#will be posting my analysis of the two zodiac sets tomorrow

[eyes-brainrot]

*sees bertholdt assigned as taurus in official art*

*flashbacks to my homestuck phase*

[pudgy-puk]

post #7000

so in honor of how tomorrow, all of us will be piling onto the theater ship prima vista, which plays the story of the zodiac braves, and now docks over kugane (where the wandering minstrel will reinterpret the battle with shinryu, jazz it up and set it to song and lo, we will have a new EX trial), i have a gift for you, and it comes in the form of a new analytic lens for the history of the final fantasy series:

what if i told you every single 2-D FF game was a play—was theater?

here, i will expand on that. by saying that they are plays, i don’t mean they’re staged shows so much as i mean that they are play scripts, of the sort you have probably encountered in various language/literature classes that include theatrical stuff as texts to study, the standout here being teaching shakespeare as literature. and actually, older drama is very good for illustrating this point, because the scripts have very simple direction, with much room for interpretation and ambiguity. this describes old sprite-based final fantasy games very well. i would argue that playing a 2-D final fantasy game is much like reading plays as literature. the characters, with their makeup and costumes, being squished into 16-bit sprites, introduced with a short line (“a mysterious young woman, born with the gift of magic, and enslaved by the gestahlian empire…”)? dramatis personae. characters moving on simple grid backdrops as simple blocking instructions and set design guidelines. the sprite games had a very few simple signifiers, such as animations-of-the-sprite or thought-bubbles-with-hearts-in-them etc. to communicate the character’s emotional state during scenes, functioning like [angrily], [enamored], or [shocked] direction notes in a play script. and, of course—the silence of it all, dialogue standing alone and quiet, with none of the grounding and contextualization and narration to peer into character’s inner lives that happens in novels or other forms of literature. there is, in old-school final fantasy games, a level of ambiguity unavoidable in the final product that simply could not have made it past storyboards in modern games.

for a general dramatic example, consider kain’s little mind-control problem throughout ff4 (the character, best friend of the hero cecil, is mind-controlled by main antagonist golbez to turn him against those he loves, whose magic can prey on kain’s jealousy, resentment, and insecurity festering in those relationships to effect the mind control). we are given bare, silent dialogue and flat animations to communicate the character’s struggle to control himself and his regret and shame following episodes of this, because it’s a sprite game. (given this, is it any wonder that this character so often falls flat with players)? for a general comedic example, consider the character of ghido, in ff5—a wise old turtle mentor figure, providing the heroes with guidance, assistance, and truly scathing sarcasm (“what the warlock seeks is in the great forest of moore.” “the forest of moore?” “trees, my dear boy, lots of them”). imagine what a voice actor and animator with good comic timing could do with that character.

and for an example of how much is left ambiguous: consider ffvi’s opera aftermath. not the actual performance—the scene immediately following, that introduces and establishes setzer’s character, that demonstrates celes’ cleverness, ruthlessness, and chutzpah, that develops locke’s relationship with celes and sabin’s with edgar’s by revealing the truth behind an event (at that point) long past. with the dialogue as script, the animations as rough blocking and directions, and the characters’ sprites as guidelines for costuming—give that, a brief synopsis of what happened before and character personalities, and time to workshop and rehearse to five good actors, they should be able to deliver three or four or more variations on that scene that communicate radically different things without much difficulty.

and beyond acting: costume design, set design, lighting, all of these things are communicative. is the blackjack interior well-kept? is it in disarray? is it perfectly orderly, but covered in dust? these things tell us different thing about the airship, and about its owner. and—recreating setzer’s costume, such as his coat, from the sprite (ignoring concept art and going solely on what’s in the game itself): is it old, or new? in good condition? in a state of disrepair, or obviously-has-been-repaired? is it heavy and stiff, or light and easy to wear? does it fit setzer perfectly, or is it too large or too small? how does he wear it? all of these things, again, inform the character and thus the scene differently. all of these are necessarily left ambiguous because of what a sprite game is and how it must work.

now, of course there are some key differences, but even these can inform and inspire analyses in fun ways. the biggest difference is that the custom is, in serious game thought, to consider each of these individual games their own discrete text, finished, complete, whereas in theater, a script that is unperformed is incomplete. the performances and realizations of the script are needed for the thing to be fully complete. consider how this does and does not apply to remakes, re-rereleases in analysis!

to be honest, this lens of formal analysis is something i think about a great deal when it comes to ffxiv—because although the array of resources to draw from is much larger than the sprite games, i still think about actions as stage directions and blocking in the majority of content—how it is rare for characters to perform actions other than the basic player-accessible emotes or stock npc emote actions, and thus by so doing imbue the scene with extra meaning (e.g. zenos’s hauling yotsuyu up by her hair, both his action and her pained expression and pose in response). in this simple formal way, ffxiv is itself (inadvertantly or not) a classic throwback.

and speaking of classic throwbacks within the series as a whole—consider ff9, the origin itself of the theater ship prima vista that we’ll be seeing tomorrow. the entire game is heavy with the history of the games prior that it chooses to make public and displayed rather than more layered in and circumspect; it is also riddled through and through with references to theater. and i am not sure these things—this choice for their self-conscious and self-celebrating flagship game—was unconnected, unconscious. the theatrical elements of ff9 are surface (the protagonist is an actor on that theater ship prima vista, there are play scenes both as opening and as closing) and structural: characters have soliloquys and asides, the five-act structure is followed religiously.

and, lastly: in light of all i have just said, consider what it says about developers’ relationship with their audience that the two leads of that game, zidane and garnet/dagger, are respectively an actor and a devoted theater aficionado, that she asks him to “kidnap” her and he does so, and together they go on an adventure and fall in love.