Yuletide, Part Two
Dec. 5th, 2017 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingYesterday I started sketching out my fic for the Yuletide fic exchange based on a prompt for Final Fantasy IX. The more I read the prompt, the more comfortable I feel with it, and I think a short vignette should satisfy what this person is craving, which is a friendly conversation between two characters who don't normally interact with each other. I've decided that, before the party heads off to the Iifa Tree for the final battle, they will return to Madain Sari. Garnet will be sitting in front of the Eidolon Wall and feeling vaguely homesick, and Freya will approach her, sit down with her, and talk about what they're going to do when peace has been restored.
In order to prepare for this, I've been reading through various entries in the Final Fantasy wiki, which is a truly excellent resource. What I especially appreciate is how, at the beginning of each character entry, the character's costume is described in loving detail using very precise language. I am gaining some serious sartorial knowledge from this, I'm not even joking. I've also been reading through various translated pages of the Ultimania companion to the game, which mostly rehashes basic information presented in the game itself and is honestly not particularly interesting. And then finally, I've been reading some fic based on the game – yesterday morning I went through Lassarina's FFIX stories, and they were all excellent – but it really is a small fandom.
I've also been making my way through the game, but I'm still burned out from having spent so much time playing and teaching Final Fantasy X, and I can only deal with about twenty minutes at a time. Also, so much of FFIX is about how its art contributes to the sense of exploring a beautiful and fully realized world, and the super blurry backgrounds aren't ugly, exactly, but they don't do the game any favors. In addition, very early on I decided to go ahead and use the "cheat" settings to max out my party's money and experience and skill points, and though I regret nothing I do think it takes something away from the game not to be involved in the monitoring of your characters' growth and resources. Right now I'm at Conde Petie (the dwarven village built on a bridge), and when I get to Madain Sari I think I'm just going to stay there and soak up the atmosphere. I still love FFIX; but, after December 18, I'm not sure I'm going to return to the game. After all, I still haven't gotten past the second chapter in Final Fantasy XV, and it feels like a waste to keep returning to the same games that I've been playing for the past twenty years.
In order to prepare for this, I've been reading through various entries in the Final Fantasy wiki, which is a truly excellent resource. What I especially appreciate is how, at the beginning of each character entry, the character's costume is described in loving detail using very precise language. I am gaining some serious sartorial knowledge from this, I'm not even joking. I've also been reading through various translated pages of the Ultimania companion to the game, which mostly rehashes basic information presented in the game itself and is honestly not particularly interesting. And then finally, I've been reading some fic based on the game – yesterday morning I went through Lassarina's FFIX stories, and they were all excellent – but it really is a small fandom.
I've also been making my way through the game, but I'm still burned out from having spent so much time playing and teaching Final Fantasy X, and I can only deal with about twenty minutes at a time. Also, so much of FFIX is about how its art contributes to the sense of exploring a beautiful and fully realized world, and the super blurry backgrounds aren't ugly, exactly, but they don't do the game any favors. In addition, very early on I decided to go ahead and use the "cheat" settings to max out my party's money and experience and skill points, and though I regret nothing I do think it takes something away from the game not to be involved in the monitoring of your characters' growth and resources. Right now I'm at Conde Petie (the dwarven village built on a bridge), and when I get to Madain Sari I think I'm just going to stay there and soak up the atmosphere. I still love FFIX; but, after December 18, I'm not sure I'm going to return to the game. After all, I still haven't gotten past the second chapter in Final Fantasy XV, and it feels like a waste to keep returning to the same games that I've been playing for the past twenty years.
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Date: 2017-12-07 04:28 am (UTC)I love FFIX a lot, but I feel oddly...complete about it. That is to say, unlike most of the series, I don't feel nearly as compelled to write for it as I do for other games. It exists and gives me joy by so doing, and i don't feel the need to add to it or explore it further.
I wonder why that is.
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Date: 2017-12-14 08:22 pm (UTC)In Final Fantasy X, there's a scene late in the game when Seymour ambushes the party on Mount Gagazet and says that he just killed all of the Ronso. Aside from the awful boss fight that follows this pronouncement, it doesn't really carry any narrative weight because we never see Kimahri react to this information in any way.
There aren't many holes like this in FFIX, which feels, as you wrote, oddly complete on its own. Aside from the obvious fantasy hijinks, there aren't that many holes in the story, and various characters are paired in new and interesting ways throughout the game that give the player a more well-rounded view of their personalities. The ATE scenes are also fantastic, so much so that I can't help but wonder why no one else has ever tried to do something like that with any other game since then.
I didn't do a deep dive into the fandom, and I limited my reading to various tags on AO3, but the vast majority of the fic I read to prepare for Yuletide is set either before or after the game, which makes me think that you're not the only one who is satisfied with the game itself. Now that I'm coming back to FFIX as someone who's had a bit more experience with writing my own stories, I can really appreciate just how well-crafted it is.