Final Fantasy V (1992, Playstation)

For my latest Final Fantasy post, I decided to do something different.  As you may have gathered, I've been playing through the series with my wife, Clare.  In honor of the first FF to allow for 2 players, we've decided to do a "2-player blog post".  Hope you enjoy!  (We may decide to make this a tradition here at TPINS.)

Ben:  So...Final Fantasy V.  Sandwiched between the much more famous IV and VI, FFV is perhaps the most controversial game in the series.  Some people think it's a blemish on the series, and some think it's a hidden classic.  But whatever people think about the game and its strange job system, everyone seems to agree that its plot is not much to speak of, so how about we start there?

FFIV's big innovation was the large cast of characters, each with well-defined personalities that played off their fixed class in some way.  FFV, like earlier entries, has just four(-ish) characters that can be anything from healers to bad-ass ninjas to...flamenco dancers.  Unlike those previous games, however, these characters actually have somewhat fleshed-out backstories.  I actually found the occasional flashbacks to be surprisingly touching.  For instance, when Bartz, pretending to be asleep, overhears his parents arguing about his father leaving home to go on another dangerous adventure.  How do you think these characters compare with those from FFIV?

Clare:  I found myself much more invested in FFV's characters than FFIV's, because they stuck around for so much longer. After it became apparent that some of FFIV's characters were going to drop out more or less permanently, it became much more frustrating to deal with the remaining team members...were they going to disappear into some sickroom somewhere too? I also think FFV allowed for a nice mix of scripted character arcs and player input in the form of which job(s) each character was going to level up. For example, Faris is a pirate captain. Having her level up as a fighter makes a lot of sense with her scripted plot. On the other hand, the plot seemed to want Reina to be the healer -- she is the "kind" one, the princess, but there was nothing stopping us from subverting this trope and making Bartz our healer instead. Somehow, this lends more richness to the plot than there otherwise would be. Reina isn't just the kind, sweet princess out healing the team. Instead, she has a meta-narrative of trying to figure out which of the many jobs are going to work for her...for us, it turned out that alchemy and archery were really her thing. Furthermore, Bartz is sort of scripted as our lead guy. He is the first character we control, and seems to fit the wandering hero trope. But instead, he winds up being the support character to the much more physically powerful female warriors. Speaking of which, even if Bartz is one of the fighters, the game has as many female characters as male ones. It's not possible to have the girls be the token female healer -- there are just too many of them.. So what did you think of the largely female cast? Do you think it represents a real shift in gender dynamics in the Final Fantasy series?

Ben:  I was hoping you'd bring that up!  The Final Fantasy series, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the stereotypes that pervade depictions of females in JRPGs.  FFV, despite being dominated by women at the end, is no exception.  Reina is the "kind healer", Faris is the "unrepentant tomboy", and Krile is...well, I suppose she's more of a cipher, although some have suggested that she's supposed to be the "lolita".  But one of the great things about the job system is that you're free to subvert those expectations.  And except for a couple cutscenes where Bartz shows off his ninja prowess, the story lets you have it your way.

But while we enjoyed having fun with these characters, their story was hard to take seriously.  This is a game, after all, where the greatest threat to all existence comes from an ex-tree named X-Death.  If I may go on a tangent, though, there is some sense to be made of this.  The informative Final Fantasy Wikia tells us that this is actually a portmanteau of Exodus and Death.  This brings to mind the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, responsible for the exodus of Adam and Eve.  Really, recasting the villain from that story as the tree as opposed to the serpent is an interesting interpretation - I wonder if the Gnostics had something similar in mind.  Probably not something Sakaguchi was thinking about, I guess.

...Anyways, another thing about this game that nobody seems to talk about is how great the monster designs are.  Seriously, this game goes off the deep end, giving us cats wearing wings...


 ...ballerina goblins doing handstands...


 and...again, X-Death is an evil tree.

 I would argue that with RPGs pre-FFVI, the monster designs, and not the story, are the real "content" of the game.  Would you agree?

Clare:  I think one of the surprising things about pre-FFVI Final Fantasies is that they seem to have complicated and weird stories that aren't really all that different from later RPGs, but they are delivered in a much clumsier and less coherent fashion. In FFV, we have an evil tree trying to destroy the universe, yes. But there is also the fact that the world was split in two (I don't remember if it is clear why that happened), and you can travel between these worlds via meteor. There is also a strong theme of fathers passing on the torch to a younger generation, who has to step up and take their place as heroes. There's sort of a lot in there. Not as much as FFVI or ChronoTrigger, but it's still a fairly complex set of elements. On the other hand, the storytelling aspect of the games is still a little clumsy, and the individual elements don't really gel perfectly into a whole. It's much better than FFI, where everything was delivered in one near-incomprehensible infodump at the end, but they still haven't quite figured it out all the way by FFV. FFVI seems like such a huge leap forward because it knows how to tell a complicated and strange story. It has a better set up, a better reveal of the true enemy, a more solid story arc over all, and the stakes just feel much higher. So, to take a long time to answer the question, I think the story "content" of FFV is not really that different from later games, but the delivery is still clutzy enough that the really enjoyment of the game comes from things like the monster designs. And those designs are great! I loved the handstand demons. Also, this guy:

looks a lot like one of the monsters from Mother 3:

So, there's that.

There's also the fact that, unlike in previous Final Fantasies, I really felt like we hadn't fully completed this game. There were a lot of optional bosses that we didn't beat, a lot of summons we didn't acquire. We didn't level up all the jobs, or try all the alchemy combinations, or learn all the songs. It seems like there is just much more to do than ever before, and unless you are really devoted, and probably have a manual at hand, you won't really get to do or see everything. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see this as being a good direction for the series? I'm a little torn. On the one hand, it lets you decide more what you want to do (and potentially adds replay value), but on the other hand, it puts a kind of pressure to put more time into the game than you might really want to. When we encountered a lot of the optional bosses, it was pretty obvious that we were nowhere near being able to beat them, but if you let the story move on, then the opportunity to do so disappears. Is it reasonable to expect players to spend another several hours leveling up just to get a new summon?

Ben:  If Final Fantasy V gets talked about today, it's usually because it's great for "Let's Play's" - the replayability of the game, with its myriad job combinations and various collectathons (summons, blue magic, songs, etc), surpasses anything that came before it.  As a rule, the only games that I enjoy replaying are the ones, like adventure games, that play exactly the same way a second time.  And yet I enjoyed Final Fantasy V despite this, because there's so much fun experimentation that you can do in a single playthrough.  And moreover, this experimentation feels necessary.  The boring fighters that you can get away with in earlier games just don't cut it in FFV - you need to add a ninja skill like 2-swords (which allows dual wielding) or forgo a shield and use 2-handed to double the attack power, or else you're not going to be useful.  Also, the traditional elemental black magic is relatively useless against later bosses - much more useful is time magic, like Haste2.  The magic spell that allows you to restart the battle should be in every JRPG ever.

There is plenty in the game that we missed, but we did most of the optional sidequests - at least all of the obvious ones - and randomly discovered an extremely cool hidden town.  I think there's a healthy attitude to take, somewhere between speeding from cutscene to cutscene and being an absolute completionist.  I too wish that we could have beaten Omega or Shinyuu, but I think the game tried to make it clear that those battles were for masochists.  Certainly, it was annoying to stumble into them after hours without a savepoint, but I do like the idea that there are beings out there that can crush the greatest of heroes.  If Shinyuu wanted to take over the universe, we'd all be doomed.  It is true that Final Fantasies would soon pander more and more to perfectionists.  I remember the Playstation-era games containing many sidequests that seemed impossible to 13-year-old Ben without a walkthrough.  I'm very curious to see if that will still be the case.

Overall, I would agree with placing FFV in the "under-rated classic" department.  Certainly, Square's decision not to release it in America for several years seems increasingly baffling.  One final question:  what do you think modern JRPGs could learn from FFV?

Clare:  I guess all games have to walk the line between showing you too much and not showing you enough. If you want players to have a feeling of discovery -- that "Oh my god, there's a hidden town here!" feeling -- then you have to also risk that some things are going to remain hidden. And overall, I think that's a good thing. And if there is going to be some challenge to a game, then you have to risk having some bosses who are too hard to beat. I guess "hard" isn't really quite the right word. I don't think anyone is really "bad" or "good" at this style of turn-based RPG. It's more a matter of being persistent or not. In fact, I think that's where a lot of the fun comes in. The most fun thing in this game is seeing Faris deliver 9999 HP of damage with a sorcery attack, but that's only fun because before that were hours and hours and hours where a really good attack was probably only worth 200, or 500, or 2000 HP. The thrill of beating Shinyuu is probably similar. It's fun mostly because you were totally unable to do it before, and it took hours and hours of grinding to get up to a level where you could even have some kind of strategy.

So what can modern RPGs learn from FFV? I guess the biggest lesson is that there is a balance between having characters who can do everything and having characters who are too limited by their class. If all your characters are good at everything, there isn't much strategy, everyone is just an equal badass. But I hate being punished for making bad decisions in choosing classes early on, or for experimenting with different strategies later. In FFV, you can only be good at 2 things at a time, but you can learn new things and change your mind up until the end of the game. We didn't make Reina an archer until the near the end, but it was easy to switch her, and she wound up really powerful. Each character has his/her own role, but those roles can be switched up easily to allow for more, well, more play with the mechanics. The other lesson that sadly hasn't been implemented much, is that RPGs are super fun with a partner. FFV allows a second player to control half the characters in battle, and that makes it so much more fun. It is an easy thing to implement in a turn based game, and it sort of makes me sad that we can't do that in all upcoming games. But not too sad, because FFVI has the same mechanic. I call Celes!

All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

This is a movie whose Wikipedia summary is less a summary than an accurate description of everything that occurs during the film.  So let me just say that this is a movie where Robert Redford endures a harrowing ordeal at sea.  I suppose the film to compare this to Cast Away, which has slowly become the gold standard by which these sorts of survival movies are compared.  I didn't think much of Cast Away when it came out.  It seems overly fascinated with all of the different ways that a man might survive, and even stay sane on an island for years.  There's no room for fate in Cast Away - in the end Hanks' character saves himself when no one else is going to.  Yes, he gets a bit lucky with that ship at the end, but the way it's presented, it's like he earns that ship.

Redford's character in All is Lost is certainly more resourceful than most people.  Certainly not everyone could make it through what he does in this film.  But what makes All is Lost the better movie is that, ultimately, it's not up to him.  If God deals you a bad hand, then all the resourcefulness in the world isn't going to save you.  How does a man face that knowledge?  Well, the genius of the film is that Redford conveys those emotions with panache.  There's some genius touches in this movie, such as when Redford shaves while a big storm is coming in.  I certainly felt like I learned more about Redford's character than Hanks' in Cast Away, and Redford didn't need to talk to a volleyball to accomplish that.

xx (The xx, 2009)

Shortly after this album was released, The New Yorker's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a review, in which he discussed an early xx concert he attended on a lark.  The music, performed at a near-whisper, sounded aggravatingly sterile, and Frere-Jones left feeling confused and unusually irritated.  Then he heard the album itself, which is wonderfully intimate and emotionally resonant, and concluded that the band had constructed the record first without a thought to how it would sound live.  This is a reasonable conclusion.  It is also completely false.  The xx were playing shows for years before their debut, and developed the arrangement of each piece through a great deal of experimentation.

This basic misconception explains a lot about the xx.  Regardless of Frere-Jones' first impression, the xx is a band that fills football stadiums when they perform.  Yet there's no doubt that they do so on the strength of a single album, whose success they've had a great deal of trouble replicating.  Their second album was critically panned, and the songs on their third, forthcoming album have so far fallen a little flat in performance.  Perhaps the reason is that the band doesn't really understand why their music resonates with so many people.

The tags that we attach to this music - "minimalist" being the most important - were not intentional.  It's hard not to listen to the lead singers, male and female, and think that their music is not about a relationship, even though both are gay.  Clearly, the band deserves their success, but it's hard not to feel that there's a fundamental disconnect between them and the audience, and the group is going to have to reconcile this before they can move on.

In any case, the album is so good that they should have lots of time to do so.

Something I learned This Week

A slimline Playstation 2 can be left on for 24 hours covered in a thick gray sweater in 90 degree weather and still work fine.

Johannes Brahms

Barring especially extreme weather, I walk to and from BU every day.  Although the small amount of exercise is important, I do this mostly because it gives me a whole hour each day to listen to music without much distraction.  For the last few months, I've been listening to Brahms each morning.

Only a couple years ago, my knowledge of classical music began and ended with Beethoven.  I once had the ridiculous idea to listen to every Beethoven opus in order.  Brahms more than any other composer could be considered the heir to Beethoven, and for that reason I avoided his music for a while.  Why listen to a imitation instead of the real thing?  Well, I was being stupid.  Brahms has an extremely wide range, and though there are plenty of clever allusions to Beethoven in his music, it's very easy to enjoy on its own sake.  The key thing to remember is that Beethoven was working actively to thwart the classical conventions of his time.  Brahms, over fifty years later, was seen as a conservative, using the older (but heavily altered) musical forms while contemporaries like Lizst and Wagner had abandoned them for something more programmatic.  While their music can be hard to follow along with (without form, it's hard to keep your attention focused), Brahms' is not, but at the same time his music can be much more melodic than Beethoven's, in my opinion, and doesn't have as many "gotcha" moments, where Beethoven messes with your expectations.

Anyways, since I only listened to most of this music once, I'm not really qualified to go into any depth about any of it.  Instead, I'll take the easy road and rank what I heard into groups.  Let me first say that there wasn't anything on this list that I actively disliked.  Brahms' music is very approachable.  I would heartily recommend him to classical noobs.  Since he burned almost all of his early work in a fit of self-revisionism, what's been passed down to us is especially good and not overwhelming (four symphonies as opposed to Beethoven's nine, three string quartets as opposed to sixteen, etc).

Top Tier:

Piano Quartets 1-3:  To me, these quartets sound like piano concertos with a heavily reduced accompaniment.  Which is to say that the piano dominates these.  But the strings do their darnedest to keep up.  Most people would probably recognize the fourth movement of the first quartet if they heard it (the "Rondo alla Zingarese"), but I'm stunned every time I hear it.  Finally, I'm a chamber music convert.

A German Requiem:  I'm also a choral music convert after this one.  Brahms didn't use any existing mass for this one, but created something extremely personal and moving to commemorate his mother's death.  The melodies on this one are amazing.

Clarinet Quintet:  When you think clarinet and strings, you think of Mozart's incredibly relaxing opus.  This one is expectedly weightier.  Surprisingly, it works!

Still Great:

Piano Trio No. 1
Violin Concerto
Violin Sonatas
Four Serious Songs
Symphony No. 2
Piano Concerto No. 1: The reputation for this one is not good - the bad reaction to this piece apparently put Brahms off orchestral music until he was middle-aged.  But I quite liked it!  Sure, it's somewhat heady, but there's a great momentum to it.  I even like the much maligned third movement!

Good, but kinda disappointing:

Symphony No. 1:
This one is popularly known as Beethoven's Tenth, and it's fans say it holds up well against the ninth, which it unsubtly alludes to with a very "Ode to Joy" like theme at the end.  But I didn't find it nearly as epic and moving - in particular, the fourth movement seemed to be kind of a mess.  Overall, I would say that Brahms' symphonies just don't compare to Beethoven's.  I did like the second one better (see above).

String Sextets:
Some people wonder why the sextet was not a more popular form.  I am still not one of those people.

The End of Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

Morality in post-war Japan figure largely in Ozu's films, and by 1961 conventions had changed remarkably from when Ozu started his career in the 20's.  However, in The End of Summer, it's the patriarch of the family who brings shame to his children.  The widower Manbei, played by Ganjirō Nakamura, keeps running off to visit his old mistress, with whom he may or may not have had an illegitimate daughter.  He isn't very good at hiding his excursions either, and when he's confronted about them he brushes it off very unconvincingly.  Meanwhile, the family business is on the verge of collapse, and two older daughters, one played by the Ozu favorite Setsuko Hara, wonder if they should marry men they don't love to help save it.  There aren't many bright spots in this movie.

And yet, there's much to be grateful for - this is Ozu, after all.  Manbei seems to care deeply about both his potential daughter and his other children and grandchildren.  More importantly, he seems happy at the end of his life, and even a heart attack doesn't stop him for long.  For all the pain he causes his children (and his wife, when she was alive), it's hard to deny him that.  I do wish that the other storylines were more fleshed out - it seems like Hara doesn't have much to do in this one.

But one of the most fun things about this movie is that it's my first Ozu film in color - the beautifully maintained Japanese homes really come to life in unexpected ways.  I'm particularly struck by all of the dark wood, which I didn't expect.  Even Hara's face in color is a minor revelation.  Of course I wish that Ozu had more time to utilize it - this would be his second-to-last movie.