You Did It Again

(Originally published 16/11/16 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

World of Final Fantasy is a better critical reflection on the Final Fantasy brand than any thinkpiece I've ever read on that topic. It's Square Enix's clearest statement yet of the frustrations of developing for such a contradictory audience. It's also a much more self-aware game than a branding exercise like this might be expected to be (compare, for example, Ni No Kuni).

That awareness is in every aspect of the game's design, so please excuse my taking longer than normal to describe it in detail; there's a lot to cover. Full spoilers for the game's plot follow, though I'm personally convinced that none of the plot's turns are supposed to surprise the player – if anything, their impact relies on you seeing them coming.

World of Final Fantasy is the story of Reynn and Lann, siblings who at the start of the game live in a kind of fugue state in a pocket reality which looks like a generic modern city. They are woken from this half-life by Enna Kros, a woman who claims to be God, and find that they lack memories of their past and family.

Enna Kros sends the twins to Grymoire, a magical world populated by tiny, bobble-headed Lilikin and a cornucopia of 'mirages', monsters the twins can use special powers to capture, train and fight with. The twins are 'mirage keepers', and if they collect enough mirages, says Enna Kros, they will recover their memories and find hints of the whereabouts of their mother, who is or was somewhere in Grymoire.

Exploring Grymoire, the twins find themselves playing out the events of a prophecy, which says two giants will collect four keys and open a gateway to paradise. The prophecy is the dogma of a cult associated with the evil, or at least dark and spiky, Bahamutian Federation, who are slowly conquering Grymoire, and there are rumours of another, older prophecy which might be less sinister.

Still, the twins stumble their way into fulfilling the prophecy because this is what heroes do. Instead of opening to heaven, the Ultima Gate admits a horde of terrible, mechanised monsters, the Cogna, to Grymoire, just as the Bahamutians planned. Worse yet, the twins discover that they opened the gate once before; this is how Brandelis, the Bahamutian leader, arrived in Grymoire, and also what caused the loss of their family and their sealing in the pocket dimension.

Horrified at what they've done, the twins break into the Bahamutian fortress and confront Brandelis, and Lann sacrifices himself to win the final battle. It's too late to save Grymoire, though; the world is overrun by the Cogna, and the twins can't even save their parents. Reynn returns to the pocket reality, alone and devastated, and the credits roll.

Load your file after this (as far as I could tell, the game only allows a single local save at any one time), and your guide, a servant of Enna Kros named Tama, offers to give up her nine lives to rewind time – a power previously used to explain why you don't game over when you die – far enough to give Reynn a chance to change the course of the story and save Lann.

Taking this chance opens up a slightly confusing cluster of sidequests which allow the twins to formulate a new plan. They return to the gate and set it to reverse, sucking all the Cogna out of Grymoire. When the Bahamutian leaders show up to stop them, the twins beat them up and then follow them out through the gate, leaving Grymoire to its own devices.

The other systems of the game are a similar mix of convention and twist. Combat is effectively a classic ATB system, though presented in Grandia's style, with all the combatants displayed charging along a single bar. Equipment is simplified to ability-granting gems, 'mirajewels', with each of the twins having a number of slots for these set by their level.

Progression is linear for the twins, just a fixed stat gain with every level increase. Captured mirages get that, but every level also grants a point to be spent on the mirage's 'mirage board', a miniature version of Final Fantasy X's sphere grid which can yield new abilities, stat boosts and occasionally mirajewels for use by the twins.

The game is explored as a sequence of towns and dungeons, with occasional small field areas linking them. There's a world map and an airship, even, though not in their conventional forms – more on this later. Most encounters are the traditional random kind; encounter markers are not visible to the player except for bosses and certain set-pieces.

There are four broad categories of 'optional' content. NPCs in towns will occasionally give grindy quests – usually to kill a number of rare monsters or collect particular loot. Most dungeons have a secret area with a rare, more powerful mirage to be captured. There's a coliseum with further, largely formulaic, setpiece fights.

And there's a peculiar space known in-game as 'The Girl's Tea-Room'. Accessed from the twins' pocket dimension (which you can return to whenever you want from special gates strewn across Grymoire), it's a dark void containing a grandfather clock, a table set for tea for three, and a mysterious white-haired girl who has forgotten her name.

The Girl offers two services; she sells medals which allow the twins to summon classic Final Fantasy heroes in battle (usually a hero will become available after their first major role in the story, though not all the FF characters in-game have medals), and there's a catalogue of around 40 small adventures, most of which are simply a cutscene, followed by a boss fight, followed by another cutscene.

I want to start (if, again, you'll forgive my taking a thousand words to get started) here, because the twins' participation in these episodes is not as protagonists. The cutscenes concern other characters; The Girl simply parachutes the twins in to fight the boss, then pulls them back out afterwards, leaving the story's actual characters to wrap things up, almost completely ignorant of the twins' involvement.

'Welcome to where fantasy meets reality' is one of The Girl's generic greeting lines when you open her menu. When she's introduced, her explanation of what she can do for the player characters is clear on the voyeurism of this relationship. Reynn and Lann can vicariously fight the heroes' battles, but they can't actually shape, or perform the virtues of, the heroes' stories.

Some of the best writing in the game is reserved for those stories, too. The opening ten to fifteen hours of the main story are pretty bland. The twins are reduced by their amnesia to little more than blank slates and their comedic roles. Their actions in the plot are formulaic. It's funny and lighthearted, but very shallow.

Meanwhile The Girl's adventures, because they deploy familiar characters with histories available, to varying extents, to popular culture, can engage with the iconography of Final Fantasy much more thoroughly. FFX's Rikku and FFV's Bartz join forces to raid Ifrit's cave for treasure. The Tonberry who runs the coliseum calls on his old friends, a Moogle and a Cactuar (who runs Grymoire's train network), to help round up some loose monsters. Gilgamesh, who pops up throughout the game in pursuit of Bartz, runs into FFXIII's Snow and FFVI's Celes and mistakes the former for his nemesis.

The stories are generally playful, a kind of joyous fanfiction, rather than slavish recapitulations of Final Fantasy canon. There's a bit of the latter; an episode where Snow and Lightning cross paths and have a row, one where Cloud and Tifa battle a version of Ultima Weapon, another where Tidus tries teaching Yuna to whistle. But the details of the games from which these relationships are drawn are left tacit.

In fact, the episodes that draw in this more specific way on the brand's history tend to be less characterful, to the point that on a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing quality seems inversely proportional to the familiarity of the scenario. When it's something as niche as a Rikku/Bartz crossover, it feels like the work of a writer who loved those specific characters, knew how they might fit together and just wanted to see it brought to life.

For Cloud and Tifa fighting yet another, even bigger, Weapon, though? FFVII's heroes barely acknowledge each other as humans at all, and the fight is a miserable grind. 'Supraltima Weapon', as the boss is called, has a total of three abilities and a monstrous health pool. So indomitable is the creature that after a while, a message pops up in-battle saying 'and the fight went on...', and the twins are returned to the void of the Tea Room. Restart the story, and you watch the same (skippable) intro cutscene, but the boss starts with its health bar exactly where you left off, so after half a dozen attempts you can finally finish the quest and see the equally bland closing scene.

The repetition, devoid of any of the sophistication that characterised Cloud's relationship with Tifa in FFVII itself, cannot be an accident. World of Final Fantasy exists to challenge the idea that this kind of recreation is a tribute to, or celebration of, Final Fantasy. So much of this brand's cultural presence in the west is constituted by its most vocal fans demanding repetition of its 'greatest hits'; World of Final Fantasy argues for space for creativity and an understanding of everything between the highlights and famous scenes.

More broadly, World of Final Fantasy never allows one to forget for long that it is a game, that its environment and story are an indulgent fiction rather than a simulation (even an incomplete one) of a world. The twins' relationship to the characters in The Girl's stories is exactly that of the player to those same characters in their original games; 'real' outsiders, reaching into the fiction to participate in the combat, but never the subjects of the story.

Other reminders abound. Characters who know about the pocket dimension – Enna Kros, the twins and their two guides Tama and Serafie – flirt alternately with breaching the fourth wall and scolding each other for doing so. Descriptions of captured mirages often refer almost directly to the games that are their source material.

One particular incident occurs as you traverse Grymoire's version of FFV's Big Bridge (which is also Grymoire's version of the summon/esper/eidolon Alexander, watched over by FFIX's Eiko). Halfway up, Lann triggers a trap that spawns some iron-giant-ish monsters. The monsters in turn create a timed puzzle where they throw force blasts down the bridge at you and only specific pads on the floor allow you to jump over them; failing to time a jump correctly results in an encounter and being knocked back down the bridge.

On seeing this, Lann shouts 'Ah! An abstraction!' Reynn quickly corrects him, manzai-style, to 'obstruction', but abstraction is exactly what this scenario, like every other puzzle in a Final Fantasy dungeon ever, is. Dungeon puzzles are not meant to be taken literalistically (and quickly become ridiculous if interpreted this way); they exist to induce particular kinds of movement through a game space, specific durations and perspectives. Final Fantasy's designers, I suspect, have always understood this, while western writers have often complained about such things being 'unrealistic' or 'arbitrary'.

These examples might be written off as jokes or incidental, nuggets of 'for the parents' content in a game apparently aimed at children and families, but the spine of the story is similarly reflective. It is a story about blindly following a heroic narrative in search of the catharsis of triumph, without pausing to examine the symbols and meanings that form the path. When the characters are forced into reflection by the disaster they caused, the simplistic fantasy structure dissolves, and only a much richer understanding of the game's themes and concepts establishes a possibility of resolution.

The crucial moment comes when the twins reach the prophesied Ultima Gate. In front of the gate floats a cage of energy inside which a female figure is dimly visible. The twins assume this is their mother. Brandelis appears for a not-terribly-challenging boss fight.

The twins celebrate their victory, then turn their attention to freeing their mother. A mysterious figure, glimpsed a few times earlier in the game, turns up behind them and tells them they must open the gate; doing so will reward them with limitless power to break the cage.

For a moment, their suspicions are raised; they demand the stranger's identity. She removes her mask, revealing a face which prompts a lost memory in Reynn; this is Hauyn, someone the twins knew from childhood as their 'older sister' (it's implied this is not a blood relation, and Hauyn seems to have been an apprentice of the twins' mother, but it's not 100% clear).

Duly reassured, the twins open the gate, smashing the cube in the process. The woman inside falls to the ground, her face concealed by a deep hood. The twins rush to her, but when she pushes herself up, the face revealed is Hauyn's. The mysterious figure smirks, then vanishes. Hauyn turns her back on the twins, looks up at the gate, and says bitterly 'You did it again'.[1]

Then the Bahamutians – the real ones, rather than the earlier illusions – show up to gloat, stripping away the illusion that made the gate seem heavenly, revealing instead a structure like the muzzle of a giant rifle. The monstrous Cogna begin to stream into the world. The crimson prophecy, which the twins have unquestioningly brought to fulfilment, was a scheme of the Bahamutians all along.

Here, I think, lies the crux of World of Final Fantasy. It is a celebration of Final Fantasy, yes, but it is also a reaction – at times an angry, even vicious one – against the idea that repetition could ever celebrate so fluid and variable a brand as Final Fantasy. No two Final Fantasy games are very much alike, but every new instalment suffers vocal scorn for being unlike its predecessors.

To see all Final Fantasy games as alike is to see them as linear sequences of superficial cutscenes linked by movements that are only meaningful because of the chance they might bring another combat encounter. Approach World of Final Fantasy in this way – and you can, it even puts a little star on the minimap at all times to show you where to move to – and you get exactly what the twins get.

They arrive in Grymoire and conveniently stumble into a prophecy that fits them like a glove. Every time they must move to a new location, someone provides them with a convenient mode of transport. They set out to find the four keys of the prophecy, but three of them drop conveniently from bosses the twins encountered for other reasons, or without much searching.

Stories are not convenient. The stories of Final Fantasy have never been convenient; they have just been presented in a convenient way (in the same way that the majority of novels are 'conveniently' presented in well-formed sentences and paragraphs, with the pages and chapters in some intuitively intelligible order). Actually understanding their narrative power requires recognising that the player's progression through the game cannot be conflated with the characters' progression through the story; though the former is smooth, carefully paced, beautifully arranged, the latter is often nightmarish, fractious, and traumatic.

To their credit, the twins, particularly Reynn, are not completely oblivious[2]. Every so often they notice something amiss. But there's a star on the minimap, and no in-game opportunity for the player to make a material response to those doubts. Reynn allows Lann's enthusiasm to overcome her concerns; the player is forced to follow suit.

This is why I said at the top that I don't think spoilers spoil this game. You're supposed to realise that things are too convenient, the story too simple. It shouldn't at all be a surprise when the illusion falls away and the monsters pour in. If you've been paying attention to the story, and not just its delivery, all of this is obvious.

When Hauyn says 'You did it again', this is her bitterness. So much of what makes individual Final Fantasy games great is lost when they are considered as 'Final Fantasy games' first and separate texts second, when they are taken to be repeated instances of the same structure with a different sheet thrown over it each time.

This is how Cloud and Squall come to be remembered as cool, taciturn mercenaries and Tidus dismissed as a clown with a weird laugh. How people end up arguing over which male character was 'going to be' the hero of FFXII and accusing FFXIII of doing a bad job of introducing its protagonist.[3]

The game isn't finished yet, though. The twins understand that they have been tricked; they understand they have unleashed disaster; they do not learn the underlying lesson. Almost without pausing, they seek to pick up the thread of their own story, a quick answer for what to do next.

Hauyn, with her apparently intact memory of the twins' past, seems like the key; they seek her out. The resulting conversation does not go as planned. Hauyn speaks in vague accusations and stinging tone. She tells Reynn to stop shortening her name (to 'Wyn') and calling her 'sister'. At one point, she demands 'And why should I bother to help you figure out the obvious?'

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of convenient answers, Reynn asks whether Hauyn is 'one of the bad guys' and Lann accuses her of being the masked illusion from the Ultima Gate. Hauyn's patience runs out and she summons her familiar, Siren, to carry her away from the conversation.

Reynn: Wait! You can't go! We still have so many questions!

Hauyn: You bring nothing to this world but pain and chaos! Leave now! Go back home, and never wake from your sleep again! Your mother and father... I'll save them.

Without substantive answers about the past, the twins latch onto the one thing Hauyn did confirm; their parents are alive and in need of 'saving'. Unfortunately, there's no clarity about what they need saving from, and it's this ambiguity that leads the twins to the Bahamutian headquarters, the confrontation with Brandelis and the disastrous dummy ending in which Hauyn, the twins' parents, and Lann all die.

This final salvo of the game proceeds exactly as you'd expect from a Final Fantasy game. You get an airship (more on that in a moment), a set of quests, some optional and some mandatory, that revisit various locations from earlier in the game (albeit by means of The Girl's Tea Room), and then the epic path to the final boss rush.

It's only after the dummy ending, when Reynn is given a chance to reconsider this course of action, that things change. There's still a set of triggers that have to be hit in order to unlock the 'true' ending, but they're more spread out, occasionally harder to find. For example, one in particular requires remembering who Sherlotta (from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time) is and where you encountered her early in the game.

If the first ending is the product of following a narrative that shares the convenience of its presentation, this postscript is a structure that shares the inconvenience of its narrative. The twins can no longer follow the obvious path; they know where that leads. Instead they must rely on their initiative and the specific details of their experiences to find some new solution. Repetition cannot be their only guide.

There's a risk of hypocrisy here, since World of Final Fantasy inevitably repeats and reuses a great deal; ATB combat, various levelling systems, environment types, icons and even narrative structures. But there's nuance in all of these things, too.

Among the repetitions that get demanded most with Final Fantasy games are world maps and airships. Ever since both were reduced to a menu in Final Fantasy X, the fanbase has complained bitterly about the loss. Well, World of Final Fantasy has both, but I doubt the complainers will be satisfied.

Grymoire is not a globe; its continents float in a rough stack one above another. This spatial discontinuity is reminiscent of Final Fantasy XIII's split world, and disorienting at first. It takes a long time to grasp that this isn't a representational device but the literal content of the fiction; Grymoire is like that, and resists conventional understanding of what a 'world' is.

Furthermore, you only get one camera angle on this world, an awkward one zoomed too far out to reveal much landscape detail but too close in to grasp the whole structure. Even when flying the airship, the camera doesn't come under player control. The result is that the airship itself has tank controls for horizontal movement and steering it in three dimensions takes a lot of getting used to.

Not that you can use it for much. There are a few decontextualised setpiece encounters knocking around the world map space, but you can't actually land at plot locations; if you want to land you have to bring up the menu, the same one that all the earlier fast-travel systems use. It's the antithesis of the exhilarating rush of your first flight in FFVII's Highwind or FFVIII's Ragnarok.

This, again, is pointed. Every Final Fantasy game this century has had airships and world maps, after all, it's just that some of them (all but FFIX and Type-0) haven't used them in the way that the earlier games did. They haven't – and I'd argue it's for good reason – repeated the feeling of spatial mastery that those older games provide, and that is implicit in fan demands.

Mastery is the minefield of rpg design, the great liability of baking power into the fabric of a game and thus the physics of its fiction. As LeeRoy put it last year:

 "When these numbers-as-abstractions are taken as abstractions-that-model, it can lead to some unsettling conclusions. Role-playing games model the purest meritocracy, the most awful gamification, the idea that labor can transfer 1:1 value."

Generally the primary function of these systems isn't to represent power at all, but to space out and pace out other kinds of event. They're the page-turning of a story, not the words (though this, too, is oversimplification). Take them as symbols of mastery and they frequently conflict outright with storytelling.

Travel systems are not separate from the combat in an rpg; it's partly the fact that they bypass certain chunks of combat that gives them their significance. The rest is phenomenology; the feeling of flight and speed, a soaring musical theme, the commanding camera angles that literally look down on a world once laboriously traversed.

There are absolutely stories and contexts where that kind of feeling is appropriate. There's a reason, for example, that Skies of Arcadia is entirely airships (though it still has an 'airship moment' – in fact, several). But the Final Fantasy games of the last fifteen years have been a steadily-growing critique of mastery and power in heroism[4].

It would hardly suit World of Final Fantasy to give the twins this kind of mastery. They more than any previous Final Fantasy protagonists are player surrogates; the driving theme of the entire work is that the meaning of Final Fantasy is never reached through triumph over its combat. This is a game mastered through understanding and attentiveness, not power or the appearance of it.

World of Final Fantasy could have been bland, cynical, and lifelessly corporate. In fact, so could pretty much every Final Fantasy game since the blockbusting success of Final Fantasy VII. I'm still worried that Final Fantasy XV will do this, with its grotesque marketing and Ubisoft world structure. Instead, WoFF is a sophisticated response to the challenge of making art under the banner of a massive commercial brand.

It's still cute, still joyous, funny and earnest; without its context it's still a story about the importance of empathy and self-reflection. But it's also an argument that the history of Final Fantasy can and should contain those things, should be recognised for those things. It's an argument for Japanese RPGs against a sometimes-hostile, conservative foreign audience, and that, I hope, is something Square Enix will do again.

[1] At least, that's the line as I remember it. In the English audio, it's 'How could you do this twice? You opened it again', and I can't find video of the Japanese audio subs (which is what I used), so I may have run a couple of sentences together, but it conveys the sense of the moment quite well.

[2] Reynn still doesn't pay enough attention, though. Before beginning their ascent of the tower leading to the Ultima Gate, the twins discuss why so much of Grymoire has capitulated to the Bahamutians and embraced the cult of their prophecy. Reynn stops short of the word (if you can call it that) 'sheeple', but her tone is pretty condescending; this contempt itself is part of what allows the twins to be duped. They consider themselves smarter, separate from and above the world, but their ignorance of it is their undoing.

[3] As a sidebar, while I'm drafting this, this twitter thread is scrolling up Tweetdeck on my other monitor, and there's no more straightforward expression of this problem than the difference between getting a player to poke at a map-marker and getting them to 'really notice' what's going on.

[4] In the linked article I discuss gender alongside heroism, and while I don't want to spend too much time on that here it ought to be noted that World of Final Fantasy continues the trend of female characters having to introduce nuance and clean up after rash male characters cause disasters. The game is also flat-out scathing of several of the classic male heroes it includes; the narcissism that underlies Squall's sullen detachment is highlighted, and Edgar is rendered as an insufferable sleazeball, always viewed from the perspective of a female character he's pestering.

Final Heroes

(Originally published Feb 25, 2016, at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

A thought I keep having lately:

What was the last Final Fantasy game with a male hero?

I don't mean a male protagonist (Tidus) or a male viewpoint character (Vaan). There's a difference, too, between being heroic and being a hero, and another between being a hero and being the hero. It's the last of these senses that I'm interested in here.

I take 'the hero' of a story to be the character who saves whatever it is the story centres on the saving of (or, more likely, the character who leads whatever effort it is ultimately achieves that saving). A possible alternative account would be that the hero is the character on whose virtues and vices turns the saving whatever is to be saved. These are necessarily imprecise and shouldn’t be taken as 'definitions', just flexible guides to what I have in mind.

So, which Final Fantasy[1] last had a male hero?

Whatever Snow might think, it's clearly not any of the FFXIII games. Taken as a trilogy, the hero is clearly Lightning. There are cases to be made that Fang and Vanille are the heroes of the first game, and Serah the hero of the second, though individuating the games like this risks losing nuances of the wider project.

I've dug into FFXII's Vaan before. Suffice it to say that, however important Vaan's presence is to FFXII as a complete work, there is no plausible reading according to which he, rather than Ashe, is the hero. Similarly, Basch is too much Ashe's follower, and Balthier altogether too superfluous, to displace her.

What about Tidus? FFX's protagonist is certainly more important to his game's events than Vaan or Snow to theirs. I think it's clear, though, that his metaphysical alienation from the modern Spira limits his ability to actually save anything. He supports Yuna's effort to save the world, definitely, and does so in ways that no other character does or could, but ultimately Yuna does the saving, and so is the hero.

I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that both FFVII and FFVIII have male heroes. I don't really know FFIX well enough as yet to make a judgement – I'm eagerly awaiting the Steam release to rectify this oversight – but my impression is that things are more balanced between Zidane and Garnet than between, say, Squall and Rinoa. Even if hero duties ultimately fall squarely to Zidane, though, it's been fifteen-plus years since Square/Enix released a Final Fantasy whose hero was male.

I'm not saying this to attribute some great feminist virtue to Square's developers (in fact the opposite could be argued), nor as a simplistic defence of FFXV's all-male central cast, though I do think it establishes a context that makes the latter phenomenon more interesting. Instead I want to look at it as interrelated with (either caused by, a cause of, or some mix of the two) a general shift in how Final Fantasy has presented and engaged with the concept of heroism, and videogame heroism specifically.

There are multiple ways to state my underlying thesis, none of them perfect:

• 'Heroism' is a male concept and in trying to create female heroes, Squenix designers had to develop a new concept of heroism.
• In trying to develop new, more critical notions of 'heroism', Squenix designers found it necessary to dissociate heroism from male characters.
• The way we relate to traditional notions of heroism is such that any female character placed in a heroic role will seem masculine.
• The way we relate to traditional notions of heroism is such that any female character placed in a heroic role will seem implausible.

I could go on, but I've made enough of a mess already. Some of these claims require sociological or psychological evidence I'm not qualified or trained to obtain. Others would at least require some journalism I'm not willing or able to do. It is difficult to state a 'purely aesthetic' thesis as such, though, particularly since nothing can be 'purely aesthetic' in this sense; the use of socio-political signposts is inescapable.

Still, there are enough different approaches here that we can do some triangulating. Clearly, the nature of (video game) heroism is central to what I'm getting at. So is some idea of associations between aspects of that nature and gender. Both the perspectives on gender held by specific individuals – designers and writers employed at various times by Square/Enix – and those that exist as more general patterns in our society[2] are called into question.

Heroism

I've written before about the idea of 'hero privilege', a distinctive way in which characters framed as heroes in fantasy stories relate to the societies that they move through. It can be summed up this way: because a hero encodes a normative value (i.e. heroism requires or entails 'doing good'), if they come into conflict with society over a question of value, the hero defaults to being morally right. If society opposes the hero, society is in the wrong.

This means that things which we ordinarily value, like democracy, self-determination, free agency and human rights, if they belong to characters who are tokens of society in a heroic narrative, may be overridden. The people (or at least people-tokens) who make up a society can be comprehensively dehumanised purely because they stand between the hero and objectives the hero has deemed necessary.

This pattern is found across a wide range of media involving the heroic fantasy narrative (the most familiar example may be the police drama where the hero 'goes rogue' in order to stop a criminal who has evaded the legitimate methods of law enforcement), but it becomes particularly pernicious, I think, in video games. In some ways, JRPGs are most at risk of this problem, though the genre has also produced some of my favourite critical engagements with it.

Video games generally, or at least single-player-centric ones, naturally give a special place to one particular character or character-token – the one controlled by the player. Often games do their best to pretend otherwise, but characters in a game apart from those controlled by the player are not fully-rounded human beings with agency of their own.

What values a game ultimately expresses, then, will be shaped at least in significant part by the way the relationship between the player character and others is handled. If the player character is allowed to relate to the rest of their world's population as an abstraction only, a blob of simulated humanity to be saved or ignored, it suggests endorsement of the player character's 'specialness' – and possibly by extension treats the player themselves as special. Lana Polansky has written persuasively about how limiting this can be.

On the other hand, if other characters in the world are allowed to challenge the hero, if the hero's rightness isn't guaranteed, something much more nuanced can emerge. In 'real life', we have to deal with clashes of value and conflicting interests all the time. Our art should be able to engage with this, but it can't if one particular position or point of view within the work is given huge special treatment.

JRPGs tend to represent society in more abstract ways than most games[3]. Towns will be represented by a handful of NPCs, a couple of houses and a shop which sketches a hint of an economic situation. Social authority is often reserved solely for traditional authority figures – kings, parents, teachers – while other characters are little more than walking signposts.

This means that JRPGs are particularly susceptible to this problem. The player characters are often the only ones able to travel from town to town; they often become absurdly, economy-devastatingly rich; to add unimpeachable moral authority to that is to completely dismiss any humanity that 'ordinary' people in this fictional world might possess.

To their credit, narratively-focussed franchises like Tales and even Final Fantasy have done their best to engage with this. Still, the iconic Final Fantasy heroes, Cloud and Squall, certainly benefit from elements of this privilege. Cloud, particularly, exists in a world where the only major authority, the Shinra corporation, is clearly coded as evil. There is seldom any question over whether Cloud is right to challenge them, and, apart from other playable characters, he is seldom answerable to anyone else over whether or not he does.

Cloud and Squall are both presented as loners. The female heroes of the 21^st-century Final Fantasy games, though, are more commonly seen in group contexts. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Yuna; Tidus, the player's viewpoint, spends the first third of the game watching Yuna interact with other people more than talking to her himself. On Besaid, Lulu and Wakka keep Tidus at arm's length while the locals crowd around to wish Yuna well. At Kilika, Yuna tends to the traumatised community in the wake of Sin's attack, more a priestess than a summoner.

It isn't really until the infamous laughing scene at Luca that Tidus gets to connect with Yuna directly. After that, episodes involving the Crusaders' Operation Mi'hen and Seymour's wedding continue to emphasise how much Yuna is a part of Spiran society, how many different factions have an interest in her and compete to determine her actions.

When Yuna and her guardians do finally turn against the expectations of society, it's a much less trivial thing than Cloud's opposition to Shinra. And the weight of their decision is reinforced by a sequel in which the transformation of the religious order, and resulting schism in society, dominate much of the plot.

For Ashe, as a princess trying to restore her kingdom, relationships to society are even more complex. Much of Ashe's journey is concerned with not just the fact but the legitimacy of her throne. Initially, she seeks proof of her lineage in order to appeal to such impartial authorities as Ivalice has, believing that if she can just establish herself as the legal ruler she will be able to at least negotiate with the occupying empire of Archadia.

When the Archadians reveal the extent to which they're willing to use force regardless of any legal or traditional authority, Ashe's quest switches to one for power. She seeks a weapon powerful enough to serve as a deterrent to further Imperial aggression. Much of what happens thereafter, though, from Vaan's presence to the devastated ruins of Nabradia, is structured to reveal the absurd moral compromise that weapons of mass destruction entail.

To whatever extent Ashe actually earns legitimacy as a ruler in the story, it comes from giving up such power; from not only throwing away her own opportunity to wield it, but from working to dismantle and stop the superweapons of others. The gods of Ivalice offer her the weapon she seeks, but only after she refuses them and those who seek to unseat them can she actually restore her kingdom.

With Lightning, things are twistier still. Lightning has no great heralded societal place; she's just a soldier. Being a soldier, and being the persona a woman – Claire Farron – has constructed in order to perform soldierhood, she is already divorced from the kind of social ties that Yuna and Ashe experience. By the start of FFXIII, Lightning has also cast off military authority and is acting on her own.

In fact, Lightning's determined preference for acting alone rings throughout the trilogy, right up until the final hours of Lightning Returns (about which I don't want to say too much because the Steam release is still fairly recent). But it does so because people keep placing demands on Lightning, not always without justification.

When Lightning frees Sazh in the middle of the Purge at the beginning of the game, she's obviously frustrated at his tagging along – but what else can he do? The game makes clear that his options are go with Lightning or fight and most likely die alone. Later, in the Vile Peaks, it's Hope who becomes the burden, this time grounded in a vague idea of connection between Lightning and Snow (of whom more later).

Lightning's old military organisation tries to lay claim to her in its power struggle with other factions in Cocoon's government. And there's the overarching question of which fal'cie power has claimed the party and in doing so forced them together – Lightning spends a long time trying to ignore her brand in favour of saving Serah.

So while Lightning definitely aspires to the solitary freedom of the hero, Final Fantasy XIII keeps finding ways to deny it to her. In the second game, Lightning gets her solitude, at the expense of being totally narratively inert – literally trapped outside of time – and having the focus shift onto her sister.

Serah, by the way, is consistently shown as deeply engaged with communities and social ties. She's a teacher, she lives with a group of close friends, her objectives in the game are always established according to the needs of local communities, and her only 'heroic' motivation is the restoration of her family, through getting Snow and Lightning back. The extent to which she's defined by this signifiers of archetypal femininity is heavy-handed, even clumsy at times.

Lightning Returns crams Lightning into a cramped, closed-circle world stuffed full of individual NPCs with distinct needs and objectives. Since the player can only raise Lightning's stats by completing their sidequests, Lightning is forced to draw power from specific social connections. Her only escape is to her base on the Ark, another place outside of time and space where Lightning can be a demigod, but only ineffectually.

LR also runs on a fixed internal clock – as long as Lightning is outside the Ark, time flows and cannot be clawed back. Sidequest-givers are only available at particular times, and once missed may be missed for good. The need to be in specific places at specific times to gain the power needed to complete the game is another way of limiting Lightning through social connections, of making concrete the demands society places on her.

Ultimately, the structure of the trilogy undercuts Claire Farron's attempt to perform the 'Lightning' persona. Given that FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama specifically asked Tetsuya Nomura to design Lightning as "a female version of Cloud from FFVII", the effect is a reflection on that earlier construction of the hero, and it shows just how far Final Fantasy's heroes have come.

I don't want to sound like I'm dunking on Cloud – his story is interesting. It's just the parts of it in which he is a hero, and the subsequent cultural understanding which remembers him purely as a brooding loner who fights Sephiroth, are among the least interesting. The story of Lightning, who wants to be the brooding loner fighting evil but is unable to deny the nuance demanded by her social and societal connections, addresses exactly this blind spot.

Gender

It's possible to see this shift in Final Fantasy's heroes as a product of their various writers' needs to break new storytelling ground – since at least Final Fantasy VII, Square Enix's devs have been under intense pressure to take the lead in this area. The traditional construction of heroism is familiar, sometimes to the point of tedium, and attempts to move beyond it will almost inevitably require critical engagement with it. The switch to female heroes could be a coincidence.

But we should be careful not to understate what it means to be a coincidence. We needn't prove that a decision to change to female heroes caused the shift in narrative types or vice versa in order to show that the two changes were connected. The link I want to argue for may be much subtler than direct one-way causation, but still much more substantial than coincidence.

Refining from my starting points, my claim is this: hero privilege and the more general male privilege are similar enough that we – and particularly the writers and narrative designers employed by mass-media companies like Square Enix – struggle to conceive of a character having one without the other. This is not to say that it's impossible, just that it's easy to not do. Standard ideas of innovation aren't enough.

Try to imagine a male hero coerced into a political marriage, as Yuna is. Male heroic characters can have political and tactical marriages – FFXII's Prince Rasler, for example – but because society still treats the 'husband' role as the authoritative one, these cannot pose a threat to their agency in the way that marriage to Seymour might subordinate Yuna's. To a male hero, a political marriage can be a tiresome but necessary symbol; to a female hero, it is by default an obstacle to be overcome, every bit as much as any boss fight.

Or consider the sequence in FFXII when Archadian officials steal the Dusk Shard from Ashe. Judge Ghis tells her, "We hold the proof of your royal lineage. A maid of passing resemblance will serve our purposes now." Ashe's body and person are dismissed outright. It is only Ashe-as-symbol that the antagonists are interested in, because no other part of Ashe presents a threat to them. It's a very clear statement against heroic actions that it's hard to imagine any but the youngest male heroes encountering. A male hero would normally never be reduced to his 'passing resemblance'.

There's another shift at work in the 21^st-century Final Fantasies, too. Each game invokes male heroism in characters who ultimately prove ineffectual, or at least markedly less significant than their heroines.

Tidus is an endearing goof, sometimes important for his outsider's ability to think the unthinkable and sometimes important for the party's morale, but Yuna would have succeeded at being some kind of hero without him. Her place at the intersection of Yevon and Al Bhed cultures contributes as much to that as anything Tidus does.

Balthier is a more pitiful spectacle; a pampered rich kid playing at defiance and criminality as a flight from his troubled family situation. His repeated wisecracks about being 'the leading man', in context of the wider story, are a sad joke. Basch is a deeper character, but his narrative role is as little more than a vector for exposition and context.

With Snow in FFXIII, the franchise turned outright scornful. Snow is a childish fool whose playing at heroism, the game makes abundantly clear, gets people killed. That his gang's epithet is NORA – 'No Obligations, Rules or Authority' – makes him the most pointed comment yet on the dangerous irresponsibility of hero-privilege narratives.

Again, it's hard to imagine characters this ridiculous being female. A woman in the place of Snow or Balthier wouldn't be tolerated by those around her, or if she was would be regarded much more clearly as repugnant by the majority of the games' audiences. In mass media, men – or at least men who centrally benefit from male privilege, which is the group of men we see most of - get away with behaviour which from anyone else would be unacceptable.

Critiquing heroism goes hand-in-hand with critiquing masculinity, but that doesn't mean that there can't be better representations of either. Both Sazh (despite the harmful way his race is presented) and Hope in the FFXIII trilogy are given more nuanced treatment, a broad range of emotional expression and strong non-sexual social ties. Both are placed firmly in their social context and are answerable to other human beings.

Which leads naturally to the question of where Final Fantasy is headed next – Final Fantasy XV, a game with an apparently all-male playable cast, with director Hajime Tabata talking about a 'boys will be boys' story, that lifts the curtain on 'what boys do when girls aren't around'. Tabata's remarks are at best an awkward misstep, and definitely troubling, but, well...

What if the game actually does offer an alternative? What if it gives us men who, at least in character if not in identity, aren't like those we're used to seeing? Some of the signifiers of hero privilege are present, like the characters having the freedom to travel into the unknown, but the journey, framed as a roadtrip, seems more aimless than many. So far it's unclear what threatens the world, or how the characters' journey is supposed to help.

Taken on its own, another game with an all-male cast is a tedious prospect. As inheritor of the modern Final Fantasy tradition (and, indeed, Tabata's record for games that present healthier masculinities, like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII), though, there is at least the possibility of something more.

[1] I want to limit this to the 'major releases', but this is increasingly difficult to define. 'Home console releases' is more precise and I think captures what people mean when they muse about the trends, destiny and/or fate of the franchise. Let's assume for now that the MMOs, FFXI and FFXIV, can be safely overlooked, as well as handheld and mobile spinoffs. The Fabula Nova Crystallis (FFXIII) sequence is so coherent as a trilogy that I feel justified including all three games, though Type-0, as a handheld spinoff that was later ported to home consoles, is a tricky one, and entirely available as a gotcha against my pitch.

[2] It's vital to recognise that in certain crucial respects, Squenix's staff have never been members of our society. This limits what I can say because, again, I am not sociologist (or anthropologist) enough to have significant insight into the construction of gender in Japanese culture. I can talk from my own experience of our 'Western' (better: Anglo-American) culture, and I can speculate to an extent on how Final Fantasy games have increasingly been developed for an international market and audience, but these don't entitle me to leap the cultural gap.

[3] And to do so more as a matter of conscious choice than as a response to technological limitation, though certainly the traditional abstractions of the JRPG started as a response to technological constraints. To whatever extent 'the JRPG' is a coherent concept, it has always valued 'realism' (or 'literalism', or even just 'the concrete') less than western RPGs and other genres.