The first three Final Fantasy games avoid this by not having a story at all, just a plot. Story and plot are, technically, different things; both are chains of events, but in stories, the events are caused by the characters making choices, whereas in plots they just happen. The Light Warriors are going to defeat Garland in Final Fantasy simply because they're the Light Warriors, and that's what they do - at no point do the Light Warriors get together and say "Right, I reckon' we should go save the world, how does that sound?". Not only do they never speak at all, but the fact they simply appear out of nowhere holding the orbs that will save the world makes them the most ridiculous plot device in the entire series. Alright, other than Time Kompression. There's no sense of being railroaded in these games, because, although there's usually only one way to go, the player is the one making the decision to go there, not the characters. Final Fantasy IV not only has a proper story in which the characters have personalities and make choices, but a story which is a perfect fit for a console RPG. Anyone who calls it 'cinematic' is completely missing the point - it knows that it's a video game with graphics that don't even begin to approximate reality, and it doesn't try to look like a movie. Like, say, all the games after Final Fantasy VI. The story is told through imagery, rather than images - when the heroes blast off the moon in a rocket, it's memorable because they're going to the goddamn moon in a rocket, which is the thing you least expect to happen in a world full of knights and castles. It isn't trying to impress us with graphical effects that the NES couldn't manage, although this was a nice side-effect at the time. Later games utterly forget this, and use up whacking great chunks of disc space in order to give us FMV of two characters dancing, or an ad for a car. The other reason the story works so well is because it genuinely is a story, not just a random collection of events. Cecil and Kain go to the Mist Village because Cecil got demoted because Cecil questioned the King of Baron's actions because Cecil is a nice guy underneath his evil-looking armour, not the "Let's go explore the cave" setup a lot of RPGs were using. Cecil cares for Rydia because he feels guilty about her village being destroyed because he was (in)directly responsible for it and because he inadvertently killed her mother, rather than the hero spontaneously deciding to protect the first magical girl he comes across, and she in turn joins him because his actions have proven him to be a good person, not simply because the party needs a mage. This is a narrative that invites the player to become involved in it, not one that keeps the player at a distance and contrives to make itself difficult to understand. It's silly to say that this makes the game linear, because it's no more linear than any of the previous ones, and only marginally more linear than the later ones. What the story does is provide context, pacing and focus. The only difference is that where we were previously playing unnamed characters wandering around and killing monsters because there was nothing else to do, here we've got Cecil The Dark Knight With A Heart Of Gold exploring a desert cave in order to find the ruby that will cure his lover's fever - this scarcely took more time to set up than "There is a vampire in Earth Cave", but now there's a sense of personal involvement, even if it's fairly slight. Most importantly, thanks to the fact we know the ins and outs of the characters' quest, we're never reduced to wandering around in the hopes we'll stumble upon the next dungeon by accident, because we always know where we need to go and why. Yes, there's copious melodrama along the way, but what else could there be? There's no point in trying to get a subtle performance out of a character the size of the player's fingernail, and when they tried it in 1998 with state of the art graphics, it still didn't work. Likewise, if things were treated frivolously, the urgency and energy would be lost. Everything about Final Fantasy IV is big, verging on mythic. This is exactly how console RPG storylines should work, and it's amazing that not only did they get it right the first time, but that they subsequently undid it all by making the concepts progressively smaller. Zemus, Final Fantasy IV's Ancient Evil, works as a villain because he really is an ancient demigod from another world, and that's all we need to know; Final Fantasy VII's Sephiroth starts out the same way, but the story's attempts to make him 'believable' and a 'real character' serve only to show up how shallow and poorly-motivated he is, reducing what could have been an iconic Darth Vader / Luke Skywalker relationship to a sluggish soap-opera. All this, of course, precludes the possibility of 'real' role playing. Not only do the characters have lives and minds of their own, but the player has no sway over how they develop, or even which of them are in the party (oddly, we can still change their names, which seems redundant under these circumstances). It does, however, mean that the player is going to have to keep changing their approach, rather than changing the game to suit their approach. It gives us an interesting collection of characters; a 'balanced' party rather than one created simply to cause as much damage as possible, which is what the player would no doubt have created if they'd had the freedom to do so (cf. Final Fantasy V). There's just as much strategy involved here as the other games, even if we don't get to manage a spreadsheet, and the combat will punish players for making poor decisions. The groundwork for the series is laid out here, and, although it'll keep re-inventing itself throughout the years, it won't ever leap ahead like this again. You could argue that, if anything, it starts moving backward, with progressively less thought being paid to each game as progressively more is put into how things will look and what directions the plot will move into. Even if there's no one element in Final Fantasy IV that other games in the series don't do better, no other game will hold those elements in such perfect balance. If Final Fantasy VII serves as the prosecution case when it comes to working a linear storyline into a video game, then Final Fantasy IV is a more than adequate defense. |
I PREFER THE JAPANESE ORIGINAL BECAUSE IT HAS SWEARING which I can't read.
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Final Fantasy IV reminds me of the time I was in a Sushi bar, interviewing Hideo Kojima, who had taken time out of his busy schedule to talk to me, as I am one of the few people to truly appreciate the subtle social commentary of Metal Gear Solid. "Video games are the literature of the moment", he said, "like an egg made of mist, or a homosexual duck floating upside down in a vat of chardonnay". Being intellectual, this made perfect sense to me, but I asked him to repeat this in simpler terms that the target audience of mouth-breathers could understand. "I'll be honest", he said, "I'm not really Hideo Kojima, I just made a bet with someone that you wouldn't notice as long as I looked vaguely Asian and said a lot of things which sounded important, but were totally meaningless. My name is Warren and I'm not even Japanese". With that, he left like a solemn Autumn wind, and I pondered his words. Can we really be certain who we are? Do we belong to nationalities and races, or are we all citizens of the one world, hanging silently in space like a whelk with indigestion? What does the concept of identity really mean? Perhaps, in a way, all of us are Warren.