Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
So, my serious take on the scene and your ability to save Cid is that it works in the context of following the playground rumor. If you played this part "naturally" and have Cid die, and then heard about how he can totally be saved and did that in a new playthrough, that's pretty great because you have memories of the first gut-wrenching scene and now you get to say, "no, that's not what's going to happen now."
However, from that point on it kinda undermines the death scene. It can be avoided, it's not even hard to avoid (just kinda obnoxious and may require a reload or two), so if Cid dies after you know how this thing work, it's because you let him die rather than as a natural outcome of established events.
Which ties into the next thing: a lot of people have commented on the benefits of player agency, and they're all wrong. Like, player agency is cool in general, we all love the ability to commit genocide or not to commit genocide, but this specific scene derives its pathos from the feeling of hopelessness. Celes did everything she could to help Cid, and it wasn't enough, couldn't be enough because the world is dying and this is the end (and then she finds the faintest ray of hope in the form of a broken-winged bird that gives her just enough strength to keep going and crawl out of black despair).
You don't need the possibility of winning for this scene to work. Not being able to change the outcome makes this scene stronger, not weaker as it allows you to better connect with Celes and put yourself in her place.
Probably the biggest problem here is that Cid's death scene is just plainly better than his survival. It's more emotionally charged, more poignant, more grounded in reality than basically anything else in FF series so far, but it's also the lose state. It's a game you can win, and you're rewarded for winning, but losing just works better narratively, which creates a friction between story and gameplay that doesn't truly need to be there.
In conclusion, RIP to your grandpa, but I'm different. I have faster fish.
However, from that point on it kinda undermines the death scene. It can be avoided, it's not even hard to avoid (just kinda obnoxious and may require a reload or two), so if Cid dies after you know how this thing work, it's because you let him die rather than as a natural outcome of established events.
Which ties into the next thing: a lot of people have commented on the benefits of player agency, and they're all wrong. Like, player agency is cool in general, we all love the ability to commit genocide or not to commit genocide, but this specific scene derives its pathos from the feeling of hopelessness. Celes did everything she could to help Cid, and it wasn't enough, couldn't be enough because the world is dying and this is the end (and then she finds the faintest ray of hope in the form of a broken-winged bird that gives her just enough strength to keep going and crawl out of black despair).
You don't need the possibility of winning for this scene to work. Not being able to change the outcome makes this scene stronger, not weaker as it allows you to better connect with Celes and put yourself in her place.
Probably the biggest problem here is that Cid's death scene is just plainly better than his survival. It's more emotionally charged, more poignant, more grounded in reality than basically anything else in FF series so far, but it's also the lose state. It's a game you can win, and you're rewarded for winning, but losing just works better narratively, which creates a friction between story and gameplay that doesn't truly need to be there.
In conclusion, RIP to your grandpa, but I'm different. I have faster fish.
I'll seize on the tangential relation of people discussing Celes' Theme again to say that my favorite version of it is off an album that Nobuo Uematsu famously said he hates:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXyNJ3_T218
Anyways, everyone else already said it best, peak fiction, etc... The bad outcome is so heavily weighted for new/blind playthroughs, and is itself so emotionally resonant that I don't have an issue considering it the canon event...even if I'm a sentimental fool and always reloaded until I was able to save Cid instead.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXyNJ3_T218
Anyways, everyone else already said it best, peak fiction, etc... The bad outcome is so heavily weighted for new/blind playthroughs, and is itself so emotionally resonant that I don't have an issue considering it the canon event...even if I'm a sentimental fool and always reloaded until I was able to save Cid instead.
This is spoken as someone who hasn't played the game and doesn't know future plot.
Something about the esper genocide that strikes me is that, for all that Kefka suddenly displays the ability to turn espers into magicite despite established lore, the Empire never uses that magicite because it stops existing pretty quickly. Breaking the lore doesn't add anything.
I think that a better version of the scene might be to repeat the Empire's action in Doma, since we know that the Empire has fast acting magic poison and decades of research into Esper biology. An esper specific mass poisoning where the peace talk were supposed to happen also has the benefit of explaining why Super Kefka didn't kill the party as well as the espers.
Something about the esper genocide that strikes me is that, for all that Kefka suddenly displays the ability to turn espers into magicite despite established lore, the Empire never uses that magicite because it stops existing pretty quickly. Breaking the lore doesn't add anything.
I think that a better version of the scene might be to repeat the Empire's action in Doma, since we know that the Empire has fast acting magic poison and decades of research into Esper biology. An esper specific mass poisoning where the peace talk were supposed to happen also has the benefit of explaining why Super Kefka didn't kill the party as well as the espers.
- Location
- Texas
All this talk just reminds me of Dragon Quest XI where the "End Game" is something like a third of the overall game length. And involves time travel after already saving the world, so you can go back and beat your own high score. Also undoes a lot of poignant character bits.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
At least that one
has going back to fix tragedy at the cost of character development cause larger problems
Agreed. Ultros you beat down because he's screwing with you. Kefka you beat down because if you give him a chance, he'll slaughter a town. See Doma, and what happened just as soon as Leo left.
The Esper genocide needs a bit of handwaving (spell is specifically anti-Esper, Kefka came with defenses and weapons in place based off of the attack on Vector, etc.), but the Floating Continent stuff is completely in character. Kefka finds a chance to obtain absolute power (the Warring Triad), seizes it, bites the hand that feeds him (offs Gestahl), and then goes for the most destructive thing possible (imbalancing the statues and breaking the world). Shoot, half the reason you probably survive the Floating Continent is because wrecking the world is more entertaining to Kefka than killing your party.
Just as the War of the Magi and all warned, the wrong man got ahold of the power, and the world is ruined as a result.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
To me, the choice of whether or not you can save Cid (and Shadow) brings to mind the universal question of anyone who is a soldier/adventurer/leader/whatever where they lose friends and/or fellow soldiers/etc. along the the way. That eternal question of: "What if I did something different, would my buddy Johnny be alive?"
Celes may or may not be asking herself that question (if we take the Bad Ending) but with the (likely subsequent) knowledge those characters could have been saved, it leaves the player with that question. Putting themselves in the shoes of Celes - and larger party as a whole in the case of Shadow - they can feel the nagging of that never-ending "what if?" when it comes to the deaths of your companions. Compared to, say, Tellah and Galuf, who never had a chance at survival because the story mandated they die. Instead, Cid and Shadow have a chance and it's up to you, the player, to make those decisions and perhaps change their fates.
Now obviously this is an SNES game and it has a save feature, so the "choice" isn't exactly super complex and in the era of Internet game guides the "solution" can be made equally obvious to you; and if you screw up it's a fairly quick save/reload to try again - at least in Cid's case, not sure where the last save point on the Floating Continent was. But still, to me that's the mindset the game designers gave me, whether intentional or not, whether the limitations of the hardware and software at the time could really pull it off or not. Which makes it all the more powerful to me.
*These days there are certain hardcore games that can control the save files in such a way that it is really One Save Per Game (absent some kind of hacking the game to get around it) so that a "do over" means going all the way back to game start, which would arguably make something like this way more meaningful; not to mention modern gaming's comparative freedoms in allowing things like branching paths and so on. But still, for the time I think this is about the best they could do so I give them credit for it.
Celes may or may not be asking herself that question (if we take the Bad Ending) but with the (likely subsequent) knowledge those characters could have been saved, it leaves the player with that question. Putting themselves in the shoes of Celes - and larger party as a whole in the case of Shadow - they can feel the nagging of that never-ending "what if?" when it comes to the deaths of your companions. Compared to, say, Tellah and Galuf, who never had a chance at survival because the story mandated they die. Instead, Cid and Shadow have a chance and it's up to you, the player, to make those decisions and perhaps change their fates.
Now obviously this is an SNES game and it has a save feature, so the "choice" isn't exactly super complex and in the era of Internet game guides the "solution" can be made equally obvious to you; and if you screw up it's a fairly quick save/reload to try again - at least in Cid's case, not sure where the last save point on the Floating Continent was. But still, to me that's the mindset the game designers gave me, whether intentional or not, whether the limitations of the hardware and software at the time could really pull it off or not. Which makes it all the more powerful to me.
*These days there are certain hardcore games that can control the save files in such a way that it is really One Save Per Game (absent some kind of hacking the game to get around it) so that a "do over" means going all the way back to game start, which would arguably make something like this way more meaningful; not to mention modern gaming's comparative freedoms in allowing things like branching paths and so on. But still, for the time I think this is about the best they could do so I give them credit for it.
ChildishChimera
A umbran summon
- Location
- New York
Hmm while Kefka is comedic I don't think the Game ever portrays him as non-threatening the first thing we see him do is command the armors that made the first area a cakewalk and the second is him going behind Leo's back to poison all of Doma and showing the impact instead of just listing the damage in a text crawl. By setting him up with Victories we get a preview of what happens when we can't stop him especially since even in the Kefka's down scenes he's still a homicidal jester who thinks less of everyone around him an has no empathy. So we beat and stave him off during act 2 because the game spent time outlining the narrative effects of a Kefka win. Hes the games Darth Vader so while not the main threat he has a decent amount of Antagonist agency built up so far.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
I would argue that Kefka is treated like a joke, even by the game, the first time you meet him at Figaro. It's Doma where he goes from comic relief to complete monster. From that point Kefka can be entertaining but he's never a joke.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
I dunno about that. He acts like a petty, capricious asshole (accurate) and then promptly escalates to war crimes as soon as he doesn't get what he wants. Yes he has funny lines and wacky responses, but considering his actions that just shows that he's unhinged and dangerous.
He's certainly a bit more of a joke at first, but he also still responds to not immediately handing Terra over with "so anyways I just set your entire castle on fire". Guy's a psychopath dressed in clown shoes from the very start, just because Edgar happens to have the counter of desert submersible castle tech doesn't make it less murderous.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
Oh, back at Figaro he's still a psychopath, but he's the kind of ineffectual Saturday morning cartoon villain psycho that can still be treated as a joke by the narrative, at least that's how I felt about it. I'm pretty sure randomly setting things on fire at the first sign of resistance would fit as a Captain Planet villain, even.
The first time we see Kefka he enslaved Terra and ordered her to slaughter fifty soldiers, the second time he lights a stone castle on fire at the slightest provocation, and the third is Doma. Just because he's a ridiculous person doesn't mean he isn't consistently shown as a deadly threat.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not to "man who has only seen one movie before" this, but Kefka very obviously draws from the Joker and, hm, how to put it.
A lot of people celebrate arcs like The Killing Joke (though it's way more ambivalently remembered today) or Death in the Family ('s more modern retellings that don't inexplicably involve Ayatollah Khomeini) where the Joker laughs and cracks jokes while being a genuine menace whose actions have permanent, terrible consequences for the cast of heroes he's an antagonist to (crippled secondary character, main character death).
But a lot of people don't remember Emperor Joker, and among those who do, it's more remembered as... weird...? "That time the Joker got reality-warping powers and became an invincible Superman antagonist who could toy around with the entire Justice League for cheap gags" is more a comic book history novelty than something that's strongly remembered as part of his character. (FFVI predates Emperor Joker, obviously, I'm using these as examples.)
There's a spectrum between "character is evil comedic relief whose efforts at evil are undone," "character makes jokes that mostly underscore that he's a genuine psycho with a rising body count," and "character laughs while taking over reality and redefining the setting for his own amusement," and Kefka basically spends the whole game on a running sprint from one end of the spectrum to the other, and a lot of how you feel about him, I think, is going to depend on how much you buy that he can believably go the distance.
A lot of people celebrate arcs like The Killing Joke (though it's way more ambivalently remembered today) or Death in the Family ('s more modern retellings that don't inexplicably involve Ayatollah Khomeini) where the Joker laughs and cracks jokes while being a genuine menace whose actions have permanent, terrible consequences for the cast of heroes he's an antagonist to (crippled secondary character, main character death).
But a lot of people don't remember Emperor Joker, and among those who do, it's more remembered as... weird...? "That time the Joker got reality-warping powers and became an invincible Superman antagonist who could toy around with the entire Justice League for cheap gags" is more a comic book history novelty than something that's strongly remembered as part of his character. (FFVI predates Emperor Joker, obviously, I'm using these as examples.)
There's a spectrum between "character is evil comedic relief whose efforts at evil are undone," "character makes jokes that mostly underscore that he's a genuine psycho with a rising body count," and "character laughs while taking over reality and redefining the setting for his own amusement," and Kefka basically spends the whole game on a running sprint from one end of the spectrum to the other, and a lot of how you feel about him, I think, is going to depend on how much you buy that he can believably go the distance.
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I honestly kinda... disagree. For me the possibility of Cid's surivival adds nothing to the death. Since if you know he can survive, it's easy to do And like... I know how people talk about games. People talk about games where the golden ending was achieved, it's treated as the default state. Letting Cid live casts a shadow about the way the game is talked about, about how people think of the ending. Having a better ending leads a weight where it can be the 'true' ending and people start talking about it as the default. Basically any 'golden ending' is treated as canon by most communities.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
At the very least the Emperor's been using it, since during his fight with Kefka he starts busting out super high tier magic like Meltdown and I don't see him risking his health on the procedures that Celes and Kefka went through (not to mention Meltdown is way beyond anything that Celes is capable of).
I mostly remember Emperor Joker for it's fantastic adaptation in Brave and the Bold.
Well yeah, obviously Celes isn't capable of casting Meltdown.
Because Terra is the one who learns it if you somehow get her to level 86.
(not really considering that a spoiler because... you're not getting anyone to level 86 without insane levels of unnecessary grinding.)
- Location
- Canada, probably
Sorry for being late here, but as someone who didn't know anything past Kefka's super-awesome death-beam-that-only-works-on-espers scene because that made me quit the game in disgust… and then learning that it's followed by more of the same…
I genuinely don't care that the world ended. I'm sure it doesn't help that I dislike post-apocalypse settings, but mainly I just have no investment left in the story, because the writers blew it so hard with their shitty clown DMPC.
But then, I'm unusually prone to total suspension-of-disbelief failure. I don't much care for Earthbound, for example—a famously amazing game—purely because I hate the ending with a searing irrational rancor, which manages to taint the entire—again, amazing—game for me.
The tale of Celes and Cid, though, is haunting. What a powerful story of loss, and tragedy, and despair, and finding the strength to go on after giving up, that they decided to completely ruin by making it a secret bad ending. TWICE, including Shadow.
I… I don't… what happened here? How is it possible for the writers to be so good at storytelling, and yet so incredibly garbage at putting that story into gameplay? It's like a master chef who makes a mouthwateringly delicious pie, then throws it in your face. Y'know, like a clown.
Well yeah, obviously Celes isn't capable of casting Meltdown.
Because Terra is the one who learns it if you somehow get her to level 86.
I'm now wondering about my level grinding habits that I grew into with the SNES JRPGs I played. I know I had at least one save file with everyone lvl99 (it was my "no learning magic from magicite or items, just naturally" run), and I would swear I had another where a few characters reached that level simply because I used them that much.
I know I usually tried to have Fire Dance before the raft splits everyone up, so I think I was running about 5-10 levels ahead of Omicron here.
Spectral Waltz
Scatterbrained Writer
- Location
- Walking the Endless Corridors
Well I think if there's one thing to take away from this it's that no two reads of this game can agree on it's quality.
It's not a secret bad ending. In a blind playthrough Cid is almost certainly going to die because the game does not tell you the rules of the minigame, including the fact that it's on a real world timer or that the fish that are easy to catch will poison him.
Sure, if you know what you're doing it's largely trivial to save him, but the game goes out of its way to not tell you how. If anything, Cid living is the secret ending. Anyone who plays the game without knowing the hidden mechanics will see Cid die, because you have to catch a lot of the fast fish to save him. Casual players aren't going to deliberately go out of their way to avoid the easy fish when there's no immediate indication that they'll hurt Cid.
So the reason the Emporer couldn't defeat Kefka is that when he joined Kefka's party he was auto-leveled without any magicite stat bonuses. Got it.
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
As a woman who's seen a different movie, it's definitely something I'd have previously said was essentially impossible to pull off in a satisfying manner, but I have definitively been proven wrong on that front. It's defs possible to watch a villain jump from D-Tier joke to S-tier living god in a single moment and make the end result feel genuinely true. Not quite sure why Movie landed for me, where this didn't. Kefka makes sense as the logical endpoint of the Empire's ideology unmasked, and destroying the world is the logical extension, but still...