Why Square Enix Will Not Get The FFVII Remake Right pt.1/2

[TRANSCRIPT]

I’ve been playing games for about 17 years now and even though today I mostly play action and strategy games, Role-Playing Games, specifically Japanese RPGs, were what got the ball rolling. They didn’t demand much mechanical dexterity, their stories were relatively easy to understand not dipping into any difficult subject matter, and they were aesthetically and linguistically charming enough to hold my interest [beat] even as a small child. My experience with these games was so positive, in fact, that as a youngster I took it upon myself to try and play all of the classics – I’m not sure if it was my childlike curiosity, Explorer Bartle-type, or the steady drip-feed of dopamine I got every time I watched some numbers go up on a screen. But, I really wanted to play em all, and being 6 years old this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with the rest of my life.

So, long story short, I played a few old RPGs, had a pretty good time…and then one day I heard about…It, the UR game; the game with a story and characters and gameplay so mind-boggingly pants-tighteningly awesome that it would grow to become one of the defining games, not just of the measly RPG genre, but the entire goddamn medium as a whole. And the game I’m talking about is of course…Planescape: Tormenthaha I wish - it’s Final Fantasy VII.

I was still remotely sane when I played this, so I must’ve been abouuut 9 years old; still just a smidge too young to not be tainted by all the swearing and bizarre…eh…encounters [Cloud attempting to cross-dress by getting gang-raped by burly men.” But, when I got to the end, and finally saw the credits roll after 40 long hours, I didn’t feel any…ehhhh? Accomplishment? Satisfaction? Something like that|anyway, it was on that day that I learned a lot about the world: That death affects everyone a little bit differently; That I was not as smart as I thought I was; that more people are sheep than sharks…LOSEYOURNECKSDAMMI-

I was just kinda confused ya know? Like I had just sat through a marathon of The Wire where the dialogue kept randomly cutting to an episode of Dragon Ball Z. Naturally, I couldn’t explain or even recall the story with anything vaguely resembling lucidity, so a couple of years later I said, “ehh maybe I was just too young to comprehend its brilliance. I’ll play it again.” Buuuuuuuut 56 more hours of huge swords and gold saucering later, and I still could not put any meaningful words to my experience. It was basically an electric rufie – I’d pick it up, watch some terrorists blow-up a nuclear reactor, then 5 or 6 days later I’d see Tetsuya Nomura’s name scrolling by unsure of whether or not I should regret any of my life’s decisions. That’s how rufies work right? I mean I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either, and being unable to explain why bugged the crap out of me.

So, after a couple of years of soul searching, a movie, a sequel, a prequel, a cell phone game, some hentaerm- art, and message board discussions later, I tried it one more time vowing that I was going to KNOW. This. game. Better than the hardcore fans…and the developers and-and-annnnd I made it about 30 minutes into the first disc before getting too bored to function, so I just chucked the controller and went “PEACE!” [beat] – never to pick the game up again.

Of course, the game’s Kardashian-like popularity made it pretty much impossible to avoid in RPG discussions, so I kept hearing about it anyway. But, it was through this forced osmosis that I noticed something interesting: nobody actually seems to remember anything about this game. I mean sure things like Sephiroth killing Aeris and Cloud swinging a huge sword, buttotallyisn’tcompensatingfor anything are so ingrained into video game culture that RPG fans can’t not know them. But, I’m talking about basic plot details, like, “why does everyone in Avalanche leave Midgar with Cloud?” or “why does the party have to destroy the Diamond weapon?” Ya know, stuff anyone who’s played the game should be able to answer in a heartbeat. I’ve seen innumerable declarations that it’s teh gratest gayme EVARRRRR, but no one seems to be able to give a real reason for it being so good. And by ‘real’ I mean something other than “I cried like a bitch when Aeris died...10/10.”

So, with Square finally deciding to cash their billion yen pay check and milk this cash cow with a remake or four…ughhh, I spent about a dozen hours watching the entire game on youtube, courtesy of VGHeaven – lord knows I wouldn’t play this crap again – to try and imagine what a remake would look like. It was during this vision quest that I think I figured out why no one can remember this game’s plot as well as why seemingly everyone loves it anyway. Trouble is, I also noticed that a graphical update, which is absolutely fucking required for this Popeye the Sailor man simulator, is nowhere near enough to bring FFVII into the 21^st century. (Besides, fans already made one like ten years ago – it wasn’t enough then, and it isn’t enough now). Answering these questions about FFVII’s success however is gonna cover alotta different aspects of game design; some obvious, some “sweet Jesus who the hell cares about this” esoteric [beat], but it’s all important! And seeing all of this should make yooouuu…fuck, I dunnoSmarter?...or at least be able talk about FFVII with some degree of sophistication?

Soooo the next time you see Joe Weaboo is like “C’mon gaiz! This gayme’s GRATE!” [*Picture of a cheese grater] You can look that motherfucker in the face and say “NO[beat], this game is NOT grate! This- this game is the opposite of grate! TH-TH-THIS GAME IS WHISK!!! IT’S ALL WHIS-”

[*Bell sound]

#1 The Mystery – Ludonarrative Dissonance in JRPGs

Okay so, do you remember “Ludonarrative Dissonance?” That phrase that everyone and their grandma’s litter of dead cats threw around for about a year, then laughed at, withdrew, and purged from their collective memory bank? Well, Final Fantasy VII helped pioneer a very special iteration of it unique to RPGs.

For everyone who missed the first internet spam fest and was outside talking with other human beings in person like a SQUARE, Ludonarrative Dissonance occurs when a game’s story and gameplay don’t gel together – what the player does, contradicts their character’s stated identity or mission, like when Lara Croft whines for like 10 minutes over killing an innocent deer, while the player has to murder several platoon’s worth of human beings, ooor when Snake’s getting shock-tortured on Shadow Moses, and you have to cook Bolognese Spaghetti in 18 seconds, Cooking Mama-style to keep him alive [*Insert Cooking Mama with an eyepatch saying “The Better the Mama!” in the bottom right corner]. Prettysurethat’swhat happened*SOO, the recurring complaint among all the rabble was that arbitrarily stuffing story heavy games with wanton murder causes ludonarrative dissonance. And yet, while those complaints are kind of true and that caaaan happen, RPGs historically haven’t had this issue.

Yeah, the player can kill all sorts of monsters and people who were proooobably innocent and just happened to be minding their own business in the wrong part of the forest, but hero’s need xp mang! And them slimes be straight drippin’ wit’ swag! Okay, no, we’re not doing that. Where an RPG’s story starts breaking down is when you’ve got a meteor fast approaching the earth, and the heroes feel like shooting some hoops or making gonzo-style emu porn in a shed, instead of doing anything about it. [beat]

Nothing in the story justifies doing this sort of crap [beat] *hopefully, oh god I hope this isn’t an actual game *sigh*…but gameplay-wise there just might be something to making a bunch of oddly colored ostriches copulate against their will- like the single most powerful summon in the entire freaking game [beat] or trees [Ancient Forest]! y’all love that folia-. Anyway, it’s in stuff like this that we see the common ludonarrative dissonance of RPGs: Players are given free rein to do whatever the hell they feel like, and the written story of the game just has to lie back and think of England until they decide to stop satisfying themselves and pay attention to it. [beat] Sex pun.

Now, over the past couple of years, the “L phrase” was only thrown around whenever some pseudointellectual wise-ass tried to “objectively prove” that a game was bad. In fact, it became such an easy and common complaint that things actually swung in the opposite direction where most critics purged the words from their vocabularies and others, most notably Chris “Campster” Franklin, have said that: [*use the actual clip from the video*] “Ludonarrative dissonance doesn’t actually exist because the gameplay makes up the narrative.”

I love Campster and the work he does, hell I’ve been subbed for like 3 and a half years now? But, not only is he WRONG about Ludonarrative dissonance not existing, so is every chuckle-fuck who squealed, “IT MAIKS GAYME BADD CUZ MIY IMERCSION HERTZ!” [beat] As damn near every post-FFVII JRPG has shown us, ludonarrative dissonance has nothing to do with the quality of a game. The only thing it does is accentuate the fact that all games with a story have two narratives: the static narrative written into a game by its writers, and the dynamic narrative partially constructed by the players. In literary terms, since FYI: I majored in English Lit in college, the static narrative is, with exceedingly rare exception [Stanley Parable], always in the 1^st or 3^rd person depending on the camera angle, while the player’s narrative is always in the second person, as indicated by every out-of-breath Just Cause story ever.

And it just makes sense given the strength of early videogame technology. You couldn’t write, “hero parries enemy sword, does a triple pirouette at a 137-degree angle and slits the antagonist’s throat. You had to abbreviate that shit: villain appears; a fight ensues; hero slays villain. Exit – pursuedbyabear.

This is slightly presumptuous but, I’m pretty sure all players intuitively recognize the distinction between the two narratives, which you can actually hear every time someone wants to talk about something that happens in a game with a pre-determined character: For instance, no one says Geralt killed those six drowners they’ll say “I” killed those six drowners. No one says, Sephiroth stabbed “me,” everyone says Sephiroth stabbed “Aeris” [short beat] or “Aeriththththth” IfThey’reParticularlyFondOfSoundingLikeA TrogolodyteWhoReveresBadTranslationsAsDivineLaw.NotJudging [*say fast and in a lower voice, like a mumble]. And you can do this little test with pretty much any game with a fixed story and…ehhh un-fixed gameplay to quickly find both narratives. In some games they actually overlap on top of each other [Trails in the Sky] but, I- I- IIIIII don’t have time to go over that in this video. As much as I would lurrrve to spend the next hour and a half discussing narratology and story-telling in video games, I’d rather you didn’t shut off the video and blacklist this channel.

Anyway, as you’ll quickly notice if you do this test for like a minute, games which have two narratives are probably among your absolute favorites [beat], some of these might even be among the best games in their respective genres [FFXII, Bayonetta, Painkiller, Professor Layton: And the Unwound Future, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid]. More importantly, games with ludonarrative dissonance specifically, like sayyy every open-world RPG ever, might not have any major issues in either of their narratives or their gameplay. So, you’re probably wondering: [use a British accent] “if amazing games can have ludonarrative dissonance and there’s nothing inherently problematic about this paradigm, why am I bringing this up in relation to FFVII?” Well, my eloquent, erudite, and likely well-endowed viewer, that is because ludonarrative dissonance also creates a serious risk that every designer must account for, which 1997 Squaresoft very clearly did not: one narrative may supercede the other.

In games with Ludonarrative dissonance, the story and gameplay are literally by definition disconnected from one another. So, in order for the game to not be the digital equivalent to modern art, both have to be able to stand on their own merits. This is basically why MGS3: Snake Eater is kinda meh, while MGS3: Subsistence is arguably the best game in the entire franchise. Same excellent James Bond-story, same maps, pretty much identical enemy layout, but one handles like a 2006 Lotus Exige complete with the industry standard scantily-clad model eating a cheese-burger on the hood, while the other controls like your grandad’s first automobile that he personally “upgraded” with lead tires and a cellophane windshield.

If only one of these parts of the game is pulling its weight and the other is lying listlessly on the floor, then like [shortbeat] surprisingly pragmatic human beings, players will write-off the carpet fetishist and only pay attention to the part that’s actually engaging. And again, consciously or not, we all do this as evidenced by every time we go full used car salesman and try to make our friends buy a game we like. “The story sucks, but the gameplay is AWESOME [beat] and it comes with a free hand jo-“ In most games it doesn’t matter that much which aspect is good if the developers just want the player to enjoy their product. But in some games, like oh I don’t know…a bog standard JRPG with gameplay less intellectually stimulating than Hello Kitty: Happy Party Pals, the story had DAMN well better be a selling point, or else why the hell wouldn’t you be playing…well, Hello Kitty: Happy Party Pals……or Bloodborne [*brief tilting footage of The One Reborn].

Okay…point [HUMPH] taken. Another simpler and far more ubiquitous, yet surprisingly subtle way we think about this is that games in which one narrative is just overtly stronger than the other set up a work-reward relationship, where the weak narrative, typically the gameplay, is the work players have to sift through to be rewarded with the strong narrative, typically the story.

If you invert this, you’ll notice that it actually presupposes that good gameplay and character progression can hold a game up all on its own, since these are videogames and you can usually skip cutscenes but, can never skip gameplay[beat] buuuuut once again, discussion, another time, check the footnotes. E.t.c. E.T.C. (Elite Tauren Chieftain).

Funny thing is, with big JRPGs specifically, when the gameplay is better than the story something weird and very interesting happens. BTW, this is the part where I piss away any and all good will I may have built up for the last 10 minutes so brace yourself for shitstorm in 3…2…1… For some reason lots of, probably intelligent, people think that many RPGs with barely acceptable gameplay and godawful writing have some of the best stories in all of video games [Chrono Trigger, FFVII, Golden Sun, Kingdom Hearts].

The most rational and probably unnecessarily forgiving explanations I can come up with for this are 1. nostalgia [beat], 2. that ludonarrative dissonance facilitates intellectually dissociating from a game’s written story and, therefore, due to the lack of accessible in-game plot synopses, leads players to assume that potential on-screen melodrama is warranted because of something they may have forgotten or weren’t paying attention to, even when they haven’t actually forgotten anything. [beat] And 3, players inadvertently conflate the dynamic narrative (their personal experience playing the game) with the static narrative. Sorry, no bad jokes on that one, here’s a clip of a clown watering toys.

Now FFVII, is like the posterchild of this phenomenon. Even though those other games had lousy stories, all of the-[shortbeat] one of them [Chrono Trigger] had a story that was bad because it was overly simplistic, which is at least kiiiind of forgiveable[beat]ya know since it’s a kids’ game. But, these other games are attempting to be complex and are generally aimed at older audiences. [beat] They don’t get a pass. And although FFVII isn’t the first game to commit this offense, it popularized this STUPID trend of making barely comprehensible (MGS2), plot-hole ridden (Drakengard), pig feces (Kingdom Hearts 2) qualify as a “story.”

And don’t get me wrong, the dynamic narrative is “passable,” but the written narrative is a babel-esque pillar of shite so monumental it can PIERCE THE VERY HEAVENS!!!…okay maybe not that bad, but it is pretty damn awful. According to this Extremely Scientific Chart Measuring The Quality Of Videogame Narratives™ [*Scale goes from left to right: The box of Ico,Terrible, Bad, Acceptable, Good, Moving, The Witcher 3 box*], The static narrative of FFVII is approximately 0.5 thumbs above Ico while the dynamic narrative is exactly at 1997’s acceptable, giving it a mean rating of slightly bad by 1997 standards, and, adjusting for inflation, completely fricking appalling in 2015. Meaning this shit’s gotta get fix’d, and because this is a video game, the most rational place to start is almost certainly:

#2 The Gameplay - Myopia

JRPG gameplay is generally simplistic enough that you can actually break it down into just three linguistically vague, but *sigh* actually depressingly specific components: Exploration, Character Progression, and the “Battle System” – because there is always a battle system.

Exploration is exactly what it says on the tin – wandering around and finding STUFF. The “battle system” is whatever flashy, formalized, and fffffoooverly simplistic representation of fighting the devs could come up with. And Character Progression is just a fancy way of saying “when you get gear and level ups.” When I say a JRPG has "good" gameplay it means I enjoy rummaging through peoples’ houses, slaughtering bats by the thousand, and again, watching numbers go up.

·         Footnotes - The currency issue

First thing you’ve gotta understand about FFVII’s gameplay, though, is that it was about as revolutionary as Fruit Loops were in a world dominated by Cheerios. In fact, about half of the problems with its gameplay stem from Squaresoft trying to hold on to conventions from previous Final Fantasy games, without updating the story or game structure to facilitate their inclusion.

Ya see, after Final Fantasy I, Square started looking for ways to get ahead of the curve and innovate on RPG gameplay conventions before they became norms. The thing I know you’re already thinking of is the battle system which switched from a static turn-based system to the Active Turn-Based system we all know and set fire to pitch-forks over for the FFVII remake. But the ATB system didn’t actually change much from its proliferation until FFX-2 over a decade later. FFVII’s use of it was perfectly acceptable in 1997… assuming you switched the game mode from passive to active that is. cuz ain’t nobody got time to patiently wait for a 1-minute canned animation they already seen 5,000 times over.

No, the more immediate and subtle thing on Square’s hit list was actually the fixed job system. You ever heard that saying that “every Nintendo game is a beta for the next one?” Well you can pretty much say the same thing about Final Fantasy. In FFII, they removed jobs entirely and made characters’ stats develop in accordance with what you made them do in battle. In FFIII you had formal jobs, but you could change anyone’s job at any time outside of battle, so that they didn’t define the character. FFV did the exact same thing, but added more jobs to the pool and had FFIV’s ATB combat. Then, in FFVI characters had unique abilities which matched past jobs, but anyone could learn magic by equipping magic stones, and their stats would develop partially based on which magicite they had equipped on level-up [short beat] kinda like a greatest hits of everything that came before it.

Which finally brings us to FFVII, where characters could use magic AND other abilities by equipping magic rocks, this time called materia, but no one had any unique abilities, they didn’t get modified stat growths, and did not learn magic permanently. And just for the record they kept iterating on this idea with later FFs right up to the latest one, buuuut ehh, you know [short beat] footnotes.   

Footnotes: The continued evolution of materia

Now, I don’t actually have a problem with Square’s vendetta against RPG class system [short beat]. Hell, I even think the materia system is one of the coolest character customization systems Square has ever come up with…except for the whole characters aren’t unique anymore…thing. And before you say buh-buh-what about liiimit breaks? It’s not the same. You can’t hack a guy to pieces one turn with a chainsaw, then blast him with your mom’s…fluids the next. It’s tragic. TARGIC I SAY!!!

Mooore specifically though, there are two big problems with limit breaks in FFVII: you can’t use them consistently enough to justify using one character over another, except during some boss battles and, more importantly, most of them just don’t match the characters (which was the supposed point of their inclusion in the first place. Take Cloud for instance: He’s supposed to be an ex-SOLDIER 1^st class, one of the most skilled fighters in the world and all around BAMF. So his limit breaks are of course…uh, let’s seeee we’ve got some sword swings, shooting a sword-laser…thing, conjuring meteors from nowhere, SUMMONING A CATEGORY 2 TORNADO, and some more sword swings. What the fuck does reenacting the start of Armageddon have to do with swordsmanship, skill, or being a SOLDIER? Was Michael Bay the head of the SOLDIER’s training division? Were promotions given out based on how much collateral damage you could cause? WILL I EVER STOP ASKING STUPID QUESTIONS?!?!?!? (place answers in upside down at the bottom of the page).

Well, maybe Cloud’s just a weirdo with a probably sexual inferiority complex. Surely the plucky ninja with a big-ass shuriken will have attacks based on Japan’s extremely liberal interpretation of ninjutsu right?

[show Yuffie’s Earthquake limit] 

Ohhhhhhhhh nooooo. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Real talk: only 3 characters in this game (Barret, Tifa, Aeris) have limit breaks that actually reflect their supposed abilities. Everyone else is a clusterfuck of moves from past FFs, random references to other media, and insane small town nuking lasers. Even though they got some of the limit breaks right, yhe fact that over half of them don’t match the characters, indicates that Square designed them thinking “what would look most awesome” instead of “what awesome things could this character do.” While visually, they’re all pretty diverse, none of them paints a picture of who a character is. And functionally, they’re all pretty much the same: damage, damage, and uh oh we heard you like damage, so we put some damage in your damage so you can damage things while you damage things.

All of which, basically highlights the biggest problem with Square’s push to “transcend” classes: Characters who can do anything without specifically designated roles, or at least limitations, are functionally identical to each other.

In FFVII characters gaining exp points and levelling up isn’t actually that important. It’ll raise their base stats generally making them more badass, but materia is the heart & soul of their combat performance. With the right materia, Aeris can be your designated hitter and Barret can be the archmage of the universe, lore be damned to the 9^th circle of hell. And while that sounds kind of awesome from a “hey, look how much I can fuck with the game” perspective, it doesn’t actually make much sense in this game specifically.

Ya see back in FFVI your party was constantly rotating for story reasons, which made it pretty much impossible to rely on a single line-up to get you through the entire game. So, to avoid riots from entitled people who couldn’t strategize, Square gave every character access to a big-ass, omni-present curbstomp boot called “magic” as compensation. In FFVII, though the party almost never separates and even when it does, Cloud is almost always a constant. So, from a structural perspective, the enemies really only needed to be designed around Cloud’s specific capabilities, *grumble*had they given him any*grumble*. But even so, there was nothing preventing them from giving everyone A unique capability regardless.

And, this is bigger than a measly structural oversight [beat] much MUCH bigger. Like, if this was their first RPG I would’ve said, “well maybe they just don’t get how RPGs work and they’ll do it right next time.” But no, this is Final Fantasy V (for vendetta)-eye (beholder)-eye (beholder) SEVEN, they’ve had six goddamn cracks at this for over a decade, and in the game that immediately preceded FFVII Square deliberately designed the game to avoid making this mistake.

And look, I know it seems like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but structure aside, homogenizing characters is something ya just don’t do! In all games, players have two spaces in which they can understand the characters, the story and the gameplay,[beat] obviously.  And whether they’ve got roided out space marines or a group of Japanese high school students, games need to not only utilize both of these avenues to communicate your character(s)’s identities, but also make sure that what they’re communicating in each area matches up. [beat] Logically. After all, games are composed of two stories; the writers’ story and your story, and both of these narratives share the same characters. If these two don’t match up, then you just get ludoscababib discobiscuits. And those taste awful. 

Most RPGs will reconcile the two characterizations by pretending to give you control over the writers’ story, but most JRPGs and other fixed narrative games are stricter than my friend Kevin’s Asian parents, don’t let you touch anything with a ten-foot pole. So, ALLLLLLL of your story’s characterization has to be expressed through the gameplay. And ya know what? that’sfine. In most games….butnotthisone-

Like I said before JRPG gameplay only has three parts: Exploration, Character Progression, and the Battle System, each of which provides an opportunity for characterization. But in FFVII, the characterization in these areas could accurately be described as:

- nonexistent [exploration: Partly leader is fixed, NPCs talk at you not with you]

- inconsistent [character progression: materia’s growth governs everything

- and nonsensical [battle system: character stats don’t affect the atb bar; levelling up doesn’t affect combat abilities, abilities are entirely governed by materia, not character capabilities; few limit breaks match the characters]

THIS is why Aeris’ death feels less impactful than a Meseeks’, why FFVII’s gameplay can’t even manage a ‘C’ grade – half of the roleplaying just isn’t there! HOW CAN ANYONE CALL THIS A ROLEPLAYING GAME WHEN YOUR CHARACTERS DON’T HAVE ROLES TO PLAY??!?!?!?!

*sigh*

The only time a developer should ever EVER refrain from expressing a character’s individuality within the gameplay, is if they have a damn good reason for doing so. FFVII does not have a reason.

Giving everyone access to everything just seems like Square hated individuality and was secretly [trying to revive Stalin’s fascist communist dream to crush those capitalist pig-dogs by mind-cleansing western youth! VIVA RUSSI-] (*gradually ascending demented FFVII music, from when Sephiroth goes insane. Speak in increasingly thick Russian accent).

Or more likely they just tried to iterate on the magicite system from FFVI and didn’t think about how it affected everything else. And make no mistake this change does affect a lot of other things like:

CONTINUED IN PART #3 
The Story & Characters – Jenova Ruins Everything 

Footnotes: 

FN#1 The Third Narrative/Why Campster is TECHNICALLY Right

The redacted portion of my "Extremely Scientific Chart Measuring the Quality of Videogame Narratives" is the Synthesis/Meta narrative. This is the fusion of the static and the dynamic narratives, or more plainly what you can tell people about your experience in the game. Campster's error is that he's suggesting that this is the ONLY narrative in games, ignoring the fact that it itself is made up of two different narratives.

FN#2 A Good Story Can’t Support Bad Gameplay

As I mentioned, a game with good gameplay and a bad story, is totally fine since you can just thumb past the story to continues enjoying the gameplay. But, if the opposite is true, then you have a serious problem, since players can’t skip the gameplay to experience the story. As a designer, this is something you have to watch out for, since players won’t want to finish your game if it’s too tedious to get through. FFVII’s gameplay being better than its story would theoretically make it an easy game to finish, but since it’s a JRPG (read: long) and the gameplay isn’t exactly revolutionary, it’s still hard to muster up the patience to do so nowadays (and even in 1997), when other RPGs with better gameplay and stories are available.

FN#3 The Other Unnecessarily Forgiving Explanation

There is a 5th explanation for why so many people like FFVII (hint: it starts with “aes” and ends with “thetics”), but I have a more robust discussion of it planned for the next video, so you’ll have to chill till then. All, I’ll say here is that art and themes are EXTREMELY important factors in determining whether people like a thing.

FN#4 The Currency Issue

Character progression in RPGs (and most games with RPG elements) is dictated by the speed at which players acquire the game’s currencies, and the value of said currencies throughout the game. By currencies, I’m referring to anything that the player can accumulate (Money, Exp, Job points, Weapons, etc.). Because these currencies are the player’s means of gauging their progress through the game, balancing the value of these currencies is the single most important aspect of structuring an RPG’s dynamic narrative. Most RPGs from the 90s onward use 3 major currencies, and FFVII is no different (Gil, Char Exp, Materia Exp). However, FFVII doesn’t balance them particularly well, in that Materia dwarfs the others in value at all points in the game. This would be fine if its strength was necessary to handle an in-game challenge or there was some narrative reason justifying its strength…but as I’ll show next time, there is no reason for it being so strong.

FN#5 The Continued Evolution of Final Fantasy

So, to pick up on where I left off:

FFVIII - goes to the logical extreme of Square's trajectory by removing the value of classes, magic, and even STATS, by giving players complete control over all of these factors via junctioning

FFIX - ignored all of the advancements made in its generation and went back to a style akin to that of FFIV, but with a new twist that was later copied by Tales of Vesperia and several other JRPGs.

FFX - walked things back by giving the characters fixed jobs until you reach the end of their "line" on the sphere grid, at which point they can jump over to another job. It's basically FFV's system with greater restrictions (which is good).

FFXII - broke classes down into their functions, then scattered them all on a single grid (the License Board) for players work towards with each character. Essentially there were no classes and anyone could do anything.

And finally, FFXIII - gave all of the characters access to 6 jobs, but each character performed the job slightly differently, and you could switch all of their jobs at the same time during battles

FN#6 My Mistake/The Nuance To Discussing Ludonarrative Dissonance

You may see my arguments as inconsistent, since I say that ludonarrative dissonance doesn't affect the quality of games, and then point to it to explain why the gameplay in FFVII is lousy. So, to clarify, ludonarrative dissonance in games does not inherently pose a problem. However, if the static narrative does not present consistent characterizations of the player characters, THEN ludonarrative dissonance becomes a problem, since you won't be able to get a clear picture of who your characters are, and by extension, will have a difficult time getting invested in the static narrative. I’ll expand upon this further right at the start of Part 3, so don’t sweat it if that’s still a little ambiguous.

FN#7 The Illusion of Choice in Games

The value of choice in games depends on which narrative you’re referring to. If it’s the static narrative, then it doesn’t exist: all choices and possibilities were written into the game before you played it, and nothing you do will change anything about it. If it’s the dynamic narrative or the synth narrative, then it is extremely consequential, since it directly influences what you see in the game, but its value depends on how many times you play the game & how much you know about it. This makes calling choice in video games an illusion somewhat fallacious, since the choices DO matter to you, the player, just not the developer or someone to trying to articulate a game’s story.