When we were still little, we just mindlessly play FFTactics at PS1 because we love it, and ‘somehow’ understanding little bit of the story. But now as adults, we started questioning ourselves the why’s and how’s. So I played this game again through my phone to answer ourselves. I know it’ll be a train of feels again if I ever play this game again, but I don’t regret it. FFTactics is yet one of the best story we’ve ever known.
Themostunderrated narrative parallel in the game is Alazlam and Pablo, but I get that making the innermost and outermost layers of the narration structure Guys Trying To Pitch Their Meandering Book Project probably wasn’t a deliberate choice.
Honestly, Zalbag and Ovelia are pulling into a close second with regards to Rafa and Wiegraf when it comes to Top Narrative Foils in Final Fantasy Tactics that Nobody Talks About.
Let’s talk about them!
Zalbag and Ovelia are ostensibly good people who do bad things through not asserting their own agency; letting their dreams be bound to another’s, to a collective’s. Just following orders.
Whatever lies they believed, whatever betrayals were visited upon them, they each provoked their own deaths by the end. I sense they regret their actions.
It helps contrast Ramza’s decision to buck convention when his morality demands, despite the ostracization it brings him.
I love how their failures to act also contrast with their status as the two characters we see in game who have some sort of meaningful connection to Denamunda IV (AKA the last Ivalician king to actually be good at doing things), and how the whole build up to their respective final tragedies involves Chapter 4’s really blatant paralleling of Delita and Dycedarg via back to back duke-stabbing and eavesdropping cutscenes. They’re two characters who should have the power to enact change as the hero of an era and as a queen recognized by half the country, but they only really undertake meaningful action when they’re put into conflict with the Machiavellians the narrative pairs them with. And then… when they collapse of those relationships to the people who supposedly brought them to power, they collapse along with them.
Honestly, Zalbag and Ovelia are pulling into a close second with regards to Rafa and Wiegraf when it comes to Top Narrative Foils in Final Fantasy Tactics that Nobody Talks About.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get it together to write a big, sweeping fic about a morally grey Ovelia, but I really wish in all her despair over people dying over her there was some acknowledgement that she couldvolunteer to the world that she isn’t a viable candidate to the throne and–at substantial risk to her own life–end the war.
Like, I can’t lay the blame all too heavily on a teenage girl grossly manipulated by everyone in her life for not wanting to die, but when Vormav and Draclau ask for her complicity in their plans, she does… in fact… comply.
I know I need to do some more Minidisc posts, but it’s been a terrible allergy season and works been a bitch, so here’s a pic of Agrias Oaks, the most perfect bae.
FFT: War of the Lions was an epic, cinematic masterpiece. I adored Delita and Ramza, and I was immersed in the gripping story from beginning to end. Stands out from other FF games, and from other games in general.
