LogFAQs > #882692828

Raganork posted...

Polygon has a very good read if you're interested

I am! And I will read.



Raganork posted...

Coming off of Vagrant Story and its "elderly" protagonist Ashley (who was in his late 20s) - a game that didn't sell as well as Squeenix had hoped - the higher ups absolutely did not want their flagship series to have those same disappointing sales figures, and, well, I think we all know the types of characters the Japanese like.

Well, like I said, that was definitely the logic behind shifting the lead spot away from Basch and onto Vaan, though as far as I know that's always been portrayed more as an organic group decision during development as opposed to something forced on them from outside. But it's entirely possible that they would have presented it that way even if Squeenix was forcing them to do things (in the same way BioWare's spent the last few years spinning like crazy to justify EA's endless nonsense).

That being said, it almost seems odd that if Vagrant Story itself was the key catalyst for that decision, that they'd assume the age of the protagonist was the problem, as opposed to clunky game mechanics and a genre-bending plot set in a mostly dull setting deliberately released as a new IP with little fanfare (at least in the West). I can think of dozens of problems to avoid before I'd ever go with "Man, the REAL problem is that the protagonist wasn't an unrealistically adept teenager!" The entire point of the game was to be as un-FF as possible, and it failed, mainly because, you know, it was as un-FF as possible (which, in a way, means it actually succeeded, I guess?).

Especially when Ashley comes across like an effeminate anime pretty-boy (like nearly every other Square main character) regardless. I'm not sure anyone who didn't buy the game would even KNOW he wasn't an unrealistically adept teenager. It was certainly never made clear in the exceedingly few advertisements I saw for the game at the time.

Though the other irony there is that FFXII uses the shitty version of Ivalice from Tactics Advance as its setting, and actually incorporates elements of the setting of Vagrant Story as part of it (because of easter egg-y references to Ivalice and Tactics in Vagrant Story), which was one of the things I really disliked about FFXII. Ivalice, as a setting (and distinct from the original Tactics version of Ivalice) is kind of meh. I'd much rather have gotten an entirely new setting rather than one with complicated antecedents (though also to be fair, an entirely new setting didn't help sell FFXIII or FFXV to me either - but by then FF was pretty much dead to me regardless).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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