Oh, funny. Via GameSetWatch, I got a good laugh out of Polybius' official Final Fantasy X-2 drinking game. Excerpt:
NOTE: It is important not to drink every time somebody groans. You are going to groan a lot.
- Every time you see Y-R-P: TAKE A SHOT.
- Every time you see a clumsily-framed Yuna fanservice upskirt: TAKE A SHOT.
- Whenever you re-notice LeBlanc’s impossible simultaneous side- and under-boob dress setup1: TAKE A SHOT.
- Whenever Brother’s antics become completely insufferable: TAKE A SHOT.
Check out the full version, footnotes and all. I think X-2 gets a bit of a bum rap. All of the Final Fantasy games are disparate adventures, so we rarely get true sequels. Which seems a bit sad, because so much storytelling energy is invested in introducing the characters, and then we never see them again. Which, I guess, is appropriate, since the real star of the Final Fantasy series is the "hero saves the world" formula, complete with commentary on religion, war and human spirit (even if they're not always "human" people, per se).
Been thinking a lot about formula, as at Castle Videogameland, we've been playing the Metal Gear Solid remake, Twin Snakes. Metal Gear and Final Fantasy actually have a bit in common -- the cyclical nature of the storytelling, the common thread each installment shares, in terms of plot structure, with its predeccessors. Metal Gear's easily my favorite series -- big "duh" from anyone who reads this blog regularly -- and it's in part because of the wisdom of that formula. It's always salient and its presentation is both different enough to continually provoke engagement and familiar enough to make you feel invested, like you're on the inside. You feel close to the characters. If Metal Gear prompts you to think about the nature of being a soldier, the complex morality of war, and the fact that the difference between good and evil is sometimes anything but clear-cut, it's because you empathize with the characters.
X-2 is the first attempt in the Final Fantasy characters to repeat the classic formula with some of the same characters, in the same world, as opposed to an entirely new world of entirely new people. And yet it's regularly ridiculed. I think that some of that ridicule might come from the fact that the lead characters are three scantily clad girls who appear to be pop stars, or Charlie's Angels, or something. Is our majority-male audience a little embarrassed to enjoy the game's decidedly chick-powered, poppy, chipper vibe? Sort of like another certain guilty pleasure no one will admit is really good?
That might be part of it, but I think the other part is that while X-2 aims to be a continuation of Yuna's adventures in Spira, there seems to be a little bit of a selling-out of who Yuna was. In FFX, I actually found her one of the most compelling and complex "damsels in distress" ever featured in the series, way more than, say, Rosa, Rinoa (though my personal fave) or that one who died, OMG SPOILARZ. You're always introduced to a pretty-eyed femme you're supposed to love enough that your journey gets personal, and yet it never really worked until Yuna's sad smile. And maybe that's just because at that point, we'd never seen facial expression in RPGs to the extent that we'd seen them with FFX. But I was motivated by Yuna's quiet sincerity, the pain of her emotional conflict between piousness and doing what's actually right.
And then she shows up in hot shorts and what Polybius elegantly calls a "titty-tat." It didn't work. You know, I actually like that we had three female heroines who were allowed to be cute and feminine and still effective. That's rare. But we snicker at FFX-2 because Yuna, and even Rikku, to an extent, became caricatures of themselves. That's not to say hero stories can't have humor in them. But X-2 wasn't like a return to Spira, a deeper look at Yuna. It was like decking Spira out in pink vinyl and putting on the disco lights, simultaneously un-dignifying the world and its characters and divorcing us from our sincere emotional relationship with the previous title.
Metal Gear proves that repeating an effective formula can just make us fall more in love with a world. But I think Final Fantasy suffers the backlash it does -- and mind you, it's not a bad series of games -- because it exploits the formula. It raises the ante continually, and rather than becoming more real, the outlandish characters and escalating themes just become less so.
Bonus: Also via GameSetWatch, a quality dissection of the Campbell hero-story formula for sci-fi from Gawker's new Io9 blog. And coming soon: SVGL's Metal Gear drinking game.
