Poll of the Day > If there was a reverse Final Fantasy, what would the distaff plot/stuff be?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was thinking of this, playing as the Dark Warriors to return balance when there's too much light...

The distaff counterpart to Bahamut would be probably Tiamat, so that'd be your ultimate summon; using Prismatic Flare to strike will all the elements... (or whatever)

So that got me thinking of other reverse-final fantasy stuff; like the final boss of FF1 is too much Order; Rigid, stubborn, stagnant and so on and so forth.

Anyone wanna join in?

Light and dark, order and chaos are not true dichotomies. Darkness and chaos are only there to play the part of the defeated over and over so long as their story is useful. There is darkness only so the light might have by contrast its brilliance if once by example and then it shall be done away with forever. And so to chaos and its aimless amorphous mass. It shall be filtered and sorted from its constituant parts. The rough parts made smooth. The crooked ways made straight. The dross purified from solid gold.

The serpent shall be unwound and trodden underfoot and know the depths of outer darkness are its portion. Forever. I reveal myself. Mine true enemy, I know thee! En garde, fiend!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/7/6/AAfGAbAADmK4.jpg

Nevermind, it's the witching hour. My troops have minus 2 to defense and attack. Look at these cute squirrels instead.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/2/AAfGAbAADmK-.jpg https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/3/AAfGAbAADmK_.jpg

skorls!

but ya, chaos and order don't have to be opposites - but they're the appropriate pairing here, just like fire and ice even though that doesn't make sense

I liked the dark crystals in FF4. Maybe the crystals themselves are evil. Then again I don't like that either. FF13-3's ending pissed me off. Fuck the South of France. (Not really, i like The Riviera) Getting rid of magic because of some evil god.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/1/1/AAfGAbAADmLb.jpg

I play these goes because I like magic. Fuck Lightning and her missing heart problems. Chad Snow and Serah should've been the heroes anyway. Fuck yeah. At least it happened in another dimension in FF13-2

Seriously, you know what I really want? FF6 if they redid that like ff7remake... wait... I used to say shit like omg everyone would get into gaming to play it. As if I could relate and direct such interest. Turns out no. I'm unique and like what many don't. Aka Twilight. Day 1 every fucking film. But still FF6. I always keep 4 as my favorite for Cecil, but 6 was always my favorite. I think it's just that I wanna be Cecil.

I'll probably wake up wanting some other flavor of fantasy by tomorrow. Humans are so chaotic. Or at least I am.

Lokarin posted...

So that got me thinking of other reverse-final fantasy stuff; like the final boss of FF1 is too much Order; Rigid, stubborn, stagnant and so on and so forth.

that's the rough plot of one of the FFXIV expansions and it kicked ass

the original world got split into a bunch of fragments, and the villains are flooding fragments with elemental imbalances to wreck the world and advance their master plan. Shadowbringers had the main characters get yeeted into a fragment that was being flooded with light, which resulted in stagnation. "heroes" are weaponized in their service (the dungeon Heroes' Gauntlet), one of the later bosses is actually a major villain manifesting as the original FF1 Warrior of Light and the boss uses player mechanics against them

First Fantasy?

Lokarin posted...

I was thinking of this, playing as the Dark Warriors to return balance when there's too much light...

That's literally part of the plot of Final Fantasy III. The world cycles through periods of balance and unbalance, and when one force grows too strong, the other has to pull it back into line. The current heroes are the Light Warriors, but the last time the world was saved thousands of years earlier, it was the Dark Warriors with the dark elemental crystals who saved the world from the Light.

There's also similar ideas in Dragonlance (where the Cataclysm that destroyed the world in the past happened because the powers of Good had grown too strong and thrown the universe out of balance).

Basically, it tends to crop up in universes where this is the case:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightIsNotGood



Lokarin posted...

The distaff counterpart to Bahamut would be probably Tiamat, so that'd be your ultimate summon; using Prismatic Flare to strike will all the elements... (or whatever)

To be fair, just because you're going for an opposite take doesn't mean you really have to go with a "distaff" (which means female-swapped, not opposite) counterpart. And Tiamat is really only Bahamut's female/evil opposite in D&D (and things inspired by it) anyway.

You could just as easily go for something else that seems to represent primal chaos/darkness/etc to you as a counterpart to Bahamut. Like, say, something like Jormungandr or Fenrir or even Nidhoggr.

Ultimately, it kind of depends on how you're defining "dark". Chaos? Evil? Literal darkness? Because there are probably better avatars for all of those things than just picking Tiamat. Imagine a setting where you're summoning demons to aid you and you're still one of the good guys (and in the context of Japanese RPGs, there's a good chance those demons will be from the Goetia).

(Though admittedly having a summon that is shooting five different flavors of elemental damage out of five different heads would definitely be a cool visual if nothing else.)



Lokarin posted...

So that got me thinking of other reverse-final fantasy stuff; like the final boss of FF1 is too much Order; Rigid, stubborn, stagnant and so on and so forth.

The backstory for Werewolf: the Apocalypse (and for most of the old World of Darkness by proxy) was that the entire universe and all of reality was created by the Weaver, the Wyld, and the Wyrm. The Weaver is pure Order, structure, planning, logic, etc (but also stagnation and stasis); the Wyld is Chaos, growth, mutation (for good and ill), instinct, emotion, and so on; and the Wyrm is supposed to be the Balance between them - it exists to tear down and destroy the creations of the Weaver when they grow too overgrown or tangled, and to tame the Wyld when it grows too out of control.

But the Weaver developed full sentience (probably because of its own orderly and structured nature), realized that nothing it created would ever mean anything because the Wyld and the Wyrm would always change or destroy it... so the Weaver promptly went insane, and started spinning her web faster and faster in the hopes of ultimately capturing the Wyld and the Wyrm and calcifying the entire universe into frozen eternal perfection without change.

In the end, she was never able to trap the Wyld (because by its very nature it cannot be contained or restrained, and will always shift away from any such attempt to imprison it), but she did manage to trap the Wyrm, which drove it insane as well - so now instead of Balance, it has become Destruction and Corruption. It brings ruin to everything it touches, polluting the world and bringing out the darkest aspects of anyone it infects.

And the ultimate tragedy of the World of Darkness is that even the heroes who fight back against the universe being broken (mostly the werewolves, who are explicitly fighting a losing battle) are mostly fighting against the Wyrm (whose corruption is both blatant and obvious) - which means nothing will ever be fixed. Because the Wyrm's madness is only a symptom of the Weaver's madness. Which makes the Weaver the true enemy, and no one is really fighting back against the Weaver at all (and in fact, some of the werewolves outright worship the Weaver themselves).

So yeah, there's an example of a universe were "Chaos" is explicitly the "good" force and "Order" is the "bad" one, as the growth of order and science and reason and technology fuels the destruction of the natural world and undoes the intended balance.