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auronlu
I tend to experience roleplaying in Final Fantasy games the way I experience dreams: on the one hand, I'm often inside the skin and POV of a fictional person, experiencing their adventures through their eyes, and on the other, I'm a "lucid dreamer," aware that I'm not really in that person's body, and that I can choose what happens to them. So for me, Final Fantasy games with vividly-realized characters help aid in the immersive experience, and I'm quite happy with the participation-in-a-movie style of roleplaying that's come to dominate the franchise.
We reached this stage of roleplaying games gradually. We had a lot more freedom when all characters could do is wander around, whack bad guys and collect loot. It's much harder to program a game so that the player has full freedom and control when characters are able to talk, perform complex actions and interact with each other. Therefore, over time, we've lost a lot of the character customization and non-linear roleplay of older games.
The balance between player autonomy and game script has always been a difficult juggling exercise, ever since graphics began to become photo-realistic. We had MYST, where the well-developed main characters are mostly trapped offscreen to limit interactions with our mysterious protagonist. SCHISM had other members trapped in an alternate dimension so that we couldn't talk to them directly, only leave messages. There have been various methods used to explain why we can't engage in direct conversation.
Final Fantasy, instead, took the "scripted story" route, with preset bits of dialogue triggered when we talk to this or that NPC, and somewhat randomized bits of dialogue between PCs. For a long time, Final Fantasy still let us rename PCs and (rarely) choose dialogue options that dictated different outcomes, but the plot arc and character roles and backstories were set.
With the advent of voice acting, Final Fantasy soon gave up on the old custom of letting us rename the lead character (at least), because calling Tidus "You Know Who" was too silly (and too Voldemort-like). The final loss of renaming broke that sense of claiming and making one character our own stand-in, our surrogate role and POV within the game. Accordingly, in FFXII and XIII, we had a cast, rather than a party, and there was no longer a designated lead: we chose whom to identify with, or could choose to identify with none and simply act as puppetmaster. That never troubled me, because I'm a storyteller and enjoy putting myself into the headspace of characters I'm writing or strongly identify with, but it's a slightly different gaming POV from the "you are the lead character" approach that one had in FFV and VII through X.
This actually gave me pause. I've gotten so spoiled to the modern connotation of "RPG," which means "play a character or characters designed by someone else," that I forgot that real old-school roleplaying games -- which I played from the 70s through early 2000s! -- meant designing and playing your character from scratch; the GM provided only the external environment and events, refereeing your adventure, and leaving character designs, dialogue and roleplay entirely to your imagination.
So when I picked up FFI, I thought, "FFI's Warriors of Light are cardboard characters who don't speak -- I'll be bored if I play this game straight, so I think I'll loosely borrow characters from another old game I like." Essentially, I was doing crossover fanfiction, inserting Breath of Fire III characters into Final Fantasy I. Why did I automatically reject the freedom given by this earlier style of RPG, which I used to play back in the 90s with Might & Magic and other PC games? What if I had played FFI as Lassarina did, inventing her party and characters from scratch, imagining their dialogue and enjoying the greater roleplaying freedom afforded by FFI?
I suppose it's because one of the strengths of the Final Fantasy franchise -- at least when I got hooked it, which was in the VII-X era -- is that it tended to create appealing parties a bit like the cast of a favorite TV show. I liked getting to know the characters and watching the dynamics between them. That was part of the game, a voyage of discovery of people, not just of the story and the world. I couldn't have come up with characters as interesting as Auron and Fran and Fang on my own, and I enjoyed discovering them. Or perhaps I could have...but the great thing about those characters is that they were thoroughly embedded in their worlds, sometimes establishing and then exploding tropes (see: Vanille, OMFG Vanille). Ceding character control like we had in FFI allows the game designers to present us with greater character complexity and story arc. So there are positive as well as negative trade-offs as games become more linear and characters become more defined.
Interestingly, recent gaming titles -- MMOs and more sophisticated single-player RPGs -- have begun to let us do what we could do back in FFI (although I failed to do it): design our own protagonists, and have the game's AI adapt to our choices such that we have a lot of scope for inventing part of the story. Oddly, I haven't tried any of those games yet.
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Date: 2013-01-12 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-12 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-12 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-12 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-12 06:27 pm (UTC)I happened to read your first playthrough post right before I was going to write up my own, and I thought how much cooler and more interesting it was to insert character commentary into the game. So Leo, Sarisa, Jenica, and Stella are basically all your fault; they're archetypes because I wasn't feeling creative enough to come up with my own. I didn't really go in intending to insert characterization; it was a conceit to make the write-up more interesting! (oh noes my secrets are out, etc.) After the first write-up, I guess I did start thinking more in a role-playing fashion and taking screencaps not just because something interesting was happening, but because I wanted the party to snark about it. So that's actually pretty cool, and thank you!
That being said, though, I came to RPGs with FF4 and 6 when I was nine or so; I met tabletop games in college; and the modern Bioware/Bethesda single-player RPG is something I didn't encounter until after I'd started playing White Wolf games. I have a lot of thinky thoughts about me vs. Western-style RPGs, and they're tied up in how I met those games after I met tabletop, and that's a post I keep meaning to write and failing.
Yet even when I play Dragon Age, for example, I don't...necessarily build the character the way I would build one for my LARP or any of my tabletop games. My Warden was a diplomatic paladin-type, and my Hawke was a diplomatic goody two-shoes, and when I get to tell my fiancé how we're running Mass Effect Shepard is a paragon paladin princess. It's not really that I'm a very good person, it's that I flinch and cringe at the idea of being mean to pixel people who aren't sitting around a gaming table with me, assured that OOC I don't actually hate them.
(I think you'd really enjoy Dragon Age, and probably Mass Effect; the characters in the party are amazing.)
Heh, I'm a bad influence
Date: 2013-01-12 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-12 06:53 pm (UTC)Re: Heh, I'm a bad influence
Date: 2013-01-12 07:01 pm (UTC)(Not going to lie, Moogle U is, for me, partly a "productive" excuse to replay FF games.)
Re: Heh, I'm a bad influence
Date: 2013-01-12 07:07 pm (UTC)Also, I'm so grateful. It's hard to geek about a particular game when the fandom's moved on. But we'll be making all the stops!
Re: Heh, I'm a bad influence
Date: 2013-01-13 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-24 08:38 pm (UTC)YES, PLEASE!
Date: 2013-01-25 06:44 am (UTC)Although, just to be complicated, I took the above half-assed post and rewrote/expanded on it on my own website, here:
Final Fantasy: The Best Stories I Ever Lived.
It's a more polished essay, but it's longer and NOT on DW. DW posts tend to get more comments. So... Link to either one, as you pefer. I don't care which; I'm just delighted to get some feedback and see some good meta discussion!
Re: YES, PLEASE!
Date: 2013-01-27 03:11 pm (UTC)Re: YES, PLEASE!
Date: 2013-01-27 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-10 08:13 am (UTC)...Actually, perhaps I do have something to add. More open-world games like FF1 may invite us to plant ourselves in the heroes' shoes and create backstories and imagine conversations a la D&D, but most of us would rather just kill a bunch of stuff. I think, anyway. For me, it was the story-heavy FFs - starting from FFIV onwards - that have trained me into wanting to create worlds and stories. (And that's why I went down the dark path of fanfic writing and DMing lol.) FF1 was fun for me to watch as a kid (I never played it myself), but I never made any kind of creative leaps into that world.
Modern MMOs, though, with all their customization options and real social interactions with other players and quests - I think that's a whole other ball game. I don't actually play any MMOs so it's hard for me to say, but it seems to me like you are clearly being asked to self-insert in those games. And I find that...kind of boring, actually! Even though I love D&D. I don't know why the difference.
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Date: 2013-04-10 03:39 pm (UTC)"most of us would rather just kill a bunch of stuff." Heh. You're right. I certainly did that with Rogue, Temple of Apshai, and other early games, so you may be right. It was only coming to FFI as an adult, with the knowledge that oh, this game doesn't have story/character development that I found myself doing so.
And then the next game fell flat for me because I didn't, since it had rudimentary story/character development. Oops.
I am very interested in how much roleplaying/storytelling people do in modern MMOs. I was very much into text-based MUSHes in the 90s, but the particular communities where I roleplayed required us to write character applications and develop them with depth and internal consistency to the world. So while there was a certain amount of self-insert, it was more like method acting.
I've got some friends who have modern MMO characters and show me screencaps they've taken with their characters, animal familiars, and so on, and it does seem self-insertish, plus some customization and the usual amount of "X is too common, everyone does X, so I will do Y instead" which results in a surfeit of Y. ("everybody plays an elf so I'll be different and play an orc.") That can help people stretch and imagine the world more fully instead of just killing stuff.
I'm rambling here, but anyway, all of what you said!
It really depends when you came to JRPGs and with what kind of roleplaying/writing background I think.
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Date: 2013-04-10 06:41 pm (UTC)Me too! Like you said, I think it depends on what background you bring to the game. But most of the people I know who play MM0s (mostly men and women in their early 30s, some of whom play D&D with me), don't do much imagining or storytelling of their own when they play. They will get a little into the story, but it's in a much more passive way than D&D or fanfic writing asks for.
I think the people who want to tell stories instead of being told stories is always going to be a smaller subset of the population. But we can be trained into liking one role or the other based on the platform we're given. And obviously it's a sliding scale, not an absolute.
Have you seen The Guild, btw? It's on WoW, which I haven't played, but I think it's pretty accessible to everyone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grCTXGW3sxQ
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Date: 2013-04-12 04:02 am (UTC)In a better world, The Guild would be on prime time instead of Big Bang Theory. :)
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Date: 2013-04-12 05:36 am (UTC)I've only seen a bit of the Guild too! I had never even seen Do You Wanna Date My Avatar until now! :D
OH THANK GOODNESS someone else who thinks Big Bang Theory isn't all that great.