Final Fantasy IV DS-Who is getting it?

[Teclo]

[scy]

[spoiler]Edit: Oh boy, totally didn't put "at the time" in my first post on this. Oops! Yeah, the death scenes later definitely did better than these earlier ones ("OH NOS I DIE FAREWELL") for pretty much all game genres ... but man, were they all pretty lame back in the day.

At the time? A lot of character death scenes aren't much unless it's truly pivotal to the main plot. If they had introduced Anna for more than the 5 seconds before she died then maybe we'd get something...

...then again, look at the rest of the deaths in the game. They're all just as bad so I doubt we'd ever have gotten more than "I HAEV LUV U okay bye" even if she was a bigger character. She does get the scene afterwards, I guess, if that counts for ... something.

It became a better trend later with character death in RPGs to be something touching but the early ones not so much ... unless I'm forgetting some big "OMG" one from the SNES days.[/spoiler]

[Teclo]

I'll leave this out of spoiler tags because it should give anything away. It's not that we'd only just met Anna, it's more that it was a character development moment for a main character. Him just leaving didn't harm her character development per se, it harmed his character development and any sort of suspension of disbelief.

[Hobbun]

[Teclo]

So you don't find it strange that a man that is meant to be in love with a woman leaves her dead body to rot on the floor of his ruined castle..? Why put all the dialogue and sobbing in if it's going to be instantly undermined by him leaving her to rot on the floor? If the game had a consistently blatant disregard for character and plot, it would be fine if he did that but since its all about the story and characters, it's stupid for them to do that. Not to mention that Tellah comes all that way to find her and as soon as he sees her corpse he runs off. So even her father left her to rot.

At least Tellah was meant to be enraged, but the prince went from "Oh my god she's dead, what the hell am I going to do?" to "OK Cecil, I'll join your party!!" and then just leaves her there. It takes it from a sad scene that's meant to inspire the player to defeat the enemy to an unintentionally comic scene. It's not that it ruins the game per se, but more that it makes the story seem silly - a bad thing when the game fully rests on those things.

[scy]

Whoa now, when did spoony bard become a main Character? He's a side character at best. So is Tellah. So is everyone but Cecil, Kain, Rydia, Rosa, and that lame ninja noone remembers who I can't even recall backstory for.

But, seriously, what do you expect? A long drawn out ordeal of them burying the body? I mean, I can see at least a quick scene of a tombstone erected or something but ... what? Quite frankly, the impact of the scene was her dying and the fight with Edward and Tellah. Yeah, they get over it way too fast (okay, Tellah never gets over it) but it's not like burying the body adds any depth to their character.

In the end, Edward is still a spoony bard, Tellah is an crappy old mage. Only thing I can think of to make it "better," is if he merely pointed out the way to go for the Antlion and stayed at the castle with her ... and then showing up at the end of Antlion cave (or during the fight when you're losing, since the game seems to like to do that with fights; OH MAN LOSING BATTLE PINCH HITTER GO) to help.

...but it doesn't change anything. The game does a decent enough job of making you understand they loved each other and the King of Baron is a dick. Though, I'd have preferred him staying there and the castle collapsing in on him ... but that's mostly because he's a terrible character and outside of being a spoony bard, I don't care for him.

Hell, this hasn't even changed NOW; how many character deaths have an impact on the story beyond the moment it occurs? Not too many. They may remember the scene if the death was close to the main character but it's almost always something they get over far too quickly.

[Hobbun]

Scy pretty much summed up what I was going to say. But I have to echo his question as in what did you expect they do in the game? Have a big burial scene?

Characters have been dying in video games a lot since FF IV and I can't think of any huge funeral/burial scenes done in games that I have played.

Who's to say they didn't take Anna's body and bury it? Doesn't mean it didn't happen because SE decided to not to make a cut-scene for it. I really think it is something very minor and does not take away Edward's feelings for Anna. They even reinforced it with the later voice-acted cut scene by the water in Kaipo when you see Anna's ghost.

But I agree, sure, they could have actually shown something or give some kind of indication they took care of her body. But like I said, video games have been doing this long after FF IV first came out.

I guess it would be different if you said "I don't like how Edward does nothing with the body, it makes it seem like he doesn't care. However, it's not like scenes similar to this have not happened numerous times in other video games." You make it sound like FF IV has been the only one.

To be honest, it has more of an excuse than most video games as it was one of the first, or the first console RPGs to do something like this.

[Teclo]

You're arguing this all wrong. You're putting words into my mouth and then arguing with them. Both of you keep putting the words "drawn-out". "huge" or "big" before "burial scene". I'm not saying there should be a drawn-out scene. It could fade to black and then have them outside next to a grave with the prince kneeling by the grave then they could get up and leave. It would take about 10 seconds but it would eliminate the scene-ruining oddity of them leaving the corpse in the throne room. You see, not only does their leaving her to rot ruin the scene in which it happens, it sort of takes the meaning out of the ghost seen in Kaipo. She appears to him in a bid to inspire him and it's a nice scene... But if you remember that she's now still lying dead on his throne room floor it seems more like she should be saying "For fuck's sake, come back and bury me!"

To be honest, when it comes to RPGs, I can't think of any games that had them leaving the corpse there. However I also can't think of any RPGs before FFIV that had people dying in. Well, in Dragon Quest III your father is killed when you're a baby but he falls into a volcano so they couldn't do much with him. Anyway, because of that it's kind of hard to argue the point either way, but really that isn't the main thing. As I've said before, just because the story was in a game, it doesn't give them a license to leave any sort of sense out.

I did actually say way back when we first started arguing about FFIV, before it came out, that there are many other games from the time that have illogical story points and I would be equally critical of them. Saying that it was one of the first story-driven RPGs isn't an excuse - it's a story and we've been writing stories for thousands of years. It's one thing to think "it's only a game, story doesn't matter" but when the entire point of the game is to have an epic story, the developers themselves are attesting that story does matter in this game.

It makes even less sense now, in this remake. They've added a lot in so you can't just say that they're trying to preserve the original. They've added a lot more depth to the characters, but like the RPGamer review said; the added depth only serves to make certain story events even more illogical.

It's a shame because they have some great ideas, like Rydia "unlearning" Fire because of what happened to her village. It was a lot more dramatic and intelligent to have her (re)learn Fire through that story event than it was to just hand it to her at X level.

[scy]

[Hobbun]

[scy]

Ah ...

Suikoden spoilers:
[spoiler]Technically, he's a "villain" and, therefore, is left to rot much like every other villain ever in the history of games.[/spoiler]

[Hobbun]