Final Fantasy Retrospective: Mobius Final Fantasy, Act Two (Part 2)

 

There are some things about this game that don’t change. After the first act concluded, I was certain that the repetition regarding the prophecy would end. I was mostly right about that, but the game’s penchant for repetition hasn’t changed. Each chapter has not only repeated what the main plot has been so far, but the characters have constantly repeated the world’s situation in cutscene after cutscene.

Mobius has a much different method of storytelling than Final Fantasy XIV. Even though it takes about an hour or two to play through each of XIV‘s content patches, and it (usually) takes three months for a new patch to be released, the game’s main character doesn’t spend the first part of each patch monologuing about the direction the plot has been taking. Any time the characters do mention what’s been going on, it’s in service of moving the plot forward rather than spinning everyone’s wheels and getting nowhere, like Mobius does.

Starting with chapter four, certain aspects from act one returned, including the halo that appears around peoples’ heads when Vox speaks to them. Vox has been conspicuously absent from the game after the defeat of his most beloved villain Chaos, and the characters have attributed the game’s runes to Palamecia’s influence rather than Vox’s influence, but the implication is the same. Vox or Palamecia or someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes and trying to claim the toy box for themselves.

It took until chapter five for the game to finally find a place in its overall plot for the Warrior of Light. For the first four chapters, the Warrior had little to do but cull fiends and gather supplies for the village of Omega and other than the ongoing story of the runes and the changes that have been creeping into Palamecia, it feels like the Warrior’s contributions to the plot could’ve been skipped entirely. It’s like the writers were just reminding us that the Warrior of Light still exists.

To put this into real world perspective, it took nearly a year after the end of the Warrior of Light storyline before the Warrior of Despair storyline began, then a half a year beyond that before the Warrior of Light found himself a part of the main plot once more.

It also took a half a year before the Warrior’s calm and uneventful storyline was revealed to be just as important to the overall plot as anything else. Palamecia’s manipulation in chapter five seems to be with the intent to put Graff and the Warrior of Light at opposite ends of an arbitrary fight. By showing Graff and Sophie visions of Anozea and of the negative aspects of what’s called the Collective, it makes Graff immediately suspicious of the village of Omega, which the Warrior of Light has been building up into its own “collective” and which recently hoisted a new flag which looks remarkably similar to the flag used by the villainous Collective. The Warrior of Light saw Omega get destroyed by the “Warrior of Despair” and whom looked in the vision to be almost exactly like Graff. A fight between the two is inevitable.

It’s no wonder Graff slipped into the role of the villain so easily in The Sleeping Lion, taking to Seifer’s part as if he was born for it. He was more than willing to act as the Sorceress’s Knight in order to guide Squall to the inevitable final showdown with Ultimecia.

For Graff, he had little choice in the matter of his fate. At the end of chapter five, the villagers of Omega are enchanted by a group of evil Echo fairies, and even named characters are shown to be vulnerable to the influence. Graff has no choice but to slay one of the villagers in self defense, an act which gets him stabbed and left for dead.

There is a good Echo fairy, of course, and she returns to the story to guide Sophie. Surprise, she’s the Warrior’s Echo who had supposedly died at the end of act one. A different one shows up to help the Warrior at the start of chapter six, calling herself Eco in order to differentiate herself from the original Echo, sort of like how all Moogles have names that derive from the word Mog.

Chapter six introduces an interesting aspect to the battle system, Support Mode. I never got a chance to play around with it, but in essence, it allows for the main character to issue rudimentary orders to a party of characters, somewhat like the battle system of Dragon Quest IV‘s final chapter. Come to think of it, I mentioned changes to the battle system of Mobius last week and then didn’t elaborate.

Thanks to The Sleeping Lion, I at least was able to play around with the second act’s main change to the game’s battle system, which consists of a turn system not unlike the one in Final Fantasy X. Enemy turns come more often because of this. Not only that, but a second limit break system is introduced, called the Mobius Zone. A new meter is built up as the Warrior fights, and if it’s completely filled, he enters a period of heightened aggression where the enemy’s turns don’t come up for a short while, all the elements turn Prismatic and thus players are able to use all of their skills with almost reckless abandon. Attacks are also strengthened during the Mobius Zone, which means all but the strongest of bosses will crumple beneath the onslaught.

Unfortunately, at least in The Sleeping Lion, most bosses become immune to damage at specific HP percentages, and the only reason for this is so that they’ll be able to perform their mechanics. This is something that happens in Final Fantasy XIV as well. Some bosses have a percentage of HP that they aren’t allowed to drop below until they perform specific battle mechanics. It doesn’t matter if players are powerful enough to defeat these enemies very quickly, the developers are super proud of these mechanics and really, really want players to have to deal with them.

It’s an aspect of The Sleeping Lion that I hate. What sucks about it is that I wasn’t as powerful as most players were when they played through the story, so I ran into battles where I entered the Mobius Zone and was only able to hit the boss once before running up against its invincibility mechanic, wasting the entire Zone in the process. It reminded me of how limit breaks are wasted in Final Fantasy IX, either activating at inopportune times or at the very end of battle. The Mobius Zone is both useful and useless.

In chapter seven, Sophie arrives at the Tower of Hope, but it’s shown to be still in construction. The people of Palamecia are building it mainly because it’s shown in the runes and if it hasn’t been made clear before, chapter seven firmly establishes that the runestones are a new prophecy. It’s not as ubiquitous as the prophecy was, but the people of Palamecia seem starved for something to believe in and they latch onto the runestones to replace the prophecy in their hearts. What’s worse is that the Dark Flood washed away everyone’s memories, so no one even remembers that they once believed in a prophecy with all their heart and for all their lives. It’s like deep down in their souls, they were made to be subservient to the whims of an invisible being.

I began to realize while researching this chapter that the story had presented the Collective of Anozea as a great evil in the opening chapters of the second act, then went to great lengths to show the ideals of the collective start to take root in the world of Palamecia, each little step being brought forth and supported by the protagonists of the game. It’s like the writers had something they wanted to say about good and evil, and how easy it is for good ideals to become corrupted.

The game fudges this a little by making that ruin come at the hands of a Deus ex Machina. The evil Echo fairies that occasionally show themselves throughout the Warrior of Despair storyline reveal new powers as the story continues, and it comes at the expense of the village of Omega, and the free will of the citizens therein. The corruption of the ideals of the Collective don’t happen naturally, unfortunately.

The evil Echo fairies do make one mistake here, and that’s to start actively meddling in the affairs of the world. Because they try to be a bit more hands on, somehow the Warrior of Light figures out that there are evil fairies pulling the strings. That said, sometimes I feel like the leaps of logic that the Warrior of Light performs are incomprehensible. It’s not explained how he suddenly figures out aspects of the story, but apparently he’s just that clever. It’s like a badly written detective story, or one of the old episodes of Adam West’s Batman, where even if you’re told what the leaps of logic were, you can hardly see how they’re supposed to work.

The developers choose to use chapter eight to reveal Graff’s backstory for no reason other than that there simply is no more time to do so. Graff had woken up without memories and lived a similar life as the Warrior of Light lived in the earlier chapters. Graff, however, had a lot more trouble convincing villagers to take up arms and defend their home. These villagers also seemed to resent him for his skills, yet depended on those skills to preserve their way of life. As he tried to protect his village, his sister attempted to take on some of his burden and got killed for her efforts. In other words, Sophie was already dead and Graff merely pretended that the girl he saw in the runes was his sister. He pretended so hard that the girl in the runes actually became his sister, overwriting whoever she was in the first place.

…yeah, this revelation feels like it comes out of nowhere, and was revealed just so that Graff could then be turned evil, since that was what the writers intended for him to do in chapter eight. It’s just another example of the game’s poor method of story-telling.

That said, the trope of the unreliable narrator isn’t bad, but having key information withheld from us and then revealed for no reason other than the writers ran out of time, that’s not the trope done right. For as problematic as the philosophy of Fight Club has become in recent years, it was always a very good example of how to properly write an unreliable narrator. The revelation comes at a natural and opportune time in the narrative and redefines everything about how the story was framed.

That said, the revelation that Sophie’s name isn’t actually Sophie does explain why the game didn’t name her until Graff did.

When he reveals to players that his actual sister is dead, an evil Echo begins to tempt Graff to villainy, and succeeds rather easily, which is actually a little disappointing. I never really got the impression that Graff was someone who could be tempted to the dark side that quickly. Even as the villain of The Sleeping Lion, he seemed like he was playing a role and not actually evil. Fou-Lu he’s not.

According to the evil Echo fairies, Sophie’s influence over the building of the Tower of Hope wasn’t a part of the original plan, and she was changing it to something different. So when she ignited the light of hope in everyone and accidentally resurrected Chaos…

Okay, so Chaos was supposedly killed off for good at the end of act one, but apparently can be brought back if everyone somehow still generates enough hope that it makes despair grow in equal measure, so it leads me to believe that Vox and/or Palamecia have plans within plans within plans. Vox’s original toy box was spilled over and his toys stolen from him but he can put together new games and find new toys to play with. For players like me, the rules of the world seem made up as the writers go along. A second storyline was asked for, so everything that was put right can be made wrong again, with the only reason being “Because JRPG.” It’s like when Final Fantasy VII received a sequel in the form of a movie and the plot was just an excuse to bring Cloud and Sephiroth together once more for another epic sword fight, despite that Cloud already destroyed Sephiroth “for good” at the end of the original game.

It sometimes feels like writers don’t know how to take their stories in new directions with new villains, so they resort to bringing established villains back, even if they’ve been killed off before. Sephiroth returned in Advent Children, and if rumours are true and Final Fantasy X-3 sees the light of day, the final boss (or one of the main bosses, anyway) is going to be Sin, despite that Yuna figured out how to definitively defeat it at the end of the original game. Then there’s Maleficent in the Kingdom Hearts series. Despite being left a dark stain on the stone of her castle in game one, she still returns from the dead in order to remain a presence throughout the entire series.

So when Chaos is resurrected in act two of Mobius, I’m sure no one will be surprised that I rolled my eyes. But I feel like I must stress once more than I didn’t play act two of the game, I’m just getting all of this from second-hand research. I can vouch for how reliable it is (I basically watched all of the cutscenes in a compilation video), but I might have a different attitude towards it if I’d experienced the game the way it was supposed to be experienced rather than watching it.

If I’m being honest, I feel like having to beat the same villain over again can sometimes reduce my desire to try. If I’m just going to “lose” the battle so that the villain can return again in the next game, it feels like a let-down to me. That said, Final Fantasy XIV may be an exception to that rule, depending on how next year’s expansion plays out. I won’t get into it now and it’ll be a long while before I get the chance to, but for now I’ll say that the mechanics of how Final Fantasy XIV‘s world works were long established before a certain resurrection happened, and said resurrection was well within the rules, even if some of those rules weren’t revealed until Shadowbringers.

Anyway, Chaos is once more defeated “for good” but I imagine the writers could’ve brought him back over and over again if they wanted to make players go “Oh shit!” whenever they felt like it. It always feels like a Saturday morning cartoon way of going about things. Can’t let a “good” enemy go, we have to keep fighting it forever and ever, and now that they’ve established a mechanic for how to bring back Chaos from beyond even the final destruction of his essence, he’s truly an immortal force in the world of Palamecia. It doesn’t matter that it was established at the end of the first act of the game that he’s permanently gone. It doesn’t matter than this temporary resurrection was ended with the functional equivalent of “And stay out!” He’s essentially become Zeromus from Final Fantasy IV or the Cloud of Darkness from Final Fantasy III. Maybe even Necron from Final Fantasy IX. As long as there’s evil in the hearts of man, those dark forces will keep coming back.

The revelations of chapter nine bring into doubt the existence of Anozea. It was seen vividly in the runestones and Sophie became utterly convinced it was real, but by chapter nine, she’s forgotten the name of the place, and it doesn’t seem like it was ever real in the first place. Graff had lost all of his memories as well, so whether it truly was his home or not can’t be known at this point. Of course, since the game’s gone, it’ll never be known.

One of the biggest events of chapter nine is the Warrior of Light’s confrontations with Graff. Graff destroys Sophie’s sense of identity, tries to murder her, and seems like a very overtuned boss. I’m glad I never had to fight him. He reminds me of the Garland boss fight which I felt was overtuned.

Chapter nine also reunites the Warrior of Light with Echo, a reunion that’s a long time coming. It seems she wasn’t destroyed at the end of act one. But then, neither was Vox, and the Warrior figures out at the very end of the chapter that he’s behind all of the manipulation, playing with Graff and Sophie behind the scenes and turning them both into his puppets. New puppets to replace the old, and to bring about new prophecies and new cycles of hope and despair.

This leads into chapter ten, the final chapter of the game and the final confrontation with Vox. Depending on if the game would’ve continued or not, I’m sure the writers would’ve come up with ways to have Vox pulling the strings even more, This chapter reveals the true nature of the Echo fairies, as pawns being controlled by Vox. The Warrior’s Echo seems different, though, outside of Vox’s control.

Vox also wastes no time in wounding the Warrior of Light with the knowledge that Sarah didn’t choose to relinquish her memories of the past and was only pretending, keeping it a secret and going along with the fiction of being brother and sister. He wounds Sarah with the knowledge that the Warrior of Light also was pretending, weaving a deception of his own. In taunting the Warrior in such ways, his aim is to bring the Warrior to such deep despair that he becomes the true Warrior of Despair that Vox requires in order to bring about his new cycle to replace the old.

Graff is knocked back to his senses during this chapter and he confronts the girl he’d imprinted Sophie onto. Everything about Graff and Sophie’s stories were manipulated by Vox, even Graff’s descent to villainy, only so that Vox could turn the Warrior of Light into the true villain of the story he intended to tell. But once Vox finished with his new puppets, he cast them aside and didn’t realize that they might then be able to turn their strength against him.

Sophie willingly chooses the identity of Graff’s dead sister over whatever she might’ve been born with, and she and Graff confront the dark version of him that Vox had helped cultivate.

An interesting aspect of the final chapter is that Graff, Sophie and Meia, once they’re reunited, need to gather the four crystals of the elements and let their light shine forth, with Vox directly quoting the very first Final Fantasy at them. The game isn’t even playing coy at this point, it’s reveling in its nostalgia trip. Vox himself is reveling in his position as the disembodied voice that everyone obeys, something akin to the god of the world of Palamecia. A wicked and cruel god.

In a manner of speaking, Mobius could be seen as a criticism of monotheism, with Vox being the supreme supernatural being in the world of Palamecia, a jealous god who is utterly corrupt. And when one thinks of religions with monotheistic structures, the first one to come to mind is inevitably Christianity. Vox himself takes on three forms during the course of the story. He was Voyce, his original self before becoming the voice that seduces all, Vox. And then, after the Warrior of Light is rescued from despair at the end of the game with some well placed words from his friends, the Warrior and his friends goad Vox into doing something Vox himself was absolutely certain was beyond his abilities: manifest into a new corporeal being long enough to become the final boss of the entire game.

The metaphor falls apart if you consider that the Holy Trinity of Christianity is ever present, all three alive at the same time, whereas Vox’s forms cannot co-exist. He ceased to be Voyce when he became Vox, and Vox manifested himself when he became corporeal again. His forms also occur outside of the proper order. I would consider Voyce to be the son even though he came first, and Vox the disembodied voice is the father, an invisible man in the sky, even though the disembodied voice came after Voyce the human. That said, Vox the boss fight made manifest does work as the Holy Ghost.

Vox as boss fight is something that I’d been hoping and wishing for since act one, and especially after hearing Vox’s deliciously desperate cries when his precious Chaos was defeated. And as a boss fight, it certainly takes a while to fight through all of his forms. Every character available at the end of act two fights him separately, each one taking on a different one of his forms, and the time it takes to beat him reminds me of the final boss of The Legend of Dragoon. The Legend of Dragoon definitely takes longer, but Vox is quite the lengthy fight himself.

Vox also is somehow, after everything he’s done, given a hope spot for a redemption arc that won’t ever happen now that the game is gone. He claims victory after the fight, for the sole reason that he’s able to experience such a fight and it doesn’t matter that he isn’t able to actually defeat the heroes. He even disappears at the end, although the Warrior is certain that Vox will return someday.

With how the ending of act two was written, it sounds for all the world like there’s at least one more act planned. The “three act structure” is something talked about in film studies a lot. They don’t even have to stop at three acts. If the game had continued to be successful, there’s no end to how many stories could’ve been told in Palamecia. The writers certainly gave the impression that they were making it up as they went along. I do believe that act two was planned out from the beginning, as the plot twist of Sophie not being the real Sophie is too neatly done to have been made up on the spot, and was actually somewhat foreshadowed when we first met her. This means that act two is somewhat of an improvement over act one, even though the revelation that Sophie is a random girl Graff imprinted a new identity onto is something the game revealed to us for no real reason other than that the plot needed us to know at that particular time.

It could’ve been handled a little more subtly, with the evil Echoes taunting Graff with the knowledge and forcing him to face the facts rather than having him just casually reveal it in random dialogue.

The final boss fight with Vox has absolutely no finality to it, nor is there much animosity shown between him and the Warrior of Light. It’s instead treated like a friendly fight between like-minded individuals, sort of like Gilgamesh’s duels with Bartz in Final Fantasy V. Vox and the Warrior of Light did not meet as bitter enemies for each other to destroy, they seem to see each other now as friendly rivals who look forward to future battles. It’s peculiar and admittedly not what I expected from the last chapter the game would ever release.

If there’s one thing I’m sure everyone can agree, it’s that the attempt to create a game with very high graphical fidelity for mobile devices produced one that occasionally struggled with choppiness and drops in frame rate, even on PC. Just like most games they’ve made in recent years, Square-Enix put a little too much stock in making it look as fantastic as possible and yes, it does look fantastic. But I would trade some graphical fidelity in their games for more content. I want more enemies in the Final Fantasy XIV overworld, especially in areas where players need to farm for enemy drops. I would’ve liked some interesting side-quests in Final Fantasy XV instead of hunting down dog tags and helping people at the side of the road. Actually, I wouldn’t mind those quests as long as there were more things to do in general. If you truly want an open world Final Fantasy, then pack that map full of stuff like you were playing Guild Wars 2. Anything other than graphics that take a full minute or more to load up.

I suppose this is finally the end of my journey through Palamecia. I have been talking about this game for two months, and now I can return to where I left off in the Square-Enix Retrospective series. That said, I have not yet looked into the second half of the Final Fantasy X crossover, Dream Within A Dream, which I began playing through when Mobius was still active. Supposedly, this crossover is canon to the greater Final Fantasy X storyline, which means that I might return to it when I finally reach that point in the retrospective. But then, Final Fantasy VII is also canon to the Final Fantasy X universe and as far as I can tell, the two Final Fantasy VII crossovers Mobius got aren’t considered canon, so take anything regarding what’s supposedly canon to what with a grain of salt.

For now, it looks like I can finally close the loop for good.

 

 

The Warrior of Light needs a rest, so there will not be a new article next week, or the week after. Watch for a return to the Square-Enix retrospectives on August 26 with Dragon Quest IV, and September 2 with Final Fantasy IV.