This review contains spoilers

mixed feelings about this one. it's very beautiful, map verticality adds both immense visual appeal and an extra tactical layer, the mechanics are cool to explore and exploit in a similar way as ff5's are, and i do think delita's entire tragic trajectory all the way until the final cutscenes is an extremely well-crafted story...

but the original translation blows chunks, characters besides ramza and delita kind of rotate in and out making it very clear that they're not really the ones that matter, and the ancient evil that the church is keeping under wraps is just not really well integrated with the political intrigue, so these two plots (and whatever's going on with mustadio and his optional dungeon) end up fighting for screentime. in the end, neither of them feels like it really mattered.

i do think the final impression of "none of this really mattered" is a strength in a story about the grand machinations of nobles and priests, and that it's to some degree what we're expected to take away from this; a somber and bitter counterpoint to delita's ambition to rise from his humble origins to the highest positions in the land.

it's certainly not unintentional either that most of the events and characters responsible for the direction the plot takes are just constantly offscreen, somewhere in the lofty halls of power, in a parallel to the true history of ivalice being something that's buried and out of reach that ramza only stumbles onto by chance.

the game is full of these conspicuous little chance encounters and crossings of paths -- especially important is ramza running into orlan or orran or whatever the astrologian kid's name is. a friend of mine feels that the point being made is about fate or inevitability; i don't necessarily think so, but it's definitely a theme.

however, living in the future year 2022, and with the benefit of future sight into further ivalice games, it's clear that some of this stuff is just bungled. there's a limit to how much of the story you can have happen offscreen before i completely stop caring about it; and ramza, outside of his family business with his brothers, is less of a character than a leaf in the wind. alma and ovelia just get george rr martined, each in her own way, and while it's clearly meant to compound the tragedy, there's a lot to say about the suffering of women being a cheap medieval fantasy cheat code for gravitas -- and in the end, i do think it's delita who we're meant to think of as the tragic antihero, not ovelia (i feel vindicated in this reading by, of all things, the ivalice raids in ff14, where ovelia doesn't even survive as a footnote).

i do think it's a hugely better story on the whole than ff12, anyway.

Reviewed on Jul 08, 2022


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