we are told that the lucavi themselves choose the flesh. now if ultima consciously chose to bodysnatch alma as a final fuck you to germonique this would’ve made sense but unfortunately the whole point is that ultima only found out about the bloodline thing as she was dying. if anything bodysnatching alma was probably the worst possible choice because of germonique descendant 1 chasing her all the way into hell over it and descendant 2 splitting her own body and separating from ultima (?) somehow. now the one and only answer I can offer is that the lucavi think the whole body selection process is up to them but that there’s actually some other force who gets a say in the whole ordeal which just leads me back to The Mysterious Entity That Resurrected Marach (equally unanswerable question and therefore an aborted train of thought). fft we need to talk about your messy angelology/demonology NOW

i don’t really care for the ‘ramza is a descendant of germonique’ reveal at all whatsoever (the parallels between ramza and germonique were obvious enough and it kind of goes against ramza’s whole arc of defining himself by his deeds rather than by family names to suggest that his victory over ultima came about because of his Destined Bloodline) BUT i am willing to entertain it solely because of what it means for alma. why is ultima’s perfect vessel a girl who bears the blood of the man who got her killed ages ago? we will never know but it sure has Implications™ of some sort.

i don’t really care for the ‘ramza is a descendant of germonique’ reveal at all whatsoever (the parallels between ramza and germonique were obvious enough and it kind of goes against ramza’s whole arc of defining himself by his deeds rather than by family names to suggest that his victory over ultima came about because of his Destined Bloodline) BUT i am willing to entertain it solely because of what it means for alma. why is ultima’s perfect vessel a girl who bears the blood of the man who got her killed ages ago? we will never know but it sure has Implications™ of some sort.

We caught your man doing 2% milk shots at the club

everyone hyping wiegraf up over his quote about governments falsifying history to suit their needs when the very next thing he said was basically that they’re right to do so because their people are lazy ignorant sheep anyway… well. i’ll just say it’s crazy how wiegraf has become the face of Based FFT Revolutionaries when he’s been wishywashy at best and actively detrimental to a peasant revolution at worst in any given scene he’s in. literally the medieval equivalent of ‘sure he’s well-versed in leftist theory but does he do the dishes’ (no. he lets milleuda take care of them)

argath making a grievous faux pas compilation… he’s so stupid </3

I know we all hate argath etc etc but can we just acknowledge that he’s one of the funniest characters in the game for dedicating his whole entire life to social climbing back into the kind of position he ‘deserves’ while also being absolute dogshit at the bare minimum of etiquette and decorum. he finally meets a beoulve and immediately creeps him out by acting desperate. he gets an audience with dycedarg and accomplishes nothing but pissing him off. he plays with the life of his marquis because he’s too wrapped up in his pissing contest against the poor to get through Freeing a Hostage 101. literally bro is so mad at the heirals for being on the grand stage of ivalice when he should’ve been worrying about the fact that delita is consistently delivering the performance of a lifetime while argath is flubbing his way through the lines of the b-plot

I adore fft with all my heart it’s one of my favorite games ever etc etc but unfortunately it is definitely not immune to the final fantasy brand of misogyny. like yeah maybe tietra had to die for delita to have his arc. maybe alma had to be kidnapped for ramza to spur the story into the right direction. and I do get that ovelia’s lack of agency is a reflection on the trope of the cloistered princess.

but then there’s agrias, who is not afforded any of the screentime that her popularity might suggest. she got an extra scene in WoTL about the sacrifices she has had to make to be part of the lionsguard; the scene mostly focuses on how sad it is that she doesn’t have time for ‘womanly things’. there’s reis, who gets a whole sidequest in WoTL centered around her abduction so that her lover beowulf and his friend/rival can get some development. there’s meliadoul, the one older sister mourning her little brother compared to all of fft’s older brothers mourning their little sisters; she hardly gets any scenes, let alone an arc, compared to her male counterparts. we have celia and lettie, whose sole purpose is to profile themselves as the sexy temptresses flanking the marquis. there’s valmafra, allegedly a witch, traitor against the church and confidant of delita, yet she has a grand total of three scenes and doesn’t get to speak in two of them.

there’s an obvious pattern of misogynistic writing here, and as great as the game is, said misogyny holds it back from being quite as good as it could’ve been

haunted by a version of fft where wiegraf dies and milleuda takes over his arc. not even because I’ve got anything against wiegraf’s arc (nothing but love to his sick little descent into corruption) or because women in fft deserve a win (they do) but because I believe she would’ve taken the deranged catholic-coded cultish devotion to exciting new heights.

here you have a woman who was one of the first people in fft to discuss what religion means to them (“all men are equal in the eyes of the gods!”). this ideal of hers was then proven wrong in the most horrendous way. furthermore, her brother wields the divine arts while she’s just a regular swordswoman; we know that’s not because she’s not devout enough nor because women are barred from the divine arts. was it her lack of status, and did wiegraf only get extended the opportunity because he was the leader of the dead men? what was it like for milleuda, who believed that the gods were with her, to not be able to call upon their power to help her crusade? what would happen to this woman, who was so tired of her failed revolution that she welcomed death, if she was the last one standing and had to reckon with the fact that the aristocracy, her own brother and the gods all refused to listen to her? and finally, if the church granted her a holy stone possessed by a ‘god’ who did listen to her, telling her that it understood and would answer her prayers in exchange for a contract, how long would it take for milleuda to try and put the torch to all of ivalice?

one of the things I loveee about fft is how bleak the game is even in its most minor moments. like, the standard final fantasy games have set is that you’ll fight most of your battles against monsters or robots of some sort. human enemies are pretty rare, and are usually nameless soldiers and thugs. if you do end up fighting a named character, they’ll likely survive the battle unless you’re really in the endgame.

and then final fantasy tactics comes in blasting and demands you to kill other human beings in almost every battle. all enemies have names, even the mooks. you are forced to witness how the bodies of the fallen eventually turn to dust as no one comes to save them. the majority of them are either fighting for their right to survive in an unjust world or are just pawns in a war that will harm them regardless of the outcome. the protagonist of the game changes from a young man eager to slaughter revolutionaries into someone desperate to prevent more blood from being spilt; he usually fails to do so. literally I love fft’s Big Horrifying Scenes as much as anyone but what about when ramza crosses grogh heights and is forced to battle a bunch of deserters who can only see salvation from their sure death at the hands of the state by selling out the people who rank even lower on the rungs of the ladder, symbolizing the needless nature of violence under an oppressive regime and the way enemies of the state are pushed into cannibalizing each other instead of uniting against their shared oppressor!! all in one of the most insignificant scripted battles in the game!!!

various fft doodles

ludonarrative delita things that make me go crazy:

• The fact that Delita, even back when things were still relatively well between him and Ramza, never became a playable character under Ramza’s command, signifying a very thematically appropriate refusal to relinquish control leading directly into his statement that he will “not be told what I will do, or when!”.

• Delita’s already middling faith stat dropping once after the incident at Ziekden, and then once more after the reveal that Ovelia isn’t a real princess. However, his faith raises close to its initial levels again after his moment of reconciliation with Ovelia at Zeltennia. That same reconciliation causes him to wield the Save the Queen sword against assassins trying to kill Ovelia.

•Finally, as committed as FFT is to not reviving fainted characters for narrative purposes (meaning an allegedly unconscious party member may get up to say their lines just to drop dead again afterwards), Delita breaks that rule on one occasion. If he’s knocked out during the clash at Ziekden, he gets back up at 1 HP after Ramza calls out to him that he’s hurt. His anger is so all-consuming that it drives him to keep going even when he’s at death’s doorstep, defying the laws of the game itself.

obligatory “I love ramza and what he stands for as a character, and absolutely do not demand him to have a flawless five year plan for ivalice because lord knows no one else in this game does” disclaimer, but I’ve always felt like ramza kind of shows his ass here. he’s been cutting down everyone else’s plans for ivalice (and rightfully so because those plans usually suck in at least 15 different ways) but never really formulated a grand plan of his own. and now that he’s being asked for it, he still declines to do so in any great detail. what can be derived from this answer, though, is that ramza likely doesn’t blame the system for all that’s going wrong in ivalice, and thinks the fault is only with a corrupt few. but knowing ramza’s list of acquaintances, those he considers to be “good men” mostly consist of nobles, who we know won’t entirely do right by the peasantry regardless of how good their heart is. the system has to change for the poison to be drawn, and as long as ramza doesn’t see that he will continue to pass by the lower classes altogether.

Also it’s deeply fascinating to me how Barich is a sort of foil to Wiegraf: both of them are commoners who rebelled against the aristocracy, and were (most likely, in Barich’s case) taken under the templarate’s wing when their revolution failed to bear fruit. In a way, their very inclusion in fft’s later chapters feels like a callback to the simpler days of chapter 1 and the exclusive focus on the class war that ruled the narrative back then, compared to all the demonic drama that rears its head afterwards. But Wiegraf and Barich also happen to be the ones where that demon plot intersects beautifully with the class war plot. When Wiegraf enters a contract with one of the Lucavi, it’s an irrevocable betrayal of his own convictions, and when you speak to whatever’s left of him afterwards it becomes clear he’s given up on all he stood for as the leader of the Corpse Brigade in favor of blaming commoners for their own subjugation. Barich, on the other hand, entirely subverts this and posits that selling your soul to demons is not a renunciation of the revolution, but in fact a necessary aspect of bringing that revolution about.

Shout-out to the final stretch in fft, where they hand you two battles that are pretty much duds both in terms of interesting dialogue as well as worthwhile battle design in form of loffrey and cletienne, almost tricking you into believing it’s safe to tune out until you’re facing Folmarv himself, just to suddenly throw Barich “I’ve been dehumanized by the aristocracy for so long that the only way for me to feel human again is to break free of that subordination, even if that entails giving up my actual human body and soul” Fendsor and his hell of hydras at you.

Shout-out to the final stretch in fft, where they hand you two battles that are pretty much duds both in terms of interesting dialogue as well as worthwhile battle design in form of loffrey and cletienne, almost tricking you into believing it’s safe to tune out until you’re facing Folmarv himself, just to suddenly throw Barich “I’ve been dehumanized by the aristocracy for so long that the only way for me to feel human again is to break free of that subordination, even if that entails giving up my actual human body and soul” Fendsor and his hell of hydras at you.

the thing about delita is that he’s not actually that much of an enigma and only ever really becomes one if you try to define him in absolutes. delita is a cognitive dissonant mess; he’s both one of the most caring characters in the game and one of the most self-centered, he can genuinely love someone while openly manipulating them for his own ends, he’s earnest about wanting to better ivalice but also gets off on the thought of being celebrated as a righteous self-made hero for it. trying to erase the nuance from that discussion in favor of putting him in a Good/Bad box not only goes against what the game as a whole is trying to do, it also ascribes some sort of unwavering clarity and consistency to delita that he just doesn’t have.

deeply funny brand of delita-posting like I don’t think anyone’s ever missed the point in the way these people have… if you finish a game unable to tell if one of its characters is wholly right or wrong, that probably was just the point of the game rather than some riddle for players to solve lmao

deeply funny brand of delita-posting like I don’t think anyone’s ever missed the point in the way these people have… if you finish a game unable to tell if one of its characters is wholly right or wrong, that probably was just the point of the game rather than some riddle for players to solve lmao

oh this is so delicious… literally a fool’s errand for zalbaag and dycedarg to try and stick together when even their personal themes are in disharmony