Of course I'm emotionally invested in the expendable secondary characters, what do you take me for

[spindizzy]

So I've started playing FFXVI! So far it's very pretty, but suffering from a terrible case of "I can work out exactly how to get into all of these outfits, is this really a Final Fantasy game?"

(Listen, the fact that it's pretty makes how inanimate the expressions are even more jarring. Why do people only move their lower jaws when they talk! Talking is a full-face action!)

I can't put my finger on what's niggling at me about this game. It's not "Oh, this doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game" because there's no one unified thing that defines a Final Fantasy game, right? The whole point is that each main game is a different aesthetic, setting, artistic direction, combat system, whatever – the commonalities are in details like summons and magic, and the broad strokes of "Let's kill god" as a plotline, but anything between those two levels is different. You can have a high tech world where everything is run by machine (XIII) or a modern-ish tech level (VII, VIII, XV), or quasi-medieval Europe (I-V) or something between the extremes (VI, IX). But something about it is pinging at me and I can't put my finger on it. ... Maybe it's the muted colour pallette. I tried to argue with jilliferium about the use of colour but the longer I play the more desaturated everything is.

The rant jilliferium and I went on while I was playing was basically that it's not WEIRD enough. Like, consider IX (jilliferium's favourite), X/X-2 (my favourite), or XII (my second favourite). Full of weird little guys! You've got hypello and bangaa and guado and seeq and moombas and whatever Quina's got going on – weird little guys! So weird! And sticking to all humans all the time isn't boring necessarily, but man, you could get so much weirder with it. I guess having multiple species would distract from the story about oppression and slavery they're trying to tell? But it's still strange to see only one species in a Final Fantasy game.

Mechanically: I love that there's a story mode, because if I wanted to play a game where I need to know how to do combat I'd go play a soulsborne. I've also equipped the rings of Helping You Dodge and Automatically Use Potions, which means that my loadout is never going to change because if I unequip those I will just die.

Anyway, spoilers through to the aftermath of Drake's Fang.

• I was so wrong about this being in the Ivalice Alliance, but now I'm thinking about that AU fic.


• A thing I never noticed or appreciated about Final Fantasy was the lack of sexual violence. Harrassment, yes, but active threats of rape? No. The only reason I noticed it now is because FFXVI has got explicit threats or fears of rape. ... WHY. That was not something we needed.


• Related, I was not expecting the horny to become text. Is the characters being horny and sexual at each other specifically in correlation with how normal the outfits are this time around? Did they have to trade in the armoured thongs and the shirts that physically can't fasten to get three scenes with a naked woman in them?


• Of course the female-coded eikons are sexy and the male-coded eikons get to be bizarre mutated monstrosities. Why wouldn't that be how it worked. :|


• We can say fuck now?! Somewhere, Cid Highwind screams for justice.


• I cannot navigate this world. I am the epitomy of "getting lost walking across an empty room". Like, I'm very pro not having a mini map because it means that I actually look at the world I'm in instead of the "What this wild forest looks like as an empty corridor" screen, but also I am SO FUCKING LOST.


• Does anyone else get big Broken Earth energy about the bearers? I'm not saying that they ripped that from NK Jemisin, I'm just saying that having enslaved people turn to stone after overusing their powers is literally a thing there.
  
  • Although in the Broken Earth series there's a whole metaphor for racism that FFXVI isn't getting near what with the whole mono-species almost mono-ethnicity thing, but still!
  
  
  • Did have to remind myself that yes, Clive and Jill probably saw a lot of dying bearers, but those dying bearers were dying from being tools of war, not overuse of their powers. And being from Rosaria means they were less likely to encounter bearers being overworked to that point anyway. ... Yes I do periodically need to remind myself that things have an in character reason to be shown, not just an out of character reason. >_>
  
  
  • Cid and Jill both getting to the point where they're petrifying and coughing up blood: alarming. Stop that. Although now I'm wondering if Joshua was coughing up blood because he wasn't grown enough to use his powers safely, or because the petrification process had started sooner because his powers activated earlier.


• It's weird how not having an actual party that you can choose the members of or track the growth of affects who I mentally flag as a main character. I'm used to the game telling me who the main characters are by who gets EXP and who gets to be in my party, but in this... No? No levelling up Jill, she's on her own.


• I saw something go past about how Final Fantasy finally has a canon queer character and I'm kinda... Wait, I'm pretty sure we had queer characters already. That said, Gav's absolute flusterment whenever Clive makes physical contact with him did have me and jilliferium declaring them boyfriends, so.
  
  • Clive looking like he was going in to hug Gav and Gav being so flustered he dodged did amuse me. Although whaddaya mean there's only twenty Gav/Clive fic on AO3. They had a whole heart-to-heart about how Gav will keep going wherever Clive sends him because there's a home for him to come back to, thanks to Clive! Why no shipping!
  
  
  • This point was written before I got to Dion and Terrence and OH, okay! I see why people were like "LOOK IT'S CANON!"


• My headcanon is that Clive does not understand flirting or innuendo, but he does understand when it's happening because he's grown up with soldiers. ("We'll need a bigger sword." "Mine's bigger." "Thank you, Clive.")


• Cid is my favourite. No notes. Big DILF energy, got a speech pattern that I could write in my sleep, absolute king.


• The whole "I'm going to avenge my brother's murder" conversation in Cid's solar genuinely had me doubting my own media literacy. Clive. Clive. Did you not notice the entire cutscene that was you murdering your own brother. Because that was a whole thing!


• "And if it WAS you, you can just kill yourself!" CID YOU ARE A BAD MAN WHO SAID EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING.


• (Cid. Why did you have the man chained up naked. Cid. Cid please.)


• ("Pretty as you are, you're not my type." CID. PLEASE.)


• jilliferium and I were trying to count up the confirmed eikons at one point and
  jilliferium: Shiva, Titan —
  Me: Phoenix.
  jilliferium: He's dead.
  Me: Yeah, but phoenix.
  jilliferium: ... Ohhhhhhhhh.


• (We were trying to guess at which traditional Final Fantasy summons made the cut for being part of the eight, if Ifrit was somehow on an alternate list. We'd got Ramuh/Ixion/Quetzalcoatl for lightning, Leviathan for water, Sylph for air, and Bahamut or Odin to fill the gap for the untyped energy. I think the actual list is Shiva, Titan, Phoenix, Garuda, Ramuh, Bahamut, and Odin? But I'm still missing one and I'm not sure who.)


• It's weird that there's no phoenix downs and no status effects. Like. It's not game-destroying for me, it's just an odd shift away from what I expect in a Final Fantasy game.


• jilliferium made a point about how the game was using the welsh meaning of words but the english pronunciation and I really want her to do that again somewhere I can link to it.


• Am I the only one worried about the dog going into an aetherflood? I was just like "Oh, we're bringing Torgal because the aetherflood doesn't affect animals!" and then ran into a bunch of akashic bats, so why is no one worried about the dog?!
  
  • As you can probably tell, that bullet point was written before I discovered that Torgal is magic. Or at least more magic than a dog casting Cure normally is. This explains why he didn't mutate, but not why the humans weren't worried about him! They didn't know he was magic!
  
  
  • "He was always more Jill's dog," says man who is continuing to steal Jill's dog.


• I was briefly excited when I thought that the mothercrystals were all seals over whatever dimensional portal Ultima lived in, and the reason that they were draining power was to keep being a seal. Nope! I was wrong.


• I was SO PISSED about Cid dying. NO. THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED. YOU CANNOT TAKE MY FAVOURITE CHARACTER AND JUST KILL HIM FOR NO REASON.
  
  • YOU LITERALLY HAD A PHOENIX PINION IN YOUR HAND, CLIVE. I APPRECIATE THAT PHOENIX DOWN IS NOT A THING THAT THE GAME HAS OFFERED ME, BUT GAME PLEASE.
  
  
  • Cid grabbing Clive's hand and forcing him to take Ramuh's power: my fucking heart.


• I'm so impatient for Joshua's story. I know we're going to get it, but when!
  
• "What is you seek, my leige?" "Oh, Dion Lesage."


• Jote is very good and I love her. Physically strong and undyingly loyal women are my jam and I'm not sorry.


• Possessing Ultima so that it can't possess Clive is definitely a choice that he made. Like, it was a terrible choice and I'm absolutely here for it. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay devotion to the point of self-destruction!


• Mate do not get me fucking started on how this game is treating Jill. I like her! Cool character design, love a character with phenomenal cosmic powers finally getting to choose where and why she uses them, not really gotten a sense of her personality yet. I dislike the way that the characters keep shoving her to one side -- like when we return to their home castle and Jill's nearly executed. We don't get to debrief with her and see how she's doing, we debrief with Gav about her. Torgal getting magical powers is explicitly due to his bond with Jill, and she's not even there for that conversation. The boss fight that she seeks out to resolve her own trauma isn't one she fights herself; Clive does. What is happening here.


• "The crystal! What did you do to it!" "Oh, we destroyed it."


• Character growth: Clive starting as "I'm not staying, I don't need to know anyone here because I'm going to do things on my own (but obviously I will help anyone who asks me)" and ending up knowing the name of every person in the hideaway is very pleasing. It's a nice bit of environmental story-telling! Characters who started off as something like "Anxious bearer" or "Talkative bearer" end up as "Hortense, Keeper of the stores" or "[x], tale-teller."


• He's just so earnest and bad at the whole lone wolf wolfing lonelily into the night! He wants connections and to care about people! Like he'd met Gav for all of five minutes, and when he saw that he was in trouble he screamed GAV and took on a squad of soldiers for him! No prompting! Of course he wants to be adopted into the fold!


• Empress Annabelle is cartoonishly evil. "Ah yes, I will have my entire family and staff murdered for classism and eugenics reasons, marry an emperor, have a child to replace the one that I didn't want to die, and start brutally cracking down on anyone who might remember anything that predated my current marriage." She's a parody of herself.
  
  • Clive's sheer offence at the Black Shields and their misuse of the Shield's oath: excellent.
  
  
  • The empress refusing to let her child go more than a few feet away from her feels very Game of Thrones. I wonder what's going to happen when she discovers Olivier not only didn't, but can't inherit the phoenix force.
  
  
  • Imagine being so offended by the idea of not mistreating people that you have to murder everyone instead. Wtf.
  
  
  • I got to the mayor of that Rosarian village being like "Oh, we petitioned the crown to support the bearers that secretly survived the empress' murder rampage" and immediately knew that the entire village was doomed.


• Riddle me this, Batman: why is the bunkhouse smaller than Cid's bedroom. Either Cid's bedroom. I appreciate that Cid needs to have meetings and Cid also had his daughter saying in his spare room, but seriously.


• "May the blessing of the crystals go with you" is such a wonderful curse.
• I feel like Kupka's network of spies/informants/whatever can't be that great if they can't figure out that it was probably Harbard who did the whole head in a box thing. Or maybe they did discover it and realised that if they tried to mention it to literally anyone else they were going to die.


• THEORY: the person Benedikta's character design reminds me of is actually LeBlanc from X-2.


• I was telling myself stories about Jill and the Hideaway sewing circle and then IT IS CANON. HORTENSE IS IN CHARGE OF SUPPLYING FABRIC THAT THE INHABITANTS OF HIDEAWAY TURN INTO CLOTHES, AND SHE'LL CHAT TO YOU ABOUT JILL'S SEWING.


• Vivian is the prettiest and the smartest, and her maps give me a headache. Nooooooooooo.


• Clive is collecting faction seals like pin badges.


• Mothercrystals: dangerous, often mining sites, danger of aetherfloods that will kill all but eight people. Hugo Kupka: *builds his house inside one*


• Of course, it's not enough that Kupka hallucinates Benedikta getting murdered by Clive, but he hallucinates the horny version of that too! *facepalm*


• Okay, Kupka becoming a mutated monstrous version of himself: I can deal with. Kupka piloting a rock/flesh mech that he created by EATING CRYSTALS: no! What the hell! And then Clive being like "Oh, if you can do it, I can too!" NO CLIVE, KUPKA DOING SOMETHING IS A PRIME REASON NOT TO DO IT.


• Did anyone else notice that the biggest!Kupka boss fight is functionally identical to the Temperantia boss fight in Bayonetta? Because storm, tentacles, riding on rocks that the boss is smashing until I have an opportunity to rip off their arms... That's a Bayonetta boss fight!


• How does Ifrit keep finding boss fights that let him fall forever inside something. Surely there aren't that many bottomless pits in the world.


• Is there "smug rat bastard man with silver hair" on the trope list for Final Fantasy? Because I feel like there's a lot of them.


• Quest: find out what's turned up the temperature of the local hotsprings to save the town baths.
  Answer: A pack of bombs. Literally labelled Bath Bombs.