Now let’s talk about FFT’s characters. Lopen has already hit on this, but I think the cast overall is rather weak. Ramza is amazing, my third favorite character in the series and one of my favorite video game characters period. Wiegraf and Delita are both awesome, but after that? It’s a pretty sharp dropoff. For me, the main issue is NPCs completely disappearing from the storyline once they join your party permanently (aside from a couple of optional cutscenes involving Mustadio anyway). Agrias was a cool character, but she completely disappears from the plot at the end of Chapter 2, and so she suffers for it.
But probably some of my favorite moments in the game are when Ramza is having an argument with another character during the middle of the battle. It adds to the atmosphere and breaks the monotony of it. It makes the characters feel more “real” by having them talk to each other during battles. Probably one of the neatest touches FFT adds to the game here.
I don’t know if I could really do a proper character ranking here. I’ll just go ahead and say that Ramza is incredible and I love the guy to death. He’s hard to top. Delita and Wiegraf make up the second tier. Below them you have guys like Zalbag, Dycedarg, Agrias, Orlandu, and Ovelia. Then you have everyone else, some good, some bad. I don’t really like Vormav as a villain. He pulls off the “Feels like a major threat” stuff well at Riovanes when he slaughters an entire room of soldiers seemingly effortlessly. He just doesn’t feel like a very “personal” villain. Ramza never actually meets the guy until near the end of the game, and he doesn’t even have any idea who he is until the start of Chapter 4. Vormav is still calling him “that kid” as late as the scene when he’s killing Funeral. Even when you show up at the end of the game, Vormav simply looks up and says, “Oh, it’s you.” No emotion, no buildup, no nothing. It was pretty lame. He’s just not very…hate-able, I guess. The closest he comes is resurrecting Zalbag as a zombie and forcing you to re-kill him.
Yeah, I guess that’s about it. FFT is a really great game. I don’t love it as much as a lot of people on this board do, but I get why they love it so much. I’m just kind of glad to be done with it after getting snagged on a few of those battles toward the end of the game! Whoo!
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