Hydra Corps?

[Narol]

(tho i bet they hadnt figured out how to implement that well into BCs back in Zilart era)

Were the 9-2 battles created before or after Zilart?

Edit: Davilles could solo all of Wings.

Instead of pleading for Aht Urghan's help, the Allies should've just hired some Besieged-quality Troll Mercenaries. That would've made things a lot more interesting.

[ronin sparthos]

OK? I mean, its true Lion/Aldo kind of just looked at you fight in RoZ, but it comes to the point eventually when Trion, Ajido, and Volker take up arms with you in the nation quests. Before that you're an errand boy basically so it makes sense that they wouldn't be doing the same things you would!

CoP, Prishe only comes to help you at the very end. I daresay since Lilisette's appearances in BCNMs is more frequent, it makes Prishe the lazy one. She only felt the need to actually fight with us when we were fighting a god. Thanks.

TOAU, I mean I can see why Nashmiera didn't fight. If she fell in battle there'd be terrible consequences (but if Alexander managed to 'judge' all of Aht Urhgan, they would be worse I s'pose.)

Speaking of which... why is it always a heroine we fight with? Ugh!

Dont get me started on Aldo because I have no idea why SE had such an obsession with him to continue his story in ACP. He lived in Tav, bad stuff happened, he runs the Tenshodo, shows no talent at anything outside sending me on errands and somehow the player is supposed to connect with him? It's like SE was on auto-pilot developing Aldo.

The final slap in the face was ACP where his story was brought full circle.... not really and yet again he did pretty much nothing. I think the Qiqirns in Nashmau have more emotion than Aldo.

ACP should have been a Batman ripoff starring Zeid, that'd have at least been entertaining.

Lion............zzzz.....huh what? Protagonist? Zzzzzz... jumping into that crystal to Spira and doing FFX as Rikku was the best thing shes ever done. I dare say she should jump into crystals more often.

With Prishe, she was alot more in your face to the major antagonists and pretty much pissed them off to the point where a BCNM would start. Liken her to the person who runs into a mess of agro then expects you to clean it up proper. Hey Prishe, pissing off the Wyrmking when you're on his turf in a ramshackle Airship is a great idea.... the elvaan INT was showing that day.

She does get points for attempting to solo Ultima though... and hey Sel'theus was not a girl! (its just a skin condition he swears) nor was Tenz....er I mean Gessho and Excenmille in TOAU and WOTG respectively. Hm, didnt Five Moons and Nichlous participate in a BCNM too?

Lilisette was pretty much the evolution of Prishe being that she had the in your face qualities that Prishe had but without the whole leaving you to fight after retreating offscreen. She had a few onscreen skills and the brashness from Prishe was there for sure. I guess being half-hume lowers your chances of giving every major antagonist a tongue-lashing.

Nashmiera reminded me of a non-combative Ashe where we're merely along to get her control of the kingdom back. I'll credit her for being the sole major political power to recognize the player as being the reason anything positive happened and beating Raubahn to a paste made the whole endeavor worthwhile along with seeing Razfahd crushed inside his own Immobile Suit Gundam.

I'm guessing theres some sexist JP chauvanist mechanism at work that continues this tradition but I don't think I'd have it any other way...

I always thought of it as SE making up for the lack of female leads in the FFs of old. The damsel-in-distress is still there but at least they attempt to put up a fight and participate in the missions.

Recently the swing has been towards female leads with X (debatable), X-2, XII, XIII and pretty much all of the XI expansions. I wouldn't doubt some element of sexism but I figured it was because SE had a paradigm shift. (*giggle*)

Zazarg could have soloed Divine Might. Campaign was merely a setback!

Zazarg not having a bigger presence in WOTG was faaiiiiiil. They should have expanded on him or at least let him loose with an army in a zone. Hell they gave Invincible Shield gustaberg duty and all he did was talk trash in Ballista and write crappy EXP scrolls in the present.

[Peucritond]

Lilisette is not bad. Very feisty and perky but also a bit too cheerful at times. Most recently she reminded me of Vanille lol.

Wouldn't that be the opposite way around. Vanille should remind you of Lilisette.

For me Vanille reminds me of Rikku of ffx.

[Spira]

9-2 battles were created during Zilart.
Rank 6-10 missions were introduced in Zilart era, but i hadnt been playing back then so i really wouldnt know which came first.

I have to agree about the paradigm shift towards the ladies tho..

XII was clearly about Ashe even tho Vaan was the 'hero' and even X had a heavier focus on Yuna. Tidus just happened to be the catalyst that pushed the story forward.

[Narol]

XII was clearly about Ashe even tho Vaan was the 'hero' and even X had a heavier focus on Yuna.

I remember reading that the original concept was to have Basch as the hero, but the SE executives feared the game wouldn't sell as well without a bishounen lead.

Dont get me started on Aldo because I have no idea why SE had such an obsession with him to continue his story in ACP.

The guy writing ACP had a hard-on for him and wanted a chance to finish Aldo's story arc. Apparently ACP's godawful story is more executive meddling than bad writing.

I always thought of it as SE making up for the lack of female leads in the FFs of old.

Well, I'll say this at least. The obvious tsundere nature of Prishe, Lilisette, etc gets far more grating than how, say, Terra was basically an impressionable twit who had to be told by the rest of the cast what to do almost every step of the way. And at least FF6 had Celes for the other half of the game, who besides her constant "I'm a general, not a..." bitching wasn't bad/annoying at all. Plus she had actual character depth.

[Lucavi]

Don't hate on Terra. She was better than Rosa, Lenna and Faris before her. You perform god-knows what experiments on someone since they were a baby, and throw a slave crown on someone for who-knows-how-long before the game ends, rob them of any sense of a normal childhood or upbringing and yeah, you're going to get shit like a character that needs to be led around until she's able to "grow up" on her own.

There are far better examples to use if you're trying to prove a point, but Terra's personality is pretty understandable considering the two sadistic men that controlled every second of her life before the start of the game.

[LinktheDeme]

9-2 battles were created during Zilart.
Rank 6-10 missions were introduced in Zilart era, but i hadnt been playing back then so i really wouldnt know which came first.

I have to agree about the paradigm shift towards the ladies tho..

XII was clearly about Ashe even tho Vaan was the 'hero' and even X had a heavier focus on Yuna. Tidus just happened to be the catalyst that pushed the story forward.

I don't think it's possible that 9-2 mission would come out before Zilart. Sandoria's rank 6 missions take place in western altepa desert which is a Zilart zone.

[Spira]

The guy writing ACP had a hard-on for him and wanted a chance to finish Aldo's story arc. Apparently ACP's godawful story is more executive meddling than bad writing.

I think this is the case too.
The person who wrote the original story was the one who wrote for ACP, and he wanted to do a lot of things but because the story of FFXI had evolved so much since then. there were just too many cockblocks that had already be written in place that didn't allow him to finish his story without causing a major contradiction..

I don't think it's possible that 9-2 mission would come out before Zilart. Sandoria's rank 6 missions take place in western altepa desert which is a Zilart zone.

um.. what I meant was.. Rank 6-10 were released only after Zilart expansion started running, but i don't know which missions were introduced first, because they were definitely not all introduced in one shot.

Its probably like WotGs mission / nation quest.. or maybe it was simultaneous..

That given, they probably could have had Lion fight with u in a battle but she was ultimately going to 'die' anyway and i think they probably wanted to leave it as though u were powerless and then she came in to help.

[LinktheDeme]

Isn't there a sticky on some forum on the changes from alpha to present FFXI or so? At least until zilart if i remember? Might be in there if anyone remembers the link or saved the info

[Narol]

Don't hate on Terra. She was better than Rosa, Lenna and Faris before her. You perform god-knows what experiments on someone since they were a baby, and throw a slave crown on someone for who-knows-how-long before the game ends, rob them of any sense of a normal childhood or upbringing and yeah, you're going to get shit like a character that needs to be led around until she's able to "grow up" on her own.

There are far better examples to use if you're trying to prove a point, but Terra's personality is pretty understandable considering the two sadistic men that controlled every second of her life before the start of the game.

As an aside, I consider it a plot hole that they felt the need to slave crown her, since Gestahl had custody of her since infancy. Why not just raise her on a steady diet of propaganda and psychological conditioning? You wouldn't need a slave crown. Terra the brownshirt or something would be hilarious.

Anyway, I know exactly what they were going for with Terra. The problem is that it doesn't come across like what they wanted it to be. It's not the most maddening a female character in FF gets, but "has to be led around" is not a good trait in a protagonist, and it's why I used her as an example rather than, say, Rinoa, who I wish to strangle but wasn't the focal character for a sizeable portion of the story.

I'll also say Terra having to be led around by the supporting cast is better than Vaan being The Ishmael, and I'm thankful for it.

[BRP]

she did sacrifice her life to save Vana'diel too. She didn't actually die, but still.

Apoc Nigh isn't canon, because I say so.

[Lucavi]

I agree with you on many points, but to be fair, I didn't see a lot of plots in SNES RPGs being as deep and thought out as they could have been. Much of it simply had to do with not wanting to bore the player with what they felt was needless backstory and text. We were kids - I assume they felt that if we had to read waaaay too much, we'd get turned off with the game.

I know that as a pre-teen around the time that FFVI shipped, I loved reading anything that had to do with swords and sorcery, so a fully fleshed-out backstory would have been great, but I can see where they'd want to put the brakes on having too much back then. Hell, when you had so many popular silent protagonists (Link, Mario, Samus, ect.), going completely overboard the other way probably did seem risky.

You still have people today that just skip through every text bubble or CS just so they can get back "to the action", so I'll give developers a free pass for that back in the day.

Breath of Fire 2 arguably approached a far more mature topic than FFVI did, but actually told the story through dialogue in a very cutesy way at times, even in the original JP version. I really just feel like they tried to keep things pretty simple (especially for western audiences) so as not to lose the player.

I'm a lore-whore, though, and that's why I want fully-fleshed out remakes of all these games, complete with expanded plots. Give me more about Terra, give me more about Gau, and SERIOUSLY give me more about Shadow.

[Narol]

Much of it simply had to do with not wanting to bore the player with what they felt was needless backstory and text. We were kids - I assume they felt that if we had to read waaaay too much, we'd get turned off with the game.

It also has to do with how much text is on the screen at once and how any kind of monologue grinds everything to a halt like it's a bad stage play. With FF6 at least, when characters speak for like 4+ text boxes at a time, it feels like a long soliloquy even if the lines would only take like 10 seconds to speak. It's most noticeable when characters are moving around and doing things as they're talking, because SNES RPGs are very limited in how well they can sync text to action.

[Lucavi]

I only felt like that when they forced a slow progression of the text in order to allow characters to move around a lot while speaking, like when coming down Zozo's tower. As long as I was in control of how fast the text came (I'm a fast reader, so I like it fast and heavy), I was happy.

[Narol]

Things like descending from Zozo and hiking up to the Narshe snowfield are pretty clever about how they handle it. If you leave the characters for any length of time, they just stop.

It's not as distracting as the Phantom Train looping around about 50 times in the Sabin/Cyan scenario, though. I mean, seriously, they just set the background to loop rather than only show the train go by once.

[Lucavi]

Haha, I miss the old days.