more ffxv!

[queenlua]

Played more FFXV Saturday, through like chapter 5.

• CHOCOBO RIDING IS SO FUN
  
  i spent like an hour just riding around on my chocobo
  
  friend was like "are you not going to take the car"
  
  i was like "who the fuck takes a car when there's CHOCOBOS"
  
  "ok point but this is gonna take a long damn time so i'm getting some coffee"
  
  i actually have no idea if chocobo riding is fun in any objective sense. just. there's chocobos. they're adorable. they make cute "wark!" noises when you flutter-jump with them. in my heart of hearts i am still seven years old and i just discovered chocobos and i am simultaneously incredibly sad they are not real but incredibly happy i can play a game where they are.


• i think the dragon age style banter is less effective than it was in, y'know, actual dragon age. in ffxv they seem to repeat themselves a little too often (in hindsight it's remarkable how little dragon age's occassionally-repetitive battle-banter grated on me), and they sometimes spell stuff out in travel banter in ways that feel unnatural / weird. sometimes it's just infodumping that really should've been in the main story/cutscenes, "HEY NOCT TELL ME MORE ABOUT HOW AN ORACLE WORKS" etc.
  
  but for a specific example re: unnatural dialogue: here's a bit i'm paraphrasing from memory, with the part that made me groan boldfaced
  
  prompto: dude your vision must suck, ha your glasses are lame
  ignis: actually it's not that bad
  prompto: wait really?
  ignits: yeah it's good enough i don't even really need them to drive
  prompto: why don't you not wear them sometimes then
  noct: you don't get it, do you, prompto
  prompto: get what
  noct: ignis likes everything to be crystal-clear
  ignis: it's true i prefer to avoid ambiguity
  
  groooooan. i mean i'm imagining the real-world equivalent would be something like, idk, me hangin out with my bros while people casually remark on my wearing huge scarves all the time because i need to feel enveloped and protected or something. it's so unnatural, right?!?! and spelling out "nerd character wears glasses because he wants ~clarity~ and ~precision~ in all things is. so ham-handed. and unnecessary; while the presentation of this guy's personality hasn't been the most exciting, it's been consistent; i could've inferred the dude is into clarity on my own.


• mostly i'm waiting for these guys to ascend their archetypes; mostly i'm just like "the spunky/annoying one, the serious/straight-laced one, and the chill/muscleman one, got it"
  
  the moment when gladiolus yells at noct for being a whiny piece of shit was interesting! it was the first moment we got where i felt the natural, mingled tension-and-closeness a friendship goes through when you are Dealing With Some Shit. if the game goes on to develop that dynamic then color me interested.* meanwhile i am still playing largely because the gameplay is rollicking good fun.


• on a possibly-weird-and-personal note: bout this time almost two years ago, i was drinking a lot and playing dragon age inquistion, a game i hypothesized that i basically wouldn't have liked unless i was kind of sad and drinking a lot at the time. that game was also (i'm pretty sure) my first foray into western-style quest-ish mmo-ish rpgs. i think that colors my experience playing ffxv, in weird ways. on the one hand, it still has the weird soothing quality i felt in dragon age, where checking off quests feels very controlled and dopamine-y. on the other hand, i'm significantly less sad than i was while i was playing dragon age; i'm not sure if that's making me more critical of the game than i would be otherwise? it's just, making comparisons between the two feels increasingly weird to me, in an indescribable way; i'm not just comparing two games in a similar genre but two very different periods in my life. i don't think i've had such a stark example before of how the state you're in when you come into a game/piece of art/etc can dramatically affect the way you feel/interpret/enjoy/etc it.

* i mean, i'm already spinning up ideas for how i'd deal with this even if the game doesn't. i vaguely remember some interview with some ffxv developer, where he said they did the lifelong-friends-on-roadtrip thing in order to tell stories that are impossible with the random-adventurerers-who-met-like-last-week thing, and this is a prime example of the sort of meaty storytelling you can do in that framework. i was bitching on tumblr the other day how fantasy/scifi stories only deal with new romance, as opposed to the (imho) more interesting travails and trials and unique experiences a relationship faces once you already know/like/trust/love each other. already-well-established friendship is another interesting axis to play with! one that's more common, obviously, but traditional final fantasy storylines really do focus on novelty and meetings and newness and beginnings; this would cool/different territory to dig into.

Comments

[amielleon]

re: New Romance -- I can think of a few examples that deal with a dead-and-gone romance, usually in the context of learning to let go. (Eg. Inception)

The only example of an ongoing relationship I can think of is Vaarsuvius's arc in The Order of the Stick... which is remarkably unusual in the fantasy genre, now that I think about it. Vaarsuvius starts the comic with a baker spouse* and two kids back home while they're out traveling as the party wizard. Partway through, he causes a dragon to endanger his family, and he gets into a tangle with his own hubris and visits home for the first time in years just to rain down unnatural brutal terror upon this dragon (in front of his kids). His spouse chews him out for being gone all this time only to show up as an evil glory-hog narcissist, and a few sideplots later, his spouse serves him divorce papers.

(* All elves are gender-ambiguous in this comic, but I can't help but perceive V as male and his spouse as female because their narratives so strongly imply a certain gender. As you may have noticed, I accidentally started referring to Vaarsuvius by "he" halfway through this writeup. :p)

[amielleon]

OH ALSO more relevantly to this post, I SAW THAT YOU GET TO HUG FLUFFY CHOCOBOS AROUND THE NECK why do anything else in this game when you can hug. chocobos.

[queenlua]

i seriously hugged the chocobos nonstop for like five minutes straight until my friend was like "seriously" and i was like "ffffIIIIINNNNNEEEE we can do a quest ugh"

[queenlua]

also, interesting thing re OooT!

as an aside, is OooT the sort of webcomic that would be worth starting to read now if i have read none of it? it's one of those long-running famous Ye Olde Webcomics that lots of folks seem to like, but starting such webcomics always feels like such a time investment so i have to collect a lot of opinions before i am so motivated :P

[amielleon]

Imo OotS is one of those things that you can get into by accident, in a good way. Like, with some long-form webcomics, it's like "hang on I promise it gets better." But OotS starts with living-in-the-moment humor about D&D and never sheds its gag-a-strip format even after it acquires a quality long-running plot, so I think it's easy to get into the way it's easy to get into old shounen.

[lassarina]

An interesting point about romance; that's one of the things I'm intentionally doing in my trilogy, is exploring length (and second-chance) type romances.

[queenlua]

(belated)

speaking of which: when do i get to read your trilogy? :D;;;

[missxylia]

i came back to this entry bc i remembered it all of a sudden :PPP btw i can't speak for any of the other characters bc i'm still watching the game, but prompto absolutely ascends his archetype! i think you'll see it later in the game so i'm not sure if you want to see it now (although it's not really spoilery for plot), but he has this long convo with noctis about how he feels useless bc ignis and gladiolus seem better in every way as bodyguards, and there's some stuff about why he acts so cheerful and also how the two of them became friends! real cute :DD

[queenlua]

yaaaaay i love people coming back to old entries :D

i'm glad to hear prompto gets some more development—admittedly the "perky character secretly feels useless" sounds a bit archetypal in and of itself (source: did i mention this is one of those archetypes i'm weirdly drawn to in every story ever, i have biases, etc), but hell i like a well-done archetype / archetype with some depth / etc

unfortunately i haven't had a chance to play a ton more; been in KY for over a week now, and thus cruelly severed from my friend's PS4 :P we did play a few of the later chapters before i left and i still need to type up thoughts on those—tl;dr plot cohesion is decreasing rapidly but everything's still real pretty, lol

[missxylia]

*gladiolus voice* at least cup noodles exist

btw, if you've gotten to the point where gladiolus ditches you for unexplained reasons, that's another thing that will be explained somewhere that's not within the game! apparently there's dlc that will talk about that. thanks, square.

i agree about prompto! honestly, the character that feels the least archetypal is noctis himself :PP ignis feels pretty typical of a stoic dude with glasses, and gladiolus is super muscular and bad with emotions. i think it's always cool to see the directions games take archetypes in if they're interesting though.

in general i think this is yet another game that survives more on characters than plot? i've gotten to chapter 9 and i know some spoilers, and tbh this game's plot is not that great :'D i hear it picks way up after ch 9 so i'll be seeing that for myself. its main plot is also kind of short... i'd love to hear your thoughts tho :PP i have a lot of complaints about luna bc i'm too heavily invested in her despite basically being a side character

[lassarina]

oh goodness *blush* well. right now book 1 is in first-round edits (meaning that I gave it to some people, who gave me back comments, which I am now incorporating), but after that I will definitely be looking for second-round readers so, uh, be careful what you ask for because I might be like SO ABOUT READING. ;)