Setting as Character

by AimeeKae

Inspired By: The World Map: The Last Piece to the FF Puzzle

In its fundamental form, the plot-line of most RPGs revolves around one primary quest: save the world from a threatening force. It should go without saying, therefore, that the world itself should be someplace that you like, a place that proves itself worth saving. Furthermore, the place should be Home, a place you are willing to give your life to protect. When a game fails to depict the world as a character worth saving, the “save the world” theme is discredited almost entirely. The so-called epic quest becomes shallow, and without real substance. If you, the game player, don’t know the world well, why bother to save it?

When you think in terms of characterization, you think in levels of complexity. What is this character’s past? Who is s/he now? Why is s/he like that? Do I like or dislike him/her? Why? How does s/he change and develop in character throughout the course of the game? Would I risk my life to protect him/her? If you are expected to risk your life for this the world, the world should be given every bit as much consideration. The world must have substance and character. That’s the function of cities and towns, supposedly--to prove that there are people on the planet other than you and your party members, and to depict the world as Home. Unfortunately, cities and towns can be presented as every bit as flat and boring as some party members. When are characters are bland, we gamers don’t like them. The same goes for towns and dungeons.

Even though the concept of setting as character is rarely a topic of discussion and debate, it is clear that we do respond to it and appreciate it. It's not just a matter of level design. What was it that made Chrono Trigger into a classic if not the richness of the setting? Gamers became intimately connected with the world by helping and fighting alongside the people and protecting them throughout history. The land is Home; you care about it and when Lavos threatens the world you’ll do anything to protect it. Granted, this is not the only characteristic that made Chrono Trigger a classic, but it is undeniably one of the many. Furthermore, what else can account for the rapid rise in popularity of MMORPGs? With little in the way of a unifying plot, MMORPGs are all about your interaction with a highly dynamic setting (towns, NPC townsfolk and player characters all being part of the setting).

I didn’t have reason to believe that this concept would be threatened or overlooked until recently. I’ve noticed it executed rather poorly in games before, but nothing as blatantly inadequate as that in FFX, which has been so widely praised for its linearity. If such praise is any indication of how the worth of side quests is perceived by the general public, then it would seem that most of us would just as soon do without them altogether. I’d like to point out, though, that side quests and the ability to explore the world serve a legitimate function: to establish the setting as a character worth saving.

As far as I can tell, the establishment of setting as character wasn’t even considered for FFX. For me, this game is the perfect example of the setting-as-character concept gone horribly wrong. I liked many aspects of FFX, but I was severely disappointed by the fact that the gameplay allowed for very little exploration of Spira. The fact that the tale is told from Tidus’ perspective and not Yuna’s is greatly significant. As the gamer, you are him. Everything you perceive in the game, you do so through him. Like you, Tidus is not from Spira. He doesn’t know anything about it, its people, or its history. Most importantly, it is not Home. Now, because his quest will eventually become “Save Spira,” the game should prove to Tidus and us (the gamers) that Spira is worth risking his life for. He should be given the opportunity to understand and love Spira every bit as much as his party members (whom he is also expected to learn to understand and care about).

In my opinion, Spira is an extremely poorly developed character. I learned actually very little about her history, her townspeople were little more than cardboard cutouts, entire towns fit into one or two screens, and most dungeons required no skill whatsoever to complete (the temple trails and the final dungeon were the only dungeons that I thought had any real character). I got to the point where I wasn’t excited to get to a new town anymore. There were boring and almost devoid of culture. For example, everything that we know about the Ronso is directly linked to Kimahri. Surely there’s more to the Ronso culture, but who knows. If we get to explore the dynamics of our party members’ lives, I don’t see why more opportunities to explore the world weren’t considered as being important. Spira, as a character, is woefully unexciting.

Let’s now consider how a world’s character is developed. Having already mentioned Chrono Trigger as a good example, I’ll use Final Fantasy VI as my example this time. The essence of your mission in FFVI is, of course, to save the world. Before you discover that the world as you know it is in danger, you undergo numerous quests that at first seem unrelated. You help a girl escape from the Empire only to become involved with a resistance organization, the Returners, who want you to investigate a potential weapon back in Narshe. On your way there, your party is split up and you go on all kinds of seemingly random adventures until you get back together, only to be split up again when you have to chase Terra all over the worldmap. For a long time the plot continues along these lines, making you and your party seem mostly just reactive to the various unforeseen events. The actual function of these unrelated quests is to develop the setting. You go to every corner of the world and are acquainted with almost all of the people there. You’ve seen the different ways of life, and helped people here and there with their problems. After coming to know and care about the land, seeing it in ruins later in the game is far more emotional.

I haven’t finished Dragon Warrior VII yet, but I have recognized that the world in this game, too, has proved itself worth saving. There is almost no unifying plot through much of the game, yet the “save the world” theme has been executed beautifully. Due to your party’s actions, new islands are put on the map. You visit the islands first in the past, where you get to know the people and help them with their troubles. Your quests put them back into the timeline so that you can visit them again in the present, where often your exploits have become legendary. Other times you are not remembered at all, and even it that there is a sense of nostalgia. Somehow, you feel that you were still appreciated. The point is that you begin to recognize yourself in these places. You remember the adventures you had there. The world is your world, you made it, and when the Demon Lord threatens it, you take action. (Notice that this method of gameplay is not so dissimilar from that of Chrono Trigger.)

A game should allow you to experience all aspects of the world in order to make you passionate about it. In FFX, you certainly get to see many aspects of the world, but you don’t explore them. One way or another the game tells you where to go and you just go there. Cities have no more real depth than what you can see from the streets, so there’s no reason to stick around a town. The game rarely gives you any reason to go backwards and explore—if you’ve been there once, you’ve seen it all (the only instance I can think of that makes you think to go backwards is the fact that you can’t get into Yojimbo’s valley the first time you are there). You go forward with Yuna because Yuna is interesting and Spira is not.

Eventually, the game does open up and give you an opportunity to see new lands, albeit by means of one of the most unimaginative world maps ever. Zipping around the world on an airship used to be one of the Final Fantasy series’ greatest highlights. This world map is actually quite a good illustration of Spira—there’s nothing besides the surface. If you manage to randomly click to open a new area, you are usually rewarded by either a strip of uninhabited desert or valley, or a dungeon with either incredibly difficult monsters or incredibly tedious quests. Unless you are seeking to become a combat god—which hardly fits into the plot or theme of the game—the side quests have no value at all. You could return to a city you’ve visited before, but there’s never anything particularly new there.

Side quests have a legitimate and significant function that I believe is not properly appreciated. When you go to a town and a random person mentions to you the Cave of the Minotaur Brothers, or whatever, suddenly you have a little piece of that town’s history you can choose to explore. There’s more to the area than just what you can see. Talking to the townsfolk opens up a bigger world. When you take a letter from one town to another from a woman to a soldier, it is simply a moment to connect with the land’s people. When an orphanage begins to burn and you navigate the burning interior in order to save those within, you become a town hero. From that time on, every time you return to that town, people will remember you. You have left your mark there, and every time you return you see something of yourself in it. The point of side quests should be to connect you to the land and make it part of who you are.

For the most part, Final Fantasy X has escaped this type of criticism because Yuna is clearly passionate about saving Spira. But then she has lived there her entire life. She knows Spira and is willing to give her life to protect it already. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that Tidus is ever equally passionate about it. He is passionate about saving Yuna. That is his mission, not saving the world. On its own, his mission is certainly not ignoble. Furthermore, I realize that the story is ultimately Yuna’s, not Spira’s. However, I think that Yuna’s mission and the “save the world” theme are devalued because we, as gamers and as Tidus, may want to defeat Sin, but we don’t care one way or another for Spira.

The point that I’m trying to make is that the world the game takes place in should be more than just a plot device. A world is a dynamic creature full of life and stories. A world is complex and intricate. It has a history and a future. It is rich in diversity and culture. When depicted correctly, it is someone you get to know and care about. The setting is a character that needs every bit as much development as your party members. I believe that side quests and the ability to explore the world are essential to a setting’s character development. When executed properly they allow you to explore the world’s character and give you some connection with the land and its people. Only when a world thus proves itself can gamers be expected to be passionate about saving it.