Taking It All Apart

by Brett Smith 

A criticism of Final Fantasy IX such as Joshua Maciel's should come as no surprise. Indeed, it should have been anticipated as soon as news hit the presses that the game was going to be set in a world hearkening back to medieval times. The speculation spread like wildfire: Square was returning to its roots so as to attract the faithful players it has supposedly disenchanted. It should be no shock to find that some would now claim that the company's intent was nothing more than to pander to that audience. Nor does it come as any shock that the arguments being made are as weak as their predecessors. No, these are not novel ideas at all; they are only slight modifications of tried complaints.

The first part of the one-two punch is an opening with an impact: Maciel lists off one character similarity after another after yet another still, spanning all the way back to the original Final Fantasy and across a wide spectrum of different personalities. Eiko is hit the hardest: she is compared to Rydia, Selphie, Yuffie, Relm, and Cara all in one blindingly fast paragraph. The evidence certainly seems compelling: how can one claim that Final Fantasy IX is unique when one character is the mere mixture of five others?

In fact, however, the reason the editorial is so successful in playing this game is because the rules make it quite easy. A demonstration: Eiko should remind players of Rinoa; they are both one a rare few of a group of magicians, be they summoners of sorceresses. She also borrows plenty of her personality from Aeris: always full of pep, and open about her feelings. Finally, she is very sentimental, as is evident when the family stone is stolen; such an attachment to objects will leave an observant mind quickly recalling Gau and his impossibly shiny treasure.

Not convinced? A second hand of cards, then: Eiko's romantic feelings and impulses have all been seen before in the Final Fantasy series. Rosa was equally open about her emotions; Edge was equally hopeless in his romantic conquest; Edgar was equally determined in his feeble attempts to attract the women.

Put simply, Maciel provides plenty of evidence because it would be difficult not to: compare any two characters, and a similarity is certain to bind them. This opens the door for the next point. Some of the comparisons are similar: Rinoa and Rydia are both near the end of a line of users of specialized magic. Likewise, the upbeat attitudes of Yuffie and Aeris run parallel. However, the editorial does not criticize Rinoa for being the reincarnation of Rydia that she is. Moreover, Final Fantasy VII should be receiving even more slack: it had the gall to reuse the same character trait within a single game.

The same logic applies to plot points, the follow-up punch to this criticism of Final Fantasy IX. The game may share similarities in this respect with previous installments in the series, but any veteran Final Fantasy player will recognize this as nothing new; such shared elements have commonly occurred before. Elemental crystals appeared in Final Fantasy I, III, IV, and V, as well as IX. Maciel knows this; he provided that fact for this essay himself. Sacrifices have occurred throughout the series as well, and not only in Final Fantasy IV: Galuf and Aeris are two names that come immediately to mind. In sum, it is unfair to criticize only a single Final Fantasy game for borrowing plot points. It is almost a surprise that Maciel did not bemoan the reappearance of chocobos, moogles, and Cid the airship engineer.

Moreover, some of the comparisons made simply do not work. For instance, the circumstances surrounding Blank's loss and revival are different from the many miraculous returns of characters in Final Fantasy IV -- because when Cid sacrificed himself, when Yang stopped the cannon, when Palom and Porom turned themselves to stone, it was, at the time, permanent, whereas Zidane was always determined to restore Blank. Hence, not only are recurrent themes common throughout Final Fantasy, they do not occur as often in Final Fantasy IX as Maciel would suggest. In fact, it seems that Maciel himself is not wholly convinced of the points he himself makes. Consider the following paragraph:

The lifestream in FF7 is the souls of all the people and things on the earth that have died, and the life's energy or some such. The Mist are the souls of the dead on Gaia, and that's why Terra wants them used up, to halt the stream so that they could take over, or something of the sort. The main difference is that the lifestream is green.

Strong arguments do not, as a rule of thumb, contain phrases such as "or some such" and "or something of the sort." Simply put, these criticisms are a stretch. In the end, suffice it to say that Maciel's complaints fail for being baseless on two grounds: many Final Fantasy games, not only Final Fantasy IX, have shared plot points with predecessors, and moreover, the comparisons being made are weak at best, similar to the flaw with character comparisons.

It would be naive to argue that Final Fantasy IX is not a bit more self-aware than those games which came before it. There are too many references to previous installments of the series to say otherwise. However, this does not make it any less of a game. All that Maciel has provided us with is the same criticism that befell Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII, only with a new twist: instead of pandering to those who had not played role-playing games before, Square is now supposedly pandering to veterans of the genre. The details are irrelevant, though; the complaint fails for the same reasons its parent did.

There are two different approaches which can underlie artistic analysis: construction -- considering what the work builds as a whole -- and deconstruction -- seeing how all the pieces of the work in question function. Both, however, fail when taken to an extreme. This is the trap that Maciel has fallen into; he has deconstructed Final Fantasy IX to a point where all of the pieces seem dull. Such analysis fails to recognize the fact that Final Fantasy IX uses these elements -- some old, some new -- and brings them together to create a game, capable of standing on its own merit, and with a unique message about the value of life, never before explored so fully in a Final Fantasy game. In other words, the titles of these editorials are backwards: Maciel takes everything apart. Rather than follow this approach to absurdity, effective analysis should also consider the whole by bringing it all together.

Original Editorials: Bringing it All Together: Part 1, Part 2