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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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I think part of the problem is just the way Marche talks. IDK if it's a thing in the original Japanese or if it's a translation issue, but he comes off as really didactic and condescending, so the emotional results are less "Luke exhorts his father to turn away from the dark side" and more "pint-size John Galt rants about the banality of unconscious art."
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
and all it would cost me would be my memories of the world I was living in now, and I had reason to think he could actually do it, I'd be willing to die for him too
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But if you lose all your memories of your current existence that means the person which gets to enjoy all of these theoretical benefits is arguably not even you. At that point it just turns into a weird reincarnationist millennarianism.

Plus isn't there also a problem with overruling the autonomy of the people who like, don't want their world to end?

Isn't "I will destroy the world to usher in a recreation of my own preferred world" literally just

 
I mean, you're not wrong per se. Where do you think all the black mask Ascians came from? We're only shown there being memory crystals for the convocation, after all.

The difference is, he put the people who agreed his world existing would be preferable to the one they suffered through in full body concealing robes and taught them to chant slogans about his dark god, whereas Marche let them keep their own outfits and had them do more god slaying than god chanting. And without the robes or chanting or unholy rituals centered on a dark god, can you really call it a cult?[/s]
 
Amidatelion said:
But if you lose all your memories of your current existence that means the person which gets to enjoy all of these theoretical benefits is arguably not even you. At that point it just turns into a weird reincarnationist millennarianism.

Plus isn't there also a problem with overruling the autonomy of the people who like, don't want their world to end?

Isn't "I will destroy the world to usher in a recreation of my own preferred world" literally just

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Marche Radiuju, Normal 14 Year Old Child: "Case in point - I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you."
 
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What I am getting out of this is the realization that there is surprisingly fertile ground for a crossover fanfic between Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Part Two of Fate/Grand Order.
 
Marche: "Listen, just listen. I was TOLD by one of the fundamental pillars of this world that this world and everyone from it is fake. And now I want to go back to my mom, My tv and my indoor plumbing so the best way to do that is to break everything.
Montblanc: "......@#$% it! I'm in."
 
venom3053000 said:
Marche: "Listen, just listen. I was TOLD by one of the fundamental pillars of this world that this world and everyone from it is fake. And now I want to go back to my mom, My tv and my indoor plumbing so the best way to do that is to break everything.
Montblanc: "......@#$% it! I'm in."
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Montblanc: "Kupo this kupo-ing world"
 
Random reminder of something I find hilarious every time I think about FFTA Montblanc: there is a story mission where you get introduced to the Lawless areas in the game where characters can actually perma-die, instead of everything just being a game. It is totally possible to kill Montblanc off on a permanent basis here, halfway through the game, just for the hell of it. Closest thing to a major character you have in your guild before the postgame content lets you recruit a bunch of named folks, and you can just go "nah he ded".
 
Omicron said:
Alright, my play has completely stalled since the last update (I have done several more random battles but not progressed the plot at all), and I know why: I am getting choice paralysis. I am having choice paralysis both from each individual Ability to purchase as I gain JP, and from trying to figure out the job progression of each of my characters, and without being able to decide on how to advance their growth I can't move forward with the plot. Plan 'just roll with it' has failed, it turns out I can't actually do that.

I'm going to need to obsessively plan my full team's final job set-up ahead of time before I can do anything else.
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You've already been handed the keys for the missing melee classes and your mages already have access to all the stuff they need to annihilate everything while supporting your party.

However.

I'm going to break from my usual foaming at the mouth level of NO SPOILERS stance to tell you, given your previously expressed desire for Holy Sword Skills, that grinding stuff out instead of playing organically is going to be a waste of your time.

In the interest of saving you time and helping you avoid feeling like you've been tricked into wasting it, let me leave you with a final observation: it is very common in this game for people to wind up with party compositions wildly different from the "Ramza + 4 generics" that you start with.
 
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Amidatelion said:
But if you lose all your memories of your current existence that means the person which gets to enjoy all of these theoretical benefits is arguably not even you. At that point it just turns into a weird reincarnationist millennarianism.
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That's just one of those 'Plant trees whose shade you will never sit under'-things. Trying to fight for a kinder world, even if you yourself will never experience it personally, isn't weird.
 
StormyEyed said:
So my core problem with Marche is that he shoots almost immediately into Ivalice Is Bad And Must Be Destroyed - I think it would have easily been a much stronger story if Marche started out enjoying this new fantasy world just like his friends, only to then explicitly realize the human cost of the world to everyone but this core group, then tried to convince them to give it all up and fails, and is thus forced to end the harmful fantasy for the good of everybody else suffering. And that's honestly not that out there in terms of "escapism is bad" stories.

The thing is, he never really has that moment of enjoying the fantasy world, his almost immediate response is to tear it all down, seeming to assume the audience will already know that escapism is bad, but well, a lot of children in the game's target audience are probably wondering why he has such a problem with a cool fantasy world! As far as I remember, he barely even seems tempted by the world in front of him.

It's a weird thing where like, the outline of the story seems fine enough on paper, but the execution was just really phenomenally bad.
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Wouldn't even have been that hard just using the existing missions. Just make the map where you fight those three zombies with suspiciously familiar names (coughMewt'sbulliescough) a story mission where Marche recognize them and is horrified.
 
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CeBrudras said:
That's just one of those 'Plant trees whose shade you will never sit under'-things. Trying to fight for a kinder world, even if you yourself will never experience it personally, isn't weird.
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When it requires the obliteration of the current world and everyone in it, it is kinda weird! It's not like they ran a great Ivalician plebiscite to determine if everyone was okay with it.
 
Parzival said:
Omi isn't even playing FFTA and you are still arguing about it.
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Less arguing, more dissecting where and how it went wrong and then joking about such, from what I can tell

which is basically what Omi would do if he did play it, the fact that everybody (including him) can talk about such in depth (or what passes for depth for FFTA) off the top of their heads (and there not being much else to talk about for it but gameplay) AFIK is a big part of why he's not, so we're just being efficient by cramming the non-gameplay substance of what would be weeks if not months of updates into a day or two of memeposting between updates
 
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Amidatelion said:
When it requires the obliteration of the current world and everyone in it, it is kinda weird! It's not like they ran a great Ivalician plebiscite to determine if everyone was okay with it.
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Also, from the sound of it (basically everything I know about FFTA I think I've gotten from this thread, which surely makes me extremely qualified to contribute to this discussion :D), the cult members don't exactly have a lot of evidence the better world will even exist. It sounds like they're basically just going entirely off the word of the cult leader, which is filled with wild, fantastic stories about how much better everything will be for the people who will exist in the new world. And, by the way, even in his own claims he's not planning to sacrifice himself to bring it about, just everyone else including all his followers; he will get to live in the new utopia resting on their bodies. But it's okay, just like all the it-sure-looks-like-murder he's telling them to do, because none of these people are real, anyway.

If he was leading a revolution to topple the nobility and institute a democracy with a legal system that at least attempted to be egalitarian, extensive protections for civil rights, investment in infrastructure for the public good, a voting franchise that started with every surviving member of his victorious army and would be extended equally to everyone as fast as reconstruction allowed, sure, a lot of people might be willing to die for him so others could live better lives. Even if it was something like a fight to replace the Bad Dynasty And Nobles with a new Good Dynasty And Nobles drawn from the army, I could see that. But "Neither you nor anyone else are real, so elevate me to the true, better world on a tower of skulls and die joyful for my ascension, oh and the better lives other people will also have in that world"?
 
Tactics Advanced really is a special sort of shallow that people argue about the ethics of a dream apocalypse more then they do the ethics of the game about ethics.

I suppose it's partially because Tactics actually has an actual thesis on whether one should cling heavily to ones morals at the cost of reputation and livelihood, while in Tactics Advanced Marche's ""sigma male"" unga bunga, dream bad quest is kind of a personal affront to players who spent money and will spend considerable hours inside said virtual dream.
 
Tactics Advance's problem is that it seems to be completely unaware of the actual ethical questions it's bringing up. It'd be one thing if it actually stopped to ask "is it justified to tear down a self-consistent dream world for the sake of the real world? What even makes a real world when by all accounts this Ivalice is a self contained reality in it's own right?" Or if it stopped to actually make it clear how every creature save the main four are real people twisted into fantasy critters with their memoty being suppressed and overwritten, and that they're on some level aware of it and bringing an end to the dream is doing them a favor.

Instead the game seems fully on board with Marche's plan and never once stops to suggest that it's anything but correct, and even when the player stops to think "hey maybe what we're doing has some awkward implications we should maybe address?" The game wordlessly points to the next pillar of reality for you to tear down.

FFTA is really in that special sweet spot where it raises just enough interesting ideas that I can't not think about it, but is so wholly uninterested in them itself that I can't help but find it deeply frustrating. Like I've said it before, the basic outline of its "escapism is bad" plot is a perfectly workable moral for its target audience, it's just that the execution of this theme is absolutely buckwild.
 
Hm. Does anybody know whether the Tactics Advance team went on to design other games thereafter? That could help with better understanding what they were going for.

Like, take Drakengard; if analyzed in isolation, one might be unsure what the game's point actually is, what is glorifying and what is condemning, but when you put it in the larger context of other works developed under Yoko Taro's direction, a lot of the unclear elements make more sense, and while they don't make the game any better, they make the point of the plot and the themes easier to discern.

So... do we have anything else about the game's authors that one could double-check FFTA against? I don't think it was developed by the same team as original FFT, was it?
 
Egleris said:
Hm. Does anybody know whether the Tactics Advance team went on to design other games thereafter? That could help with better understanding what they were going for.

Like, take Drakengard; if analyzed in isolation, one might be unsure what the game's point actually is, what is glorifying and what is condemning, but when you put it in the larger context of other works developed under Yoko Taro's direction, a lot of the unclear elements make more sense, and while they don't make the game any better, they make the point of the plot and the themes easier to discern.

So... do we have anything else about the game's authors that one could double-check FFTA against? I don't think it was developed by the same team as original FFT, was it?
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The director also did Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis a few years before but that looks to be about it.
 
Then FFA2 implies that Montblanc vaguely remembers Marche from a dream when the MC shows up to Ivalice.

Which is certainly a choice. Definitely doesn't rise any questions there. :confused:

Montblanc: "I see you and feel like in a dream I meet my greatest friend and now will never see them again, Kupo."
Luso: "...Do you need a minute?"
Montblanc: "No need new friend! Now go out and commit legal violence for profits, Kupo!"
Luso: "Yeah! Best summer vacation ever!"
 
Reese said:
Also, from the sound of it (basically everything I know about FFTA I think I've gotten from this thread, which surely makes me extremely qualified to contribute to this discussion :D), the cult members don't exactly have a lot of evidence the better world will even exist. It sounds like they're basically just going entirely off the word of the cult leader, which is filled with wild, fantastic stories about how much better everything will be for the people who will exist in the new world. And, by the way, even in his own claims he's not planning to sacrifice himself to bring it about, just everyone else including all his followers; he will get to live in the new utopia resting on their bodies. But it's okay, just like all the it-sure-looks-like-murder he's telling them to do, because none of these people are real, anyway.

If he was leading a revolution to topple the nobility and institute a democracy with a legal system that at least attempted to be egalitarian, extensive protections for civil rights, investment in infrastructure for the public good, a voting franchise that started with every surviving member of his victorious army and would be extended equally to everyone as fast as reconstruction allowed, sure, a lot of people might be willing to die for him so others could live better lives. Even if it was something like a fight to replace the Bad Dynasty And Nobles with a new Good Dynasty And Nobles drawn from the army, I could see that. But "Neither you nor anyone else are real, so elevate me to the true, better world on a tower of skulls and die joyful for my ascension, oh and the better lives other people will also have in that world"?
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In retrospect, people really should've seen it coming once Marche started carrying the behelit around.
 
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