuses the concept of crystals, which existed right from the start of Final Fantasy, with the separate FF concept of summons, originally a job class ability like geomancy. We’ll see beings turning to crystal again in FFXIII’s L’Cie, while ShinraCorp, Odine Enterprises and Draklor are all spiritual successors of FFVI’s Esper-juicing factory.  

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Final Fantasy Kumis: FFX, FFXIII

I originally posted this on Tumblr, but it’s so hard to find old posts there that I’m archiving it here. Even though I won’t reach these two games in my playthrough for a year. Have a does of Meta!

組, kumi, “group, party, pair, band, class” ~ Wikipedia

I like both Final Fantasy X and XIII, although the pacing, plotting and worldbuilding of XIII show the duct tape and staples of development hell. Yet the characters in both games are passionate, complex individuals with hidden motivations and a great deal of personality, despite their tendency to slot into archetypes at first glance. The messy dynamics between the party members in XIII, I think, are the game’s greatest strength.

It fascinates me that the two games’ kumis start out almost as inverses of one another.

In X, every party member cares tremendously for some of the other party members. The four from Besaid grew up together and are all deeply devoted to Yuna and to one another, united by bonds of trust and understanding and old friendship (and occasional squabbles). Tidus falls for Yuna and likes Rikku and looks up to Auron  when he’s not bawling at him. Rikku cares enough for her cousin to pledge herself as a guardian, despite her upbringing. Auron is more aloof, but betrays occasional gruff fondness that goes above and beyond that of duty to dead friends’ children. They’re a kumi from the start, quickly adjusting to adopt new members into the kumi.

In FFXIII, every party member cares tremendously for someone outside the group. At first, none of them care for one another except Fang and Vanille (who are separated). Lightning is dedicated to her sister and takes out every frustration on Snow. Snow is dedicated to Lightning’s sister and barely paying attention to those dragged under in his wake. Fang will “tear down the sky” for her missing girlfriend, and will certainly tear apart a few strangers on Vanille’s behalf. Vanille’s in cloud cuckoo land to avoid inner turmoil, but she’s hunting desperately for her girlfriend. Hope’s missing his mom and doesn’t want to be with any of these crazy people, although he soon latches onto Lightning as a surrogate. The sane guy, Sazh, is in it only for his son.

So the dynamics are inverted: in FFX, the group starts out interconnected by a network of loyalties and shared pasts, whereas in FFXIII, they begin with nothing in common and with disparate loyalties pulling them outward. The first half of FFXIII, up through chapter 7, is simply the process of forging connections between members of the group so that they can become a group, a kumi.

Both arcs work for me because I like characters motivated by fierce love for and loyalty to other characters. It means I tend to fall for the tired old romance tropes, but I don’t necessarily fix on the romantic storyline, so much as the ones of friendship, devotion and trust.

Luckily most of the FFs play with those tropes, too. But FFXIII, more than most, is about the spectrum between rejection, trust and blind obedience.

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