Final Fantasy games are not strangers to the trick of having the player-character a step removed from the main story. Where heroic fantasy relies on the idea that the main character is fated to deliver peace and harmony to the world (and that the world then opens and closes for them), Final Fantasy's best titles subvert this through the perspective of the nobody. Here events are always already in motion, the absence of fate leaves conclusions open, and the world seems to endure before and after the protagonist ever entered the stage. The series has had hollow shells tricked by false memories of heroes, clones, puppets, and even ghosts; it is an always posthuman approach to fantasy that involves killing God and his mission of Peace through the restoration of fate and the divine right of kings. In God's place are nobodies. Final Fantasy XII is curious because it is very much mapped out as a heroic fantasy, but its traditionalist elements play out at a distance. Amidst stories of exiled royalty, imperialism, the ambivalence of soft power, and revenant princesses, Vaan just wants to be a pirate.
With its deserts and grimy machinery and big blue skies eclipsed by floating islands Final Fantasy XII clearly draws on the space opera of Star Wars. Vaan, like Anakin, wants to leave his poverty to find out what's up there instead. Unlike Anakin though Vaan never rises to become the centre of anything; fate never plucked him out, the heavens never conspired his overthrow, he only stumbled into something bigger than and other to himself. Vaan's perspective grounds the human impact of empire, and his distant observation of world events strips them of their drama, highlighting the bland subterfuge and broader geopolitical negotiations of royalty and commerce that determine who lives and dies. The series' enduring panpsychism is set aside for something drier too. There are minerals of supernatural origin, the use of which draws mysticism, politics, and business to the same stage in conflict, but in other Final Fantasy titles the minerals are always more than their use value. The panpsychist world exceeds the human, the earth gets revenge on humankind, or it otherwise recedes again. In Final Fantasy XII however there is no mystery, because the minerals are totally reified within the game-world's network of extractive capitalism. Of course there's the Mist, and there's always magick, but this is all secondary to what the mineral represents on the geopolitical stage as a commodity.
Maybe its fantasy is compelling because kept at a distance it's allowed to be more intricate. The characters in XII are less instantly memorable than other titles, thanks in part to their subdued mannerisms (more high fantasy than anime), and otherwise their connection to a story that we, as Vaan, are never intimately attached to. In fact many feel like discarded drafts from other titles or assemblages from a Final Fantasy database. But get lost in it from Vaan's very grounded perspective and their relative anonymity has them believably sutured into a world that is always bigger and more unknowable than what we're given. Because it always feels about ten times bigger than it is, and that's thanks to the way it always withdraws from full focus. Even returning to that small fishing village every week or so and finding it unchanged, there are clearly mysteries and forces and something being always withheld from us. It's something about the intricate patterning of the woven textiles, the grimy surfaces of the stones and sandblasted fabric of the tents, the cautious villagers that continue with their day but look across quickly just to see if we're still there. It's the most imaginatively and least narratively efficient way of presenting a world teeming with life, because it exists in its resistance to narrative purpose but never truly opens up and becomes home. It is magical because it is aloof; the feeling of 'I wish I could be here more and really get to know this place' never goes away because it is always extending beyond what we can access.
My only complaint about this remaster is that it sands off the distortion that made the PS2 version so unique, revealing too much of the 3D shapes that were always hidden behind layers of grain. The visual noise added to each location's sense of mystery, suggesting cracks and moving parts and just obscured details the remaster kills dead. It's a shame of course because mystery is such a big part of what makes Final Fantasy XII's one of the most alive gameworlds of any generation. The battle system is still ingenious, partly because it allows both exploring and fighting to take place in the same gorgeous panoramas, and partly because it leans on the small satisfactions of ultrabasic programming: if>then commands, or a play of algorithms that as the game goes on comes to absorb the player into the machinic team they've created within the machine. Final Fantasy XIII would automate things too much, XV would loosen things to the point of chaos, and Final Fantasy VII Remake would ultimately unify the live and algorithmic battle styles through a satisfying rhythmic punch. I still think this one is genius, and perfectly suited to a game that needs to make exploration in and of itself gratifying.
I earlier compared it to Star Wars because of its sand and laser gun retrofuturism, but its approach is very Lucas. Try as the story might to contain and make sense of the world for us, it also expects us to get distracted with Vaan, and to imagine our way off into the distance, to what's down there or around the corner, to what that unnamed character is doing or thinking, to whether the people here are happy. Much has been written about how the fragmentedness of Star Wars is its best asset, because its inconsistencies actively encourage investigation from audiences to fill in the blanks and tell stories about what's happening in the margins. No world exists beyond the images we access through the work, and yet we imagine one that grows and changes every time we revisit it. We're drawn to these broken worlds because the films we watch and games we play and stories we read feel like relics of something now lost; some unattainable feeling of home. Videogames require the wilful illusion that 'there's something over the horizon' more than any other medium, but Final Fantasy XII is the one that most consciously engages with the participatory nature of cult cinema.
There's a pathos to it, because not only is it the most fragmented of the Final Fantasy games, it's also the least remembered then and now, coming right at the end of its generation. A very quiet swan song, but one that swarms with more life than you can fathom every time you let it run.
With its deserts and grimy machinery and big blue skies eclipsed by floating islands Final Fantasy XII clearly draws on the space opera of Star Wars. Vaan, like Anakin, wants to leave his poverty to find out what's up there instead. Unlike Anakin though Vaan never rises to become the centre of anything; fate never plucked him out, the heavens never conspired his overthrow, he only stumbled into something bigger than and other to himself. Vaan's perspective grounds the human impact of empire, and his distant observation of world events strips them of their drama, highlighting the bland subterfuge and broader geopolitical negotiations of royalty and commerce that determine who lives and dies. The series' enduring panpsychism is set aside for something drier too. There are minerals of supernatural origin, the use of which draws mysticism, politics, and business to the same stage in conflict, but in other Final Fantasy titles the minerals are always more than their use value. The panpsychist world exceeds the human, the earth gets revenge on humankind, or it otherwise recedes again. In Final Fantasy XII however there is no mystery, because the minerals are totally reified within the game-world's network of extractive capitalism. Of course there's the Mist, and there's always magick, but this is all secondary to what the mineral represents on the geopolitical stage as a commodity.
Maybe its fantasy is compelling because kept at a distance it's allowed to be more intricate. The characters in XII are less instantly memorable than other titles, thanks in part to their subdued mannerisms (more high fantasy than anime), and otherwise their connection to a story that we, as Vaan, are never intimately attached to. In fact many feel like discarded drafts from other titles or assemblages from a Final Fantasy database. But get lost in it from Vaan's very grounded perspective and their relative anonymity has them believably sutured into a world that is always bigger and more unknowable than what we're given. Because it always feels about ten times bigger than it is, and that's thanks to the way it always withdraws from full focus. Even returning to that small fishing village every week or so and finding it unchanged, there are clearly mysteries and forces and something being always withheld from us. It's something about the intricate patterning of the woven textiles, the grimy surfaces of the stones and sandblasted fabric of the tents, the cautious villagers that continue with their day but look across quickly just to see if we're still there. It's the most imaginatively and least narratively efficient way of presenting a world teeming with life, because it exists in its resistance to narrative purpose but never truly opens up and becomes home. It is magical because it is aloof; the feeling of 'I wish I could be here more and really get to know this place' never goes away because it is always extending beyond what we can access.
My only complaint about this remaster is that it sands off the distortion that made the PS2 version so unique, revealing too much of the 3D shapes that were always hidden behind layers of grain. The visual noise added to each location's sense of mystery, suggesting cracks and moving parts and just obscured details the remaster kills dead. It's a shame of course because mystery is such a big part of what makes Final Fantasy XII's one of the most alive gameworlds of any generation. The battle system is still ingenious, partly because it allows both exploring and fighting to take place in the same gorgeous panoramas, and partly because it leans on the small satisfactions of ultrabasic programming: if>then commands, or a play of algorithms that as the game goes on comes to absorb the player into the machinic team they've created within the machine. Final Fantasy XIII would automate things too much, XV would loosen things to the point of chaos, and Final Fantasy VII Remake would ultimately unify the live and algorithmic battle styles through a satisfying rhythmic punch. I still think this one is genius, and perfectly suited to a game that needs to make exploration in and of itself gratifying.
I earlier compared it to Star Wars because of its sand and laser gun retrofuturism, but its approach is very Lucas. Try as the story might to contain and make sense of the world for us, it also expects us to get distracted with Vaan, and to imagine our way off into the distance, to what's down there or around the corner, to what that unnamed character is doing or thinking, to whether the people here are happy. Much has been written about how the fragmentedness of Star Wars is its best asset, because its inconsistencies actively encourage investigation from audiences to fill in the blanks and tell stories about what's happening in the margins. No world exists beyond the images we access through the work, and yet we imagine one that grows and changes every time we revisit it. We're drawn to these broken worlds because the films we watch and games we play and stories we read feel like relics of something now lost; some unattainable feeling of home. Videogames require the wilful illusion that 'there's something over the horizon' more than any other medium, but Final Fantasy XII is the one that most consciously engages with the participatory nature of cult cinema.
There's a pathos to it, because not only is it the most fragmented of the Final Fantasy games, it's also the least remembered then and now, coming right at the end of its generation. A very quiet swan song, but one that swarms with more life than you can fathom every time you let it run.
2 Comments
@unaderon thank you! same with me - ffxii does such a good job obscuring boundaries with noise, it's a shame the zodiac age threatens to reveal the illusion!
unaderon
2 years ago