Thematics: Final Fantasy VI

Welcome once again to the demented hellscape that is Thematics.  And if you have a snappier name, by all means speak up.  In the previous article, I mentioned offhandedly that Final Fantasy VII was probably the first video game that could take serious literary analysis.  But this isn’t to say it had the first game to attempt serious storytelling.  It was just the first to have enough dialogue to avoid jarring gaps in characterization and plot flow.  Fortunately, since we’re concerned with broad stroke and looking at trends and conclusions when hunting themes, this doesn’t matter.  As such, sit back as we go way back to 1994 and the launching point of the modern jRPG, Final Fantasy VI.

We begin, surprisingly enough, with the beginning, and more specifically the central character of the story, Terra.  When we first meet Terra, she can hardly be considered a person.  The Slave Crown makes her entirely docile, dependent upon her minders to give her orders in battle.  Terra exists solely as a weapon… until that fateful meeting in the Narshe mines.  The Esper met there attempts to communicate, and overloads the Slave Crown… or, more importantly, restoring Terra’s free will and thought,  giving her identity.  It is immediately apparent that, while biologically mature, Terra has spent a long, long time under the effects of the Slave Crown and has no meaningful understanding of emotions, social function, or her own desires.  Consequently, when guided to Banon and offered the chance to be the shiny golden wire of hope for his Returners, she accepts simply because she’s come to know some among them and doesn’t know what else she should be doing.

At this stage, the game branches off to introduce more characters, but we’ll set that aside for now and follow Terra’s story.  It continues back in Narshe, having successfully repelled Kefka and having found opportunity to introduce Terra to the Esper she met earlier once again.  Overwhelmed, and having no way to make sense of what it’s telling her, Terra morphs into her own Esper form and streaks off into the night… or, Terra lacks the tools to cope with reality, and retreats into her own mind, instinct taking over.  When the Returners track her down again, she’s still comatose.  They meet the Esper Ramuh, who suggests that one of his captured kin in the Empire’s capital may hold the answer to Terra’s dilemma.

Harrowing escapades later, Terra is given the crystalized remains of Madiun, her father.  As such, Terra readily agrees to seek out the Esper world and ask for their aid against the Empire… and, more importantly, hoping to gain some greater understanding of her people from them.  This doesn’t work out, and events ultimately twist away from Terra and culminate in the raising of the Floating Continent, the disruption of balance between the Three Goddesses, and Kefka’s ascent to supreme ruler of creation.  A year passes, and in that time, Terra finds herself caring for the children of Mobliz.  She’s lost the will to fight, and when the monster Phunbaba attacks, she tries to battle it herself… and fails.  Somehow, her search for answers in understanding the feelings she has towards her charges sap her power.  The others (whoever they happen to be) fight him off, and return later.  When they do, we discover that the eldest of Terra’s ‘kids’ are expecting a child (hey, at least they’re like 17 and not prepubescent)… and Phunbaba attacks again.  He’s learned a new trick, though and starts blowing the party away.  Terra, newly determined, joins the fight, and fully embraces her Esper form, thrashing Phunbaba like so much tissue.  Her morphed form startles the kids, but they soon realize it’s her and everything is hugs and puppy dogs.

Laying Terra’s character arc, and by extension quite a lot of the core plot, out in this fashion, the question of common theme has a fairly clear answer.  But I actually want to put that off a bit and discuss the rest of the cast.  Unlike most games, Final Fantasy VI really tries to use an ensemble cast.  Terra might be the lead character, but she’s not central to every aspect of the story, and does not participate is a number of events.  In particular, if discussing Terra, it’s only natural to discuss Celes, given the lengths to which the two are set up as foils.  We’ll try to keep this a little shorter.

Celes was raised from an early age as a top-notch warrior for the Empire.  She was infused with raw magic and gained powers not terribly different from Terra’s, sans the morphing, shortly after Terra came to the Empire’s labs.  As such, while she has a clear identity and by the start of the game has become so disillusioned with the Empire, and Kefka in particular, she’s been declared a traitor and left to die, she’s also naive and has spent little time among people her own age.  Rescued by Locke, she joins the Returners in an attempt to bring some sanity to her homeland and stop the conflict.  Along the way, Locke’s protective attitude and general charm eat at her, and there are rather obvious feelings there.  The whole thing is interrupted by feelings of mistrust and betrayal, but Celes’ heroic stand on the Floating Continent leaves the two firmly on good terms.  Before the world ends, anyway.

We again time skip one year, and find Celes living alone with Cid on a dessicated bit of an island.  Even the monsters in this particular patch of land are slowly dying, and after Cid falls ill, Celes comes to think she’s the only one in the entire world who survived.  Celes attempts to fling herself into the sea, only to wash ashore… and there sees a bandanna that could only belong to Locke.  Finding new hope, she makes use of a raft Cid was building, makes her way to the mainland, and the World of Ruin proceeds from there.

Lastly, we have Locke.  Since Locke could easily take up an article himself, this will be more of a short short version just as a refresher.  An accident caused the death, or something very like death, of Locke’s beloved, Rachel.  He focuses on his duties with the Returners to put off dealing with it, and is overly protective of women in the meantime.  But when the world ends, he apparently decides he was just running, and finally finds something that might help Rachel; the remains of Phoenix, an Esper with power over life.  He finds it, conveniently around the time the party comes looking for him, and rushes off to Rachel.  The Phoenix Magicite no longer has the power to restore life, but Rachel is able to say goodbye, and use her own body to restore the Phoenix.  Locke stays a while, then comes back, gives Celes a big wink, a lot of treasures he beat her to, and says it’s time to go save the world.

When we look at the three leading characters, it would seem that the common element is Hope.  Terra represents Hope against the Empire (nevermind the very Phoenix-like imagery of her Esper mode and spell list), Celes’ story is predominantly about finding Hope, Locke again has lots of Phoenix rising from the ashes overtones.  But that’s not quite it.  Let’s look over how the rest of the cast resolves their stories.  The brothers go into the game largely developed.  Their mutual reunion scene affirms their basic character and motivation for the rest of the story.  Edgar had, in the time leading up to the game, found confidence in being a King for his people.  He [i]would[/i] keep his people safe.  Sabin had journeyed far and wide, and realized his place was at his brother’s side, keeping him safe and supporting him however he could.  When the world ends, Edgar spends that year trying to find Figaro Castle.  Sabin wanders the earth, helping those in need while his brother handles the big jobs.  Cyan spends the early parts of the game eager for revenge.  When the world ends, he corresponds with a young woman, unwilling to tell her her beloved has died.  He feels more and more guilty, until realizing that, like her, he’s been putting off dealing with his losses and needs to move on.  He’s attacked by the dream demon, Wrex, and as the party deals with the demon’s influence, Cyan realizes that all he can do now is make the world a better place and, perhaps, start again.

It goes on like this.  Now go back and look at Terra again.  She has the fullest story arc in the game, owing to her beginnings as a blank slate.  She forms a theory of self, struggles to understand the world around her, even retreating into her own world to escape it.  She gains understanding of who she is from her father.  She seeks to learn more about herself and her heritage.  And finally, she enters a stage of crippling self-doubt that’s only resolved when she finally discovers a purpose.  She follows the path of human mental development (give or take a few dozen steps), culminating in, simply speaking, Self-Discovery.  She forms a clear idea of who she is, what she wants, and what’s important to her.  To lesser extents, all the cast goes through the same journey, and each ends in that one thing important enough to challenge a god and save the world over.  You could certainly call that Hope, but the emphasis is placed not on the endpoint, but on the journey.  The characters, by and large, don’t walk into the game with some precious ideal that keeps them going.  They struggle and suffer, they doubt who they are and what they’re doing, until the time comes when they can only face themselves and ask what keeps them going.  And while that answer differs for each of them, the path towards Self-Discovery is one they all share.

And really, that’s the best way to approach a game like Final Fantasy VI.  By deciding to have a large cast and shifting focus away from the lead character, you make it hard to give each one a cohesive expression of a single theme.  By instead making the game a series of stories with a common pathway, you make something thematically and stylistically consistent while still having the diversity that makes an ensemble work worth doing in the first place.   It also means, of course, that you have an easy path towards writing a villain.  Kefka of course is, as the Emperor said in Dissidia, a ‘gibbering nihilist’.  He looked within himself and saw nothing, and as such lives only for the moment, to his own enjoyment, to the suffering of others.  He fights for no deeper reason, but simply because it’s something to do.  When he asks why the party fights, he expects no answer, for in his mind there is none.  That they respond affirms only that they are deluded, in his eyes.  And that’s why he had to die.  Well, that and the loincloth.  You can’t dress like that and expect to be left alone, y’know.