The Top 10 JRPG Fish

(Originally published Mar 31, 2016 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

Fish are an essential part of the JRPG genre, and while recent entries may have lacked some of the sparkle of the JRPG golden age in the mid to late 90s, there are still some great fish out there. Here's a look at 10 of the best.

10. Marinebasher (Xenogears)

Of course, a game about mechs and ships ought to have some underwater mechs. Marinebasher is... not one of them. This battle takes place half-way up the Tower of Babel, because of course a mechadolphin can fly in Tetsuya Takahashi's sprawling, absurd world.

9. Strong Glory (Eternal Sonata)

I guess this is technically some sort of swordfish? This guy is to regular swordfish as the average JRPG sword is to actually plausible bladed weapons. Peak anime (fish).

8. Cutlass Fish (Blue Dragon) 

Look at this magnificent, swashbuckling bastard. JUST LOOK AT HIM.

7. Forest Whale (Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth 1)

A brief moment of glorious light in an ocean of garbage.

Not a literal ocean, of course. You didn't think JRPG fish would actually appear in water, did you?

6. Lord Iwama (Live-a-Live)

Ode Iou's castle is a vast, complex dungeon with dozens intricate subplots. The politics and spiritual turmoil of feudal Japan are brought beautifully to life through a horde of characters and mythical encounters. It's a masterpiece of environmental design.

There's also this fucking carp God lurking in the moat. You don't actually need to go for a swim unless you're doing the challenge where you kill every human in the chapter, but if you do, Lord Iwama will be waiting...

5. The Nebra River King (Final Fantasy XII)

What a beautiful fish. I love the contrast of blue and pink on its irregular scales. It wouldn't be a list of great JRPGs without a Final Fantasy or two. I have to confess a little person investment here, as well. I owe the Nebra River King quite a lot for finally teaching me the Dualshock button layout after years as a Nintendo gamer. He also yields the only component of the Wyrmhero Blade ultimate weapon that I've managed to acquire more than once.

4. fish (Xenogears)

You're stranded on a raft with your lover-to-be, your mechs trapped underneath it. Finally alone. You're trying to work together with him to secure escape, or rescue.

All he can think of is catching this one fish. You don't even have a way to cook it, but he insists it's essential. You think he might try eating it raw. His efforts to catch it dissolve into slapstick.

No intimate moments for you. Just fish.

3. Sushie (Paper Mario)

We can all agree Sushie's great, right? She's a better boat than Mario could ever be, even with Gamecube power in The Thousand-Year Door, and despite being a land-dwelling fish in a swamp she manages to be a great mom to a pack of rowdy baby yoshis. She's great.

2. Fastitocalon-f (Final Fantasy VIII)

Oh, man. One of the most notorious break-points in all of video games. On the beach near Balamb Garden before the game's first dungeon, Fastitocalon-fs drop fish fins when killed. These can be refined for large quantities of ice magic, which can then be used to boost your stats well beyond the range of the early-game encounters. Seldom has a single random encounter distilled so much of what is distinctive of its host game.

And finally, the number one, the best fish in all of JRPGs

JRPGs

JRPGs are the best JRPG fish, because there's no such thing as a fish.

Okay, let me explain.

When Stephen Jay Gould opined that there is no such thing as a fish [(possible) content warning: upper-class British comedy], what he meant was that 'fish' is not a coherent biological category. We call a huge range of ocean-dwelling creatures 'fish', without much respect for physiological similarity or genetic links among them. Life began in the oceans; all land-dwelling (and airborne) creatures fall within a single branch of the tree of life, and every other branch gets labelled 'fish'.

Why bring this up in reference to JRPGs? Because even if the concept of a genre has a use outside of marketing (and that's not clear, though it probably has some sociological utility), JRPGs aren't a genre of video game even by the wonky standards of the field. Trying to explain what unites all the games that get labelled JRPGs is futile.

What does Fire Emblem have in common with Nier? Do Live-a-Live and Kingdom Hearts share any formal properties that actually matter to the overall experiences they create? How do Xenogears and Etrian Odyssey come to be regarded as part of the same tradition?

There are answers to these questions, of course. But they're mostly in terms of the people and organisations involved in producing and distributing the software, or the people playing and writing about it. The games themselves may be action games or strictly turn-based, virtual spaces to explore or digital chessboards, deep stories or near-pure mathematical systems.

And there are reasons to take them all together, because they come from a specific culture that isn't ours, and because all these games labour under this unified expectation we have placed on them. But those expectations can only limit our ability to enjoy and make meaning out of the games themselves. There is no such thing as the JRPG you're expecting.

To Model Lightning

(Originally Published Mar 10, 2016, at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

This post contains full spoilers for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

In Lightning Returns, Lightning is sent into the last days of a dying world to save the souls of people who remain trapped there. By Final Fantasy standards, this world is very small – four areas, two of them cities, only two open field zones. In a blunt but effective spatial metaphor, the world is a circle, and you can eventually run a loop around the whole thing.

The five parallel chapters that make up the core of the game revolve around characters from the earlier in the trilogy; Snow, Sazh and Fang from the first game, Noel and Caius from the second. In each chapter, Lightning encounters an old tension, a pain that her former comrade or rival must let go. She brings an awkward and often confrontational healing to each in turn, pressing her mission as saviour.

Throughout it all, she is haunted by Lumina, who sometimes seems to be a ghost of Lightning's sister (and frequently primary motivation) Serah, and sometimes seems to be an avatar of Chaos, the power that is consuming the world. Lumina teases Lightning, casting doubt on her motivations and challenging her trust in the powers that have claimed her.

In the game's finale, Lumina reveals that she is actually the part of Lightning's personality that has been suppressed since the death of her parents. She reminds us – and as someone who hadn't played the original game for five years years when I played LR, I'd completely forgotten – that in FFXIII Lightning has a speech about how she buried aspects of herself in order to become strong to look after Serah.

Unlike certain classic Final Fantasy heroes, Lightning's denial of her past was at least in part a conscious choice, something she was and remains aware of. And Lumina's revelation has a second crucial detail: unless Lightning reunites with her, becomes whole again, Lightning herself will be trapped in the dying world. The underlying assertion of the game is laid bare: that a nature divided against itself in self-denial, as Noel's was, as Snow's was, as Lightning's still is, is a deathtrap.

Lightning, of course, because this is a story, reunites with her other half. So, in a substantive sense, it's a new Lightning, a new Claire Farron, who survives into the new world shown briefly at the game's end. This, as I understand it, is the Lightning who recently became a model for Luis Vuitton[1]. The interview that she gave to The Telegraph seems to back that up; at one point she says "I'm currently winding down after a long journey."

A few people have suggested that the interview doesn't sound like Lightning, or sounds a little cringeworthy, and to an extent I agree. It certainly doesn't sound like the indomitable warrior Lightning of the video games, and the interview itself doesn't seem to have benefitted from quite the quality of translation that the games did. But Lightning is a changed woman, and to me the changes feel about right for her story.

In fact, some of what Lightning said in the interview resonated for me very strongly, particularly "My clothes were nothing more than armor to stay alive; "dressing up" was a concept I've never had." I've spent a lot of my life choosing things like clothing and food on a purely functional basis, a habit of self-denial that eventually became so pathological I ended up in counselling for it.

For me, this was grounded in repression of my gender identity born of the belief that I wasn't 'trans enough'. And while I don't want to reduce all of trans-ness to clothing, or assert that Lightning is trans – she encounters none of the social tensions that come from an ill-fitting birth assignment –this theme within her story powerfully captured a particular component of my own trans experience.

Lightning Returns, after all, uses clothing as a core mechanic in a way conspicuously absent from the first two games. In the first two, equipment is exclusively weapons and accessories, but in Lightning Returns, Lightning's entire combat role and ability set are determined by the outfits she wears. The game incentivises collecting and experimenting with a broad and diverse wardrobe, which can be tweaked both mechanically and cosmetically.

And I have this scene in my head where Lightning, after saving the world, has kept all her outfits, telling herself they might be useful, and Serah walks in on her trying one of them on. "I, uh.. I just wanted to check I still knew how to use their powers." "Lightning, it's okay. You look great! Let me go grab you some eyeshadow-" "Could- could you call me Claire?"[2]

Yeah, it's a scene rooted in a painful cliché of discovery and exposure for trans folks. But the idea that Lightning could go from that to modelling – and to saying, in an interview with a national newspaper, "It makes me feel excited... It is a thrill that I, who has faced my share of danger, have never experienced before," – is a rare happy ending to the cliché.

I've argued before that a lot can be learned about heroism and masculinity from Lightning's journey. With the benefit of these spoilers, I can say a bit more. Lightning's sullen, insular soldier personality – the persona for whom clothes are nothing more than armour – is classically masculine in some crucial ways that the resolution of her story critiques.

For men, and particularly men growing up in the anglocentric academic tradition I was raised to, emotions and preferences are weaknesses to be suppressed. The idea that emotion is at odds with reason – and, with reason, the possibility of true, pure, perfect knowledge – has dominated this tradition and many of the specific cultures spun off from it since at least Plato. We see it still in the 'reals before feels' rhetoric of internet 'rationalism' and the clinical oppression of old academia.

In FFXIII, Lightning's determination to suppress her pain, her frustration with her sister, with Snow and with the Sanctum, and ultimately with the Fal'Cie, leads to rash expressions of violence and driving the few people who might support her away. By the end of the trilogy, her self-denial has become so poisonous that it traps her in a dying world, a world torn apart by the Chaos it cannot control or comprehend.

Early in FFXIII, there's a flashback to Lightning's recent birthday. Serah's attempt to throw her a party – with only Serah and Snow attending – ends in a disastrous row. Lightning's only gift, from Serah, is a high-quality utility knife. It's a stark illustration of how little there is to Lightning besides her soldierhood, how thoroughly she has suppressed herself. I may or may not have had birthdays a bit like this.

To see Lightning 'proud to be chosen', inspired and uplifted by the opportunity to express a self she seems surprised to have discovered, gives me hope. I feel like I, too, can be whole again, like I can escape the meaningless circles of functionalism and rationalism. Like there is a person – and specifically a woman - that I can be.

[1] There's a very short view of the new world from orbit in the closing cinematic of Lightning Returns, and the coastline it shows looked suspiciously like the real Mediterranean coast to me.

[2] I assume it's uncontroversial that Serah would be fully supportive.