Final Fantasy XII and the Paradox of Final Fantasy

This is a transcript of my mini-episode for the Dead Genre Chronicles podcast (by the way, I'm on a podcast, check it out).




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There is a paradox at the heart of what 'Final Fantasy' means in gaming. A Final Fantasy game must suffer two irreconcilable comparisons to the series' landmark seventh instalment; first, to the narrative and interface conventions it defined, and second to its astonishing transpacific impact. No game, or indeed any other work of art, could meet both, since landmark status can seldom if ever be achieved by preserving and perpetuating conventions.

Final Fantasy IX and X were commercially and critically successful, and still hold up today as excellent developments of the form and style laid down by Final Fantasy VII. They are outstanding games, deeply worthy of their heritage, but neither even approaches global landmark status.

Final Fantasy XII wasn't Square Enix's first attempt to break from the FFvii formula; even discounting handheld spin-offs, that honour goes to the misunderstood and underrated Finall Fantasy X-2. But where X-2 is an optimistic tale about the construction of new traditions, it is Final Fantasy XII that best expresses the frustration of the Final Fantasy paradox.


At a personal level, FFXII is the story of Ashelia B'nargin, princess of the recently-conquered kingdom of Dalmasca. Her adventure comprises a series of desperate attempts to restore her sovereignty and build a resistance to the grand empires that want to use her country as a battlefield.

But Ashe's actions are largely irrelevant to the history of Ivalice. At a political level, what really turns the world of FFXII are the tides of power and honour that bind the empires of Archadia and Rozarria to their cold war.

At every turn, Ashe and her party are thwarted by Archadia's effortless military and technological supremacy; more than once, hours of in-game travel will end in a cutscene where Archadian airships fly overhead, overtaking you and destroying whatever faint hope you journeyed in search of.

The true magnitude of the plot's commitment to futility can only be conveyed through spoilers, so if you want to avoid them skip ahead now.

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We are used to Final Fantasy games where, in the end, the player's party challenge the power of Gods who wish to control the destiny of mankind. In Final Fantasy XII, though, it is the villains who chant about placing, as they put it, 'the reins of history back in the hands of man'. There are gods, the Occuria, who manipulate human affairs, by granting the powers of magical superweapons to some monarchs and not others; but it is Vayne and Cid who seek to break their monopoly.

Ashe – herself chosen by the Occuria to wield a new nethicite superweapon – defeats Vayne, having finally decided not to use the power of nethicite herself. In doing so, she allows the Occuria to remain in their position of absolute power and forswears the only thing that could make her political and military position secure. Though she ends the story with Dalmasca's sovereignty restored, the nation's army remains weak and the power of her neighbours stands almost unchecked.

It should be noted here that there's a distinctly Japanese relationship to the politics of nuclear weaponry at work in FFXII's plot, but it's a topic for another time, and for a critic who isn't tied by national and personal history to the development of nuclear power for military use.

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Very little is changed about the world of Final Fantasy XII by the actions of any character. Against the tides of history, individual agency is largely irrelevant. This is reinforced by the sheer scale of the slice of Ivalice you're permitted to explore. FFXII's playable areas are vast, but they also have open horizons that reveal just how much of the world is beyond reach.

It's a long game, and you travel what feels like an extraordinarily broad stretch of the world. But for all your wandering, you explore less than half of Archadia and never trouble the shores of Rozarria at all. This is the great advantage of unifying the game around a single scale rather than having the world-map/field-map dichotomy of older games (which is not to say that world-map-games are necessarily bad, just that FFXII gets excellent mileage out of the alternative).

I'd argue, though this is more subjective, that there is also an insignificance to the combat. There are no dramatic transitions between exploration and battle, few opportunities for a triumphant pose or the game's subdued version of the iconic victory theme. And the gambit system, which allows you to programme your own limited friendly A.I. rather than individually input commands, diminishes your moment-to-moment role in the fighting.


To truly address the motif of insignificance that runs through Final Fantasy XII, though, we have to talk about Vaan. Because while Ashe is clearly the protagonist and lead character of the game, it is Vaan who serves as our viewpoint on events, a less-intelligent Watson to Ashe's less-insufferable Holmes.

The story of FFXII's development is far from transparent, but something that's become widely-believed over the last ten years is that Vaan was a late addition to the cast, only added after Yasumi Matsuno's departure from the development team. Matsuno's departure is a complex issue in its own right – the official line is that he left due to illness, but rumours remain that he clashed with other key Squenix figures, or that creative differences drove him out.

The popular myth holds that after Matsuno's departure, his original protagonist was deemed too old to appeal to the core Final Fantasy fanbase, so Vaan was introduced as replacement. Opinion varies as to whether the original protagonist became Basch or Balthier, or whether the character disappeared entirely.

I haven't been able to find an unambiguous source for any of this. Certainly, elements of the game's story changed after Matsuno's departure, but this is to be expected on any large video game. The ambiguity leaves a cloud hanging over Vaan, particularly as the idea that fans of JRPGs couldn't handle a 'mature' character feeds into a trite, overplayed narrative about the kind of people who like Japanese games.

Still, I feel Vaan is absolutely essential to the thematic project of Final Fantasy XII. He is the ultimate in insignificance; orphaned and stripped of his family by the war, he lives by street crime and odd jobs in the capital of Ashe's kingdom. Though he is close enough to the familiar hero-of-humble-stock to pass for it on first inspection, Vaan is not really any kind of hero at all.

Vaan is an NPC given life. In any other JRPG, he'd be the street-savvy kid hanging around near the airship dock with big dreams and little concept of the outside world. He'd have three different dialogue boxes, one in each act, indicating a steadily-growing awareness of the stakes at work in your quest.

So why cart such an inconsequential character around with the heroic Princess for seventy-plus hours? Why force him between the player and the game? When he displays any character at all, he's unquestionably annoying.

Yes, thank you, child.

The relationship between Vaan and Ashe brings out the absurdity of the relationship between Final Fantasy's magical heroes and the undifferentiated mass of virtual bodies they claim intent to save. Vayne's quarrel with the Occuria is irrelevant to the citizens and subjects of Archadia. Only the most powerful men in Ivalice are more oppressed by the Gods than by human rulers.

For Vaan, no theological quibble can be worth the threat that the Occuria's nethicite poses to his friends in Rabanastre. Ashe contemplates the use of nethicite as a weapon of war; Vaan's mere presence represents those who would be destroyed. He highlights the distance between Ashe's idea of her subjects' needs and the actual experiences of her people.

Ashe stands between Vayne's might and Vaan's insignificance. Technically a divinely-entitled monarch, she should be free to challenge the gods, but her claim to heroism rests in principles that demand she not use the tools presented. Vaan represents the second horn of this dilemma. It would be trite and inaccurate to call him the voice of Ashe's conscience; instead, he is a prompt to the player's awareness.

Were Ashe to be the viewpoint character, the conventions of the Final Fantasy series would preclude any possibility of considering this tension. We might see the precarity of Rabanastre's citizens in occasional NPC dialogue, but we have been trained out of identifying with these digital sheep. We trust that the game will enable us to save them, except for those that will be sacrificed in some spectacular cutscene to symbolise the stakes.

Vaan forces us into their perspective, makes us understand why it is that the means of heroes must be limited, cautious, and surgical. If this limits their ability to transform the world, perhaps we should reevaluate the idea that the world is in need of transformation.

It's no coincidence that this question appeared in FFX-2, and went on to reappear in the sequels to Final Fantasy XIII (itself a game about the inevitability of dire fates). But Final Fantasy XII states the question most clearly: for whom do we transform the world, and at what cost?


FFXII gives a hopeful answer. When Ashe and Vaan finally get their moment at the fulcrum of history, they choose to give up the possibility of nethicite power, to place it beyond reach of another human epoch. This is the answer that places the principles that underlie heroism ahead of the empty egoism that so often goes in their place. It's Bruce Wayne choosing to fund public infrastructure and advocating progressive taxation instead of dressing up as a bat and growling at people.

And Final Fantasy XII is defiantly hopeful about Final Fantasy as a project. It treats the Final Fantasy rulebook with the same forward-looking disregard that Final Fantasy VII once did. It rejects, or gives up on, the attempt to equal FFVII by imitating it. It recognises the impossibility of pleasing everyone who will try to claim some ownership of the Final Fantasy brand or identity.

So it's sad to see, half a decade later, the grim fatalism of FFXIII. It's hard to read that as anything other than a response to the hostile reception of FFXII. The recent furore over the Final Fantasy VII remake trailers has only emphasised this sense of futility; every feature of the original game has become a battleground between those who consider it essential and those who hold it to be anachronistic. By the time the remake emerges, the game's fan base may have entirely self-cannibalised. 

But on the other hand, there's Final Fantasy XV, a game of massive areas with open, stunning horizons. A game that enshrines a journey, and where, at least in the demo, the armies of a powerful empire occasionally swoop effortlessly overhead to attack you. A game that locks you to a single, small scale in a vast world. Possibly a game that, in completing the Fabula Nova Crystallis sequence, will finally break its fascination with the inevitable. The paradox of Final Fantasy may yet see resolution.

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Whose Silence is This?

Devon Carter's 'This Silence is Not Mine' stands as one of my favourite pieces of critical writing. It resonates with me because it points towards the novelistic understanding of narrative that I prefer over the dominant conception of video game narrative built around agency and expression[1]. Normally I can tolerate the silent protagonist only in worlds that are silent.

But then there's Tales of Xillia 2's Ludger Kresnik, a character without significant dialogue of his own yet probably the character I've engaged most deeply with this year. Ludger is no blank slate – he emotes both vividly and subtly, and indeed occasionally even utters the kind of not-quite-verbal speech that silent protagonists are sometimes allowed. But in all scenes where there is explicit communication among characters, Ludger is silent[2].

Part of what brings Xillia 2 so powerfully to life is the richness of the characters around Ludger, but more is the incomplete and very human structure of submission it imposes on him. However dire the circumstances, Ludger cannot speak. Whatever his anger or frustration, explicit goals and plans must come from other characters. Ludger exists only in tension with the will of others.

This is something I seek in games, in quasi-circumscribed virtual worlds, because lifelong anxieties make it difficult for me in the 'real' world. Games are safe spaces to allow external forces free rein; their dominance and their costs are confined to a small box which can be switched off if it becomes too much[3]. In-game events cannot affect one to quite the same extent that rent, bills and hunger can, to say nothing of more complex relationships.

This is why I love Vaan in Final Fantasy XII, the perfect viewpoint character for a game about the unmanageability of history. It's why I feel such empathy for Final Fantasy X’s Tidus, who can only ever be a hanger-on to Yuna's journey. And it's why more competent, driven protagonists like Tales of Vesperia's Yuri and Tales of Graces' Asbel leave me cold (see also: protagonists on whom the broader story centres, like Cloud and Squall).

There is a second twist to this, though, because Xillia 2 has dialogue choices. Quite a lot of them, even. It's almost retro, a throwback to the idea that a plot is more interactive if you chuck a menu up on screen occasionally.

At the very moments when silence and submission would be most comfortable, would exonerate me of the party's toughest decisions, I'm forced, with Ludger, to take responsibility. I found it paralysing. Often choosing would take me far longer than the pace of real dialogue would have afforded Ludger. At least once, on a choice for which there was a time limit, I deliberately elected to let the timer run out, as if I could force the game to take responsibility back.

It's never clear what effect the choices have on the game's core narrative (for some choices, the game will tell you which other characters you've impressed, but only after you make the decision). More than once, I found myself doggedly opposing choices that led to plot events that were probably inescapable. Even when it comes to affecting which ending you get, few choices before the game's climactic chapter matter.

The choices exist to reward engagement in the characters with the agony of choice. It's an interactivity far more palpable than pushing buttons. More importantly, because of the way choices are framed, because of the game's narrative structure taken as a whole, Ludger's voice is restored in them, and harmonised with my own.

I played Ludger as a reluctant, stumbling non-hero, unwilling to make tough choices and struggling to communicate with his allies. Partly this was because I struggled to intuit which potential nuance of any given phrase the game would pick up on, so I often made choices which the characters put a different spin on to the one I was expecting[4]. But by accident (or maybe design, though not mine), there was a coherence to my errors.

Ludger's silence, and the awkwardness I bequeathed him, fitted. My Ludger made bad decisions and hurtful remarks because neither of us could handle loving the people around him as much as we did in such cruel circumstances. His silence was not mine, but it was so like mine – a silence I often find myself in – that the difference seldom mattered.

All of which was only enough to earn me the sorta-OK ending, out of the game's four choices. For the true ending, not only would Ludger have to be braver, nobler, and more confident, but so would I. It may be a while before I can face trying again.







[1] Herein lies the (perhaps over-strong) line I draw between games I play for narrative and games I would prefer display as little narrative as possible. Silent protagonists – truly silent protagonists, the Gordon Freemans who are silent because they are protagonists in a video game, not because their silence is part of the plot – feel to me like holes, like an absolute barrier to my engagement rather than a necessary precondition for it.

[2] It was pointed out to me after I drafted this that in Xillia 2’s new game plus mode, Ludger’s speech is restored for his dialogue choices. I imagine this changes a few things about how the story feels, but I can’t comment on it directly as I haven’t experienced it myself.

[3] So the orthodoxy goes, anyway. Perhaps I would be a healthier being if I had not spent so much of my life believing it.

[4] A familiar experience. I'm not great at verbal communication.

What a Wonderful Genre

I sometimes wonder whether there’s a value in genre-based critique, particularly for a genre as diverse and nebulous as JRPGs. Looking at Tales of Vesperia means addressing the genre at large as well as its contemporaneous western perception, but I’m wary of falling into the trap of fanboyism. I’m not even sure what might constitute a ‘genre crisis’, never mind whether one actually occurred.

The perception of a genre crisis persists, though. I think it’s probably been there for a long time – some of the things that bring it about are inescapable consequences of an international games industry – but the phenomenon of games being proclaimed ‘the saviour of the JRPG’ is newer, I think. The World Ends With You is the first such game I was aware of.

To quote the almost inevitable arch-villain of any extended defence of the JRPG, Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, from his 2008 review of TWEWY:

“I had heard that The World Ends With You does things differently to most JRPGs, and while I took that with mountainous piles of salt … I thought if the release dates are from bizarro world, maybe the entire game is, too, and will turn out to be the first good JRPG.”[1]

And that’s very much the perception I remember having of TWEWY. That it does things differently. Maybe it’s just what this genre needs. TWEWY certainly positions itself as modern and exciting, not always successfully. Its contemporary setting, punk aesthetic and action combat were all trumpeted as much-needed progress; even Yahtzee found a positive word for the game’s look.

But the actual extent to which the game innovates is unclear. Modern settings weren’t new; the Persona franchise was a decade old by TWEWY’s release, and more obscure modern-set games go back much further (the original Mother, for example, came out in 1989). Action combat in Japanese RPGs goes right back to the SNES (Secret of Mana, Tales of Phantasia). Even the ‘punk fashion’ doesn’t actually look so very different from the outfits on display in any number of earlier titles.

The game’s treatment of its female characters is sadly predictable. Shiki, Neku’s first partner, gets damseled at the end of the first act to provide motivation for acts two and three. One of the female villains is an ‘ice queen’ archetype, the other emotionally erratic and constantly being told to calm down. Rhyme gets fridged in act one, then turns out later to have already been in a different fridge all along[2].

On the mechanical/structural side, the game really isn’t that innovative at all. The plot progresses as the search for cutscene triggers, along with the completion of occasional arbitrary challenges and a steady supply of boss fights. You can overlook it at first, but about half-way through the second week there’s a day where all you do is go to a new area, find out what the next challenge is, backtrack to grind it to completion, and repeat.

There are genuine innovations here – the gender-neutral but not gender-ignorant clothing/bravery mechanic is one that I wish had taken off – but the game’s biggest strength lies in its dialogue writing. When not burdened with the demands of exposition, the dialogue is incredible. But TWEWY isn’t the first well-written game, and good writing predates digital games by a few years at least.

In fact, I’d argue, one of the things that got the game touted as forward-looking, the non-turn-based combat, is a real weak spot thematically. For a game trying to engage with the modern, digital era, where combat serves among other things as a metaphor for brand advertising, I feel like turn-based combat would have been quite at home. It could have been built around the frantic exchange of text messages or emails – discrete bursts of activity followed by an anxious wait for the potentially disastrous response.

Turn-based combat was a favourite punching bag of JRPG haters, though, and probably still is. Certainly Yahtzee went after it with knives drawn – reviewing Super Paper Mario, he crowed that “The stupid, effeminate, blouse-wearing turn-based combat is replaced with wholesome, traditional, masculine head-stomping,” which is a perfect distillation of the insecurity that underpins a lot of JRPG criticism.

But attempts to get away from turn-based combat have had mixed results. TWEWY’s system at least produces some sense of rhythm and party interaction. Eternal Sonata and other games that adapted Paper Mario’s action command system tended to end up with blind guesswork and repetition. More drastic experiments like the gunplay in Resonance of Fate could be bewildering, not to mention difficult to balance because of a lack of precedent to learn from.

Meanwhile, games that stuck to a known formula for combat tended to draw less notice, but be more consistent. Tales of Vesperia adds only tweaks to a system polished through Tales of Symphonia and Tales of the Abyss. Blue Dragon worked wonders with a modified version of Final Fantasy X’s completely turn-based battles.

I’m not complaining about innovation per se. My problem with all these examples is that they’re innovation at gun-point, innovation not driven by the needs of the work but the demands of a hostile audience. If there is a genre crisis at all, it resides in this tension. Certainly that’s what Vesperia engages with at every level of its design.

What I’m not sure of is whether there’s any great value to my pointing this out, which is a bad thing to say at the end of a thousand-word blog post. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people, and I don’t really want to try. I’m certainly not qualified to approach this as a design textbook, or even as a way of advocating a design principle. I do want to capture what Vesperia expresses, though, and that involves at least a little of both those other things.







[1] Yes, I watched that video carefully enough to transcribe it. Don’t say I never suffer for my work. (The note about release dates refers to the fact that TWEWY – like more recent ‘genre-saviour’ Xenoblade Chronicles – came out in Europe before America).

[2] Okay, yes, I’m indulging my love of tortured metaphors here. Bigger-than-average-spoilers for explanation: having been killed off in act one to get Neku angry at the Reapers, Rhyme turns out to have come into the Reapers’ game as a result of a death whose function in the story is to motivate Beat.

The World Trends With You

For a game that went into development in 2005, elements of The World Ends With You feel outright prescient. This was a time before Facebook or Twitter even existed (or at least, before they were open to the general public), when ‘social media’ meant MySpace and Livejournal. Unfortunately, largely because of how Facebook and Twitter, and their explosive success, have changed social media and social patterns, other bits of the game haven’t aged well at all.

The good first: TWEWY has a ‘trends’ mechanic whereby most equipment in the game has a ‘brand’ and different brands are in vogue in different areas. Over time, trends shift and brands rise and fall. Equipment with trending brands gets bonuses. The ever-shifting trend chart will feel pretty familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, as will the way trends shift unpredictably and arbitrarily over time and from region to region.

What feels less in-touch is how you interact with these trends. You can boost a brand by wearing it and fighting battles, and some plot events involve using protagonist Neku’s mind-reading powers to manipulate others into setting or following trends. Neku, trapped in a shadow version of Shibuya, invisible to its ordinary inhabitants, becomes a sort of spooky, subliminal influence, enacting the unintelligible whims of vast and sinister powers.

For 2005-7, you can see where the developers were coming from. I’m sure that people who know the ins and outs of the fashion industry have some sense of where the trends one sees in the street come from, but otherwise it can seem very mysterious indeed. This is particularly true for those of us of a male persuasion, who are socialised to find fashion completely opaque.

Having the combat promote brands is one part pure ludus, of course, but it’s also a metaphor for being seen wearing. This is how fashion brands work, or at least how they’re supposed to – people see someone influential wearing <brand> and want to imitate them. That TWEWY also has supernatural forces and mind control at work to create this effect is a pointed comment.

But our understanding of trends – and certainly the definition of the word ‘trend’ – has been transformed over the last decade. There’s nothing in TWEWY to make you feel involved in trends. Neku stands apart from the culture he influences, boxed off by the metaphysics of the Reapers’ Game. Trends happen to the background humans, even to the point that in the end they are all brainwashed into one particular pattern of thought.

And there’s another quirk of the game that takes this from being merely dated[1] to actually off-putting. Neku is a misanthrope; we are first introduced to him as he bitches about how noisy and irritating other people are. The enemies you fight to promote your brands are collectively referred to as ‘Noise’, too.

One of the few insights the game gives into Neku’s character is his preference for one particular designer’s work and philosophy, but the philosophy in question is a conceited, shallow existentialism that feeds Neku’s contempt. Neku seems to hate other humans for existing (and to assume they can generally do no more than exist). His dislike of noise isn’t a now-familiar objection to the ceaseless howling of twitter or the noxious stew of Facebook[2], he’s just petulant and self-centered.

Yes, by the end of the game Neku has begun to open up. One of his final lines is “I have friends now”. But there’s no sense that this is part of a wider development of his empathy. His friendships were developed in isolation from humanity, just like everything else that happens in the game.

It’s the isolation that no longer feels resonant. It’s not just that we see ‘trending’ differently now. It’s that the idea I remember having in 2007 of how trends work seems naïve. Had I played the game then, I might have felt reassured by its portrayal of trends and fashions as the work of a sinister corporate nether realm. But the failure to address how we ‘ordinary people’ participate in and propagate trends is now obvious.

The separation between Neku, along with the other residents of Underground Shibuya who can shape and exploit trends, and humanity at large grants the latter group the comfortable innocence of the powerless. They are only ever victims of trends, or occasionally unwitting pawns of trendsetters. If Twitter has a general lesson at all, it’s that this is a fiction.

This is where the passage of time really hasn’t been kind to TWEWY. Something that was hidden in its understanding of its theme has been laid bare. There’s more to be said about TWEWY’s relationship to modernity, but for a game touted as a much-needed update to the JRPG genre, its theme now feels simplistic and outdated.









[1] Not actually a sin, for what my saying it is worth. TWEWY feels right to me as a piece of its time – the retro phone graphics of the HUD are spot-on for the kind of phones I had as a undergraduate (2005-8).

[2] Both of which are probably not quite as bad as the hype suggests, but bad enough that I’d be sympathetic now to most people complaining about noise in those contexts.

Dog Time

‘World’ is, by root, as much a temporal concept as a spatial one. I’ve said before that one of the things that Tales of Vesperia struggles with is conveying the passage of time between its plot developments. The plot moves in fits and starts, tied tightly and transparently to the movements and actions of the player characters.

There is one side-quest in the game, though, which is a little more sophisticated. At roughly the end of Vesperia’s first act, you can run across Little Wolf, the nemesis of Yuri’s canine companion Repede (Repede being a playable character in his own right). Little Wolf challenges Repede to a ‘marking battle’, a contest to say which of them can claim more territory around the world.

The way this works is simple; rest in an area of the world map and Repede will claim it as his own. Meanwhile, over time, Little Wolf slowly builds an empire, taking unclaimed territories and nibbling away at Repede’s. If you, at any point, manage to take 95% of the world map from Little Wolf, you win and he shows up to concede. He will still, even more slowly, claim territory, but his submission is clear.

After starting the side-quest, you can get an item which displays Repede’s and Little Wolf’s territory on the world map – not the live one that tracks your position as you move around, but the more detailed one available from the pause menu. Repede’s territory is marked with blue blobs, Little Wolf’s with red, and the boundaries pulse and blur enough to make them seem dynamic and in constant conflict.

What the slow swelling of Little Wolf’s territory conveys, in a way that little else in this game can, is the passage of time. It’s not perfect – you have to keep opening a pretty deeply-buried menu to see it – but it’s there, and it does suggest that some things happen in the world without Yuri’s direct intervention.

It conveys some broad things about the party’s situation, too. You can only claim territory that you can get to, and if you start the side-quest as soon as it’s available, your travel options are extremely limited. Many areas are inaccessible until you get the airship late in act 2, by which time Little Wolf can claim a lot of land you can’t reach.

The world changes as the plot progresses, as well. A handful of the areas you have to claim are lakes or mountain ranges when you first encounter them, and only become places where the airship can land after the earth-shaking events of the final act. In my early play-throughs of the game I spent a long time searching for concealed landing-spots in act 2 before discovering these transformations.

Perhaps the most important function of the Little Wolf side-quest is its interaction with the sections of the plot that restrict your mobility. In particular, during the section where you’re trying to rescue Estelle, your airship is damaged and you’re forced to ground. On recovering to the nearest town, you find that a civilian exodus has tied up every last boat, and you’re trapped on one particular continent.

Vesperia then sends you on a long, torturous journey to where Estelle’s being held. From having granted you and your characters an exclusive mastery of the skies, the game narrows down to a single convoluted path, fraught with monsters and harsh terrain. It never really manages to convince you you won’t rescue Estelle, but it does its best.

Functionally, of course, the rescue of Estelle will wait for you to reach your destination. Until you hit the right series of triggers, Estelle – and her captors – remain in limbo. There’s time to chase up any of the side-quests that are available to you (not many, but there are a few diversions, at least one of which is only available during this sequence). So it’s hard to feel much urgency.

But through it all, Little Wolf advances. He’s always moved fastest on the far side of the world from where you’re stuck. Now there’s hours of gameplay where you can do nothing to stop him. Whenever you come back to the dog map, Little Wolf’s territorial gains are a diagram of your delay.

You can always recover – tents aren’t expensive by the standards of the late game, and once you have your freedom back you can claim territory pretty quickly (though you must fight at least one battle each time you rest before you can rest again). Nothing is missable, you don’t get locked out of the rewards[1], but time does pass.

It’s this sense of the inexorability of time that I think games often struggle with. In-game time is malleable in a way that real-world time isn’t, and many ways of making in-game time more restrictive also place harsh demands on players that have little respect for differences in ability or circumstance. Vesperia’s dog map offers a way to weave between this limitations.







[1] Though Vesperia is quite happy to lock you out of other sidequests if you miss particular steps. I’m of two minds about this, but it’s a topic for another time.







Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:

Of Maps and Men

Right from the very first lines of the opening narration, Tales of Vesperia emphasises how wild and uncharted its world is. Towns are only safe because of vast and powerful magical barriers; few humans ever go outside, and those who do will be eaten by monsters if they can’t defend themselves. The failure of a town’s barrier is a cataclysmic event.

Given this strict binary between townsfolk and travellers, the game quickly sorts the player characters into the latter category. Yuri and Estelle are forced to flee from their homes into the wilderness. Before they go, though, they are given a map. Apart from the immediate area around the city, it’s blank.

Yuri and Estelle decide to fill in the map as they go; it updates automatically from this point forward. Shortly, they meet Karol, a young trainee monster hunter about to be thrown out of his guild for cowardice. Karol doesn’t have a map of his own, but takes over the role of cartographer when he realises how little of your map is filled in.

Later, your quest brings you to a forgotten shrine, Baction, where you find a dungeon consisting mostly of repetitive square rooms differentiated only by monster placement and cracks in the floor. Here, again, Karol is given mapping duties – this is the only dungeon in the game that has an on-screen minimap. Numerous skits and cutscenes emphasise Karol’s love of mapmaking, of which the most striking is when he says:

“Nothing calls to a man’s heart like the thrill of making maps!”

This is not a sentiment the other male characters share (Yuri responds, drily, “I’ve never had that thrill.”) Both Yuri and Raven emphasise a more familiar violent and promiscuous masculinity. Throughout the early part of the game, Yuri constantly trolls Karol for his cowardice, apparently with the idea that this will toughen him up. Later, when Karol does get to ‘prove’ his manhood by defending the rest of the party from a boss all by himself, Raven says, “Facing down challenges like that is part of becoming a man.”

But while Karol does fit or try to fit some parts of this image of masculinity – trying to be a monster hunter, carrying comically oversized weapons – his actual manhood is constructed very differently. It’s in his building a guild of his own, and developing its reputation through hard work and respectful business with other guilds. It’s in his interest in mapmaking and his (implied) willingness to step back and let others benefit from it[1].

In other words, Karol’s masculinity is sited in responsibility, and in engagement with community. What Karol seeks is not just manhood in himself but legitimacy, a place in society. For Yuri and Raven, masculinity is no such thing; one way or another, their masculinity is about the freedom of power and self-determination.

Karol’s love of cartography dovetails with his masculinity. As Kaitlin Tremblay writes in this month’s Critical Distance Blogs of the Round Table prompt:

“Maps… order and define spaces… They set a boundary to what otherwise feels vast and potentially limitless, a way to compartmentalise and therefore tackle the world.”

Where Yuri and Raven – along with most of the game’s other male characters – are erratic and chaotic, Karol’s is a masculinity of order and control. It is a masculinity that takes wild spaces and tames them, and this sounds like a good thing. At least, it sounds preferable to Yuri’s rampant individualism.

But control and categorisation are the subtle weapons of masculine hegemony. Yuri’s violence – and Raven’s lechery – may seem more dangerous, but many of the game’s villains are motivated by the desire to control, to keep people in their places. And, on the face of it, Karol’s maps only really serve those already capable of using the spaces he charts – since these spaces are dungeons and the hostile wilderness, only those who can already take care of themselves benefit[2].

Mapping the world, by implication mastering it, is an expression of privilege. Maps that go beyond the purely topographical – surveillance maps, maps of national boundaries or battlefronts – are often tools of power. We see this in the refugee crisis in Europe at the moment, thousands of people dying or being mistreated for the sake of lines on a map.

Vesperia doesn’t address this facet of maps directly. Its world, Terca Lumireis, is not really divided among nations, since the land outside the magical barriers is equally hostile to everyone. While there are occasional references to governance and military action, it’s basically never the focus of events. Karol’s maps are never used to express collective, institutional or hierarchical power.

The game does entrust the map to hierarchical power, though. When you complete the world map, the ‘reward’ cutscene and title go to Estelle, an Imperial princess. By this time, she’s already passed over the possibility of succession, but she remains an image of royalty – indeed, the supernatural legacy she inherits suggests her bloodline may be exceptionally pure.

What does she use the map for? In the cutscene, an NPC notices her looking at it and asks Estelle to tell her about all the exotic places she’s visited. Estelle, whose passion is storytelling, obliges, talking right through the night.

Maps can be tools of power, but they can also be souvenirs and reminders. Somewhere I still have the map of New York I bought on a trip there in 2004, because without a map I can’t fit the memories of those four frantic days together in a coherent order. Estelle’s use of the world map does more than that, arguably; it enables her to bring the now-tamed spaces of the wilderness to those not privileged to be able to visit them.

Whether this is enough to defang the map as a tool of power, I’m not sure. The game could be seen as naïve in suggesting that. But as a suggestion of a better way – not just for maps but by implication for masculinity – it bears some consideration.







[1] I’ll return to this point later, but the rewards for completing the world map all go to Estelle.

[2] It should be noted that not all such characters are male in Vesperia. In their own distinct ways, all three of the party’s female members are empowered to be outside the safety of the towns, but where addressed at all this tends to be framed as ‘unladylike’.


Written for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table:

What the Hero Cannot Save the Princess From

Tales of Vesperia is the story of a young man going on an adventure with a princess, so of course, at one point, she gets kidnapped and he has to ‘rescue’ her. As this happens about two-thirds of the way through the plot, there will be some more detailed spoilers than are usually necessary in what follows.

The kidnapping happens shortly after the game’s sequence of big reveals plays out. We discover that Estelle, the Imperial Princess Yuri has latched onto, is the Child of the Full Moon, imbued with a power that threatens the natural order of the entire world of Terca Lumireis. Estelle, who is possessed of a compassion that borders on the cherubic, has already once said that if her power cannot be controlled she is willing to accept death for the sake of the world.

Yuri will have none of this. When the party work out, collectively, just how much of a danger Estelle poses, Yuri insists that Estelle not give up on the slim chance that they may be able to find some way to control her power. As he pressures Estelle, berating her for saying that she’s prepared to die if necessary, she cracks and runs off, seeking a moment alone to process her desperate straits.

The rest of the party give her space, spending the time discussing what might be done to help her. After a few moments, Raven, the shifty older dude who’s latched on to your party for as-yet-suspect reasons[1], complains he can’t follow the discussion and goes outside. When the rest of the party emerge later, both Raven and Estelle are missing.

It seems pretty obvious what’s happened. The only ambiguity is where Raven might have taken Estelle, and who exactly he might be working for. This prompts a search of the current town, which – if taken at face value – the game makes an oddly laboured affair, with some really awkward progress triggers.

The complicating factor in all this is that the town in question is the sky-city Myorzo, isolated and secret[3] home of the Kritya (basically Vesperia’s ‘descendants of the Ancients’ race). The only way out of the city is your airship, which is still docked. Eventually, you find an old, decommissioned teleporter which has been reactivated, and the guardian spirit of the city tracks its signal to tell you where to go.

Here’s where things get weird. When someone asks how the teleporter was reactivated, the party’s magic expert and expositor, Rita, specifically says that it could only have been Estelle’s powers that got it working. On top of that, when you follow the trail that the spirit identifies, you go to a location that there’s no sign Estelle ever visited.

Now, when you finally catch up to Estelle after blindly chasing another false lead, she’s definitely being held against her will, tormented and puppeteered by the current arch-villain to serve his ends. But while it’s unclear exactly how much power he has over her, what is clear is that the threat she poses to the world is contained.

What’s suggested, subtly but insistently, is that Raven, acting on the mastermind’s behalf, made some vague promise to Estelle that he knew someone who could control her power, and Estelle jumped at the chance. The mastermind’s solution is cruel and painful, but Estelle is still conflicted about whether she wants freedom – even during the rescue, she begs you to kill her.

Some of this – the cackling, sadistic villain, the tortured princess – could be chalked up to standard and regrettably exploitative video game melodrama, and it’s clear that Yuri himself reads it that way. It never occurs to Yuri that the Princess might not want to be rescued, or might be terrified of the implications of rescue even if she wanted it, or even that he can’t actually save her by rescuing her. He just chews his way through three levels of delaying tactics and diversions and rescues Estelle.

Rescuing Estelle, by the way, means fighting her as a mind-controlled boss; in the final phase of the battle, Yuri fights alone, without the rest of the party. On the way he’s accepted that it might be necessary to kill her to save her from Alexei – he’s willing to do that, even though he wouldn’t let her give her own life up willingly. All through this, he has no answer for the question of what they might do to prevent Estelle accidentally destroying the world.

Yuri’s actions and misjudgements come from two sources. One is his assumption of his own narrative, what I think of as ‘hero privilege’. While never as overt or self-aware about it as someone like Final Fantasy XII’s Balthier, Yuri understands both the structure of fairytales and the role into which he fits within that structure[4]. One of the key thrusts of Vesperia’s narrative is to highlight how inhuman this can be, how much we accept from heroes that in other contexts would be abhorrent.

But Yuri’s actions, and particularly his insistence that Estelle not ‘give up’ (i.e. accept death), are also part and parcel of his personal ethos. Yuri has a devotion to self-determination and authenticity that would do Sartre proud. Self-serving as his manipulations to prolong his time with Estelle are, it’s clear he earnestly believes that she wants and needs the adventure for her own sake.

Generally speaking, Estelle agrees, too. She speaks often of needing to find her own way. If she does indeed go willingly to Alexei, it is because she gives in to fear of the consequences of not doing so, fear that the cost of her freedom for others would be too high.

Yuri can embrace the existentialist life because he has very few social ties. For Estelle, as a princess and as the inheritor of a powerful mystical lineage, things are more complicated. The game eventually comes down much more on Estelle’s side; before you can go to the final boss, there’s another awkward sequence where you have to go around the world seeking the blessing of its various heads of state for your near-apocalyptic plan.

Rhetorically, Tales of Vesperia positions ‘hero privilege’ as a distortion of responsible interaction with society. Yuri is always willing to take responsibility for his actions, but he is never required to face truly horrible choices the way Estelle is purely in virtue of who she was born. There’s no question that Vesperia’s way of making this point exploits and objectifies Estelle, but its use of dissonant, ‘gamey’ surface to address Yuri is worth some attention.

This is not a game that hangs together well on the surface. Yuri doesn’t really get to be the hero, the rescue of Estelle makes no sense and the final act is unfocussed, confusing and disorganised. You can play this as a Video Game Story, but it won’t satisfy you.

The coherent narrative of Tales of Vesperia is buried under Yuri’s story; just as Yuri is blind to the harshest consequences of his actions, reading him as the hero blinds you to what’s really going on. In a way, this is futile, since the only players who are going to see this are already beyond the shallow engagements the game critiques, so it’s preaching to the choir, but it’s still a very competent use of the narrative to express theme.







[1] There’s a character like this in every Tales game and he’s always the worst[2]. Yes, Val, that includes Alvin.

[2] Actually, in Tales of Graces, the role is played by Asbel’s younger brother, and the older dude who hangs around with you is pretty cool.

[3] There’s an essay in exactly how isolated and/or secret the city is, but I’m still puzzling that out.

[4] Vesperia plays this up by contrasting Yuri, the social drop-out, with his childhood friend Flynn who has joined the Imperial Knights and steadily climbed their ranks. That relationship is too much to get into here, as is Flynn’s relationship to Estelle.

Coherence, Dissonance and Tales of Vesperia

When trying to characterise the phenomena that induced me to make a study of Tales of Vesperia, I fumbled with a variety of terms. ‘Gamey’ and ‘self-conscious’ were among them, but I eventually settled uncomfortably on ‘absurd’. ‘Absurd’ has a particular sense and history in art, though, and I’m not sure it quite fits what I was getting at.

Fortunately, thanks to Lana Polansky, I now have a better terminology to work with. Polansky discusses two terms, ‘coherence’ and ‘dissonance’. These aren’t opposites; Polansky makes clear that a work can be one or the other, both or neither. They refer to distinct characteristics a work (experience?) can have.

Dissonance, as I understand it, is something felt or sensed; a phenomenal property of things not quite seeming right. As such, dissonance is an artist’s tool, with well-documented uses. Across every genre of music, dissonance is used to create uneasy moods and dark feelings. Elements of a painting may be dissonant with one another, leading to a work that resists simple, literalistic readings.

By contrast, I understand ‘coherence’ as a logical/cognitive property, whose opposite is contradiction. This is very much a philosopher’s understanding, so take it with a pinch of salt, but it’s what I’ve got to work with. Contradiction is what happens when two propositions cannot be held together; a set of statements is coherent if they can all be held together.

It’s very hard, given how the language of academic philosophy has bled into wider culture, to prevent this distinction seeming hierarchical. There’s a cultural tendency to privilege the logical over the sensed/apparent/phenomenal. But whatever your feelings about feels and reals, I think Polansky makes clear that coherence and dissonance can’t stand in a hierarchical relationship because they don’t denote specific points on a shared continuum. They’re phenomena different in kind, not degree.

Simplifying, dissonance is when something feels wrong, whether or not anything ‘actually is’. It’s when a surface reading of a work won’t fit. Incoherence is when the statement being made by a work – or being attributed to a work by a critic – doesn’t make sense because parts of the work actively detract from it. So Clint Hocking’s (in)famous ludonarrative dissonance is actually more a kind of incoherence[1].

Bringing this back round to my interests, we can now say that Tales of Vesperia is often dissonant, but that it is also strikingly coherent. The game’s plot, visual design and mini-games/side-quests make it a jagged landscape littered with obvious cracks. The Wonder Reporter is just the most aggressive; there’s a whole city built to look like a giant mace, and you could drive a bus through some of the holes in the world-building, particularly the schemes of the various bad guys.

For every dissonant chord, though, there is a resolution into harmony. Sometimes this is prominent, as in the contrast between the way the game handles its ‘Wonder Log’ and the other player logbooks. Sometimes it is more subtle, as when one realises that a plot hole is really protagonist Yuri ignoring key plot details because they don’t fit his personal narrative.

Every time, though, a pattern is reinforced; a genre trope is instantiated in a way that brings out its laziness, its familiarity, its gaminess or its wrongness, then subverted to critique the mainstream reception or expectation that created it. In other words, something is first presented as dissonant, and then its dissonance is attributed to forces outside the design of the game.

This establishes a very coherent – not to mention angry – message. For Vesperia, and/or its developers, the ‘genre crisis’ in JRPGs has nothing to do with the actual experiences produced by any of its immediate predecessors, but is instead a matter of conflicting expectations among its audience. I happen to think there’s a lot of truth to this, but the argument would be coherent even if it turned out to be completely misplaced.

Of course, no work of art assembled by the size of team that works on most major industry game titles could be completely coherent. Vesperia fails most prominently in its engagement with temporality, where it just doesn’t do as much with its dissonance. This isn’t necessarily a problem – I am, after all, doing arts criticism right now and not abstract formal logic[2] – since it’s not a broad enough incoherence to obliterate the overall point.

Generally speaking, then, my ongoing work with Vesperia is going to involve taking each point of dissonance in turn and pushing at it until it resolves. Depending on your attitude to art and meaning, this can be seen either as a forensic or a creative endeavour, or a combination of the two. It’s the approach I’ve already applied to the Wonder Reporter, and I’ll have another piece along those lines next week sometime.







[1] I think this is the essence of Robert Yang’s complaint about the term – we don’t feel any dissonance playing, say, violent games that attempt to critique violence, even if on a closer look these games end up seeming terribly hypocritical.

[2] Again, it’s hard to make that sound non-hierarchical, but having taught formal logic I can say its uses in pure form are very limited.

Abstraction and Attention

I’m trying not to say ‘Zelda isn’t an RPG’. ‘Zelda’ and ‘RPG’ both mean too many different things to too many different people for that to be a useful statement. But I think I can say something useful about what I look for in an RPG – and particularly a JRPG – by contrasting it with what I look for and love in Zelda games. For clarity, I’m a 3D Zelda person – I’ve generally found the 2D games frustrating to play, though that may be because I’ve mainly played them on handheld and I kinda hate handheld gaming.

To start, here’s what I understand by ‘RPG’: a system of abstraction(s) that primarily serves to mediate the telling of a story. This is a pretty broad definition (the ‘primarily’ is important), but I think it’s useful because it captures the connection between pre-digital pen-and-paper RPGs and their digital analogues. The downside is that it leaves out the act of roleplaying that makes up such an important part of the pen-and-paper experience.

Anyway, what I mean by it is this. The abstractions in RPGs serve a primarily extrinsic focus[1]. Phenomena like HP and XP encode the labour and temporal cost of travel. World maps and sidequests indicate scale. The more abstract components of the game are there to set a tone and player mindset for the story developments, which are generally treated as less abstract[2].

The 3D Zelda games, though, have a different focus. For one thing, the biggest abstractions in Zelda games are the puzzles; not the player’s actions but the environments that induce them. The player’s attention is drawn more to the phenomenal/sensory qualities of their actions – the flight of the boomerang, the heft of the megaton hammer, the whoosh of flying through the air with the hookshot.

As a complement to this, Zelda games generally have less involved storylines. It’s telling that the games that do have stronger emphasis on storytelling – Majora’s Mask and especially Twilight Princess – have more in the way of player action that mediates story. Moments like the sequence where you carry the injured Midna to Zelda, or the horse-and-cart bit where you transport Ilia to Kakariko Village, are more about the urgency of the moment, the dramatic interruption to the otherwise pervasive melancholy of Twilight Princess’ Hyrule, than the phenomenal qualities of the specific actions the player takes[3].

There are exceptions on the other side of the equation as well, of course. Action RPGs and even some more recent turn-based ones do take an interest in the intrinsic qualities of their abstractions. This can take the form of Tales-style combat, levelling systems like Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid and the Lillium Orbs from Tales of Xillia, or even quicktime events, as in Final Fantasy XIII-2.

Almost every game that has a story dabbles in abstractions that favour the story; similarly, almost every game period dabbles in abstractions that feed the senses. The question is one of balance. When I go to my collection of Zelda games, it’s because I’m looking to have my attention drawn to a particular sensory/phenomenal mode of engagement. When I go looking specifically for a (J)RPG, I want to focus on the narrative and register other interactions as in service to that.







[1] I think this is true whatever RPG you play, but it’s probably less true for more modern western RPGs than JRPGs.

[2] There’s a whole complicated question of the role of abstraction in fantasy narratives – magic and magical creatures as metaphor, fantasy hierarchies as engagements with real politics and so on – but it’s too big a topic to get into here, hence the ‘generally treated as’.

[3] The cart-and-horse sequence is also a call-back to the similar escort mission in MM, an explicit link between the two games.

The Price of Time

A couple of weeks ago, I said I’d be talking about time in JRPGs, and one of the particular issues I picked up on was this: “Plot developments that are tied to player progress can seem preposterous coincidences.”

When plot events in a game are tied to triggers based on player progress, whether that’s beating a particular encounter, arriving in a particular location or just talking to the right NPC, that connection can be pretty obvious. Sometimes this is fine, but often it centres the player characters, and through them player action, at the expense of effective storytelling.

Tales of Vesperia, for all its subversion, never quite escapes this. The first half of the story is characterised by coincidences – every other town you arrive at gets attacked or otherwise disrupted within minutes of your arrival – and despite the characters joking that protagonist Yuri must be ‘cursed’, it’s impossible to miss the underlying artificiality of the plot structure. Nor does this crack in the façade feel as planned, as deliberate as other things the game does; Vesperia fails to provide contrast by handling its triggers better elsewhere.

There are ways around the problem, though. Final Fantasy XII is at its strongest when confronting this head-on. It has to be, given its theme of the insignificance of the individual. It would be strange to spend most of the plot declaring Ashe inconsequential only for the grand schemers of the world to wait on her every move.

So, for the most part, FFXII does something a little different. You spend much of the game out of touch with events, travelling on foot through the wilds[1]. The plot triggers are generally associated with your arrival at the end of the journey, whether you travel to defeat or just to meet a plot-relevant NPC. When you arrive, what you feel is not that you have caused something to happen, but that you have missed something happening and must struggle to catch up.

When you return to Rabanastre after escaping prison near the start of the game, it’s the kidnapping of Penelo. When you arrive at Mt. Bur-Omisace after travelling across half the world in search of support for Ashe’s royal claim, it’s the replacing of the kindly Emperor Gramis with his merciless son that removes all hope for parlay. Later, arrivals at the Imperial capital Archades and the summit of the Pharos lighthouse are similarly recontextualised.

The exception to the pattern is after the first long journey in the game – here, you’re swooped down on by the Imperials right after subduing and recruiting the powerful spirit that guards Ashe’s inheritance. Why? Because for a brief moment, holding that inheritance, the characters are globally significant. Then the Imperials take it off you and destroy it.

This symbolic disenfranchisement of the player is very FFXII, but doing things this way doesn’t have to be so stark. The key is not that things happen without the player involved (though that helps) – it’s that things happen without a precisely-defined moment. The plot develops while you travel, however long that takes. Even if a specific timestamp were to be given for the event when you’re told about it (‘three days ago’, ‘last week’), the fact that different players will have taken different amounts of ‘real-world’ time to get from trigger to trigger establishes ambiguity.

Plot developments can only seem temporally coincidental if they can be tied to specific moments[2]. The ambiguity of the translation between play-time and narrative time can be used to break these ties and make the narrative feel much more (for want of a better word) organic.

There’s also the brute-force solution, of course: the Majora’s Mask approach. Games like MM and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII keep the clock ticking throughout. Events happen at precise moments whether you’re there or not. This is, in a sense, the most realistic way of presenting time.

But it has costs, at least if you want to tell a conventional story. Narrative triggers must be stretched, pulled out of shape, or repeated, to prevent the player missing them altogether. It’s telling that both MM and LR let you supernaturally manipulate time – without that affordance, the games would be unnavigable.

What FFXII shows is that the structure of in-game time can contribute powerfully to the meaning of the events portrayed. Temporal structures need not be neutral, invisible systems for the delivery of cutscenes; and they need not function based on an analogue of real time to do so.









[1] There’s something to be said, I realise now, about the relationship of this narrative device to the communicative intensity of the modern world. I’ve felt for a long time that this is something that fantasy narratives will struggle (or are struggling) to adapt to, and I’ll probably return to this theme later.

[2] This is actually tautologous, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it.

Abstraction, Simulation and Narrative Time

This post grew out of a conversation that’s happened between several people over quite an extended period of time, so apologies if I have to send you on a bit of a reading list to catch you up.

It more or less started here with Devon Carter’s Critical Switch guest episode about the role of abstraction in JRPG mechanics (which is basically essential reading if you want to follow anything I write on this blog, so get to it if you haven’t already).

Then Austin C. Howe had some thoughts about JRPGs on generation 7 hardware, which I Storified, where he discussed how more powerful technology had revealed some of the ways in which the classic JRPG form struggles with ‘realism’.

That prompted LeeRoy Lewin to write this excellent piece about how the basic abstractions of JRPG combat – HP, MP and XP – are bad representations of anything ‘real’.

Finally, and possibly independently of all this, Vincent Kinian reviewed Yuuyami Doori Tankentai with a focus on how it actually does address the real successfully.

Got all that? The key point I want to focus on is LeeRoy’s, that the mechanical abstractions in JRPGs don’t directly represent the things we ordinarily take them to. HP are a poor representation of health, or even endurance, because health is not linear or one-dimensional. XP in particular, to quote LeeRoy, models “the purest meritocracy, the most awful gamification, the idea that labor can transfer 1:1 value.”

If MP and equivalents are innocent in this, it’s only because they represent something that makes no claim to reality – magical power. Because it’s entirely up to an author to invent a magic system, we can’t gainsay the device of MP, but we can point out that it’s a formulaic and often uninteresting way of limiting power. To be fair, sometimes it doesn’t need to be interesting and is just an unobtrusive balancing tool, but I feel like there’s often a lot that could be done here that isn’t.

The more complex, player-engaging systems built on top of these stats – materia, GF junctions, sphere grids and so on – may be a little more representationally rich, depending on how they are contextualised[1], but the statistical foundation is poor in this regard. So why are these numbers so ubiquitous?

Convention, and the legacy of tabletop roleplaying games, makes up one major part of it, of course. Things are Done This Way because That’s How They’ve Always Been Done (and in the case of at least HP, the problem isn’t unique to JRPGs or even RPGs in general). But these stats do serve a function, or at least are a crucial pillar of a system that serves a function, and that function, I would argue, can be meaningful and valuable.

What JRPG systems – the stuff we think of as ‘systems’, the numbers bits – do is control the delivery of a story. They may do other things as well, but one persistent function is to determine when the story moves forward. Part of this is just to space things out, so you’re not just playing a novel (and to meet the ever-louder consumer demand for ‘value for money’, as measured in hours of ‘content’), but there’s also a crucial contribution that this makes to JRPG stories.

Pacing is everything. JRPG stories tend towards the epic in style as well as length. They are stories of big deeds, world-shaking changes. Worlds do not change overnight. Many forms of storytelling work just fine over short periods – one can hardly object to the near-real-time duration of Twelve Angry Men, or the one-night framing of Die Hard – but the grander the scale of a story, the slower it needs to feel like it moves.

The games industry is already bankrupting itself and driving employees to exhaustion to deliver games of sufficient length and graphical quality to keep ‘the market’ placated. As graphical standards continue to rise, representing the passage of time non-literally is going to get more and more important for delivering long-form stories.

This is where RPG mechanics, and particularly their JRPG versions, can shine. HP and MP represent the costs of time; the wear and tear of travel, the hazards and labour it involves. XP represents the benefits of that time – as LeeRoy pointed out, often badly, but I think this approach to them at least suggests some ways to complicate them into something more meaningful.

What is represented by these stats – perhaps it would be better to say ‘encoded’, since ‘representation’ implies something more explicit – is not really anything about the software objects to which the variables belong. What is represented is the world, the time and space through which these objects move.

If an encounter, or sequence of encounters, leaves your party on their last legs, you’re given the sense of characters limping into town, propping each other up, maybe dragging a stretcher, bags emptied of supplies. Backtrack over the same ground later in the story, and the easy passage, the image it conjures of marching proudly through the same gates with head held high, represents the sheer length of time it takes to master what was once marginal.

Here is where that stuff from Austin and Vincent becomes important. Taking stats to be directly representative creates misleading indulgences about vast gains in personal power and importance over implausibly narrow stretches of time. Austin’s point that realism is about more than just visual literalism, and Vincent’s that the sense of the real comes from the mundane, the stuff that happens between the fantasies, suggest that the way to get real value from explicit stats is to look at what they imply.

If a magic spell allows you to do ten times as much damage to a target as the strongest physical attack, but costs ten times as much to use, what does that say about the scarcity of that spell, the rarity of this casting? If a character is dying of poison and you’re out of antidotes, can you make it to the next inn or item shop in time? Frequent easy encounters that wear you down slowly suggest a long journey; fewer more potent encounters suggest danger and pain but less time; a surfeit of brutal fights implies that the world must turn a little longer before you can make it through.

The actual games could do a lot more to draw attention to this side of reading them, but that doesn’t mean that existing games shouldn’t or can’t be read in this way. It’s an approach that I’ve found useful particularly when looking at games that focus their narratives on journeys – I'm a broken record, I know, but Final Fantasy XII and Tales of Vesperia are both excellent examples of this[2].





[1] Some are much worse, particularly ‘relationship’ systems that reduce social ties between characters to single score variables.

[2] There are a couple of sequences in Vesperia where mechanical representations of the passage of time are directly contrasted with what cutscenes have told you about the time-frame of events, which show both how effectively good stat usage can suggest the passage of time and how quickly bad stat usage can undercut it.

Protecting the Trophy Cabinet

Tales of Graces is the story of Asbel Lhant, heir to the small border domain of Lhant. Asbel begins the game as a spirited, disobedient child at odds with his militaristic father's strictness. Eventually, Asbel runs away from home to pursue his dream of becoming a knight in the King's army; the bulk of the plot kicks off as he nears the end of his training seven years later.

In short, Asbel is a textbook fantasy hero. So textbook, in fact, that he and his kind were written out of the fantasy textbook some years ago as a tired and never-terribly-interesting cliché. Graces does a pretty good job of bringing the cliché to life, though, through a combination of good visual design, good voice-acting and a solid script.

And that's a problem, because this is a cliché that embeds a lot of toxic masculinity, and Graces either doesn't realise this or outright embraces it. Asbel is obsessed with the idea of protecting people; Graces' statement of theme translates as 'Discovering the Strength to Protect'. The idea of protection at hand is fundamentally possessive.

The best illustration of this is in Asbel's relationship to his childhood friend and eventual wife, Cheria. During the childhood section of the game, Cheria is unspecifically frail, easily exhausted and doted on by the people of Lhant. After the seven-year intermission, mysteriously[1] cured, Cheria becomes the party's strongest healer and a powerful caster.

During childhood, Asbel tolerates Cheria more than actually caring about her – in his initial escapade, he drags his brother along to climb a nearby hill, but leaves Cheria behind saying he doesn't want her slowing them down. When they return to town Cheria is upset; Asbel stalls her by handing over a flower he picked idly on the hilltop and pretending he meant it all along as a gift.

In his seven years of training, Asbel never once tries to contact Cheria. When the adult section of the story begins, she comes to find him at the knight academy to tell him his father has died and he's now the Lord of Lhant. She's reticent, clearly sympathetic to Asbel's loss but also unwilling to offer comfort. Asbel is too self-absorbed to understand, but the player will; Cheria has been deeply hurt by Asbel's silence.

Matters reach a head between them a chapter or two later, when Cheria is kidnapped and Asbel rescues her. When she isn't as grateful as he expects – as grateful as she would have been as a child, or as a fairytale damsel – he protests 'You've been treating me like crap ever since I got back here!' This spectacular feat of obliviousness is compounded by every other character present ganging up on Cheria to push her to be nicer to Asbel. Asbel offers only a trite apology, plus excuses that make it unclear whether he really understands his fault.

In other places, Asbel's determination to protect is played for laughs. At one point he gets into an argument with companion Sophie about which one of them will protect the other; they end up agreeing to a race to decide, and Sophie easily wins.

There are comedic examples of how much Asbel wants to fit the rest of the party to his script, too. The game has a rich variety of victory celebrations, several of which it implies have been coordinated and choreographed by Asbel. In the one that features Asbel and the three female party members, they mess up his script and he ends the animation effectively sulking in a corner:

Asbel, when women don't do what he wants.

If this were just another game mishandling the common toxicities of masculinity, it wouldn't be worth an essay in its own right, but the sad thing about Graces is that, in some ways, it's much more sophisticated than that. Its presentation of Asbel as a centralised male raised on myths and norms of his own importance rang very true to me as a centralised male raised on myths etc. etc. etc... He's neither a trite nor a shallow character.

Asbel's ideal of military prowess doesn't come from nowhere. It's bound up in the feudal structure of his society; his father is both master of the household and military commander, and clearly doesn't separate the two roles in his own head. Lord Aston is a harsh, cold presence in the childhood section of the story, and the silence of his absence seven years on is more a continuation than a relief.

It's a cliché to blame toxic masculinity on distant fathers, of course, but the distant father archetype is part and parcel of toxic masculinity, and Graces does a pretty good job of portraying it. In fact, overall, Graces understands toxic masculinity much better than the majority of male-led games. If it deploys clichés, it does so only because toxic masculinity is so inescapable that all its features are sadly familiar.

And herein lies the frustration; ultimately, Asbel gets his fantasy. In the final moments of the story, he gets to step forward and use his martial and magical strength to protect the world. Several much more interesting possibilities that the game flirts with, including some which would require him to accept the protection of others, are squandered.

Compare this, for example, to the engagement with masculine toxicity that Austin C. Howe finds in Final Fantasy VIII. Graces does try to build a contrast between Asbel and his even-more-toxic brother Hubert, but given its endorsement of Asbel, this doesn't actually achieve much. 'This is acceptable because it isn't as bad as that' is a child's excuse for a game that purports to be about growing up.

It is not enough to understand, or to present clear understanding of, dominant cultural constructs. That which does not explicitly challenge will be taken as tacit endorsement. Graces wastes its opportunity, and the good work of its writers, by allowing Asbel his triumph.






[1] Even the game doesn't think it's kidding anyone as to the nature of the mystery, but it's not relevant here.