I tap two lands and play "WALL OF TEXT!!!"
The consistant problem with Final Fantasy is that we barely know any of the characters and we're expected to give a shit. So when they get all ;~; Teary eyed and super emotionalz like? It doesn't do anything. Imagine walking in on your grandmother's soap opera half way through and some random woman you don't know is pouring her eyes out - do you give a shit?
That's final fantasy in a nutshell. Remember as far back as FF7? Remember what the trailers were like? They didn't show you boo-hooing and wanking off no, they showed you riding a motorcycle down a busy madmax highway, they showed Cloud leaping off a train, they showed shit blowing up, and when you got inside, you found out there was more to it - people with pretty much blank personalities that developed over time as you played along. Their plights were (more or less...) realistic and ya gave a shit because they didn't dump it on you at the start. And by the start I mean the trailer, obviously they'll push this emotional droll I can't wait to skip somewhere past disc 2.
Maybe they should try something else to make a character interesting, it seems Enix is stuck on dragging the Mary Sue trope through the ground. I have an idea to make them special, lets put TRAGEDY in their lives! No...Knock it the hell off. Give me real people with real problems that I can fucking relate to.
I've more experience with FF8 because thats one of the few I had mind enough to pay attention to, and it rang with me solidly because at the time I was an emotional shut in with no girlfriend in freshman year of Highschool and here I was playing an emotional shutin who thought he didn't need anybody - in a highschool setting. So it won major points with me at the time, but what it did was set up the characters over four grueling discs, it didn't jam it all down your throat in the trailer. You had some sense there was something going on between him and Rinoa because of all the dancing and feather scenes they jammed in but you didn't know what the crap was going on, you just knew that when Squall met her in the game, something important had happend but you still had to work to figure out what the hell that was.
Don't get me wrong - I just hate when the characters get pretentious. More important than they really are. It doesn't help that certain tragedies (orphaned, parents dead, the biggest offender) aren't responded to realistically. 'I changed my name cuz stuff!' ...urgh. When you've got to put more effort than the typical person needs to just to balance out your psychi it portrays you as a mentally weak individual incapable of growing up on your own without the power of lovely friendship and friendly lovingness, that's fine and dandy but I'd like for my characters to have that mental fortitude to make it on their own, with friends around to make them realize, they can do that ...but having friends around is better. *COUGH* Cloud *COUGH* Squall *COUGH*, not to get caught with their psychological pants down and having to spill the beans and now everyone knows their dark secret so they've gotta heel-face turn their whole personality then and there since obviously once you tell someone - all of your problems are for-the-time-being solved.
Don't get me wrong - The trailer is definitly a lot more pretentious than the actual game can ever be, thank you editing. It looks beautiful, based on what little glimpses we get from the combat system it looks like it plays well, and there's a hero-figure for us westerners to bank on to keep us planted in our seats. It'll be a decent game or I'll eat my nonexistant hat. I'm just saying her dead parents BETTER BE RELEVANT TO THE PLOT.
In all of the old stories what you would have is a small hero dealing with his own personal plights and then he'd eventually realize his issue is everyone elses. As his vision expands beyond his own selfish needs he realizes whatever plague is set upon him has a much broader scope, and for whatever reason, it is he who has to take the first step and save his land. His strong conviction magnetizes others to the cause simply for the fact that they would have been this hero if only they had a little more courage, a little more strength, and a little more conviction of their own.
In STARK CONTRAST let's take Dragon Age's Human Noble. Warning: vague spoilers - skip this paragraph. You start out as a character of obvious significance in a castle with 'oh a small war' just on the other side of the hill and you're set on meaningless fetch quests until eventualy it's revealed that the guy in the bright armor who was hinting severely that he wasn't here for Sir Gilmore spills the beans and states the obvious. What bothers me is that everyone is stern browed and shooting names out like a bad Tolkien Fanfiction. Highever, Cousland Family, The Blight, Ozammar. I don't know who the hell these people are, where the hell they're from, or what the cultural significance of a crappy little shanty town not 20 meters across with explorable houses has on the rest of the world. They've shoving names down my throat and they expect me to care. What I want you to garner form this is that yes, you are important. You're so damned important you've got Hero tattooed on one of your ass-cheeks. There are big important places that you need to save from a big important evil or bad things will happen to a world you've barely spent 5 minutes in. OooOoOoOOOoO! SpoOoOoOoky JAAaaaAaAazz HaaAAaAands. Who the hell is the blight anyway? Oh they're lead by a dragon or something, that's cool. I haven't fought a dragon yet so I don't know how scary they are. Turns out, they aren't, if you've got 10 healing potions and a good sidestep you can hack one of their back legs once, move before the dragon kicks you, then move back in and repeat ad-nausium until you get bored, just dont stand in front or behind it. Annnd apparently this blight turns humanoids into Locust, ok thats neat. I haven't seen them tear up a town yet, I haven't seen them in greater numbers than 5 in small packs across a sprawled meadow...If you're going to tell me the Blight is some great threat four minutes into the game you better show it to me. All in all I feel like the Noble Hero is just this massive internet troll wrangling up an army for shits and giggles. Show, don't tell. Infact, don't tell me at all until I'm in a position where I care.
If FF13's going to make it in my book, they'd better have the water works toned down and the plot set at a reasonable pace. If this game starts with lightning busting cacoon heads driving around the streets of super-sky-city shouting at some big scary guy with a sinister "I mean business" smirk on her face seconds before she gets the drop on them by leaping off the side of the floating city to decend below into an escape vehicle that speeds off into the sunset while highly styalized co-stars perk up with their more than overly obvious right-out-on-their-skin personalities asking "well what do we do now?" I'm going to be seriously put off. Why am I so worked up when it's just a game? Because I'm BORED and I'm tired of seeing the same shit all the time.
I'm sure there could've been worse.
