Final Fantasy XVI's Magical Misery Tour (The Jimquisition)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.ย. 2024
- / jimquisition
/ jimsterling
www.thejimporiu...
Final Fantasy XVI is miserable. Everybody is a vicious hateful scumbag, everything is governed by a vicious hateful system, and the international pasttime is vicious hatred. Apparently we're supposed to wanna save this world.
#FinalFantasy #FinalFantasyXVI #SquareEnix #Writing #RPG #Jimquisition #JimSterling #JamesStephanieSterling #Games #Gaming #Videogames
to quote a friend of mine "i had to stop doing side quests because i got the feeling i was gonna get called a bearer with the hard R at some point"
Explain
@@elegantoddity8609 Bearer is basically the N-word with how they are treated in the game
If I wanted to face verbal abuse from people I had no agency to refuse orders from, I'd wear a pride pin and work retail.
Should’ve seen me with my vote mask when I worked a grocery store during 2020
I'm in that same boat as well. I've had to walk away a lot.
#leavethosekidsalone
Do it.
as a target employee...this cuts deep
This makes me think of how Horizon Zero Dawn went about this. At the start of the game you learn that the protagonaist, Aloy, was banished from her village from birth, because she wasn't born under normal circumstances. When she comes of age she proves herself and all of a sudden the villagers need her help with what's going on in the world. So her response is literally, why should I help you? I vividly remember that being one of the few times in videogames where I sat there and went, wow, this character actually actively tells people to go fuck themselves in response to a cry for help from people that gave her nothing but shit all her life.
And don't forget, she was hated for it by many a "nice guy" gamer because she's so "rude and unlikeable" instead of passively demure.
What i find fascinating is that in a weird twist, apparently this same standard if preferring a milquetoast, spineless protag transcends gender for many people xD
I've never heard of this game until right now but now I have to check this out. Thank you!
The opening to Overlord 2 is so perfect. The young witch boy is ostracized by the entire village except for one girl and when the Empire attacks, he wrecks both sides.
@@wdcain1 Indeed; it was a great opening to a terrible game that gradually squandered all its opportunities. No end of "Hey Overlord, you're so big and bad! Do the bad things! And more bad things!! Hee hee, having fun yet, you bad person?"
I was like "Dude I'm just morally complex, not Chaotic Stupid, why you even in this frigging game, Gnarl... I thought you were the Wizard Hero and killed by the first Overlord, the former Warrior Hero. I don't like your nagging and you can piss off."
And then there's something about a hippie elf who's just written to be maddeningly unlikable, and turns out to be a big bad world-ending monster villain on top of it all, which... what? Why is the "bad bad overlord" fighting a world-ending villain? At least ask if we'd like to just smash the world with him or whatever, if you're so committed to the image of braindead, shallow "evil".
But nope, shallow evil vs. shallow evil because we couldn't think of anything better.
But yeah. The opening with Witch Boy and his initial promising story arc anchor, it promised _so much better._
Sadge.
Yeah, I loved that in Zero Dawn. Thank god for the like: two people in that village that treated her nicely or she probably would have razed it to the ground herself early on.
John Brown has been regrettably villified, we need more like him
Based and commie pilled.
There was an excellent Behind the Bastards podcast episode on him, one of their non-Bastard Christmas ones.
His Truth is marching on!
@@badflamer Can you translate into pre Twitter English please?
He really isn't at this point. I went to High School in the South and my history teacher loved him.
The way people treats Branded sounds like how people treat retail workers.
“Mage slaves” isn’t subtle.
i mean, its not FF first time dealing with slavery...
If the most popular mod for the game on PC isn't changing "Branded" to "Retail Workers" and all NPCs' names to "Karen" I will be disappointed.
Yeah that was my immediate thought, sounds like a metaphor for the working class
I mean of retail workers could wield fireballs... I think every sentence I say to a retail worker would end with "sir or ma'am".
I can handwave the Pokeplot thing in most games as "There are other ordinary things going on and being talked about, but the player only notices things the character finds relevant" But it can get kinda extreme at times
We should really stop handwaving it. When lazy, overly theme-obsessed writing gets a pass, the bar is lowered and other lazy writers can follow suit. When it becomes the norm, people will start forgetting there's even an alternative. Any world that revolves completely around any one thing - pocketmonsters, Element Zero, zombies, whatever- loses any right to call itself a world, at least in my eyes.
Take Project Zomboid; yes, it's a zombie game, but it also has loads of interesting objects, needs, moods, exercise and soreness... a world. Every single thing in the game is not "axe to hit zombies with" (there are axes, but you can also use them on trees), "anti-zombie armor" (wear what you can find and hope it absorbs a hit or two), "zombie cure pills" (nope), "wooden turret to shoot the zombies" (again, nope)... "zombucks" for the microtransaction store (once again, nope). It's a good game because it does zombies well and with a lot of detail and nuance and related mechanics, but it doesn't force every single part of itself to be about the zombies.
@@hazukichanx4081: I wouldn't call it innately lazy just because it has been done lazily, hell, Yugioh seems to *actively benefit* from leaning in as hard as possible and *trying* to one up itself in the absurdity of it.
2: Having played Zomboid *without the Zombies* (which it does let ye do) I did manage to find it a pretty alright survival thing even without the thing literally in the name of the game, intriguingly.
You can even handwave it from pokemon because of something Jim forgot to mention..... *GOD IS A POKEMON*
"Would you Clively?"
That's really good.
I'm lucky to have just played through Bioshock for the first time, else I would not have got that joke.
Raises the question why the protagonist wouldn't just say "fuck it, I'm going fishing".
Heck, that's what Noctis from FF15 would have done. XD
In some countries, the plubing is really bad so people don't throw used toilet paper down there but on a separate TP trash bin. Maybe this "story" was written in one of those countries, but after a guy used his throne time to review the text, he realized he spent too much time, and in a hurry grabbed the wrong pile of papers.
I have to assume this game should take around 30 hours to complete. That's at least a weeks worth of being told you're trash, and I have no idea why I should feel heroic or grateful to saving the lives of bigots🤨
That's what I do in FF14. Far superior game.
@@shindean It's a final fantasy game. So at least 60 hours maybe over 100 if you include side missions.
I believe the trope name for the "poke-plot problem" is called "The Planet of Hats", when an entire society is focused entirely on one defining thing.
To be fair, Pokemon has dogs that breath fire or lightning, and birds that make it their life's goal to murk you. Plus y'know God's a pokemon.
But at least there's some acknowledgement of there being death or danger, and a reason why you need a pokemon stepping out of town. This game is just depressing. Tales of Symphonia did it better with the whole half-elves treatment and how that backfired.
Thanks for sharing the Planet of Hats reference. I didn't know about it until now.
Same with Beyblade, yugioh and such
Have you heard of the trope Plot Tumor "A single plot element that was once a minor part of The 'Verse swells in importance as the series progresses, growing more in focus and elaboration to the point that it becomes the focus of major arcs and plot development." I think it applies a bit to this game.
@@shadowrobot7708 Honestly sounds like how Kingdom Hearts' plot went.
0:41 I was skeptical when Gorzak said this...
But when Gorzark explained more at 0:48 well, that was just poetry from the soul ❤
THANK GOD FOR STEPH, AND THANK GOD FOR GORZAK!
Don’t forget 1:52 & 24:09
When Gorzak summed it all up by saying "(burp)" I've rarely agreed more wholeheartedly with any commentator/critic.
18:15 But at least this girl actually acts like she is being remorseful post-scolding. I mean, like everyone else she has been brought up on the belief that bearers are just "things", but after Clive sets her straight, she actually starts crying "I'm so sorry, Chloe". Which is far more than you can say about the boy who got killed by wolves off screen.
A compliant oppressed person who is trying to get freedom for his people in a non-disruptive manner is one of the final fantasies of a certain demographic.
The biggest dream of late capitalist white liberal nations
Also the way a lot of actual oppressed people think things should go bc they've never been taught better
Liberal Fantasy 16
@@RebazarThe notable Abolitionists during the American Civil War were mostly Christian liberal capitalists, such as Thaddeus Steven and Fredrick Douglass. Meanwhile, many socialists and sympathizers of socialism, like Martin Luther King were unapologetic pacifists. And believed the only true way to get racial and economic freedom was through pacifism.
So please stop with this ahistorical stupidity. Like, I get it, some online leftists made you think bad things about liberals by spreading propaganda about them just like online right wingers do to get their marks to hate liberals. But repeating their propaganda doesn’t make you seem insightful. It just makes you look gullible.
@@quleughyMLK spoke of riots as the language of the unheard, lib.
I'd really have to question if ya played the game if that's your read I don't think the game necessarily handles everything it tries the best but Clive is literally the exact opposite of Passive by the second half of the game lol the man literally goes around upending countries to dismantle the status quo and killing slave owners.
Better way of dealing with the wolves and the village: Kill the villagers, fill your pockets with valuables, treat yourself to some nice food to go and then let the wolves in to eat the evidence.
Good, or even team up with the dude who brought the other wolf , and have them blame on the wolves. That they let the wolf free on the village, muhahaha. That people know how bad that dude ad his son are
@@ramonandrajo6348 I... don't get it. Why is it bad to dislike murderous slavers?
I wanna play this game.
@@ramonandrajo6348 Huh? How is it hypocritical to want to rise up against slave masters? Honestly I think it'd be a pretty neat, subversive game if they actually gave you the option to retaliate with force versus passively getting shafted by a bunch of slavers. Medieval settings are neat, they'd just be more neat if we could play with the status quo instead of being like "yeah y'know what it's totally chill to let children be brainwashed and raised as slaves." I'm just trying to see where the hypocrisy is there idk
@@ramonandrajo6348 What are you so afraid of? Woke, spell it out.
Does doing so cause your balls to fall off due to insecurity? Typical cuckservatives.
Final Fantasy XVI really is...
*(YOUR PS5 IS TOO HOT. TURN OFF YOUR PLAYSTATION 5 & WAIT UNTIL THE TEMPERATURE GOES DOWN)*
Well, the game was definitely ready on release date, as promised!
Try moving your PS5 to somewhere that has air flow. I can play FF16 for 10 hours straight and not have my PS5 even get warm.
I've a launch PS5 and zero heat issues. Shite talk.
Played my PS5 a lot in the past few weeks since games like Street Fighter 6 came out and even during really hot days and no issues. :)
@@IanMcGarr Tell that to the many people having this issue.... It's so prevalent that it's become a meme 😅... You can look it up if you don't believe me as there's plenty of footage of the overheating occurring when playing FF16.
I literally paused the video at like 4:30 just to share how absolutely hyped I am for the "overdone lore vs anemic narrative" video you just described. I feel like not enough people are talking about that.
It's 100% my issue with Fromsofts games.
I love the gameplay but can never understand why I'm doing anything or why I should care.
I realised I got to the last area in Elden Ring still having no idea what a tarnished is or why they matter.
The world has a ton of back story and lore but basically no plot outside of "Go kill boss because he's there"
@@DragonNexus There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It can be a positive to a lot of people.
@@DragonNexusI kinda feel the same way. I do love the incredibly deep lore but I do find it hard to understand what MY role is without paying rapt attention to the lore via items and scenery (and videos on it)
With Elden Ring it’s basically: Become Elden Lord and repair the shattered Elden Ring because an outer God to us to continue the status quo.
Of course we can ignore that and fuck things up if you want or unfuck them depending on your view.
@memelord9416 are you fucking serious, it's literally a sentence to a tiny paragraph just in case you don't remember where a certain kingdom is or why placing a dominant in chains works. Like holy shit I would have begged for that system in FF9.
Not to mention you don't even use it after a few hours cause if you got a brain you understand what's going on. It's like complaining about "Mako" in FF7 and not understanding how it works or if Sephiroth is discussed, you hit the button and "Tifa Lockheart, Cloud Strife, Sephiroth, and Nibelheim" descriptors come up, the game still tells you regardless in the cutscene, it's for if you're a little confused
@@DragonNexus Fromsoft has there own story language. And I don't mean that they shove everything into item descriptions. It's difficult to explain, but after playing enough of their games you start to understand what characters are saying even when they're not directly saying it.
As a Souls veteran, I found Elden Ring's story to be entirely explained by the time I finished. And I was able to do the entirety of Ranni's questline without looking online for more info, because by Fromsoft's standards, both the main story and Ranni's questline were told with very explicit details about what's going on and what you need to do next.
It's totally understandable that someone with fewer than like 1000+ hours in the games wouldn't really follow along easily though
11:57 so basically everyone in the Pokémon world is autistic and everyone’s special interest is Pokémon. Got it.
God is literally a pokemon.
... well now I wanna live in the world of Pokémon even more.
I always thought it's just an overcentralized society with creatures that solve all of your problems in a post scarcity society. Much of the world IS going to focus on your problem solvers that literally everyone has and double as companions. Imagine if cats could do your taxes, bring power to your homes, and participate in organized sports. We are already obsessed with cats but it would be a world defining thing now.
From what I've heard, Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon, might actually be on the autism spectrum... Would make sense, since the games are about collecting and cataloguing beings that are sorted into "type" categories.
Yay for the ableism.
F off
Eight Deadly Words: I don't care what happens to these characters.
Eight better words: I want bad things to happen to them.
I like that line:
" it focuses on the extreme that we lose track of the insidious" 😱
Yes... that line helps point out why the audience seems to prefer the overt cartoon racism over more realistic depictions. The 'insidious' looks a lot like what we're told to let pass by as normal, probably because it sounds like some shit we said as kids.
@@MoonShadowWolfe I wonder how one would make an rpg that allows one to see the insidious nature of discrimination?
@elihan9 I'm not sure. I think it would have to have a 'normal' point, in which your character has certain freedoms of where to go and what to interact with and dialogue options with others that, after some 'lost privilege' turning point or switching characters, disappear. You'd have to abridge freedom of interaction without seeming to. Attach price to things that were free to do before, maybe in some Social Standing meter (don't love that idea, anytime we represent abstract things with numbers, something gets lost). Have NPCs subtly refuse them information and access in a friendly manner, distrustful but pretending not to be. Stack the probability against them in selections that are ostensibly random. Ultimately, you'd have to restrict the player while kind of sneaking it by them that those restrictions are there, so if they're poor and subtly shunned and losing the game, it must be their fault. Honestly, I don't know how it wouldn't be a miserable experience if it was accurate, which kind of puts a damper on a project getting funding.
@MoonShadowWolfe I think a lot of those mechanics you mentioned are present in "Disco Elysium"
Maybe that style of turntable, story driven, rpg could be utilized to make the insidious nature of discrimination possible in the game.
@elihan9 More Disco Elysium praise. It's on my list ... 😮💨
You know how in most JRPGs, the central villain is this brooding, ultra-nihilist who just wants to wipe out all life and destroy the world? Their only justification is that life is so full of misery and sadness that death is the only true escape.
That would have been kind of an ingenious twist for the plot. You, the main character, Clive? You ARE that mega nihilist central villain of the story, but this time you can argue that you are completely right, and all of your enemies in the game are the band of so-called Heroes trying to stop you.
Just a thought.
I think it was Joseph Campbell who wrote, "The most noble quest an heroic protagonist can undertake is maintaining the status quo for the benefit of the already-privileged."
That does sound like him, tbh.
Btw, did you know he told a Jewish guy to his face that America entering the war against the Nazis was a bad idea, yet was totally on-board for the Vietnam war?
Reminds me of my favorite scene from the comic _Wrong Earth._ A gritty '90s Batman stand-in, Dragonfly Man, is transported to the cheesy '60s Adam West Batman world. When the mayor calls him to deal with a Riddler stand-in robbing a bank, DFM finds the president of the bank in the mayor's office. The two of them ask him to save the bank and he goes off on the mayor for letting a businessman run the government and how he's not interested in just helping maintain the status quo. Then he finds out the Riddler guy has hostages, so he goes to the bank and just shoots him. It's a fun book.
That doesn’t sound at all like something he would ever write or say. I couldn’t find that quote either.
Considering that his whole “hero’s journey” cycle was based around self-sacrifice, growth and self-improvement, then victory and triumphant return to the beginning but “better and wiser”, and being able to enlighten “your people” - it’s hard to imagine in what given circumstances he would’ve said that quote.
Wait was that sarcasm?
@@Celador He literally said that.
@@Hawkatana Couldn’t find the quote myself. Hard to believe.
These quests sound like they were going for The Witcher, where every story has a dark twist and your main character is ostracized by everyone (well, everyone that doesn't want to have sex with Geralt anyway). But at least in the witcher a lot of those twists are going for a black comedy appeal. And Geralt is always given the opportunity to tell off NPCs and betray them for being awful because it's a role playing game. I never thought about how much that adds to the experience but now I know.
I wound up feeling something similar to what little of _Duke Nukem Forever_ I could stomach. (It was on deep discount and I was morbidly curious.) I didn't want to save that Earth; I wanted to let the aliens burn it to the ground, and thereby double the average IQ of the galaxy.
Of all the places to see you pop up again Rogue, I definitely wasn't expecting it to be here!
I will say that the idea of a social outcast who's still expected to go along doing their job and bearing all the shit thrown their way without a complaint, feels like a very Japanese thing. Try reading about Nōkanshi to get an idea of it.
Also U.S. workers.
But then the game should at least acknowledge the unfairness of the situation.
Also the burakumin.
The problem is we can do that in real life. In Skyrim I can blow someone up if they look at me wrong. It's really starting to hit me that Final Fantasy is stuck. I'm not sure if it's ever written an actually super strong narrative or intensely interesting world. I think its changing cast, settings, and being just okay have kept it from death. Legend of Heroes worlds and lore shit on FF.
@@snorpenbass4196 Another very good example.
At least in "The Witcher," there's real nuance about why Geralt is treated with distrust and fear by a large swath of people. His scars and cat-like eyes scare children, Witchers are known to be emotionally stunted killers for hire, and Geralt has a history of getting in violent scuffles (e.g. the Blaviken incident).
And one of their signs is a spell that influences mind. It might not be as bad as outright mind control, but still - a dangerous mercenary that can get into your head and force you to do something? That's a pretty good reason to fear someone.
I see this game being compared to a lot of other similar fantasy, but one thing is constant: this one is lazier
Aldo Geralt isn't that uniformly loathed and treated like an animal, there are people of all social conditions that actually treat him with respect.
Yeah Witcher has a FAR more realistic take on someone who's an "other"
Not everyone just agrees with that kind of stuff even if most people would just go along with it for the sake of fitting in many would still call it bullshit. This was a really silly decision and makes the world look awful and then Clive is a total nothing protagonist in response.
I just got past the Honey Bee Inn part of the FF7 Remake and Jesus Christ even someone as serious and melancholy as Cloud is far more exciting and fun to watch.
There's also an additional distinction: Witchers are *vanishingly rare.* The vast majority of people have never met one, and for the ones that have, the iteraction is usually limited to "there's the monster, here's some gold if you get rid of it". Familiarity breeds acceptance.
Also, I find *very* weird that the group with fantastical superpowers is the one that's being oppressed rather than the one doing the oppressing. Again, Witchers are few in number and very hard to make, so while they're individually powerful, as a group they're rather feeble (which is how they get almost completely wiped out). FFXVI Bearers, on the other hand, are commonplace, so if a group of them banded together they could take the place over in an afternoon.
so many games have come out under my radar it's like being at a pride event in a rural town.
social media redirecting information moment
Its weird how ff14 already had this kind of plot where everyone has their bigotry and alot of the nations and beast tribes are at eachother throats. Yet you succeed in bringing them together and having empathy for them despite what they've done to your nation. FF14 is so refreshingly hopeful and positive despite being a continent where everyone has reasons to eachother
Yeah and FFXIV is also amazing. Not every story has to be positive and uplifting.
@@AuspexAO okay so whats the point behind how bleak and dreary ff16 is?
Part of my criticism with FF16 after beating it is "FF14 already did this and better" for a lot of the story. But I feel like a crazy person, because everyone in my circles is saying this is the best story they've played. (And I know FF stories often repeat similar themes. This just hit different with 14 being relatively recent).
@@meganvincent5381 They literally just said it: Stories can tackle similar themes in different manners. 14's is positive, 16's is more bleak and both interpretations fit what their respective games are going for. Neither is inherently better than the other just because their tone is different, you may simply have a preference toward one over the other.
Hell, there was the whole discourse between the AhBhed and everyone else in FFX. Like come on, FF has done stories with racism and discrimination better in the past
My best friend played Morrowind.
As an Argonian.
After hours and hours of getting treated like scum by people, he finally snapped and slaughtered everyone he could until he wasn't about to progress anymore, at which point he quit.
Honestly, if your response to Morrowind isn't to kill pretty much everyone in it, I question your sanity.
Thats was very lore accurate of them tbf
Based
We need a spaceghost style talkshow desk with Gorzak and Mysterio for random bits. I miss Mysterio.
Yes.
I miss Willium Defoe doll.
Missterio.
That's... That's Brilliant...
Mysterio is always with you. If ever you look across the room and do not see Mysterio, he is simply cloaked in invisibility. He is always standing near; he just needs a lot of personal time to plot the downfall of Spider-Man.
I feel like this is the equivalent of the trench coat and glasses stranger danger idea. It doesn’t actually inform anyone on what the concept looks like, only that the concept exists. No one will learn how subtle comments and stares feel from this, nor does it even do the job of making the game fun.
Great video, thanks for the efforts.
"apathy can provide a cover for the actual hate" SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
No somethings aren't worth wasting energy on
Gorzak’s comedic timing is impeccable.
He's a big hit.
Sounds like with Clive, you get to play as "One of the Good Ones", coupled with the "Magical Minorities" tropes, except taken literally at its core.
So its medieval X-men.
I'm not going to take a review of this game's story seriously from a point in time when it's essentially physically impossible the person reviewing it has finished it. I know Jim/Stephanie did a whole, very valid rant on why it's not necessary to finish a game before criticizing it, but I genuinely feel that does not apply when talking about the story specifically. They may hate that Clive continues to be a decent and honest person even in the face of bigotry instead of being a murder hobo- as if there wouldn't be serious consequences for him if he was. Clive is a kinder person than our host and they don't like it. that's all. Valid opinion, silly criticism imo.
@@Keira_Blackstone People have already finished the game, so i'm not going to take your comment seriously.
For what it's worth, almost immediately after this section, Clive, Cid, and Jill begin tearing down the entire society, violently (and rightfully). I don't think we're supposed to think the current situation is a good thing.
@@hakageryu-hz7jz understandable. Have a nice day. Though I suspect someone with as active a life as jim/Stephanie who also insists on doing all the side content they're complaining about is one of the people who have finished it.
My favorite moment is when a guy pleads for you to save a group of goblins so you do, then you walk 100 feet and kill a whole herd of them who are cornering another guy haha
Isn't that just average RPG gameplay? Save some guy while murdering dozens of guys on the way there?
That was hilarious in the uh oh sort of way 😂
@@gateauxq4604 someone should make a 2 hour video essay on ludonarrative dissonance about it
Tell me you don’t play video games without telling me you don’t play video games.
@@noonenowhere877 I didn't even play FF16, I just had a dream about playing the whole game and lo it was true.
The only things I miss about old Jim Sterling is Chains of Love and Stress.
your avatar....
I like you. :)
from a distance,
in a non creepy but rather "I have autism and don;t want to interact more than i need to" way.
@@badflamer hehehe, thanks. Glad to see people still appreciate inside job (rip)
"would you Clively" is such a deep cut. well done.
This game's story sounds like a few D&D horror stories I've heard about really bad DMs with really crap worlds.
And the excuse used by these individuals, it's "gritty realism".
+
It's worth noting that the plot of the game--the plot that starts almost immediately after the part highlighted in the video--is about tearing down this society, even if it means destruction, collateral damage, people's lives being wildly disrupted, and so on. Cid, Clive, and Jill have a whole discussion about how the only way to build a new world is to burn this one down.
I think the point of this section is to really drive home how fucked up the world is before handing you a torch and asking you if you'd like to burn it down.
@@AProperNoun That was my impression as well.
Me"This fucking world sucks. Burn it down."
Cid moments later "This world fucking sucks, so we're going to burn it down."
All I can think of is when a Transwoman merchant was added to an expansion of Baldur's Gate 2 and people complained they couldnt kill the character.
Wonder what their opinion of not bein able to do that now is.
...?
The story kinda reminds me of the Broken Earth book series. It's also about a slave class with magic powers that gets treated like garbage. You might like it. The first book opens on a kingdom of slavers getting nuked by one of the magic slaves.
Which immediately begs the question: If the magical slaves are so powerful that one of their number can nuke a kingdom, how on Earth are they the slaves?!?
@@CteCrassus Because they can't ? (talking about FFXVI)
Dominants in general aren't slaves, they're often high-dignitaries, counsellors, war-leaders, and even kings in this world. They are the ones with the nuke-potential. The only nation that enslaves Dominants is the Iron Kingdom since they consider any use of Aether to be heretical. And in this context they use psychological/physical torture, and they also have ways to coerce them. For example Shiva's Dominant only accepts to fight for them because they threaten kids and kill them when she disobeys.
Long story short: if a Dominant becomes enslaved, it's because the human has been broken (because yes, they are still human, and that's the whole point of the story in fact)
Also, they can't retaliate in desperation because they are kept in manacles that dampen their ability to channel Aether through their bodies, so they can't Prime when they want.
This is how ultra-powerful beings can become slaves anyway.
1- Get a way to cancel the power
2- Break the person
3- You most likely don't need 1- any more
Having power doesn't render you immune to everything that doesn't involve that power.
The Wheel of Time is a fantastic example of nuke-capable mages that are enslaved with magical collars and broken by masters until they can't even think of hurting their masters any more because it causes them physical pain.
Anyway, back to FFXVI !
On the other end of the magic-spectrum we have Bearers. These are the "slaves" referred to in FFXVI. They are your basic elemental conjurers with the ability to heat up an oven, light a lamp, trim a tree, fill up a well, etc., but not much more. They aren't powerful magic users who can cast destructive spells.
The reason why they are been forced into submission is because their existence undermines the economical power of the nations under the Mothercrystals since they are able to cast magic without using crystals.
If they are left unchecked they would be a threat to the economy and the powers that derive their strength from said economy.
So instead they have been turned into assets to be traded and used, just like the crystals they replace in the day to day tasks.
@@arenkai I was refering to the Broken Earth book series, which is what the OP was talking about, but when talking about FFXVI, someone who can heat up a oven can set you on fire; Someone who can trim a tree can sever a head; Someone who can fill a well can flood a house. And then there's Clive who, though exceptional, can't be unique, because otherwise people would shit bricks seeing him in action.
I mean, I know he's a Dominant, but people treat him like a common Bearer, which means that there must be Bearers with that sort of arcane power and might.
@@CteCrassus Incorrect on all four accounts. The way bearers can conjure fire amounts at most to having a lighter, and it cannot be projected beyond their hands. The way bearers can conjure wind amounts to having a hair dryer (important note, they do not trim trees or cut down trees, they just give them a pleasant breeze). The way bearers can fill a well is by standing there for days because the amount of water they can conjure is having a water faucet. These powers cannot be scaled up. Even bearers used in the imperial army, like Tiamat who appears to be the peak of what a bearer can do in terms of combat magic, can at most pull off a magic missile and otherwise sticks to using swords and armor. The implication seems to be that most bearers in the imperial army are used either as regular slaves or as meat shields, with only exception being The Bastards assassin squad (so assuming Biast could also use a magic missile, that's TWO bearers in Valisthea who can use very low tier combat magic). The Cursebreakers, who are the bearer militia that Cid and Clive have, only use swords, armor and normal training instead of magic too.
As for Clive, he not only has the Blessing of the Phoenix (which is what's assumed to allow Clive to use magic until it's revealed he's a Dominant, Clive isn't actually a bearer but his mother decided that to her a more amusing way for Clive to perish would be for the imperial army to turn him into a branded slave-soldier than have them kill him when he's unconscious) when no one knows he's a Dominant yet which does let him fling fireballs (which no other bearer appears to be able to do), he's got actual top of the line combat training from a young age. So since he's obviously much deadlier than the average branded Clive's put into a disposable assassin squad. But Clive is also very reserved and at that point just patiently waiting for his chance for revenge against Ifrit so he's following orders until he'd have to kill Jill so he instead kills Tiamat in a fight, so the extent of his powers and swordsmanship is mostly unknown and not cared about. And after he does go rogue Clive's combat abilities when he was supposed to be just one branded ARE reacted to with bricks being shat, notable example here being by Benedikta when Clive's not only able to beat her summons but her when she's semi-primed, while she initially assumes that each step should be insurmountable to just a branded.
@@CteCrassus No, it takes them time and concentration to do all those things, it's not instant.
We see Bearers at the start of the game barely releasing trickles of water to fill a well. This is not instant magic.
Clive isn't a Dominant when he's caught as a slave, he just has the Blessing of the Phoenix which allows him to cast fire magic. People blessed by a Dominant share part of their power and become their must trusted guards basically. Those blessed by Bahamut become Dragoons, those blessed by the Phoenix become the Shields of Rosaria's best guards, those blessed by Garuda become assassins, etc.
Completely different from a normal Bearer.
You are arguing from a place of complete ignorance of the source material it seems here. Which is a shame, since the worldbuilding of this game is great when it comes to the magic users and the politics around that as a whole.
"without bearers the people of this world would just lie down and die in their uselessness" sounds like the Roman Empire
"It focuses so much on the extreme that we never get an exploration of the insidious."
I see the game's worldbuilding and philosophy have chosen to go on the David Cage route.
No it doesn't, it front ends it in this area because you are in a position where you cannot fight back. You are a "bearer employed" by Isabella (an ally to the liberation movement) to get a path way to the capital in order to destroy something, as payment to her you are to uncover what happened to a prostitute under her employment and protection within an Imperial checkpoint/stronghold. To get access to this information you are wearing a pendant that indicates you are a representative for her, you fuck up that situation for her and she will be facing death related consequences. Clive does not kill the wolves in the area to protect the hamlet, his job is to find the soldier who may have abducted and killed the courtesan and by circumstance he has to kill the wolves to get to her body. Clive is also an Imperial deserter which is punishable by death, so if he is discovered he's fucked. The game deliberately puts you in a situation where you can't fight back against this injustice.
Everyone who plays this part of the story are sicken by it all, and the idea of taking the fight to these assholes is juxtaposed later when consequences for taking direct action can (and does) result in the controlling heirarchy killing bearers as a violent oppressive tactic to weaken the liberation movement. The whole gambit of fighting within the system to destroying it completely is explored and argued. The fact that Bearers are both the comodity for the economic system and the military war machine over ownership of territory is addressed.
@@DisappointedBuddha Except that argument doesn't really hold water if you give it any thought at all, even with the context provided.
The entire situation involving the wolves is meant to be an awful display of the vulgar abuses of power that the system permits. However, the sheer over-the-top sadism of the scenario and the outright cartoonish villainy of the noble and his son causes the entire thing skip over any nuance and become absurdly melodramatic. There's plenty of ways to write this scenario that could highlight how vile the system is without needing to go into a scenario so absurd that it becomes impossible to take seriously.
And the argument "Clive would be SO fucked if he did anything!" falls apart the moment the twist is revealed. The noble is clearly upset that Clive survived and killed what he and his son see as a pet, isn't that a crime enough to get caught, regardless of the circumstances? Is there some special, unspoken protection that Clive would have in this scenario, or some law the noble is violating? The game up to this point doesn't really reinforce that as a possibility. Isn't the guy who caught the new wolf for the noble just as fucked for doing what the game explicitly disallows you to do? He's also a bearer, so you can't say he's any better off than Clive. The excuse the game gives you for Clive's lack of agency collapses under any kind of scrutiny - even the non-military bearers seem to have more agency here.
And that's not even addressing the issue where this whole excuse that Clive is a deserter who needs to keep his identity a secret just falls apart anyway outside of this scenario when Clive duels two members of the imperial guard he's supposed to be hiding from in the same city! Even in the context of a duel they agreed to, what is preventing the guardsmen from just reporting it as an attack to be petty if this is a world where a nobleman can literally feed bearers to the wolves, laugh about it, and get away with it?
None of this makes any sense from a thematic or worldbuilding standpoint, fails to survive even a moment's scrutiny, and turns the message it's trying to convey into a parody of itself for the sake of melodramatic misery porn, all while giving so much focus to the extremes that it doesn't explore the insidious.
So I stand by my earlier comment: This game _absolutely_ takes the David Cage route.
@@WoobooRidesAgain Lets address your points you brought up here.
I will concede that the wolf situation is definitely almost COMICALLY evil in its presentation. I thought it was good, but i can understand your distaste with it. I think a much better example of they ingrained "branded are playthings" in the peoples' minds is in another side quest about a minute walking distance from the wolf one. I can give you details if you like, though I do not want to directly post any spoilers for anyone else reading. Just let me know and I will insert it in a separate comment.
Yes, the noble is clearly upset and could very easily have got Clive in some serious trouble. Clearly though, based on the entirety of the conversation that the Noble has with Clive, and the other interactions with Branded/Master relationships up to this point, many of the people exploiting Branded do not feel threatened by them, and thus take their retribution into their own hands more often than not. Branded generally do not stand up for themselves, and thus this is usually sufficient to get the desired outcome for those in power. In comes Clive, a Branded who can clearly fight and fight well, who says in no uncertain terms that those in power are not immune to consequences. Say what you will, but it makes sense to me that the Noble in question would rather try to get payback by proxy (a bigger and badder wolf) than risk the ire of this particular Branded. This then leads into the Noble and Son's ultimate fate; they instructed their Branded to get a Bigger and Badder wolf, without thinking of the consequence of having an even stronger wild animal that does NOT discriminate in their vicinity. The Branded that obtained the wolf may have taken measures to ensure this happened, but it would have been much easier to claim it as "shit happens" with the wolf, than Clive outright murdering someone himself. An Alibi is present for the Branded, not for Clive, who is already an "outsider" in the area and thus open to more scrutiny.
As far as your statement regarding Clive's deserter status, and its relation to the duel with the Imperial Guards, I would like to refer you to Clive's now known affiliation with The Dame, a known and respected quantity within the town Clive has this duel in. Yes, the Guards' initial reaction to their trouncing is to threaten consequence of calling in for backup. However, once they notice The Dame's symbol of trust on Clive, they realize that if they go after Clive, their is a high likelihood that their priveleges within The Dame's establishment, as well as their repute within the town, would suffer greatly for it. So they begrudgingly accept defeat and move on with their lives. Were it not for the Dame's influence, Clive would certainly have faced severe consequences. However, the influence and trust of powerful/influential individuals sympathetic to your cause ( a reoccurring theme within the game) are powerful tools when one is effectively in a resistance movement.
You say these things do not survive a moments scrutiny, however my moment of scrutiny seems to almost flawlessly defend them, or at least give a logical explanation within the lore of the world as to why they happen the way they do. You may not like the storytelling in this game, however I do not see the logic in people who have not played this game past the first Act (or allow someone who has not completed more than the first act to dictate their opinions on it...) should be making statements about how the events of the game do not make sense.
@@rayriv14 Personally I don't really think there was any kind of plan going on with the bigger wolf, that was just the nobleman's and his son's own cluelessness about what wolves actually are coming to quite literally bite them in the ass.
Though regarding whether or not the wolf thing strains belief because it is so "cartoonishly evil," one can just read a little on say the Congo Free State or Sparta or just some of the more novel methods of execution from back in the day, like scaphism (though this one is possibly made up) or the breaking wheel, to see that people IRL have long mastered the art of being cartoonishly evil when they are in position to be so.
@@rayriv14 So I can sum up the entire first paragraph there with the following question: If Branded can be, literally, fed to the wolves for the sake of entertainment, and the person doing it feels so protected that they can straight up just tell one of their potential victims about what happened, what does that say about legal protections afforded to the Branded, especially in this scenario? Saying the guy who got the wolf can go "oh well, shit happens" doesn't really hold water when you have a potentially vengeful son who has already been displayed to have - as you yourself admit - comical levels of sadism who could just, I dunno, say the Branded killed his noble father, because the game is already implying there are no legal protections for the Branded if they are literally, blatantly murdered.
And in the inverse, if a Branded can commit murder-by-proxy with a wild animal and get away with it, what's stopping Clive from literally doing the same thing by leaving the guy wounded in the field, or something similar to that? I'm not even advocating for murdering the Noble in this scenario, I'm just saying that what's being presented in this sidequest, narratively, makes no sense and is awful because it robs the player of any real agency.
The most frustrating part of this whole scenario is that it's _so_ easy to rewrite: Just have the noble send out Branded to deal with a problem, neglect to mention it's a rabid wolf or monster, then act with indifference when Clive calls the guy out for not mentioning that, or showing any respect for the Branded who were already killed by the noble's lack of care. It perfectly shows the injustice of the system while not making it such an overblown display of cartoonish sadism that it becomes ridiculous and opening a whole can of worms that has your audience questioning how the society you written functions.
And to address your comment to the whole duel thing? That doesn't make Clive look like someone who's aware that he's building a relationship with someone who can afford him protection and advance his interests, it makes Clive sound like an idiot who is just lucky because the guy who he fought just happened to value his access to a sex worker over his own pride. Did he even _know_ that the symbol would protect him when he started? Also, does the Dame have any kind of protection or not? Because the person I'm responding to above is saying she doesn't, and that Clive's behavior will reflect badly on her, and you are saying she does, and that Clive's behavior is given some leeway because of her influence. If the people defending the story can't seem to agree on the story's own rules, that's not really a good sign.
And finally...My man, no, I am not going to buy a 70+ dollar game because some guys on the internet are telling me "no, dude, no, the story is good, dude, you just gotta' play 20/30/40/9,000 hours of the story, dude, cos then it gets good, dude, you don't have opinions until you play the game, dude". We have TH-cam, I can just look this shit up, and I don't need four million hours of gameplay to get a context out of what's being told here.
I'm not here to say "you should stop playing the bad game" - like, gameplay wise, the game looks fine. And do whatever you want, enjoy whatever you want. If you're having fun, that's great. But the game looks like its hobbled by a story that equates misery with maturity and pontificates about the injustices of systemic racism while showing no real understanding of the subject or treating it with the respect it deserves, and more importantly, saddles you with a terribly-written main character throughout, and that doesn't make me overly enthused to play the game because it sounds like a miserable experience.
And also, just for future reference? If you want people to take you seriously, don't say shit like "my moment of scrutiny seems to almost flawlessly defend them". Because that's just begging for someone to point out how deep in your mouth your foot is currently placed. And brother, with those arguments, you're playing footsies with your uvula.
Reminder that ff7 opened with the main character blowing up a power plant as part of a terrorist organisation. Meek compliance with authority wasn't exactly the vibe.
Especially because Cloud was Cool
Reminder that in this game you perform an act of equal terror in that region with all the horrid, racist people that have been cherry picked in this video. Literally bringing their city to it's knees by blowing up the mother crystal. But...Clive doesn't kill the villagers in that one cutscene so game bad?
Here is my essay on race in Historical Fantasy.
If you are creating the world then you can populate it with anyone, and if you choose to make them all white then it’s more about you than historical accuracy.
And how do I feel about Old you vs new you? It doesn’t matter. But I will say one thing, the new Steph smiles a lot more.
👏👏👏
I recall some dipshit on youtube complaining about Queen Callanthie in the witcher netflix series. Saying it was totally unrealistic for a woman (not that specific woman, just any woman) to be able to swing a sword like that.
There was no mention of how unrealistic monsters or dragons were, nor elixirs to give powers, or people wielding magic, only that a woman can't lift a sword.
Realism doesn't matter in a fantasy setting. You make it what you want. And as you say, if you want to populate your whole world (not even just a country, but a whole world) with one skin colour, it says a lot more about the creator(s), or maybe more about their target audience.
@KristenHolden-kn3fy Japan still exists in the world though, and Square-Enix absolutely has hopes that their games make it big internationally so yes, I think you can expect them to. For all their faults, the new Pokémon games have made efforts to include more diverse characters so it's possible.
@KristenHolden-kn3fy thats a shitty cope
I think they use the excuse of historical accuracy to not say the quiet part out loud: "We don't know anyone black and I don't have time to make MY GAME while looking for people of color to write MY VISION!"
And that's how you get this week 2 discount bin game.
Clive taking shit from random villagers makes some sense when you consider that in those moments he's presumably trying to keep a low profile in a world that is extremely racist towards bearers, and a bearer telling a villager to blow it out their ass or attacking them would draw attention. HOWEVER, I 100% agree that the lack of subtlety in how they present this world dynamic is almost comical - my 'favourite' has to be the cutscene with the mother and son in the tavern.
Definitely of the opinion that Making People Care is the hardest part of a story.
I remember Yahtzee made a joke about this in his Pokémon Black review. I always assumed the non Pokémon NPCs were just walking around and weren’t coded in.
Everyone. "Get fucked!"
Clive. "Okay."
There's a trope in storywriting that goes "Too bleak, stopped caring." And this game really fell hard at that hurdle.
I feel that one so often
Project Moon keep getting me with that one. The Lobotomy Corp / Library of Ruina folks. I mean, it doesn't _help_ that their games are demanding, stressful and fond of excessive RNG mechanics or obscure, random things like "do not have this monster on screen while your employee is harvesting its energy... apparently it's fine for the employee to see it, but not the camera"... but also, their story writing is just... "oh look a small child, wonder when -ah, there it is, the organ thief brutally murdering the child, yay bleakness".
It didn’t. They’re only 10hrs in, without any side quests done for the hub and towns, it shows with this review
Audience Induced Empathy I think it was called?
@@MikaMausArt "No, it gets better at the half way point, trust me" is such a classic excuse for weak storytelling, and so often wrong, that it rightly gets dismissed outright.
the title of the vid should have been "would you clively"
it's gold
I'm so goddamn sick of goddamn fantasy RPGs shoehorning the player character into being an ineffective pushover in the face of horrible oppression. There's enough of that in the real world already.
This game could have done with an RDR2 style of gameplay where you can shoot anyone you want at the cost of 'honor'.
Where 👏 Is 👏 My 👏 John 👏Brown 👏 Simulator 👏
@@Sheriff_Bruce_Lee That wouldn't go well in Japan, though, where that sort of thing is punishable by Seppuku...
“Ineffective pushover”
And im so goddamn sick of people who haven’t even touched the game pretending to have an opinion on it.
That "Ineffective pushover" tears out one of the many hearts the entire system within the first 5 hours of the game and spends the rest of it looking for ways to get to the rest, all while uprooting and burning down the opposition.
But he's apperantly a pushover. AIght. :P
A world in which an oppressed underclass is mistreated and despised not just in spite of their absolute necessity but because people resent that necessity has a great deal of potential for storytelling from a subtle and skilled writer. It has, in a few quite well-known books. The place for this is not Final Fantasy.
The amount of disclaimers and caveats reviewers have had to put before critiquing this game is kind of scary... Are people being that crazy defensive of the game ?
Unfortunately.
@@DMDmaster that is very silly and immature on the part of gamers then.
@@jordanetherington1922 Gamers being silly and immature? That'd be a first
the mentality of" if your not with us your against us" is transcending to real life, kinda scary.
@@LorijenkenTranscending? That’s been the status quo in this gods forsaken subculture of nerdome for as long as anyone could remember.
I think that this plot conflicts with our need for player agency. I remember having this issue with Fallout 4. I left the Institute quest for the end, so when I encountered "father" I was basically the leader of 16 communities, having expelled most external players and what I wanted was to sit the Institute at the table and negotiate some kind of peace treaty that would benefit everyone, even though I despised them from all the things I alread read about them.
But the writers of the game did not expect that, and presented me an extremely infuriating dialog in which I was offered to be some kind of "intern" for the Institute, not recognising any of my work there. It felt extremely demeaning, like if the Institute spies were worth jack shit and basically reported I spent the 40+ hours lazing around drinking nuka cola or something.
At least I got to nuke the shit out of them.
Seems FFXVI doesn't offer you even that :(
except you literally DO nuke the world in a sense....
That's a cool political essay. Will you review the game at some point in the future?
@somethingdiabolical3894disagree all you like with the argument in the video (as I do - I think it's a horrible mischaracterisation of the plot) but don't dead name/misgender people
Steph I'm a big fan you inspire me as we are both trans but the game literally becomes the violently anti slavery anti capitalism game you wanted right after the part you stopped at. There is also an entire middle eastern kingdom in the game full of PoCs. Kinda disappointed you made this video without doing full research because as a black disabled trans woman this game has Benny cathartic violently uprooting a capitalism and ending slavery in this game.
It's also worth mentioning that the whole reason Bearers are despised so deliberately and vehemently is explained in a side-quest towards the later part of the game. So they do give actual insight to it and the reason for it being actively suppressed in the world (though it definitely would have made more sense to have it be part of the main story IMO).
To be fair if I lived in a world with Pokemon in it my life would revolve around them too.
I'm not gonna lie, "in this world people are racist against wizards!" is easily one of my least favourite fantasy tropes at this point
As far as video games go, it was only done well in Dragon Age Origins. That game put in effort to show how volatile and dangerous magic can be, especially with demons preying upon magic users and wanting to posses them. There is an entire major quest showcasing how an entire land almost got reduced to nothing because a single kid made a deal with a demon.
In that world in makes sense why such a harsh bureaucracy arose to control and supervise "mages" while largely removing them from "normal" society and also benefiting from their special talents. It felt quite realistic and grounded. You could sympathize with the mages who wanted more freedom while also sympathizing with the normal "folk" who are scared of them.
@@anewunfolding195 Yeah, if you want to go that route when worldbuilding, magic needs to be _at least_ be, bare minimum, dangerous and unpredictable, otherwise the primary question going through the audience's head will be some variant of "how is this world not governed by some flavour of magocracy?"
IRL stigmatised groups have less access to power, not more - that's why it's a safe scapegoat mechanism for societal power structures to blame for societal woes. You really think immigrants, for example, would just nod and take all the mindless, insipid hate if they could throw fireballs and lightning bolts at cops? People who could do that without some sort of massive downside, ESPECIALLY in pre-modern (or at least pre-gunpower) times, would be priviledged by society, _because they'd run it_ , and everyone intuitively understands that. I mean, a non-fantastical version of "I'm better at violence than you, give me your stuff or we'll take it by force" is literally just any aristocracy.
@@anewunfolding195 FFVI does it well. By the start of the game, magic is already all but dead, and the main hero is a girl who was being controlled with a crown to cause mass destruction for an evil empire. The game has a lot of hope and brightness in it despite its setting
I can't think of an example of low fantasy that doesn't have this "oh wow everyone in this world is horrible to each other, there's no joy, and nothings worth fighting for" problem, I will never understand the appeal.
Final Fantasy XVI is a good example of that though, plenty of good people in there, with lots of spotlight on them too
(also, it's high fantasy, unless you were really talking about low fantasy, in which case I would recommend The Dresden Files ! Plenty of light-hearted great characters amidst the grim stuff)
FFXVI is high fantasy, it’s just grimdark fantasy.
I think the only game that’s fantasy and depressing AF which I genuinely enjoyed (for the most part) is “House in the Fata Morgana” which I highly recommend if you like visual novels.
I was really surprised by the themes the game talked about. It’s a story about alienation, discrimination, abuse, the trauma that comes from these things and how they lead us to harm others by perpetuating endless cycles of hatred. It’s also a love story in which two characters bond amidst those difficulties and help each other heal and break free of those cycles.
LGBT representation is pretty nice in this as well. One of the characters is (arguably) bi, there’s a trans character, and the topic of intersexuality is a central theme in one of the sub-stories. (Maybe there’s more but I can’t remember) It shocked me because I never played a Japanese game in which these topics are treated with so much empathy and nuance.
“Nothing’s worth fighting for” is the exact opposite of what this game is about.
@noidea4254 oh hell yeah, will have to check that out! That’s my biggest bone to pick with mainstream low fantasy though, it’s so damn straight most of the time. It feels like jock fantasy to me. The worlds are built to be homophobic, generally bigoted, and modeled exactly off of medieval Europe, even though they made an entire world with a different god/gods and different circumstances. I think I really just hate game of thrones to the point I’ve been turned off by the notion of low fantasy, which is unfair I admit. But the tropes of high fantasy, like high magic, possibility of non human focus, whimsy, is what makes fantasy work for me. When it’s absent, ehhhh, not my thing. FF16 feels like high fantasy by technicality to me compared to earlier entries like 9. Similar to how LOTR is technically low fantasy, but the vibes are so high fantasy it’s what comes to mind first for the genre.
@@arenkai I’ve been meaning to check that series out! I’ve heard good things about it from my partner
A cynical person might interpret this perspective the player is forced into as, "oppressed members of society are heroes for keeping quiet and contenting themselves with being useful to their exploiters". Can't possibly imagine why a corporation might push that narrative.
I’m incredibly cynical (poli-sci masters baby), but even I don’t think that’s the message here. If anything, it’s rather hopeful. Despite all the institutionalized prejudice and individual bigotry, the world is filled with people helping the slaves at the risk of their own execution, forming mutual aid networks and working to feed and free bearers.
Most of the footage in this episode is taken from an area that lies in the literal shadow of bigoted imperial power, where the attitudes of the non-bearers are at their worst. At the same time, Clive is positioning himself to destroy the basis for their entire way of life, so it makes sense he’s not trying to bring heat down on himself by cutting down random asshole noblemen.
Fair point.
The thing is, the plot of the game is about tearing it all down--destructively. In fact, right after the part in the video is where that all kicks off. Clive's goal is to tear down the old world, even if it means destruction and even if it means people lose the conveniences they're used to, because this current world is fundamentally broken.
The game isn't pushing the narrative that the oppressed should grin and bear it. It's putting you in those shoes to show you how fucked up it is, then asking you, "Wouldn't you like to burn it all down?"
Very on brand for a Japan product.
@spiraljumper74 I appreciate that text interpretation and context to the visuals. I'm definitely interested how the story goes because I keep hearing it's rebellious NOT as asthetic(Ala. Persona 5), a plus. But then I hear the ending is tragic as hell. Don't know what to believe and I don't have 70 bucks to spare yet to try it out lol
Edit: But my only takeaway here is that the side quests ain't no witcher3/Horizon FW quality, though they put all the pizzazz in the msq
honestly the moment you started whining about "mandatory lore" is when i stopped taking this critique seriously.
there is very literally NOTHING in the plot that requires you to read any lore entries to understand whats going on. it gives you flavor and context about things you might wanna learn more about to flesh out aspects of the world and characters in a way that is up to the player while the game also has the other kinds of world building and character building you'd expect.
but hey I guess its bad to have these things because a crap journalist was unable to pay attention to the story and is now claiming that all of it is in the lore codex even when the game goes to lengths to explain what has been going on already
Meanwhile, in FF14, I can ignore doing any of the hero stuff the Warrior of Light is supposed to do and just go fishing or literally open a café in the basement of my house. Therefore it's superior.
This sounds like a case of them trying to convey that the hero will only fight if attacked (physically). Like as a way to show he's more noble and rational that he'll put up with as much as possible and still save them because he believes he can make the world a better place in the end overall. But I could be wrong as I haven't played it. It does sound like they really overdid the verbal attacks for it all to blend in though as if they aren't careful about world balance, it can all feel "same-y".
As for the lore put in a book, I wonder if they did that so there was less pauses for story and more of a "read it when/if you want" as a way to let players play how they like as some hate long cutscenes for instance. I've seen this sort of thing done before as "diaries" get filled out over time to check back on for instance.
I dunno, just a few theories on a few things.
The Encyclopedia doesn't really have that much lore, all the important elements get talked about by the characters. It has some additional things, but for the most part it serves as a memory aid for people who need it (Active Time Lore, which is how you normally access the Encyclopedia, is specifically designed as a memory aid, it just lists the last entries for the current place and characters in the scene or a concept being talked about).
And yea Clive for all his fighting prowess is a gentle guy, if it's up to him he'll fight to protect. And as far as the verbal abuse goes, Steph is REALLY overexaggerating its amount and leaving out that it is very focused in time and place, especially when it's directed at Clive where it's limited to what is the game's Midgard section.
Huh, I've interpreted this game so differently. I found it far more appealing than the world of Game of Thrones, which was inherently nihilistic. FFXVI actually presents to you people who believe in something beyond money and power, though those are definitely themes.
I've interpreted Clive as kind of "above" the issues of the bearers. Yes, he does suffer from their verbal abuse and inept attempts to harm him, but he's not a bearer and it hits him differently. And, though he is fighting for a better life for bearers, the game seems to make it very clear that this prejudice is not as much a moral fault as it is a structural norm. Letting a random village die to wolves does nothing to help bearers or change attitudes towards them; it's just senseless violence. So, Clive just deals with the hatred while working towards a more important objective that will change the environment of the world and hopefully for the better.
Also, this critique is very focused on a part of the game where is a strong theme early on, but less so further on. I think it wants to really hammer home the horrors of slavery to an audience that might actually have right wing tendencies themselves.
The larger themes of the game aren't discussed in this video; perhaps because they come a bit later. It's about solidarity and fighting against a force that would divide us and cause us to harm each other instead of fighting against the real threat. It's unambiguously about about capitalism. I mean it beats you over the head with it since all the problems of the central threat are the problems of capitalism today. FFXVI wears its political commentary on its sleeve, like FFXIV.
I think, going into this from FFXIV (Yoshida's other main project) gave me a view through comparison of the intent was going into this game. I'm not saying it's perfect, but instead, that there's other ways for this to hit. I see a lot of nuance in the game, especially later on (such as when Clive spares goblins because they're just trying to survive). The characters are flawed because their setting is flawed and resistant to change (like the real world). Cid even says that the world isn't ready for equality (like the real world). They all contain biases they've got from living in the setting and there seems to be an honest attempt to sympathetically present them as trying to break free despite not being able to fully get there.
I haven't finished the game, but it's coming from a fairly sincere leftist or post-leftist perspective (the ending will determine which of the two it is). I don't think we're supposed to like the world as it is and are intended to want to make a better one from it. Again, like our own world. The "burn it to the ground" reaction to that situation is actually a pretty common start for some of the game's villains.
100% this. Thanks for making all these points way better than I could!
^This this this! I love Steph but this video is very flawed and lacking nuance and context. I can't blame steph for stopping playing the game because their job demand them make time for other things but it sucks they didn't get to the part right after they stopped when it becomes the left leaning violent anti slavery rebellion game she wanted
Also I wished this comment had more likes
This reminds me a little bit of the da'mane from Wheel of Time. Basically, there's a society where, similar to this game, magically-talented people are given up to the state once they show their abilities, and they're assigned a minder, or controller, who is bound to them through a kind of magical collar and handcuff. They are dehumanized, losing their old personal names and given arbitrarily assigned pet names (often infantilizing ones) and indoctrinated to absolutely hate themselves. The books depict some of them being freed, and many of them scream and freak out because they are convinced that they will start destroying everyone around them and that they are unclean and monsters. The whole affair is MOSTLY presented as horrific and despicable, and at least one of the main characters undergo the process and are deeply traumatized before being freed. It's not fun. There's a little bit from the perspective of the people whose society do this, where they think of it as a necessity and just a fact of life (their society practices a lot of slavery, much like many real life societies). And they CAN cite some historical events to justify why they do it: it's a fact of the world that magically-talented peopel (specifically the male ones) inevitably go insane and violent, and they once basically caused the apocalypse. It's a flawed argument, because none of that really applies to women, but it's something with only a limited (and propagandized) worldview might follow.
Anyway, I guess my point is that there is literary precedent for writing this sort of thing, and you can do so much more with it.
Seanchan were some brutal motherfuckers....
Hell, even DA:O with it's old school clumsiness on many fronts did a better job with the qun mages. They're expected to be walking power-cells and die young and painfully, often for very little, despite their power. But they explain that by mentioning society teaches them that this is a noble, beautiful thing they must do for the good of all. 16 here inexplicibly makes their mages act like a qun mage, but without being given the same reason. Instead children, old ladies and everyone you meet saying they wish you would leave society...achieves the same thing? It feels lazy, as hard as it is to admit.
They do actually address it this way in XVI much later into the game than what she was showing in this video so she may have not reached that section at the time of writing. In case you end up wanting to play the game I won't get into spoilers but a side quest has you track down a long-suppressed record of how Bearers came to become oppressed and why they haven't just rebelled. Doesn't really change the point that she's making though about the severity of abuse coming on very strong and lack of player agency in pushing back against it.
Honestly I'm not surprised to hear this, FF16 has the same writer as FF14 Heavensward whose primary setting is a theocracy entirely defined by its hatred of dragons and the poor.
Remember how people were constantly giving yoshi-p crap for not having any people of color in Final Fantasy 16? Only for us to find out that the game is about a super bigoted theocracy and it enslaving a group of people whose only crime is existing? Can you even imagine the shit show if there'd been any black branded? Or having people of color oppressing white people?
It probably would have completely and utterly annihilated any chance of the game being a success, not to mention severely tarnishing their reputation.
I will say though that heavensward has you spend time with plenty of characters who dont act like assholes, and the desire for redemption is clear early on.
@@jsrodman Yeah though now I'm left to wonder how much of that was the rest of the writing team.
@@cerebralisk I'd imagine a decent chunk of it. I know it's a hot take but I'm really not all that big of a fan of Heavensward. The broader writing felt rather generic to me, which is fine given that it seemed to want to be character and message focused but it also kind of fails in that regard imo. The characters of Heavensward mostly just frustrated or bored me, and if I'm gonna be honest the best part of the entire campaign is finishing it. I really enjoyed some of the post-game arcs, but I remember finding out a while back that the parts I actually enjoyed were not actually written by Maehiro, but rather Ishikawa and Oda. Regardless, I can say that FFXVI still sounds kind of worse in these regards than Heavensward.
Tbh FFXVI sounds like its lacking a lot of the writing staff that made Yoshida's love for polidrama and Maehiro's dark and dismal easier to actually swallow. AFAIK scenario writers paint broader strokes and the team underneath them flesh it all out with the director and lead writer's supervision, and so I'd bet Maehiro's just... not as good (or even worse, if you already don't like his stuff like me) without the team he worked with in FFXIV.
@@peperonitoni441 Yeah on one hand I'd really like to see what FF16 could have ended up as with Ishikawa involved but honestly we're eating great over in 14 and I want to keep it that way.
In a story where you have to save the world, the most important thing is to make a world worth saving.
...yeah. It was the XIII problem for me. I'm being asked to save Cocoon which is trying to execute me constantly. It's like doing good deeds in prison even though I'm there for life. "Why am I bothering, what am I doing here?"
I don't know. I feel there's something worthwhile in fighting to save a world that likely deserves to burn, for the benefit of the people that don't deserve to go with it. 'cause you know, that's real life and I'm personally not in favor of accelerating the end of the world since we've had thousands of years of horrible people doing horrible things and other people being to apathetic to do anything, if they aren't actively helping the horrible people.
Save the world? Your objective is not to save the world in this game. It's to burn it all down and create a new one.
@@FiendMatadorSlayerOfNoobs .......but that's literally what the main villain wants.
@@FiendMatadorSlayerOfNoobsyour objective is to get rid of magic and the problems it creates not burn the world down.
So I've rewatched this video a few times by now and I think I'm finally ready to do a bit of criticism of my own.
Fair warning: it's a bit long:
Honestly? I think its a little unfair and gives off the impression Steph hasn't played the game past Sanbreque.
I'm not sure why people keep pretending there aren't any PoC in the game. There are tons in Dhalmekia. Would've been nice if any were part of the main cast, though.
No levity? I think there's enough levity peppered in throughout. Whether it be Cid or Gav saying something hilarious, a moment of tenderness between Clive and Jill, Byron being a goofball, Clive breaking out into a play performance so his uncle would recognize him, Gav getting too drunk and talking about how he and Clive are like brothers now. Maybe there's not enough levity for some tastes but to say the game is devoid of it is disingenuous.
Stephanie says every sidequest, every character, is detestable and miserable. Only shows examples from Sanbreque, where they lay it on pretty thick admittedly, but no other examples. Every character? Clive is constantly meeting with and doing favors for sympathizers of the Bearer's plight, most of the sidequests after the timeskip aren't at all like the ones in Sanbreque.
They complain that Clive is spineless to his oppressors, nevermind he becomes the leader of a revolution and by the end of the game has destroyed the status quo that sustains their oppression.
Clive is Branded and this world hates magic users and has since who knows when. But you,ll notice that once you pass a certain point in the story the discrimination stops because it's not immediatly obvious that he is a Bearer.
The story itself is centered around the Bearers' plights so it's only natural that you're put smack-dab in the middle of all the horror they have to experience on a daily basis. And Clive gets the most respect a Bearer can hope to earn because he's good at fighting.
But that's all Clive gets too and I believe the reason he dosn't make a fuss about it when someone insults him even after a sidequest is because he's meant to be undercover, which makes sense because Bearers are being reported to the constables or murdered for far less than talking back to their alleged superiors. (RIght Winger's Dream, that)
Even sympathizing with them post-prologue will earn you a trip to the gallows and Clive probably wants to keep up that relative anonymity he still has at that point unless he wants literally everyone in the world to recognize him-brand or not- at a glance.
What Steph also seems to forget though is that those villages are also.. you know.. full of other Branded as well as non-Branded people, and monsters & starving wolves are not known for discirminating when it comes to getting a meal. And saying this not an hour after a whole village of normals paid the ultimate price for harbouring and sheltering Bearers? Come on, Steph.
So Steph says they want to save the Branded.. by letting them die? By killing them and their sympathizers? That's literally what the main villain's entire goal is, only they intend to do to the entire world in a misguided attempt to save it.
Merely judging by the footage I see in this video I don't think Steph did reach that point or the one where-immediatly after being exposed to the Northreach bigotry- society begins to fall apart for non-Branded which also leads to even worse circumstances & conditions for Bearers. (Hello again Right-Winger's Dream)
One interesting opposite I do like is that the most powerful and priviliged as well as the greatest bastards in the game who help maintain this system of bigotry actually tend to be your fellow Dominants who themselves are a form of Super-Bearer. This includes individuals such as the one Steph mentioned: Benedikta.
As for the whole Beastmen thing, I dunno if Steph has reached that point yet, but they-Orcs especially- gleefully slaughter humans for fun and for sustenance even without the threat of the Blight creeping behind them.
I do think the game is probably a bit clumsy and lacking in nuance when talking about all these themes, but this video paints a very different picture to my experience and make it out to be a hell of a lot worse at it than it actually is.
So that's my rant on this whole thing over.
TL:DR-ish: I just want to say: I'm sorry Steph, I usually really enjoy your Jimquisition videos but this one I don't agree with at all simply because when you-by choice or by forgetfulnes- ignore everything that's led up to the point in the footage you're showing us in this very video your criticism comes across as.. extremely dishonest and like it's pushing a false narrative and I really don't want to believe that.
I agree that the points in the video are from a fairly early perspective and mostly aimed at the area that displays the most overt, cartoonish villainy. I think the intent was to set up the "sons of bitches must pay" mentality in your drive to bring down the empire in the early game.
This gets into a separate debate of how long a person is expected to wait "until it gets good", whether that's a book, a film or a video game. I didn't have a problem with the parts Steph brought up since it all served as set dressing for what happens later, but even then that's anywhere from 10 to 20 hours of a tone she clearly wasn't having fun with.
Different strokes, I suppose. Though I will say that this video paints an aggressively negative portrayal of the game for people who may be on the fence about it.
@@rexus3021 But the thing is that these weren't the only things they dealt with at this point in the game. It's thrown several lighter moments at them, several instances of empathy, humanity and plenty of levity, but they don't mention them at all.
Why? Or rather, why not?
As a Black man I was concerned a bit at the "lack of diverity" in FF16. In retrospect the idea of doing so, and how the word “Bearer” sounds a little too similar to someting else, i'm glad they didn't. However, I remember talks with my Grandmother who was an elevator operator. Who got kindesses where she worked an scorn everywhere else, its not that far off of a represention of how things were and how things still are. I guess the hope is that if at least one person can get the not so subtle hints given, they can see just how bad prejedices can be.
There are poc in the first 10 mins of the game and have poc voice actors throughout, whereas totks dark skinned characters are all played by white people, Where's the outrage for that?
@@FalseGryphon
Point taken, that being said it’s a Nintendo game so the fact there was any voice acting at all is a miracle.
@@BrikMason FF16 is not a Nintendo game. I figured you just misspoke but had to be that guy and correct it.
@@FFFFPPPP
No I was referring to TotK if it wasn’t clear.
@@FalseGryphon Where's all the outrage for white characters being voiced by dark skinned people? It's almost as if skin colour doesn't matter in voice acting and it's all about voice and performance. Imagine that.
Square thought they made "Django Unchained." Instead, they made "Driving Miss Daisy."
The made Detroit Become Human look smart
Fricking true!
You know that old showbiz standby, never work with children, animals and Gorzak.
As someone who's been watching you since the escapist days, it makes my cold dead heart a little warmer seeing you so much happier now despite all the bullshit that g*mers like to throw at you.
@@Eisenbison You weren't looking that closely then. Being negative and spiteful towards the game industry is always what this channel was about.
@@EisenbisonOh please don’t give me that crap. The gaming community can be VERY toxic and it’s not just “a small group of people”. I see it every fucking day in comment sections, forums, etc. I hate when people say that “it’s just the minority doing that” because they are just running away from the problem by trying to minimize it.
Also the people “leaving” this channel are probably the toxic ones. They are not really leaving however cause they like to come back here and leave hate comments. I mean YOU still come back here.
People should never stop exposing the gaming community for how toxic it is and if you are mad at that then maybe you are one of them.
@@Eisenbison Late stage capitalism as it exists where corporations exist solely to make their shareholders not sell their stock with the stated goal of infinite growth IS bad. You have to bring it up when companies do these anti-consumer policies since that is the key motivation behind WHY companies let tons of staff go after every major release, WHY bad practices and behaviors exist. Also, I don't think it was ever implied that the terrible people were in the majority but it doesn't take a majority of people harassing someone to make their lives miserable. Can you imagine living your life in the public sphere with only 100 stalkers who hated you for who you are as a person? That's a pretty low ball number but it is still pretty miserable.
I feel like this year, the channel has taken a turn away from ALWAYS airing negative pieces about the games industry so I can't say that I agree with your sentiment about that being the reason (its the trans thing probably)
@Eisenbison If you think the kind of gamers Sterling rants against are representative for all of them you're disproving your own point.
Or maybe you're new to the channel but it has been established a couple of times what kind of gamers Sterling's talking about in their rants against The Gamers™. It's exactly those "worst basement dwellers" who are meant. Even you distance yourself from them by speaking of gaming enthusiasts.
There also isn't any unhinged ranting against capitalism except if you mean some overly krass Statements here and there that have been part of Sterling's humor and writing style for forever. Sterling looked at the industry's bad practices and traced back the reason of their existence to the socioeconomic system that creates and encourages them. Instead of saying "wah game industry evil" they show how these bad practices come to be and make sense in the context they are executed in and rightfully laments how such a system is in need of change.
Tbh this year Sterling's videos have become a lot less political and ragefueled than last year's for example. I don't think it makes sense to blame the shrinking of subscriber count on that
🤔 So there are no people of colour because "medieval historical accuracy" but the MC is called Clive and that's somehow fine?
The name Clive does date back to at least the 18th century.
@@JamesThomasJeans I'm aware of that (Thackeray has a character called Clive in one of his novels) but 18th century isn't medieval.
In terms of the "pokeplot problem", the way I look at it is that the video game world presented is curated, much like an author doesn't write about the protagonist driving to and from work, unless its actually relevant for the end product.
There's also another aspect that I noticed with running TTRPGs. I constantly remind my players that rumors and gossip their characters may here are not always true, nor are they always directly related to their own plot. Other people off screen do things. The world I build for them has other problem solvers, other characters with agency, changing and modifying it, not in response to the players, but because that is what *people* do.
And half the time, they'll grab a random rumor, off hand mention of some world building fluff, and hyperfocus on it, thinking its the clue to solve the mystery, while ignoring the actual clues I'm dropping.
So what I think is perhaps they found that when they add these extra, small bits of world building as kind of "fluff" and expanding the world, is that some players will hyperfocus on these essentially meaningless details to the detriment of their enjoyment of the game.
Well, yes. It's obvious that this is done out of fear that the people experiencing your story won't get your one point. The nervousness and control freak grip on the theme is palpable. I suppose a silly setting for kids isn't so badly brought down by this problem, though even Pokemon gets raised eyebrows after decades of nothing else existing in the mind of any character but 'the point'. Deus Ex was truly exhausting with its pathetic one note world, I wasn't having anywhere near enough fun to pretend that this horribly empty, boring place written by a coward was worth spending more time in. A writer too scared to do anything like writing and instead frontloading their moral constantly doesn't deserve time and energy from readers, let alone excuses for being a timid control freak. They're not improving focus, they're failing.
Besides ... why are you pretending that lessons for 'I need to corral these drunk fools into engaging with my theatre of the mind with nothing but my voice' should be applied to the task of building the world and every character in a computer, who will then speak with hired actors' voices, and the player character cannot say or do anything that wasn't specifically animated, recorded, or otherwise put in the game? If your players want to chop off the head of someone who tried to kill them, they can tell the DM who's sitting right there what they think makes sense to do, but Clive does what he was programmed to do.Your friends can do and say anything they like, and you think a product in which the storyteller is controlling the speech of the player and every action they are allowed to take, the creators must be in need of the same tactics to exert control? No. They have other means you don't. If they think they need to have such a false, thin theme and a world that feels like cardboard just to keep a character on rails and keep the audience from thinking too much, then they are bad writers who insult the intelligence of their readers. That's all.
Remember when we got fun, colorful FF characters? It also feels like they're taking the opposite approach to most D&D settings, where the people with magic are usually the ones in charge because of how much of an edge it gives them over the commoners. You see the stuff you can do in this game and wonder how a bearer with half your skill hasn't razed entire towns to the foundation.
There's a thing in fiction called "willing suspension of disbelief" where you can accept the absurd for the sake of the story.
However the fact that people with literal powers aren't fighting back, is just TOO absurd to accept.
XVI has tons of colorful, fun characters.
bearers aren’t D&D wizards, they can only manage simple daily tasks like boiling water and they can only use magic so much in their lifetime before it kills them. Clive is able to do all that stuff in combat because he has the power of an eikon
@@antney7745 The game directly takes on the power structures that created the enslavement of Bearers like right after the footage in this joke of an "analysis". The vast majority of sidequests are either about protecting Bearers, freeing them, improving their current situation, supporting those who give them a better life (a very Underground Railroad-esque system is present in the game, and it's obvious), or mutilating those who hurt them. The game even goes so far as to give you scenes where Bearers are not grateful for what you did, because your actions make their situation *worse* because of the city/republic they're enslaved under.
@@antney7745 Well then ! You'll be glad to learn that a massive blow to that abusive system is done not 15min after that scene Steph shows :D
Also,the whole point of the game's first parts is being part of an organisation that wants to bring down the system of power that's oppresing the Bearers, so I think your point is mute either way.
And you're forgetting what a lifetime of enslavement does to someone's psyche too.
They are tested at birth and immediately taught to be slaves.
There's no "rebelling" from that point since they'll just get beaten or worse.
Those who espace are tracked or they find a community like the one we have if they're lucky.
They aren't powerful magic user, they can create small amounts of elemental forces, not cast spells
Shout out to Zmanzilla for the stellar editing! I caught myself admiring it all the way through.
You really hit the nail on the head on this one, Steph. I’ve always hated that fantasy trope of “Hi, I can shoot lightning out of my nose or explode your head with a thought.” “Sweet, we’re going to brutally oppress you and everyone like you. There’s no way this will backfire on us when you inevitably use your incredible powers to rise up against us!”
It’s been the big sour point for FF16 for me, and I’m glad to see it acknowledged.
Yeah the thing they always miss is there has to be some actual lever of control for the non-magical people to exert upon the magical ones. I mean, it's fair that having the majority oppress you is gonna make your life difficult, but being able to throw fire from your fingers is a hell of an equalizer. It's way more likely that the inverse is true, and the people who can throw lighting and dance on air are the ones in charge (but that undercuts the classic underdog narrative, though of course it doesn't have to. Clive could just as easily be a member of the noble class of bearers forced to live in the non-magical slums and witness to the oppressions they face that he now shares due to his status).
On the flip side, some bigotry against people who can literally end your life with a gesture, is understandable. It's the old argument of Marvel's Mutants/X-Men being a weak allegory for racism or sexuality. People of other racial backgrounds or sexualities do not have terrifying super powers, and are no more dangerous than anyone else. People with superpowers are a legitimate existential threat. It doesn't matter how nice an individual among them is, if the only thing stopping them from turning inside out with their mind, is their mood.
The beautiful potential in this as a storytelling tool, is exploring how a particular group of characters/setting deals with that difficult issue, and using it to illustrate aspects of our own world. But it's often painted on a little thick, and without the nuance a subject like this deserves--even if its a fantasy video game where people leap into the air to do flips as they slash their lightning swords or whatever.
@@Lurklen the X-Men example is something I thought about too. In-universe mutants are stated to be the next step in human evolution, an inevitable fact of humanity from the moment they began to express their powers. Bigotry in the face of that can work as a mirror to the real-life bigotry faced by marginalised groups who have become more visible over time, something that can be linked to hatred and fear of any change that upsets what the bigots consider to be “normal” to the world. I think that dimension of fear is what I consider to be “missing” from FF16 and similar fantasy stories that use that trope.
To avoid confusion: I’m *not* saying we need to sympathise or understand bigotry, either fictional or in real life. What I’m saying is there’s a difference between “I’m a hateful shithead because I refuse to understand those who are different to me” and “I’m a hateful shithead because the writers think adding hateful shitheadery is the same thing as mature writing.”
These people aren't like Dragon Age mages oppressed by the Templars (in which mages are incredibly powerful). These people are more like batteries who can make water to fill wells, maybe slightly control plants, but not like Poison Ivy. Clive is impressive for completely different reasons. Sterling doesn't really address that Clive is not your average Bearer because, let's face it, this is just a hit piece.
@@AuspexAO “hit piece” feels very strong. Steph clearly comes from a place of wanting to enjoy the game more than they do, and I think it’s a valid criticism that the game overly focuses on how gleefully bigoted the world is against bearers for no other reason than… They can use magic that The Normals can’t without help, simply for the purpose of seeming like Mature And Realistic Fantasy.
@@ThatHybridGuy I think any exploration of why people are hateful, is better than "Because the writers thought it was the same as maturity." Even if it doesn't end up being a take I agree with, it's at least an effort to understand the human condition, instead of just an artificial writing obstacle for someone to triumph over, or the audience to endure. (I do think an understanding of bigotry is the only real way to deconstruct and address it, if only so we can prevent it from cropping up within ourselves where we might not notice it.)
Having not played the game, I can't say if it's present, but usually in these scenarios the fear was always uprising. The hatefulness and disdain towards slave cultures was usually a way of maintaining the status quo, by essentially keeping the oppressed from believing opposition was possible. Because the masters were terrified of it, to a kind of obsessive degree. If this story is lacking that underlying fear, then it is missing a sort of crucial element to the dynamic (even putting aside the whole magical powers situation).
As this was explained, I feel like there was such an opportunity to make Clive something unique and uncommon, and then pair that with an attitude that matches. It sounds like so many of the quests could be left practically as is but just have Clive essentially demand they say "please". Give him his sense of duty, his refusal to be the apathetic monster he sees other people as, but still REQUIRE he be treated as a full, actualized person.
But at the same time, Clive can only do this because he has some kind of unique mystical leverage that is what makes him so powerful. The rest of the branded just have minimal, mediocre powers that have very limited effects. Or they are denied the training and skill Clive somehow got that renders them impotent to rebel. Almost like that most: show how one of the key tools used to oppress is denying the oppressed access to knowledge and resources to better themselves.
The answer to both of those is yes. Clive is massively more powerful than normal magic-users in Valisthea and he has a combination of trainings NONE of the other actually powerful magic-users have much less a regular Bearer. The average Bearer in Valisthea is basically someone with a portable cooler or a hair dryer.
@arskakarva7474 felt like that had to be the case, but still a failure to capitalize on it in the narrative. Hell, I'd even take a story beat of "he was abused and brainwashed into obedience precisely because of his potential power", but you'd have to actually show him being servile, not just milquetoast, to explain the actions shown here.
Like, THAT version of Clive would have been apologizing to that shitty kid for being rude and begging forgiveness.
@@hartthorn Oh the bits in this video are from a specific section of the game where Clive is deliberately keeping his head down because him and the gang need secrecy for their plan. That plan is also very much is about rebelling against the status quo on the grandest scale possible.
The vast majority of your quests are from your allies in the Bearer liberation. This particular section is just before a point-of-no-return and the quests are supposed to show how awful the Holy Empire of Sanbreque is. It's also the last part in the arc of Clive going from silently enduring being a slave-soldier for 13 years waiting for a chance at revenge against Ifrit's Dominant to becoming a revolutionary.
@@arskakarva7474 Correct. After the events of Northreach Clive stops keeping his head down and talks shit back to people-even other Branded who now hate him for making their lives worse- specifically because a scalpel has done it's work.
Benedikta is awesome. I think she had a lot of wasted potential, and could've been a really interesting character if she had been allowed to be more than the girl in the refrigerator.
She was fun and I liked her performance a lot. However, as soon as her powers are gone… r*pe. Can I point out how much I hate that? It’s this childish perception that sexual assault makes content mature… no, no it doesn’t. It shows how lazy the writers are.
She was done dirty by the game and it was so bad it was comic. Loses her power, 30 seconds late it’s gangbang o’clock!
Lmaoo but honestly agreed with the I think she was snuffed out too soon. Like I get that we need villains that die early, but she was def an interesting villain that I wished had more time
Yeah, I think that there are some really good character inspirations besides just Game of Thrones. To me, Hugo and Benedikta are Antony and Cleopatra, one of the most tragic love stories.
Both Benedikta and the Iron Kingdom could have used a bit more screentime.
The Iron Kingdom especially since it's noted for both it's view on Dominants and unique language.
And then you fight them like.. twice. For the entire game. Once in the tutorial and once just after the midpoint of the game. Felt very much like the LeBlanc Syndicate from FFX-2.
yeah, just move the final garuda fight much later in the game, to allow her arc to play out on a longer timeline.
It really says something about the changing philosophy of Square Enix when you could find more hope in a world where an insane homicidal general dressed up like a clown who has access to Godhood and death lasers than you'll find in FFXVI.
Also FFVI had characters in it that weren't white.
It's amazing how progressive the franchise used to be. Minwu showed up in FF2 (1988) and he is Arabian/North African, it has a woman pirate captain as well. FFIV's original Rosa sprite was brown and of course, VI up to XIII had playable colored/women characters.
Of course we get more in Tactics (PS1-PSP) which is THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS EVIL with neon letters and still is so brilliant it made me like it despite its genre. Yes X is that too but I think Tactics goes for the throat much harder.
And here we are now where the franchise is trying so hard to appeal to the absolute worst of creatures. The only woman in XV is fridged and was a prop while alive and now the slave is shamed into doing what masters want (also no playable women and no POC to be found).
@@shis1988 FF10 also had a TON of racism and fanaticism built into the story. It arguably also had one of the most diverse casts and dynamics you could possibly get despite only having 7 members. Yuna was mixed race. Her father fell in love and married a woman of a persecuted minority culture. Wakka, a member of your party, hates said race and machines. Kimahri got picked on so much they permanently scarred him by removing his horn. Auron was a disgraced monk who already died trying to avenge his friends. Tidus and Jecht are both treated as insane due to their claims of Zanarkand. Lulu is a widow.
XIV is pretty good in that sense too.
why do so many people pretend dhalmek doesn't exist
@@shis1988 It still is? Like, play XIV. It, by far, has the most progressive messaging of the series, portrays armed revolution against a fascist state as explicitly moral, condemns colonialist actions, and even a marginalized person decides to summon what amounts to be a radioactive god-thing that literally drains the very essence of the planet, their actions are presented as understandable.
To play the devil's advocate: Clive's responses sound like an amazing example of how to roleplay a D&D character who dumped Charisma. You simply have NO comebacks.
nah. in my experience as DM, those characters (who are martial powerhouses like him, and not noble paladins or whatever, also like him) would almost certainly just kill the dude in the field and take all his shit lol
Someone correctly applied Devil's Advocate. I can barely believed it happened. Thank you good person.
@@EquinoxGT No, it's not. Devil's Advocate is using reasoning to interpret facts of a supposed bad thing as a good thing.
I find it funny saying that there's no people of colour in the game, when the Dalmekian Republic is inspired by the Middle East, having characters like Lubor and others that have a different skin colour, but it seems that in most of the reviews, for some reason, people dont talk about it and try to ignore.
Because "diversity" is the new "African-American".
It would have taken little to no effort at all to add black characters; this is a fantasy world. I get that the era they're going for was about east india trading company, but again, they could have added black characters and they didn't. That's all ppl who point this stuff out are saying. It's a fantasy world and as you point out, they have some middle eastern/asian coded characters. How hard would it have been to add black characters?
@@raven_g6667they we're going for norse inspiration jeez
You know, as someone who genuinely loves your beeeeutiful accent, Steph, you doing outlandish UK accents of various types might be my favorite thing ever.
Honestly, I really enjoy the rare moments when you get to talk about a bad plot instead of bad business practices. It's very fun to watch your keen analytical eye turned towards the intricacies of story and things like the PokePlot Problem.
Your wording has me imagining them redirecting the Eye of Stephron's burning gaze
It's like someone read N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth books stripped out all of the nuance and empowerment that makes her story amazing.
Thanks for giving this mini review. as a black queer man, I don't think i would be able to make it though a game with this kind of tone. Was excited after rekindling my love of FF 3, 4, 6, 10, and 12 and its sad to see that the game is that bleak in tone.
This black queer woman would like to echo this statement. It's the same reason why I struggled to finish the Witcher 3. I can't enjoy a game where everyone is oppressed and racist (towards elves and dwarves because there are no dark skinned people, obvs).
As someone who belongs to no minority i still think i get your points here. Who wants to play a game that feels even worse than rl can be? Games are made to entertain and as a way to escape the day to day life, not to remind you how shitty the outside world is.
On the topic of inclusion i cant say much, my kind is literally everywhere, other than that i dont get why fictional works use the excuse of a certain theme to not include someone. This is not a documentary, its a fantasy game.
I feel a variant of this as a disabled, white, masc enby. The spread of neofascism is such that I decreasingly pass for a member of the dominant culture even when not speaking my politics. Love and respect!
@@Gnarfendorf King Arthur: Knight's Tale is a good example of this (I found it when looking for a turn-based tactics game with random generation): the creator's are white supremacists who claim that including pandimensional wizards who are not white would be "unrealistic" and that the people who want such are "woke" (it might have been "SJWs", effectively the same thing when said by a white reactionary).
As a white cis man I thoroughly enjoyed watching Bahamut be a gay badass but each to their own I guess.
It's no bleaker than the start of Stormblood or Shadowbringers
Without spoiling anything, I'm really enjoying XVI; been playing it as much as I can since Thursday. I took one side quest from a "normal person". Afterwards, as far as I was concerned, every non-bearer was on their own.
Did you play past the point you are covering in this video? Having played this game for a solid 30 hours so far, it is very very very close to this pint in the story where you are facing the height of the Anti-Branded sentiment in this world, that events happen that make the main cast realize "talking" isn't going to get this done. Action is needed. And the rest of the game is very bombastic action to make the changes the main cast wants to happen, happen.
Whew, I was getting a little concerned. But thank god for Stephanie Sterling still hasn’t missed a Monday.
This is a very interesting opinion, but it does make me wonder how far into the game you are at this point. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I feel like the game does kind of address your criticisms, in a way?
I see where you’re coming from, and my suggestion would be for you to interact more with the characters in the Hideaway. The Hideaway is where all your friends are. The Hideaway is essentially the warm space of love and acceptance you always go back to.
It’s rough at the start, but the game has several really nice people to introduce to you as well that I want to see a better world for. I love Gav, Byron, and like you say, Cid. There’s also Mid, the lorekeeper character, there’s Otto as well, etc.
I really hope you’re able to press on, because there are glimpses of beauty in Valishtea that I would say is worth protecting.
In defense of the Chloe quest:
Yes, she treats them as toys and throws a tantrum on how long it will be before daddy will 'get her a new Chloe', however she actually reflects. Clive tells her off, and that telling off as far as we can tell *works*. That child is some of the only bit of subtlety that exists in the game, because it shows that they aren't inherently bigoted little shits but are indoctrinated to be such by their parents. On learning that bearers have families and are people too, and that the petrified statue isn't "broken" , as her parents taught her, but dead the little girl starts crying and just repeats "I'm sorry Chloe" as you walk away.
A little girl repeatedly saying "Sorry " to a corpse. Why does japan love this trope? Was in Trigun Stampede too, tho there it was subtley funny aswell as sad
@@lewa3910t's in response to western made title, where they don't say anything and just bang a prostitute.
The eye roll of sterling's critique is that this section of the game is meant to show how messed up the life of a bearer is. The context is lost in the critique - why Clive can't just punch the NPCs - why he's moving under the banner of someone who's powerful and an ally to the cause. It's all supposed to be frustrating for a reason.
@@andrewszabo1552 this does not change the overall tone & how deserving of critique it is.
@@kneau does it really? Because I think the only reason it's getting one is because it's the Monday after release and warrants something edgy to get views. Sterling isn't above that. My concern is that the "critique" hyper focuses on one section of the game and paints a picture like it's the whole game. It reeks of an incomplete playthrough.
Would you Clively?
Best line in the video.
Is ‘Branded’ just a metaphor for writers or programmers in the game industry? Everything would fall apart without them but they are treated as subhumans? Were the game devs crying out for help?
Harry Partridge made a funny video about a stranger who accidentally walks into a village in the Pokemon world.
"OK... People in this place are very keen on animal blood sports"
I could see a Pokèmonner responding "What's blood?" in a way that could be interpereted in various ways.
Hearing all this, I wish they'd let Natsuko Ishikawa write FFXVI instead. FFXIV - Shadowbringers & Endwalker especially - is a game that actually has something to *say* in the face of unrelenting despair and nihilism, about finding hope and belief that the world can be made better, and that there are good reasons for us to do so. That's something we could do with more of instead of just being primed for ever more garbage until it feels like anything more than mere survival is an implausible, impossible dream.
I would actually love it if they'd make a single player remake of those plots. I'm told they're really good. But fuck me the grind and dull sidequests aren't worth the result.
@@diamondmx3076 I'm pretty sure that, with all the stuff FFXIV's introduced in its patches, it already allows for a complete single player playthrough as it is though?
@@GrahamChapman not yet, they’re getting there. I think there are a few main story dungeons that they haven’t updated to be playable solo, and you still can’t do most of the required boss fights solo. There was ONE in endwalker you could do with trusts, but two more you couldn’t. Don’t know what that was about.
@@harrylane4 Ah. Still, that they are working on it is more than what can be said of most MMOs.
Yeah, instead we have XVI written by... the storywriter for 2.0 🙃
I love the Jimquisition. Before discovering it (via Philosophy Tube), I had no idea about the horrible practices of the major game developers and publishers, and I think it's great to have a voice here relaying all that to us. Personally, I'm not buying any UbiSoft or Activision Blizzard game any time soon and frankly it's hardly an inconvenience. Thanks for that, Steph.
That being said, I really like when the Jimquisition does what this video does. Game criticism. Game industry criticism is informative and important and I'm glad for it, but game criticism is a refreshing reminder of what makes games interesting in the first place. I love narrative analysis, or the thoughtful breakdown of gameplay elements. It's cool.
I'm not saying the game industry coverage should stop. It's important, it should continue. I just wish the rich assholes in suits would stop being such stinky dickheads so that both game workers and customers would be treated with respect, and also so that we may enjoy a larger proportion of videos like this one. That was a breath of fresh air.
Huh, a world where your a slave and everyone treats you like a used condom found on the floor of a pubic lavatory? Made Square should make a Dark Sun adaptation?
Square Gollum remake?
@@jacobbelyea7945 Gollum at least gets to strangle the occasional tormentor.
Lol they basically did. I keep thinking about the similarities between 16's world and Dark Sun, right down to magic draining the life out of the land.
@@AProperNoun oh wow, that's why the whole thing felt kinda familiar... Dark Sun but without the awful desert stuff
@@Healermain15 Clive is literally more pathetic than Gollum. It's fucking amazing how bad of a power fantasy he is
With how Clive rolls with all the vehement hatred and bigotry does make me think of how Okami handled the voiceless protagonist with regards to villagers SO much better. Sure, there are people calling you [Amaterasu the wolf/goddess and heroine] pet names like 'Snowy' or at worst being snarky as they consider you a stray dog. At the time I was playing Okami many years ago, it was a tiny frustration to feel like "alas, they just don't know the truth" [demon-ass-kicking goddess!] but la-de-da, I will go about my day with some humility and continue to trash pesky demons. I generally felt compelled and engaged with the story, eager to make things better in the land almost to spite the snarks and prove my worth. AND because there ARE good people in the town worth saving - as well as the beauty of nature to enjoy!
And now, hearing some of these FFXVI clips with these characters talking to Clive... I just can't help but think that if taken out of context, one could assume that it was another instance of 'selfless protagonist animal character gets no respect'. BUT GOODNESS GRACIOUS! This is way, WAY WORSE. Not just because it's now directed at a human/humanoid character but HE CAN SPEAK! He is one of many like himself that are considered less than scum. CLIVE! Stand up for yourself? Justice? Something? Stand up for ANYthing?!
It does make me wonder if the developers/writers are like "duh! that's the point! We are helping by doing this! We want the Gamers(tm) to play an 'ideal' [i.e. white cis male] character but have them feel like absolute garbage as a protagonist. But it's gotta be FAST 'N' HARD BIGOTRY AND HATRED because even if the Gamers(tm) don't play the whole game, maybe THEN they'll have a speck of empathy for real life people!" without understanding how this is just all around poorly handled misery... for everyone. Alternatively I wonder "did they want to make everyone in the game insufferable so that you think that IRL insufferable bigots are actually pretty chill by comparison?" Or perhaps they sorely misunderstood the intent of Death Stranding and wanted to do their own take on just making a depressing slog in order to hammer humility into people that play the game? Regardless, what even IS this? WHY is this??
(Side note: Does everyone really need to make everything [especially past-time media like movies, television, and games] so unpleasant, tiresome, and depressing to experience? Where the people that KNOW things are bad in IRL society are just subjected to more misery and made more sad/infuriated in their past-time because the media in question was made with naive SLIVER OF HOPE that bigots will learn how to be decent to fellow humans? BLEH!)
So yep, I agree, Commander Sterling: release the wolves on the so-called 'nobles' and bigots of Vagisil.
And Thank God for you!
I mean, Death Stranding is terrible at its point, so... maybe?
Elden Ring is this but just so much better. Hell, Dark Souls 3 AND Lightning FFXIII were both able to pull off rekindling hope in the face of the ultimate end (which Elden Ring is about too).
I can't believe, now that I've seen this, how utterly vile the narrative is that games about a nobody that begins battered and worthless becomes literally the beacon of hope for the future have more likeable NPCs by comparison. Hell, White Mask Varré serms like a good pal compared to anyone in this world!
Of course, you'd say this without context. That's not everything in FF16 and Clive does have a voice and uses this quite a bit in the game. And not just him, but a plethora of characters as well. If you skip many of the plot points, ignore the sidequests, and character around you then yes, that is how you will view the world of ff16.
@@shis1988 Whatever, salty. XD
@@Kowanpoop True.
@@Kowanpoopdo you think these people actually care about blabbering on with zero actual knowledge or context?
it’s always just projection
One thing i will say is the game made me feel like clive is doing everything so he can continue to make a place for the people who treat him good. Like the people who treat you like shit show the general environment your in but the hideaway is that one good place with people worth saving.
The name Cloud is fine but Clive gets mocked
One is interesting and the other is white bread modern.
From the way the story of the game was laid out, I was a little surprised that there isn't a point in the game where the bearers realize they can start a rebellion and everyone who isn't a bearer can't do thing one about it since they don't have bearer powers. Then again, maybe that does happen later on. If it were up to me, Clive would instigate the rebellion.
Clive is part of a group liberating bearers and doing missions to upend the status quo of the world. But they're a fringe group, so they're trying to make strategic moves when the other nations are engaging in war with each other.
Thing is, most Bearers don't really have powers. Unless you count effectively having a lighter or a hair dryer as a power. Even the Cursebreakers stick to using swords. Even by going with Tiamat as an example of how well a Bearer might learn how to use magic it still is in no way comparable to what Clive or other Dominants can do, or just Clive with Blessing of the Phoenix and being actually trained to fight.
He does... Hes literally a terrorist who blows up all the production/power plants around the countries effectively.
That's pretty much what happens but most of the Bearers' powers are not much better than being living water coolers or other rudementary things and the armies of the different nations are huge and full of both experienced soldiers, many of them also Bearers content with their lot in life.
That and them using their powers slowly kills them in an absolutely horrible way. Push too hard and you turn to dust.
I... there's just so much here... that just... rapidly misrepresents the entire game. Your literally a resistance fighter who regularly frees groups of branded and works with the liberation forces you meet in NEARLY EVERY TOWN. Clove doesn't "talk back" because he's pretending to BE A SLAVE. He is undercover because he wants to change things, not GENOCIDE ALL NON BEARERS, which seems to be the horrifying conclusion that you drew. The point of the quest with the little girl is showing how little the common person even understands because of the society they are in. Clive "just scolding her" is literally the first time she's been confronted with the humanity of the bearers after an entire childhood of being fed lies and myths from her parents about how the bearers aren't people. She literally has a breakdown on the spot. But I guess your preferred outcome would have been feeding the misled child to the wolves. Classy. Not to mention, your CLEARLY judging the entire plot based off a fraction of the game. The game is bleak and dark, yes, but once clive gets over his massive revenge boner his entire goal is to try to make the world a kinder place where everyone is free to live and die as they see fit. It hits a point where it starts to feel like you just... stopped paying attention or something.
The whole "Genocide non-bearers" is literally the big bad's ultimate plan.
Except they also extend it to actual Bearers so that they and the rest of the 'truly pure' aka anybody NOT human can 'return to paradise'.
yeah i don't understand the argument of "clive is bad because he doesn't kill the slavers but my desire to kill literally everyone means im good because im being proactive" its almost like Clive has people he cares for and wants to HELP bearers and not get all of them killed by being a complete idiot.