Final Fantasy 9 is still the best game to learn more about our self
Note: The discussion below will include a lot of spoilers about the story of the game. You have been warned.
The definition of a tragedy play
How do people end up with the right standards? Or become wicked? Learn more in this interactive forty-hour tragedy play called Final Fantasy 9.
Final Fantasy 9 story starts with a tragedy play. The play later gets ruined by stealing the princess within that kingdom as was planned by the original cast of the play. After all, for better or worse, the tragedy play was done there for a diversion to steal the princess. But the game itself did not put the tragedy play in there as a diversion. Instead, the tragedy play was placed there at the start to imply that the whole game on its own will be a Shakespeare tragedy play. As the story unfolds, you will see several story arcs each intertwined with major events, characters transitioning from worst to better and better to worst, even the beautiful music composed by Nobuo Uematsu gives us the hopes, joys, and sorrows the characters go through. Now converting a Shakespeare play into a different medium is not as easy as it seems. Unlike your average movie, most stories have a start, an interruption for a new adventure, and an ending. Most of those stories give a life lesson or two, but it does not give several to make the main characters grow. A tragedy play has a series of events that make the character to instead go from A to B, they instead go from A to C to D to B. One instance is the animated movie The Lion King. What makes that movie so popular is how the movie could fit so many events in 90 minutes. The story unfolds where the son and father are living peacefully (point A). At one event, father taught son to remember his duty to protect his kingdom, to follow it as his father does. That gets reinforced as a call to action for the son on representing that duty when his father dies (point B). However, unexpected events happen that deviate us on accessing the expected flow of events directly. The son was very young when his father died and was lured to run away from the kingdom by the tricksters that killed his father (point C). In that new environment, he ended up being influenced by a bad gang about “Hakuna Matata”, to not worry about his duties, and start living a stoic life (point D). He got so used to not following the footsteps of his father in that new environment. However, at some point, as he got older, he recollected the memories of his past self and his dad, as well familiar characters intervening him to come back to the kingdom he used to live. Then all these events empowered him to go back to his kingdom and follow the steps of his father by defeating the trickster that stole his father throne (point B). As you can see, the characters progress direction is not flowing smoothly into a straight line. Instead, the character goes from up (living happily with his father) to down (running away from the kingdom) to up (becoming stoic) to down (realizing he doesn’t follow the steps of his father) to up (taking the kingdom of his father back). Meanwhile, you also see the development of the villain characters as the story unfolds. When the trickster stole the kingdom from the throne of his father, he was able to keep it under control. However, he only knew how to take things from others, not develop them, so what was developed, ended up in ruins. He was so bad at governing stuff that even the individuals who assisted him in killing the person that previously held the throne started to lose faith in him. In the end, he was killed by the ones who assisted him to be in the throne in the first place. As you can see, story arcs like the Lion King can expand a story to unfold into months and years. It is not your normal three-day Jumanji adventure and then life goes back to normal at home. With the allotted time, we have space to develop the characters in rich detail. Even the villains are not one-dimensional characters anymore. After all, we all know that people progress and grow in small incremental steps, it does not all happen overnight. What the best can unfold overnight is having a memento or a souvenir at the end of the journey and hold it tight for the sake that it may develop you further down the road. However, it will definitely not going to be showcased in this movie. Oh no, we definitely run out of time, of course. Only on its subsequent sequel, and only if that sequel happens after several years from the original movie, we can showcase that the character has grown into a different person. That leaves a big gap to what went in the middle between the origin of the movie and its sequel. Without knowing the middle part of what went from point A for the character to develop to point B in these movies, it makes the full experience incomplete. For these reasons, tragedy plays, like the Lion King give us all the details of the mystery instead of movies that feed us by the spoon as in: “Okay. This is the victim. And now this is the murderer. How did it happen? It does not matter. The case is closed”. Nonetheless, the Lion King has crammed so much stuff within its 90-minute movie scene. You can’t explore a lot on a story arc when most are at most 10 minutes long. You have to squeeze as much as you can and put only the critical stuff.
The structure of Final Fantasy 9 tragedy play
In contrast to the Lion King, Final Fantasy 9 on average takes at least 40 hours to finish. Yes, most of the part that you will play through is exploration and battles and not cut-scenes. However, since they had so much room to discuss a story full of events, they incorporated a lot of the story progress to happen inside the battle scenes as well. There are plenty of bosses in this game and most bosses have different phases within each battle. Each phase gets triggered as the boss character gets depleted more in life. You learn more about the characters you are fighting as they start to become weaker and weaker. Furthermore, the battles that happen are not only in a few locations. The game is surrounded with more than a dozen locations where each has its own different theme, history, and take a meaningful part for the story to progress. Some places trigger special events for specific characters to develop, some other places trigger the main storyline to go to a different direction than it was originally going, and so on. All in all, Final Fantasy 9 plays the same mechanics as the movie the Lion King, taking the main characters in different events that take them into a rollercoaster ride until they become at their best form. This element of the main characters of being from the worst to the best is called “anti-hero”. At first, the characters are completely blind out of their own failures. For instance, Zidane is a total jerk that only cared about chasing beautiful women as we learn from what he did in the past. Steiner places too much loyalty on something without evaluating it from time to time and Amarant trusts no one other than himself to the point he does not see the occasions when collaborating with others is more beneficial. In fact, I do not need to prove that the game follows that principle. If you leave the game idle, you will see a screensaver where it will randomly pick every few seconds one main character with a quote of the challenges they are facing with:
- Zidane: Virtue — You don’t need a reason to help people.
- Freya: Despair — To be forgotten is worse than death.
- Vivi: Sorrow — How do you prove that you exist…? Maybe we don’t exist…
- Dagger: Devotion — Someday I will be queen, but I will always be myself.
- Steiner: Dilemma — Having sworn fealty, must I spend my life in servitude?
- Quina: Indulgence — I do what I want! You have a problem!?
- Amarant: Arrogance — The only dependable thing about the future is uncertainty
- Eiko: Solitude — I don’t wanna be alone anymore
As you can see from the above list, the game develops all of the eight characters within the forty-hour gameplay going through each of them on all their up and downs until they are able to solve their own challenges. Of course, to dedicate more time on each character, the story does not revolve on the same set of main characters at all times. Some main characters are introduced at the middle or at the end of the storyline. So as you have guessed, the characters that come late into the storyline get more time to showcase themselves in order for us to learn more about their background. Furthermore, the whole party gets split into two parts into several occasions in order to have two story arcs happening at the same time. For instance, while Zidane is on a mission to save his trapped friends by the main villain Kuja, his trapped friends found on their own a way to get out. So you switch back and forth between different parties that occur at the same time in order to fill reasonably more details within the specific event. In some cases, it makes sense for only a few characters to be in a particular act. Otherwise, if they were tagged along with a group of other characters, they would not be able to speak freely. Different social norms get triggered depending on the characters that are filled within a specific play. For instance, the events when Steiner and Dagger were going back to Alexandria alone speaks quite a lot about the challenges Steiner was facing on his loyalty with his kingdom. He never had the time to think it quietly when he was going along with others. In those circumstances, he would only yell and blame others for stealing the princess. In contrast, in those occasions, while being alone with princess Dagger, enables him to contest more to his anti-hero patterns.
Overall, the production team put a lot of effort into making sure every detail of the game fits perfectly. Being part of the final iteration of Final Fantasy within the PlayStation 1, they tried to not only squeeze out the graphics performance within the system but bring the best elements of a storyline and philosophical concepts from its previous Final Fantasy iterations. Now that Final Fantasy 9 has been re-released into high definition to almost every console (it is coming to Nintendo soon at the time I am writing this), it is hard to put an excuse for not putting this game into your entertainment backlog.
The main highlights of the characters in the game
The game is definitely great to learn about how our upbringing and attitude towards the events can end us up into different directions. For instance, Zidane upbringing was in a theatrical play (yes, the cast are actually a gang of thieves, but you cannot ignore that what they do in their free time is theatrical stuff). Although he never took life seriously, he later starts to be more responsible once he falls in love with the princess. That made him have a bigger purpose in life and live to the fullest while facing his own challenges. Vivi, an artificial living thing, facing the knowledge that he may end up at some point being stopped and never starting again (a nice way to say to a robot how death will look like), admits its fate and faces his days of life with full of meaning to himself and to the others that face the same fate as long as it lasts. His friends and the events he went through helped shape his attitude that there was meaning within life even if it does not last for long. In contrast, Brahne was easily manipulated by Kuja to gain power and be insecure of others to the point that her paranoia was beyond the normal lines of common sense. Kuja, last but not least, started his life, not full of love, but full of jealousy. Zidane was a better artificial clone than Kuja. Unlike Zidane that can live a normal life, Kuja life has a shorter lifespan. Unlike taking things in good vibe as Vivi did, Kuja without anybody to support him at times like this ended up to become a trickster and devour the world with him as his time was ending up.
It makes sense that we live today in a world with a deconstructionist mindset where everything that we do is totally fine from the assumption that there is no right or wrong of what we do. In other words, we are free to have the choice to be more or less arrogant like Amarant. Or else if we were obedient to what was right or wrong, we would be obedient without evaluating our loyalty like Steiner was. But when Amarant asked how Zidane was able to traverse a life where he could help others, his reply was more in the words of because he was always trying to find the meaning of it as he went through. It is all about our consciousness of finding meaning as we walk along the path. It is not that we should not label things between good and bad, but we should only do that after we evaluate the circumstances in the first place. Being unconscious and following meaning laid by others and we would be stubborn like Steiner. Being conscious and deciding to not follow any meaning and we become arrogant like Amarant. In many ways, Amarant and Steiner learned a lot from Zidane. Steiner was more conscious to Zidane and accepted him to be an ally to his kingdom because he started to evaluate him by the deeds he did in the past and not anymore about what his role was represented (a thief). Amarant at the same time tried to be more resourceful to others and found out that he should not put out his efforts and hopes out so soon.
Quina which represents rebellion, Eiko which represent loneliness, and Freya which represents grief, if combined, they can represent an extreme version of the weak elements Dagger unraveled during the course of her own adventure. At first, Dagger was a rebel. She wanted to explore the world outside of her kingdom and be a different person than a princess (Zidane tried to assimilate her on speaking less elegantly). It was actually that she wanted to be kidnapped instead of feeling it was being forced. However, as she went along her journey, she felt at moments lonely when Zidane was absent. When Alexandria was rebuilding itself, Dagger was out of your main party, and until Zidane came back, the signs of Dagger missing Zidane are shown non-verbally. Last but not least, Dagger always wishes the worst to not happen, to not lose the one she loves the most. If Zidane went missing, her grief would be the same as Freya who already has lost her boyfriend. She already tasted how grief is from her loss of her mother Brahne and when her kingdom ended up in ruins. These elements of rebellion, loneliness, and missing someone are elaborated on detail when meeting the characters Quina, Eiko, and Freya. Once you get to know those weak traits well from those characters and you encounter those feelings in Dagger during the story events, you have a good grasp knowing inside what is happening to her, yet you don’t know why. Albeit all those circumstances that expose Dagger on her sensitive part of her self, we all see that they are shown non-verbally and suppressed. Dagger tries to cover it up because she needs to show she is strong and bold for the role of being a responsible queen that can be accountable of the people that she has to protect. So on each part of the story, Dagger gets interrupted from the role of a queen: She becomes a rebel, a lover, a person of grief of losing someone, yet under all those circumstances, she gains the composure to still take the duty of a queen. In order to understand that further, we have to remember the scene when Dagger tried to cut her long hair. On the last parts of the storyline, after her mother passed away and her kingdom remained in ruins, Dagger cut her long hair. It showed that she wanted to earn the reputation of a queen all over again. As you can see from the dialogue, the characters tell her that she is not pretty anymore as before. That she now is more of her “own self”. A person that is their own self can show more strongly the feelings of falling in love with Zidane and in some way indirectly confessing about it before Zidane goes into serious danger by going all alone when trying to save Kuja. All in all, when she was able to face and accept she has her own personal life as anybody else, the easier it was for her to be as a queen as well because it was never a choice whether she had to be a queen or be her own self, she could be both.
