Ahh man, here I am with another couple hours of FFT footage, and I haven’t actually touched the game in weeks.
This is why I made such a big backlog, I knew this was gonna happen. I always get pulled away from games before the end, especially when I like them a lot. I don’t want it to end! I don’t want to have to deal with the annoying stuff that always happens in the endgame, too. The big test at the end of the semester, so to speak. Though FFT isn’t actually bad in that regard, at least.
This time, we’re heading over to another castle… and not murdering the lord of that castle! What a nice change of pace. There is still some killing, of course, at the end of a very fun and very vertical battle. I suppose that this, even more than reading the heretical Germonique Papers, is when Ramza’s historical reputation is set in stone: actually murdering one of the priests chasing after him.
The game doesn’t really do enough with the whole “maligned by history” thing as part of the regular gameplay. There are no mechanics based around it, or the fact that you’re on the run and there are handbills with your face on them being handed out in major cities. It’s just business as usual, walking around the map picking up odd jobs and fighting monsters.
A modern game would definitely do something with that, have some sort of heat level, make you pay more for goods, lock off certain parts of the map. But that kind of ludo-narrative connection wasn’t really common back in the 90s. This is a JRPG, so you do the usual JRPG things, end of story. Heck, the people designing these encounters may not have known what the plot was even about, and vice-versa. Who’s to say!
Well, I guess the people who worked on it, the game didn’t come out that long ago, really. It’s crazy to think that Square was pumping out banger after banger back in those days, at a rate of several every damn year. Graphical fidelity has taken so much from us….
The Beige Moth 