LogFAQs > #930102886

Lopen posted...

What makes something a character?

Is it a name? Is it dialogue? Is it a unique look? Are Mog's moogle buddies in FFVI not characters because there are like 10 of em and they look the same? The Red Mage can be named, just like any other main character in a FF game.

There are a defined four warriors of light in the story of FF1. It's not like a later game where you can swap classes on the fly or they modify an existing character. The Red Mage is what the Red Mage is and can't change. What little lore the game gives you in the form of art and whatnot highly implies no repeats too-- repetition is possibly mechanics. Of course that means two of the six are "non canon" warriors but that's okay, they're still characters.

But I would say he's more of a character than Warrior of Light because he's more distinctive, personally. Back in the NES days design was everything. I personally think the Red Mage is more of a character than like, Josef, to be quite blunt, given the tools to work with on the NES I could tell you more about what the Red Mage is about than Josef. Not to run down FF2, but yeah. Warrior of Light is just Josef with a voice actor in terms of being memorable.

It's been pretty aptly explained. It would be a lot different for me personally if FF1 forced you to have a predetermined party that's made up of certain character classes; that to me would be enough of a character to have never mentioned it. It's the fact you can have many or no red mages in your party at your choosing that bothers me; it becomes a unit at that point and not a character. They're much like Pokemon to me; you can get attached to them, you can treat them as characters if you want, but at the end of the day outside of the legendary ones Pokemon in their own universe are not characters but species. In terms of Final Fantasy, a red mage is a class instead of being a species but it's the same thing. You can play the game with or without the class/species, or you can have multiple ones at your choosing. I really feel like it's a pretty sound argument that can't really be refuted, I mean every part of your argument is invalid. I mean even the Four Warriors of Light thing; Red Mage is not even one of those according to Square.

I'm not lobbying for the removal of them anyway, I don't care anymore because that ship sailed away a long time ago and given that every host this contest has had has probably has a nice negative opinion of me anyway I doubt you have to worry about losing your FF1 classes because someone thinks something I've said has enough merit to change the book on the subject.
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Truly smilin'