Characterization in The Last Story

There are moments in the dialogue of The Last Story that frustrate the heck out of me. Yurick telling someone explicitly that his past is "not something [he] talk[s] about much." Then the formal, fangless reply of how the person is very sorry for intruding. And then that person, for almost no reason this far away from the sun, tells him, "You are a fine young man, Master Yurick." That's clumsy characterization of Yurick, an otherwise blank slate of a character. That's far too much self-awareness, and it's not how real people talk. We don't, in the first few minutes of meeting a new person, tell them something about ourselves that generally would require a psychiatrist to inform us of in the first place. This game so far is filled with all sorts of polite, optimistic, and overly self-aware dialogue and I'm just BEGGING to find some edge, some spark of chemistry between the characters, either showing the characters' familiarity with each other or even their interpersonal enmity. As a result of their nothing but civil discourse, these characters are hard to distinguish one from another (and I haven't even brought up their generally similar clothing and hairstyles), and thus hard to care about. You do get some flashes of spontaneity in the midst of battle, but that's not really story, is it?

I think part of the problem is that almost all of your party members are introduced all at once, and in medias res at that. This is not the ideal way to show us who these characters are, 1) because we're in the middle of a battle and we're trying to figure out how the system works and so can't pay much attention to who's saying what, etc., but even more significantly, 2) it is always ALWAYS better to introduce us to the main cast one person at a time. Look at, for instance, Final Fantasy X, whose characterization is so good we don't even think to appreciate it. First we have Tidus as the athlete, and who he is in the world of blitzball. Then shortly after that, we meet Auron, and learn how bad-A he is just from the five minutes we see of him. After Tidus is sucked into Spira, we kind of meet Riku (but that's more of a Chekhov's Fanservice than characterization at that point). And then Tidus is swept away again, this time coming upon Wakka, alone. Finally we meet the remaining three characters, Kimahri, Lulu, and of course Yuna, all at once, but they're such different people with such different clothes and such different roles that by that time it is easy to distinguish between the three. That moment where Kimahri catches the fainting Yuna as she comes down the stairs tells us all we need to know about him, who he is and what motivates him. Lulu is probably the least essential character to the story, and fittingly she doesn't get her very own character intro the way everyone else does. But she's not entirely useless, either, and she does have her place in the story and of course in the battle system.

In The Last Story we're greeted with everyone at once, and in a battle system where you only control one character, it's really hard to get to know how the rest of your party works, who is in what role, etc. I'm seven or so hours in, and frankly you could get rid of half the cast and it would probably not only not harm the story or game at all, it would probably improve it, because we'd know what this story was about and we wouldn't have to always be trying to keep track of everybody. In Final Fantasy X, this is never a problem.

I bring up Final Fantasy X somewhat purposefully, because, apart from being a stellar example of characterization (which it is regardless of whether or not you like the characters or not), both were produced by Hironubo Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy and thus the JRPG. So he should really know better.

Future posts about The Last Story to come: the role of narration in a story, backstory as characterization, and the importance of greater character distinction than simple degrees of personality.