'Hecatoncheir' SMH that's a duocheir. AKA just some fuckin' dude. Gimme a monster that's just a fucked up sphere of a hundred arms, you cowards.
(Yes I know it's in FFXIII, it's still not Maximum Fucked Up the way a hecatoncheires should be.)
And they're back in FFXIV and... I don't know, it looks like they're just back to two arms? They look a lot like the gigas from FFXI actually. Assuming I'm looking at screenshots of the right things anyway.
I was a bit surprised that they continued with the shortened "Hecatoncheir" name for the FFXIV enemies instead of using the full name.
This is a fun one for @Chehrazad. Ahriman is the first instance of a recurring Final Fantasy antagonist, typically being a giant floating eyeball with a single eye, a mouth, and bat wings. Here, it's a boss; in FFXIV, it's one of the more dangerous but still relatively common forms of voidsent.
They appeared in FFXI too, mostly in the Northlands (the game's "frozen hellscape" area), and are one of the relatively few kinds of Demon-type enemies that appeared in the earlier years of the game. (I think it was just them and the Dark Kindred prior to the second expansion.)
I thought Squall was so fucking cool. And that Rinoa sucked and was cramping his style and ruining everything. Not helped by certain writing decisions in FF8 but still, I also did not get what they were doing with him.
I have sort of complicated feelings about all of that. Because while I think I got at least *some* of what they were going for with Squall, but I also found Rinoa's pushy moments aggravating as someone who often does prefer to be left alone, but I still liked her overall, so...
Man, this is an interesting look at stuff that kind of becomes thematically core to a lot of later games, even if it's not explicitly mentioned by name all the time. It's also sort-of a refutation of the idea of there being some chosen mighty heroes who are destined to win, in some ways; they don't win because they're inordinately powerful or anything, they win because they were good enough people that they could develop meaningful bonds with others who were then willing to help in their moments of need.
FFXI gets kind of convoluted here. Because the PC is maybe kinda sorta a chosen one, but... it's also a MMO, and it does at least sometimes acknowledge how that affects things. And the major mission chains all have recurring characters you work with, but how deep any of those connections are varies quite a bit.
And then there's the Trust system, where you use the bonds you have with the people you've met to summon simulacra of them to fight by your side... but because they have to have some available for everyone, it doesn't always feel deep at all. In fact, doing the trust missions on a new character feels almost like a parody of the whole thing. Thinking back on all the times they've worked together... there aren't any! But somehow it still works. o.o
-Morgan.
) and then show stuff like visual gags or character expressions or w/e
