Behold, Failure Fantasy Part 2! Also, cruise over to Epixaricacy for more details on one of the games I’m about to discuss.

So I’ve taken some time to talk about bad protagonists in Final Fantasy games. What, you might ask, are examples of good ones?

I’m glad you asked me that, conjectural reader.

Zidane Tribal (Final Fantasy IX)

With the exception of Amarant, that random amalgamation of muscles and hair on the left of the pictured box art, most of the characters in Final Fantasy IX have depth, emotion and plausible relationships with the people around them. Garnet, the female lead, isn’t an insufferable whiner or completely vain. Vivi is perhaps the most adorable destroyer of worlds in any of these games (unless you count Lulu’s collection of plushies from the following game) and Steiner shows us just how badass a normal guy can be when tossed into these sort of situations. As much as I could talk about them, though, and the plethora of good things I have to say about Freya Crescent, this is about the main protagonists, and in this case, it’s cat/monkey boy Zidane.

He’s not the best main character in the history of gaming, but he’s very nearly a messiah in relation to his two predecessors. From the start, Zidane’s charismatic and fun, from his lecherous gazes at passing women to his interest in both theater and music. Even when the plot begins to twist and turn back upon it self, Zidane never really loses sight of who he is and what he wants to be. In fact, it’s one of his greatest strengths – no matter what someone tells him about ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ he is determined to be his own person. Instead of relying on his friends to get him through his most trying time, he actually attempts to forge ahead on his own, rather than endanger them. He shows more consistency and dimension than his previous counterparts, which to me puts him head, shoulders and tail above them.

Terra Branford (Final Fantasy VI)

Zidane reminds me a bit of Locke from this game. In fact, I could discuss any of the characters from Final Fantasy VI at length, because the roster of characters from the game each have unique traits, importance to the plot and dimensions that make the more people than pixels. However, again, I must remain focused on the main hero of the game, or heroine in this case. Terra was the first female protagonist to come to a Final Fantasy game, and to this day, she remains my favorite.

While the game starts her as both an amnesiac and under the control of the game’s villainous omnicidal clown, Terra is quickly revealed to be a compassionate, sensitive and intelligent young woman. Unlike some of the other protagonists I’ve mentioned in other games, as soon as the veil of enemy control is lifted from her, she becomes introspective and self-aware, growing as a character and becoming more comfortable and confident in both herself and her friends. Her arc is well-plotted and executed without major fault, and this consistent and realistic growth adds to her appeal as a cypher for the actions and attitudes of the player.

This player, at least. Most of the opinions I’ve ventured here are purely subjective. Feel free to discuss them at your leisure and fling poo at my cage. However, when compared one against the other in terms of character growth, motivations and appeal, I hope you can see why some of these protagonists succeed while others are complete and total failures.

Issue 239 of the Escapist is now available, entitled “Anti/Hero.” Below is the article I pitched for the issue.

NOTE: Due to circumstances mostly beyond my control, this article has been divided into two parts. Below is part the first.

Final Fantasy is arguably the most popular series of role-playing games from Square/Enix, and one of the selling points of a role-playing game is who drives the epic story forward. In some cases, this means the player fills in the blanks left open by the designers (i.e. Commander Sheperd in Mass Effect), while in others the player takes control of the lead character in a party. Given that developers want people to play their games, why do the protagonists of so many Final Fantasy games seem completely unlikeable?

A good protagonist is the cornerstone of a successful story. Take a look at Luke Skywalker, John McClain, Marty McFly or Frodo Baggins. Heck, even Kevin ‘Neo’ Anderson isn’t a bad protagonist in the first Matrix film. He’s as confused, shocked and awestruck as we are during the course of the story, before he and everyone else in the franchise gets railroaded into even murkier and more confusing references to the murky and confusing philosophy of Baudrillard. But in all of the above cases, you have someone who’s a bit of an everyman, someone with whom the audience can relate right away, who goes through trials and tribulations in a somewhat realistic and endearing way. In Star Wars, where it’d be all too easy for the special effects to take center stage as they did in more recent films (which I’ll touch on more later), Luke Skywalker is the beating heart of the narrative. Frodo Baggins, a short and reluctant individual, deals with his challenges the way most of us probably would. John McClain, a hard-nosed beat-walkin’ cop, shows us that one can be heroic while still being very human.

Bad protagonists, on the other hand, go so far as to unintentionally verge into anti-hero territory. Not because they break the law in the name of justice, but because they exemplify the antithesis of heroism. It’s a matter of degrees when it comes to Final Fantasy, so let’s take a look at the three biggest offenders, and see just how heroic these “heroes” really are.

Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII)

Cloud isn’t necessarily a bad guy. A product of the evil ShinRa Corporation’s SOLDIER program, Cloud’s past is something of a mystery even to himself. Still, he acts confident to the point of arrogance in his abilities up until the point of his nervous breakdown. He assumed control of the mercenary group ‘for the right price’ and after his breakdown is more concerned about protecting the planet by atoning for his sins. In both instances, his motivations are more selfish than selfless. He is at least loyal to his friends, especially towards the end, but the fact of the matter is he got off to a very rocky start.

I’m not entirely sure why people chose to follow him. Sure, his abilities were inspiring, and Tifa’s a childhood friend who never forgot the promise he made to protect her, but when we first meet him and see how he deals with the people around, he acts like a bit of a dick. Advent Children and other works have tried to make Cloud into something of an emo crybaby, but he doesn’t blame other people for his shortcomings over the course of the game. He just pretends he doesn’t have any at first. It’s only after personal tragedy that Cloud becomes more introverted and self-aware, but by that point the damage is done. He’s not the worst protagonist in Final Fantasy’s history, but he’s far from the best. At least he has something resembling character growth.

Squall Leonhart (Final Fantasy VIII)

Again, the word “emo” gets lobbed at Squall quite a bit. But despite his haircut, leather jacket and disposition, I wouldn’t go so far as to calling him that. He really isn’t an emo character. The problem is he isn’t much of a character at all. He’s an orphan dedicated to proving himself in the paramilitary academy called Balamb Garden, taking it upon himself to master the tricky and dangerous gunblade. Like Cloud, he’s self-confident in his abilities but there the similarities end.

His cold aloofness towards people around him is probably his most prominent character trait. While it’s understandable in relation to his would-be love interest, the whiny and insufferable Rinoa, upbeat Zell and gentle, intelligent Quistis aren’t able to get around his psychological armor. And don’t get me started on the whole issue of him pursuing Rinoa over Quistus. That’s even more outrageous to me than Cloud pursuing Aerith over Tifa.

It takes quite a while for Squall to finally warm up to just about anybody, including and especially his supposed love interest. He’s a bit more consistent in his growth than Cloud, but this growth is so minuscule and comes so late in the game that it might as well have been skipped altogether. With all the interesting things going on, from possession to dream states to travel into space and through time, you’d think Squall would act more as a cypher for the player and less as a completely blank and lifeless character in and of himself. Instead of allowing the player to impose choices and personality upon their representative in the game world, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Squall is just sort of there. You can’t influence who he is and how he acts, and while this would be fine if he had a personality for us to learn about, for most of the game, he has about as much personality as a block of concrete.

Tidus (Final Fantasy X)

Tidus has personality. It’s too bad that he’s such an asshole.

Tidus is a blitzball player drawn into the plight of the world called Spira by a malevolent force dubbed ‘Sin’. Gibberish aside, what Final Fantasy X brings us is a story of a young man, barely more than a child, transplanted from the world he’s known all his life into another place to which he has a mysterious connection. It’s full of foreign people speaking in strange tongues, but hey, at least they have blitzball.

Words used to describe Tidus include ‘cheerful’ and ’sensitive’. I mostly saw him as whiny, narcissistic, dense and self-congratulatory. When the game begins, he isn’t very nice, he treats people around him badly and he’s worried primarily about himself. He’s also put into a situation with a female character, Yuna, and they just happen to fall in love because the script requires this game to be a sweeping romance I guess.

Tidus, in retrospect and given the wording I’ve paraphrased heavily from Confused Matthew, reminds me of someone.

But at least Tidus didn’t commit mass murder.

To be continued…

Whoo, boy. Trying to sort out exactly where I am at the moment and what’s coming next is proving to be difficult. The dayjob is ramping up along with everything else so time during the day to get a plan of action together is difficult to come by, since I have settled on a long-term writing project that should be occupying most of my free writing time. I do have a couple other incidental side projects, and I don’t want all of it to get derailed by my interest in Star Trek Online.

Now, the game has been previewed in several places, and the open beta critiqued in a couple others, but I have yet to pass my final judgement upon it. I actually want to put together more than just some text and pics about it, however, which leads me to the big obstacle that I’ve run into today.

You see, YouTube and Google like each other a lot. They encourage you to link your YouTube account to your Google account, which I did. However, I picked up the YouTube account ‘jeloomis’ before I really got into the whole Blue Ink Alchemy branding thing. In addition to having a video supplement to my beta impressions, which will be more like a narrated slideshow than an actual video because of my desire to preserve processor power and a complete lack of knowledge in FRAPS use, I was thinking of reworking the ‘Powerless’ idea to something less artsy and more casual. In order to make sure people associate these things with this space and my other work, I wanted to change my YouTube account name. You can’t do that without deleting the old account, which I did, but in the course of doing so I neglected to unassociate that account with Google. So, when I went to create the YouTube account with my shiny username, guess what happened?

“That account is associate with jeloomis.”

So… it’s associated with an account that no longer exists. And there’s no way to unassociate it outside of that account.

I contacted YouTube to reactive the old ‘jeloomis’ account so I can yank it away from Google and get this thing set up properly. We’ll see how timely their customer service department is. EDIT: Apparently very, but that doesn’t mean they’re helpful in getting the association severed. My vexation is COLOSSAL.

Meantime, here’s a to-do list for that project I’ve chosen thanks to the Magical Talking Beardman.

• Get plot points vetted.
• Generate dramatis personae document.
• Work out rules of languages & magic.
• Write the damn thing (target word count:125k)
• Find an agent.

The first hurdle is, to me, a crucial one. I’ve laid out the plot of the novel in a document and shown it to a couple minds I really respect. My wife has given me some good feedback on it and I’ve tweaked the document accordingly. I’m waiting for a few more opinions before I proceed with the next step. Having a plan like this should keep me from procrastinating too much. I hope.

No word back yet from Polymancer, although there is another assignment I’ve been contacted about. More on that after I fit it into my schedule somewhere. And what’s this? A new Escapist editorial schedule calender? Hot diggity dog, it’s time to flood Jordan’s inbox with more pitches.

I really have no excuse for sitting around bored any time soon. Unless I’m in STO going from one system to the next and waiting for an instance to load. But more on that later.

Old book is old. Even the guy on the cover is old.

I have a dog-eared copy of the first Choose Your Own Adventure book, the Cave of Time, somewhere in my collection. I adored reading it over and over again, because every time I picked it up, something different was going to happen. Now, granted, I died more often than I succeeded, but I don’t think that’s any different from how most video games play out, especially those games called action/adventures.

To be honest, I hate the term ‘action/adventure’ when applied to video games. It feels like the term was dreamed up just to get applied to games that don’t fall conveniently into a single game-play type. Halo’s a first-person shooter. Command & Conquer is an RTS game. Gran Turismo is a racing game. Assassin’s Creed? Action/adventure.

The thing about a game like Assassin’s Creed, though, is that the game isn’t just there to be a game. It’s also there to tell a story. Halo, for the most part, has a story that, while not the worst in gaming, merely exists to get the player from one arena filled with squishy targets to the next. A lot of shooters fall into this, and several hack-and-slashers as well (I’m looking at you, Kratos). I don’t want to seem like I’m ragging on games that exist just to entertain. Believe me, I’m just as amused and distracted by shiny objects, spurts of blood and full frontal nudity as the next guy. But a game really gets my attention when something else is going on that pulls me in.

For the sake of comparison, let’s look at Halo in contrast to BioShock.

No Brute ever gave me that “OH SHI-” feeling I got when I took on a Big Daddy for the first time.

BioShock is not without a few problems. It was advertised as a mix of shooting & role-playing but ended up leaning far more towards the shooting side of things. The morality system was an ‘either-or’ choice rather than a sliding scale. And the final boss is something of a let-down. However, I love BioShock in spite of its flaws because of its deep and interesting story. Instead of the typical badass X wading into situation Y with overpowered weapon Z, the player’s character is thrust into a situation in a completely alien environment and is unaware of both his potential and the dark secrets that await. In Halo, Master Chief knows he’s a badass, goes about things in his badass way, hefts badass weapons without any problems because he’s a badass, and goes about saving the galaxy in an almost nonchalant way as fits his badass idiom. I hope I’ve used the word ‘badass’ enough times to properly demonstrate how boring I find the stories in the Halo universe. Good concepts, mind, and a badass protagonist to be sure. But kinda dull in the execution. Then again, Halo seems more and more to be a vehicle for teenagers to shoot lasers at each other and teabag their opponents.

And maybe I’m just tired of having to wash that taste out of my mouth. Anyway, let’s move on.

Right up there with Xenogears in terms of ‘games that do dirty things to your brain’.

My wife recently played through Chrono Cross for the second time, and I have to say that I need to make time to play through it myself. In addition to suggesting someone make a time-travel MMO, she points out that the story of the game is not only well-written but the kind of thing that fucks with your mind. Now, it’s an older PSOne game, so the graphics aren’t as top-notch as they once were and some of the game systems look a bit clunky from the outside. Again, this is me, and I haven’t played it myself. However, seeing some of the story playing out and the depth given to the various characters pulled me in just as an observer. I can only imagine the experience that awaits me as a player.

I’ve never played The Force Unleashed either, but I don’t think I have to. The penance I must pay for liking the prequel films when I was younger is coming, and I know I must pay it because I am quite guilty of my sins. However, I’ve tried to mitigate the damage to the memory of my childhood, which I pray shall rest in peace after being thoroughly flash-liquefied by the blazing bonfire of ego put on the screen not once but three times by Lucas. I’ve avoided the CGI Clone Wars mess like the plague, only deigning to watch Confused Matthew’s review of the film, and I refuse to play Force Unleashed. It, too, is something of a sweeping epic, but it is, by all accounts, full of wooden characters with flat dialog and pointless computer-driven action sequences that have little to no relevance to the story. If it turns out the case is otherwise, in comparison to Lucas’ other recent work, I would be very surprised. I hope the comparison is clear: both games deal with impossible feats (time travel and psychoflexus powers, respectively), both aim for expansive stories and both want to draw us into the lives of the characters. Just from observation, as far as I can tell, Chrono Cross is a shining success while The Force Unleashed is a bombastic high-energy failure.

It’s possible I’m being overly biased about this, and that I’ve been somewhat spoiled by earlier games that feature story in lieu of graphics and physics engines. I’ve covered what I enjoy about Mass Effect, and one of the things I talk about is its story. However, while there’s nothing wrong with having a linear story, and Mass Effect’s is pretty linear when the side-quests are left out, I do sort of miss the ‘branching campaign’ system that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been used much since I first experienced it in Wing Commander.

Long before MMOs, I was wasting hours on video games. This series in particular.

I wax nostalgic when I think of Wing Commander. In a game that hearkens to the likes of Battlestar Galactica and Space: Above and Beyond, you’d think the main selling point for me would be the ability to hop into a space fighter and fire my lasers at antagonistic aliens. And while that’s always fun, especially for a space cadet like myself, the other thing that makes it stand out in my mind along with those shows is the intricate and well-crafted story. And instead of moving along from one plot point to the next regardless of your actions, the success or failure of a particular mission can take the story in an entirely new direction. I don’t know about you, but to me the idea that I can alter the fate of my shipmates and the entire human race I’ve been sworn to defend excites me. It makes me want to go back and play through the original Wing Commander games, 256-color graphics and MIDI music and all.

The difference between Wing Commander and Mass Effect, other than decades of development, advances in gaming technology and the fact that Wing Commander never got past the occasional on-screen kiss while Mass Effect doesn’t flinch at laying hot blue alien booty on us, is that Mass Effect’s story kindly waits for the player to advance it. “Yes, the Geth are on the rampage and threaten to destroy us all, but go ahead and do a little mining, we’ll be here.” In Wing Commander there’s a different sort of urgency. The player needs to assist the story in determining where it goes next. It’s like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, which didn’t bother with any sort of linearity other than what was chosen by the reader. I’m not saying that those books or those old games were flawless. In fact, some of the CYOA books could be downright inscrutable.

Reading: It’ll expand your kid’s vocabulary!

However, the fact remains that the more control the player is given over the story, the more invested they will be in taking that story to its conclusion. MMOs put the player in the role of storyteller, allowing them to determine how the growth of their character proceeds. Now, many MMO players might be more interested in the aforementioned grind/pwn/teabag environment, but for others, including myself, there should be more to a game than that, otherwise why should I pay someone a monthly fee to do something I can do on my console or PC for free, and have had the capability of doing for years?

On that note, I want to mention how much I’m looking forward to the Star Trek Online open beta. Once again, not only will I be running around space pew-pew-pewing at things, I’ll be helping to tell a story. Like those old CYOA books, I have no idea which way that story is going to go. And that idea, the notion that what is about to happen to me is completely unknown, is undeniably exciting. It’s exciting in ways that running around tossing grenades and crouching over the face of an irate 14 year old boy could never hope to be.

My career path has been, to say the least, an odd one. I knew that published fiction was a tough field to enter, and that attempting to make a living from it directly out of university would be difficult, if not impossible. That knowledge, coupled with a challenge issued by a flatmate, pushed me in the direction of honing my nascent skills with computers into usable and marketable skills.

Things didn’t go so well in that regard. I worked for a few years in customer service, specifically tech support for a company in the wilds of Pittsburgh. I managed to squeeze in some freelance web work here and there, but never really found the time to truly develop my programming skills. A renewed search for the expansion of my knowledge and marketability lead me to a course in King of Prussia for Microsoft certifications.

It turns out the network administration environment and I don’t get along. There’s a great deal of stress and immediacy, no margin for error and no room for creativity. I struggled with the job daily until I lost it. Finally, after months of searching, I found my first true programming job. I’ve moved from there to another position and it’s come time to define what I want out of this particular branch of my working life. The more I work with PHP, the more I develop object-oriented solutions in Flash, the more I realize I need to be specific about my idea of a good career if I want to be happy to hop in a car or on a train to head to the office.

Don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a writer first and foremost. It’s the creation of new worlds, putting interesting characters into those worlds and setting events in motion that affect those characters that gets me up in the morning and makes me feel alive. Programming, however, is something of an extension of that. To that end, here’s something I’d like to call a ‘programmatic mission statement.’

The creative mind is like a thoroughbred horse – it requires a firm but flexible grip, one that does not allow the beast to run wild, but also one that permits some leeway, lest the creature rail against its control and fight to be free. Just the right balance of control and detachment puts new ideas on the path to greatness. You know what you want, but permitting your trajectory to follow its own course allows for growth, stays agile in the face of inevitable setbacks and lends a sense of adventure to the overall process.

They’ve called it “the information superhighway.” If you want to travel on it, you’ll need a good vehicle. ‘Good’ is a subjective term – maybe you want something you don’t have to worry about, or perhaps you’re looking for a high-precision machine stuffed with power and bursting with cool gizmos. Either way, you need someone who understands both the beating heart of an Internet vehicle and how the paint’s going to look to visitors after everything is said and done.

That’s where I come in.

I take the ideas that float around the subconscious mind and make them manifest. I find new ways to get things working. I get my hands dirty. It’s messy and magical all at once. I turn dreams into gold – one jot & scribble, one line of code at a time.

I think that makes things pretty clear. It’s a shame it took me the better part of a decade to finally put this notion together. I’ll still be pitching to the Escapist, working on stories and columns and chipping away at the latest iteration of my first novel. But in the meantime, I have bills to pay and mouths to feed and, unfortunately, I haven’t quite earned the writing stripes to leave the day job behind. Until I do, I’d still rather do something I enjoy than flip burgers or stand on a street corner.