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Squaresoft's Final Fantasy IV was a
flying-colorfully successful attempt to bring a fantasy comic-book
story to life in a videogame. Final Fantasy V stumbled into the
realm of mere videogame (though I like to think it's a damn good one)
in that it lacked artistic direction of the imitation variety; it was
released just three months after Enix's Dragon Quest V, and
more than two years after Dragon Quest IV. Dragon Quest V
was an attempt by its team to both one-up their own previous effort and
show up the growing young upstarts at Square. Dragon Quest V,
as a first for its series, rather than try to make a story befitting
the character designs of its madly popular comic-artist
character-designer Akira Toriyama or its acclaimed, classically trained
composer Koichi Sugiyama, simply sought to endear itself to the hearts
of its players. It was not big; it was not stupid; it was not silly. It
was, rather, a story about the debt of gratitude one owes one's
parents, told slowly and sweetly, and wrapped up cleanly. Square, whose
Final Fantasy IV is one of the masterpieces of the
first age of narrative videogames because it is bold and dumb,
and garish, gay, even, yet full of fear, slinked off into their
cave in the hills of Tokyo, and set about making their next game
neither a comic book nor a novel nor a home drama. Oh no, they were
going to make an opera.
The term "opera" conjures more false images
than, arguably, any other word used to describe a storytelling form.
When I personally think of the word "novel," I think of a paperback in
my hand. I think of squeezing it with my fingertips. When I think of
"movie," I think of my hand in a bucket of dry popcorn. "Videogame"
makes me think of a Super Nintendo controller -- an Ascii pad, no less.
"Comic book" makes me think of the sight of Jojo's enemy Dio screaming
"URRRRRREY!" in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. "Epic" makes me think
of the headache I had when I first finished reading "The Odyssey."
"Opera" makes me think of a fat lady in a suit of armor and a Viking
helmet, bleating some high song while glass shatters and other random,
vague, bladed chaos crashes down around her.
Is this what an opera is really about,
though? "Vague, bladed chaos"? Most of them are love stories, and many
of those love stories are tragedies, from what I remember of seeing
three opera rehearsals a week for four years at Indiana University,
home of the largest opera stage in the world (by three inches). A study
of the operas called "great" will yield that the greatness of an opera
lies in the libretto. Prokofiev's farce "For Love of Two Oranges" is
considered a masterpiece because of its score's careful attention to
the musical motifs of its contemporaries, not because of its obscenely
idiotic story. Mozart's "Cosi fan tutti" is near moronic in its
frustrating little back-and-forth love story, which offers virtually no
resolution; yet, according to music theory, it is perfect. Its score
evolves, and grows, and climaxes, cross-references itself, and finally
resolves. It can be said, then, that operas, in general, are more
"Empire Strikes Back" than "A New Hope." They end with views of space
stations and dark feelings of catharsis, not with a medal ceremony and
roaring, happy wookiees.
It's the contemporary operas, the ones
composed after careful study of the old, "classiic" operas, that you
have to be careful with. Never does a successful modern man study an
established art form with the desire to imitate and not come away,
perhaps accidentally, innovating one thing or another. George
Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" is a good example. It's a "folk opera," for
one thing, a term the composer applied generously, without anyone
asking him to do so. For another thing, it's in English, it takes place
in America, and the hero is a black man. Not just a black man -- a crippled
black man, and one who sings about such things as "I got plenty o'
nuttin', and nuttin' is plenty fo' me." He's most happy when he "Got my
gal, got my Lawd, got my song." Yet it's still an opera. The story
involves two deaths, one accidental and one homicidal, and the girl is
tragically whisked away by a cocaine dealer. At the end, the hero, on
his two legs that cannot stand, is set on a cart and pointed toward the
horizon by the supporting townspeople: he's going to New York to win
back his cocaine-y girl. The curtain slides down slowly as the music
crescendos and the people wave goodbye. The irony, here, of course, is
that though the story takes place in a little southern town called
"Catfish Row," it opened on Broadway, in New York City, in 1952. So the
question of "What happens to Porgy when he goes to New York to find
Bess?" is easily answerable with a smirk and "He makes a hit on
Broadway." People in the 1950s who either enjoyed opera or pretended to
enjoy opera found this kind of cleverism mighty cute. It's scarce,
these days, that a piece of storytelling, whether it's a novel or even
a videogame, can get away with riffing or even just studying another
form without being clever about it.
See also: Rock-opera. Space-opera.
Soap-opera.
If Final Fantasy VI is an opera,
where is its clever climax? The fact that "it's a videogame" is not
enough to qualify it as a clever take on opera. That it contains an
opera within its story is not "clever" either. That it is also
gargantuanly long compared to any other story called "opera" doesn't
quite do it, either. It is with something resembling regret that I
inform you the most clever thing Final Fantasy VI has going for
it is that it is Japanese, and very much so. Most likely, the opera
outline was selected by its Japanese writers because they wanted to
make a masterpiece. They were confused about Dragon Quest V,
which had broken the RPG story-telling mold in too brutal a way for
them to fathom. It had done this by using the medium of interactive
entertainment to reach for simple, real human emotion, rather than by
standing up cardboard cut-outs of soldiers and wizards and letting them
fall in love to synthesized rock ballads. Dragon Quest V
reached to the edge of the realm of the videogame. Final Fantasy VI
reached outside, and into another realm. (At the same time, Mother 2,
a superior game to both of these, reached outside, and then looked back
in, and observed for five years before getting started.) What Square
held in its now-half-iron fist when it pulled its hands back into the
game-making bubble was the body and soul of aspiring movie director
Yoshinori Kitase. Kitase was charged with the task of making a Final
Fantasy game that lived, breathed, cried, laughed, danced, and sang.
Kitase, drawing upon inspirations as shallow as "Star Wars" novels and
deep as Charles Dickens (most of Final Fantasy VI's storyline
events can be traced back to A Tale of Two Cities in one way or
another), set about making a fantasy-role-playing-game in the opera
mold, perhaps because he had, just two sweaty nights prior to being
asked to present his first portfolio of ideas to Hironobu Sakaguchi,
been dragged out to see "Vanessa" -- or perhaps "Carmen" -- at the
Shibuya Bunkamura with his wife.
The problem is that an opera is about two
hours long, and that's nearly not enough length or girth to justify a
6,900-yen price tag to the Japanese gamers of 1994. (Ten years later,
companies can get away with that kind of price as long as they feature
a solid twenty minutes, at least, of voice-acting from a popular idol
singer.) So it was here that half of Kitase's opera was doomed awry
from the start, and the other half was doomed to rock.
The rocking part of the opera is that, as an
opera that would have to run for at least fifty hours in length, it
would require one ungodly long score. The length requirement of the
score is what forced Final Fantasy series composer and aspiring
rock musician Nobuo Uematsu to demand some instructions aside from
"battle music," "boss battle music," and "boss' boss battle music." In
order to keep the music flowing, and flowing well, Kitase worked
closely with Uematsu to assure that each theme sounded like the
character it was supposed to represent, that each town muzak fit the
mood of the plot's current position, and that each overture was fuller
of the corresponding moment than its own theoretical gimmicks. This
resulted in Nobuo Uematsu's latent talent for composing music that
lingers in the heart's being tapped in a way it has not, to this date,
been tapped again. At the end of its production, Final Fantasy VI
was a twenty-four megabyte cartridge. A great percentage of that is
music.
The soundtrack is the first thing most Final
Fantasy VI fans talk about, when they talk about the game. Though I
believe there are a few soundtracks (three, specifically) that outdo it
in the fields of musical composition, gameplay enhancement, and sheer
genius-factor, I will not deny its place. The range of tracks in Final
Fantasy VI is not as varied as in Mother 2, yet is
staggering nonetheless. The opening overture that accompanies the
(English, even in the Japanese version) credits still manages to call
to mind the march of the magic armor suits toward the mining city of
Narshe. The music once the soldiers reach Narshe is accentuated by
finger-snaps and jazzy piano and this metal breathing of brass.
Terra's theme would be perfect with a fat lady singing a melody right
through the middle. Locke's rousing theme calls to mind the vague
bladed chaos behind the fat lady. Shadow's theme, jew's harp and all,
could use a good folk-operatic song. The operetta itself (the one that
figures prominently into the game's first half) is competent, and
exhibits a nice waltz, and an even nicer pompish dance when you fight
the boss. Almost any of the pieces from this game can be picked out,
played creatively on piano, and not sound like something a classical
music snob would dismiss as "What is that, videogame music or
something?" That, probably, is the highest compliment I, or anyone, can
give the soundtrack, as music.
As something more than music, well --
it's something that a legion of fourteen-year-olds heard and swore
instantly that it was the greatest music ever made. They wrote letters
to videogame magazines, moaning about their love for that music. Many,
if not all, of these people remember every note of that music today.
Whether you owned the soundtrack or not (I, personally, never bought it
until I was twenty-two, and it was used), if you played the game more
than once through (even just one and a half times), you fell under its
spell. That doesn't have to mean you love the music; all it means is
that you will not ever forget it. Few videogames can claim this of
their soundtracks, not even Chrono Cross, whose music, though
superior to Final Fantasy VI's in terms of composition and
production value, will never be as boldly loved.
If the music has a fault, it would be its
quality. In the days of Baroque opera, the only quality issue stemmed
from the talents of individual performers. In the days of the 16-bit
RPG, that Super Famicom sound chip really had a way of making
everything sound too washed-clean-out. Most gamers who love the
soundtrack don't care about its quality; they have learned to love the
way the Super Famicom sound chip interpreted a symphony orchestra and
poured it through a metal funnel. However, try showing the opera scene,
with its chalky fake computerized voices, to anyone not enamored of
synthesizers, and they might ask you what the hell it is. Meanwhile, Ys'
"Beat of Terror" has, on many occasions, played in the car stereos of
weekend death-metal freaks who didn't even know it was a track
from a 1989 PC-Engine CD game. When I burn a mix CD, I'd never think of
putting "Dancing Mad" on there. It's too long. Mother 2's
"Eight Melodies," however, was on the CD I burned when I went to Korea
two weeks ago. That is to say that Final Fantasy VI's music
will never be anything outside Final Fantasy music. As what it
is, it is spectacular. If you love Final Fantasy, and if you
cherish the moments you spend while playing it, you will love to relive
those moments by listening to the music. Otherwise, forget it. Not a
single track has that three-minute radio-hit quality about it (Final
Fantasy VII's "One-winged Angel," yes, the in-game version, not the
arranged one, is the only pre-Faye-Wong Final Fantasy track I
can think of that does have that quality, and alas, it is seven
minutes), and whether you like it or not, fans, if it's videogame music
and it doesn't have that quality, I don't want to listen to it in my
car. (Not that I have a car, these days.) Or, uh, on the train.
Operas are scarcely about action or
fighting in the way a Final Fantasy game is about defeating
bosses, so it's hard to place Final Fantasy VI's battle themes
anywhere outside the realm of other Final Fantasy games. I, for
one, even as a fourteen-year-old who never left his bedroom, would have
simply preferred they carry over Final
Fantasy IV's "Fight 2" instead of the vaguely rock-operatic . .
. thing that plays when you fight a boss in Final Fantasy VI.
To me, "Fight 2" is as archetypally "Final Fantasy" as the
victory fanfare, the harp prelude, or the Final Fantasy theme
itself. Or Chocobos, or Cid.
A study of Uematsu's rock-band side-project The Black Mages
can provoke a curious sideways explanation. In that band's live shows,
Uematsu plays a keyboard sparingly, while two guitarists rock the meat
of the songs. The rhythm guitarist plays the chords usually taken care
of by a synthesized string section; the solo guitarist rocks the
otherwise-tinny-brass melody. On The Black Mages album, however, it's
Uematsu's organ all the way. In all seriousness, it sounds more like a
soundtrack to a hockey game than a battle to save the planet. Uematsu
has said that he always wanted to play guitar in a rock band, yet it is
too late in his life to learn. Listening to Final Fantasy VI's
twisty little battle theme in the right context makes me reconsider my
opinion on the guy -- he's a natural-born two-string bassist. I mean,
if you had to pick one musical motif he's most famous for, what would
it be, really? Let me speak to you in guitar tablature:
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
--O-O-O-O-O-O-2-2-O-O-O-O-O-O-2-2-
It's that bassline. Though it goes ridiculous
directions after that simple introduction, it's always that beginning
that hooks us into the fight. So it is that we can play all 255 battles
of Final Fantasy VI required to lift the curse on the Paladin
Shield and not feel any part of the music outside those 4080
starting bass notes. If I were Squaresoft, I'd hold a contest, asking
bands in Tokyo's underground rock scene to present a Final Fantasy
battle theme. The rules would be that it has to start with that
sixteen-note bass intro and have no words. That would have probably
produced a great battle theme for VI. It could still produce a
great theme in the future, if such themes were still necessary.
However, that's getting to the gameplay
aspect. We'll cover that in a moment. For now, I think I was talking
about what's right and what's wrong about Final
Fantasy VI as an "opera":
If the game truly aspires to be an opera,
then it's doing so too happily. I personally think the key to making a
clever modern opera lies in either the conservative use of enough
electric guitars or lyrics that indicate the singers don't really want
to be singing. In Final Fantasy VI, the singers aren't even
singing at all. The dialogue itself is functional, if occasionally
peppered with a joke or a "Star Wars" reference. The Japanese text is
rather flat, actually; it reads like an essay on linguistics. Ted
Woolsey's superb English version, Final Fantasy III, reminds us
pleasantly that, while translations cannot, as a rule, be superior to
the source material, localizations most certainly can. Woolsey's words
work well. They're as direct as possible with regard to the source, and
each character speaks with a minimal dialect. In the swarm-translated Chrono
Cross, we meet four characters in one hour who sound like they're
either from different continents or different galaxies. In Final
Fantasy III, everyone sounds like they grew up in a different part
of Boston.
I have already expressed that operas are
about the music, and Final Fantasy VI has superb music that
does not stand on its own. Opera's music should stand on its own, even
without words. How many of you have heard the "Torreador's March" from
Carmen in a gasoline commercial without having ever seen the opera? I
suppose you could say it's a flaw of Final Fantasy VI as an
opera that its music is married to the situations its music
accentuates. It holds its story in too high regard. And what's more,
its story has little focus, and no focal hero, and not a single
character who sings. Except one. If you can call it singing.
The first character we meet is Tina Branford,
a girl with the capitalized power of Magic. We know from the
organ-fugued prologue that Magic is a power that died out following the
War of the Magi, 1,000 years ago. At that time, humans coexisted with
beings called "Espers," who were the sole carriers of Magic. The humans
were unwise and abusive, and forced the Espers to do evil things, and
eventually the Espers disappeared. Now, the Gastoria Empire seems to
have unearthed the power of Magic, and is looking to conquer the world
with it. We join up with Biggs, Wedge, and Tina on their way to the
town of Narshe, where an Esper has just been discovered, encased in
ice. Biggs and Wedge argue a bit about Tina, saying she's not safe to
be around because she possesses crazy magic powers. It's agreed in the
end that Tina is harmless -- she's been charmed by the General, Kefka,
to do the Empire's bidding. She's grown up as a murder weapon of the
Empire, we know from the story's opening scenes. Of course, by the time
the story properly begins, we've witnessed her murdering a few
townspeople, interfacing with the frozen Esper, and wake up when her
partners are dead and she has no idea who she is. The ignorant locals
are stomping around town looking to retrieve her; the local resistance
movement (not quite dramatized to Les Miserables proportions),
thinking both in her best interests and potential use in the future,
sees her into a hiding place in the hills. When she gets lost all
alone, already being hunted by the Empire and the local militia, the
resistance sends the lovable thief -- no, "treasure-hunter" -- Locke
Cole (named, yes, after revolutionary philospher John Locke) to
retrieve her, resulting in a thrilling clash in the mines beneath the
town. When Locke learns Tina has amnesia, he remembers something from
his past, and decides then and there to help her until she gets her
memory back. (We'll learn about his past, later, should we choose to do
so, when the game enters its second act.) He takes her to Figaro
(there's an opera reference, right there) Castle in the desert, where
the king is reportedly a resistance sympathizer. He's also a hopeless
romantic, like many other supporting characters in opera, though he
doesn't sing a hopeless romantic song, so what's his use? Aw, he's a
nice guy, and we learn, during a sleepless, troubled night in his
castle, by way of a talkative maid, that he has a brother who fled the
kingdom when their father died. We meet up with this brother when we
have to cross a mountain. His brother, Mash, has been wandering around
up there, seeking the man who killed his kung-fu master. This man
happens to get in our way when we're trying to cross the mountain.
We're crossing the mountain because we need to get away from Kefka.
Kefka is that evil Imperial general who was using Tina -- well, he
comes to Figaro, looking for her. King Edgar doesn't give her up,
cueing a thrilling escape sequence and Gastoria's declaration of
all-out war on Figaro. Along the road to the resistance base, Edgar and
Locke whisper about Tina's freaky magic abilities. Tina gets
self-conscious.
She's even more self-conscious when finally
at the resistance base with her three new friends. The resistance
leader, Banon, takes her aside and tells her like it is -- he wants her
to help them fight back against the Empire. The Empire is up to
something evil. Tina, weighed with responsibility, whether she chooses
to help the resistance or not (the choice is up to the player, though
it doesn't many difference aside from a few dialogue boxes and a free
item), is ushered away from the resistance camp when a messenger comes
from South Figaro, warning of the Empire's attack. Locke heads toward
Figaro to slow the Empire's movements. Mash, Edgar, Banon, and Tina
escape toward Narshe via raft. After an attack by a vicious, talkative
octopus, Mash is separated from the rest of the heroes, and the screen
fades to black.
As an opera, this is where Final Fantasy
VI would end and Final Fantasy VII would begin. It does not
end here, however. It has established too many characters, and the
player is perhaps, by this point, too engaged in the game to possibly
stop playing. The music, the sound, the graphics -- near-photo-real
backgrounds were new technology in 1994 -- and the leisurely pace of
wandering the game's towns combined to make the player want to keep
playing. The designers themselves are having too much fun, as well.
Experienced with exuberant methods for telling stories that keep people
pressing buttons (see my explanation of the shipwreck in Final
Fantasy IV), the team had most likely planned the three-way split
probably from before pencil hit paper in the planning room. Sakaguchi
probably passed the idea off to Kitase, making it sound only slightly
like an order. Kitase probably found the idea riveting. He assured that
each of the three story forks was well-rounded and a little operetta in
and of itself. Tina's fork is the least robust; since most of the rest
of the game is about her, she's pushed to the side, here. Locke, whose
relationship development with the secondary heroine Celes will be
secondary in storyline importance (and by "secondary" I mean "secondary
to the Void" that is the rest of the lovable story mess), has to meet
Celes before he can develop with her. So his fork involves meeting
Celes. He meets Celes -- whose last name is Chere -- in the basement of
a wide house with a basement after ferrying cider and soldiers' orders
from citizen to citizen in various disguises. When he finds Celes,
she's being beaten by Imperial soldiers, and called a traitor. From
what is apparent, Celes has magic powers not unlike Tina's; yet she has
been using hers willingly until recently, when she turned traitor.
Locke frees her, instantly loving something about her ambivalence.
Should we play the game all the way through, there's a sweet
no-resolution in which Celes and Locke presumably fall in love, after
Locke has abandoned the hope of using the Phoenix's power to revive his
lost, amnesiac past lover. Locke's decision to love Celes, we'll find,
if we play the proper side-quests, is the core of the game's
development as a piece of drama. Yet it, too, is expendable. The game's
story is littered with expendable dramas that would mean nothing as
mere parts. This is what most people love so much about it.
The most rollicking, thrilling set-piece, by
far, is Mash's fork of the three-way split. And by "most rollicking," I
mean in the whole game, not just of the three in the split.
Mash awakens near a cabin in the woods and instantly begins walking
toward a bizarre odyssey. In the cabin, he meets an old man who needs
his clock repaired, literally, and who also abandoned his child years
ago for some undisclosed reason. (We learn, much later, it's because
his wife had died in childbirth and he'd mistook the child for a
demon.) Outside the cabin stands a ninja named Shadow. A run-in with
Shadow in a bar, earlier, had imbued us with the knowledge that "he'd
slit his momma's throat for a nickel." Shadow tells Mash that if he's
going somewhere and has some money, he'll come along, though he might
run off at any minute. Good sports will bring Shadow along. Unlucky
sorts will see Shadow depart with a few cool words at the end of a
standard random battle. Lucky players will, much later, see one of four
odd dream sequences if Shadow is in the party when staying at an inn.
Scholars in the game's storyline will be compelled to write long
message board posts about why Shadow is the hero of the game. (I won't
do this, here. I can do it on the forums if you ask me
nicely enough.) True enough, when the fate of the world hangs in the
balance, Shadow, hired for an odd mission that involves cooperation
between the resistance and the Empire toward the end of the game's
first half, will do something very unselfish regarding Kefka.
Still, when we first meet him, he's a
bastard. Mash is a happy-go-lucky kind of traveling warrior, so he's
unfazed by Shadow's attitude. Soon, the odd pair (if Shadow hasn't
randomly run off by now) chance upon an Imperial campground. There,
Generals Kefka and Leo are quarreling about whether or not to poison
the people of Doma Castle. We then learn, in a jump sequence, that Doma
is the noble, samurai nation of Cayenne, faithful retainer and family
man. When Leo departs for the Imperial capital of Vector on business,
Kefka goes ahead with the poisoning. Mash and Shadow try to stop him.
Cayenne's family ends up dead. He storms into the campground,
slaughtering. Mash and Shadow help him. When all is killed and
reinforcements are on the way, our Japanese opera has turned into a
story of a karateka, a ninja, and a samurai ducking into a
forest and boarding a railroad car that happens to be possessed by a
ghost and bound for the afterlife. Following an optional interlude by
the World's Greatest Swordsman, Siegfried, our heroes finally convince
the train (through martial arts directed at the engine car) to let them
go. Cayenne catches a final glimpse of his wife and child as the train
departs, and he decides he should help Mash until he has seen through
his purpose to protect the world from the evils of the Empire. Then
they jump down a waterfall, karate-kicking demon fish, and eventually
befriend Gau, the very young boy the kooky old man in the cabin
abandoned years ago. Gau is crazy, and speaks only in clips of words
and growls. Were this a stage show, he'd make his introduction by way
of an interpretive dance. It's not, though. We meet him when we fight a
battle on the Veldt plain, and even then, we have to throw him a stick
of "Dried Meat" (item description -- "Eat when hungry") in order to
befriend him. Eventually, Mash, Cayenne and Gau find a diving mask and
swim through an underwater trench to the port of Nikeah, where they
board a boat for Narshe; the boat departs over the sea one night, while
Gau sleeps stupidly and Mash and Cayenne talk about tragedies of the
royal kind. It's a moment of jarring silence, brimming with the feeling
that filled the end of "The Empire Strikes Back" -- that
"opera-resolution feeling." The whole event in Nikeah that involves our
boarding the boat is utterly expendable; the scene of atmosphere it
finally provides, alone, is what holds the vague, bladed, chaotic first
half of the game rigidly together.
I always play Tina's story first and Mash's
story last. I'm probably not alone in this. I like to take my time on
Mash's adventure. It's so long that by the time it's over I've
forgotten all the worries of the rest of the world. Mash arrives in
Narshe days after Locke, Tina, and Edgar. When the story resumes
properly, it's with Mash coming in late, and everyone wondering where
he'd been. For a brief moment outside his own little odyssey, he's the
focal point of the story. Then it's back to business -- the Empire is
coming to get that frozen Esper. The game's second (and last)
real-time-strategy battle begins with the heroes assembled in the
hills, and ends with Kefka slinking off, defeated. Tina then touches
the Esper, transforms into a pink-haired demon, and flies screaming off
into the western sky. When we hurry to find her, we find she's holed up
in a rainy city full of liars, and that the only way we can help her is
to, for the meantime, go south, to Vector, and stop Gastoria's research
on Espers. We are then awarded with Magicite crystals -- the remains of
a dead Esper, and the true key to its power -- which will let any of
our characters learn magic spells, and sent back to the nearest town --
aristocratic, art-loving Jidoor -- to ponder how to get to Vector.
Of course, the only way to get where we're
going is by airship, and there's only one airship in the world, and the
only airship in the world belongs to a traveling gambler named Setzer
(odd, in that there is not a casino in the world -- to where,
exactly, does he travel?), who is deeply in love with Maria, the
world's most famous opera singer; he plans to steal her away at the
height of the opera, we learn from the Impresario, who received a
letter just as we started snooping around in the richest house
in town out of the habit the game has birthed in us to storm into
people's houses and investigate their clocks in hopes of finding
elixirs we'll never want to use because they're so useful. And oh my
lord, says the Impresario -- Celes looks just like Maria. A
plan is born in Locke's head. Little do we know there's an opera-hating
octopus with a grudge in town, and he recognizes Mash . . .
At around this point, the story has
captivated the player, because it offers him very little choice. There is
no reason to ask "what happens if I lose that battle in the
hills?" or even "What if I don't want Celes to sing in the
opera?" This is the epitome of the "console RPG," and the
videogame most people are thinking of when they utter the words "16-bit
RPG." It's not Fallout here. We're not shooting civilians and
running around giggling about it. We're doing what the game lets
us do because it lets us do it. Positively, Final Fantasy VI,
in using videogames as a storytelling medium, knits a yarn that the
player wants to hear. It is, even at the most boring parts of its first
act, never something the player doesn't want to keep playing. Future
RPGs would copy Yoshitaka Amano's art style or Nobuo Uematsu's music or
the tried-and-true Active-Time Battle system, yet forget that a
dramatic, epic, layered-operatic story starring -- let's call them
"richly-sketched" -- deep characters is of prime importance. Before
what would in later years come to be known as "The Opera House Scene"
has even begun, Final Fantasy VI has turned you on, or else you
ain't got no switches.
[next: WHERE
IT GOES FROM THERE]
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