[sethsez]

Originally Posted by mag

Well, if you saw that coming, you're pretty much the only one. I think that's the first time something like that has ever happened in a video game.

Video game? Not really (especially if you count PC games, but major characters have died in JRPGs before), but in movies it's a cliche as old as the medium itself. Any time a character in the middle of a war says that after the fighting is over he'd like to do [sentimental thing] you can bet that he'll die in either the next scene, or near the end of the movie (if he shows a locket with his wife's picture inside it, you also get a bonus last wish of "please give this to my wife" right before he bites it). This is supposed to make you go "oh no, all his hopes and dreams are gone" but generally it makes the more jaded among us reply with "oh great, that trick again."

That's a pretty neat trick. Of course, you can make any character sound bland depending on how broadly you define their personality.

But that's all there is TO the characters in Final Fantasy VII outside of Cloud and Sephiroth. Sure, they have some hastily thrown together backgrounds, but they don't evolve in any meaningful way and we get precious little insight into them at all. I defined them broadly because they're broadly defined in the first place.

The thing about the GFs actually isn't contrived at all. If you had been paying attention, you'd realize that it's actually a critical part of the story.

Yes, it is a critical part of the story, which is why it's such a lame plot element. If it were a minor point I wouldn't have minded the stupidity as much.

Although, I will say that Final Fantasy VIII did suffer from some pretty boring and annoying characters. Only a handful of the characters were really interesting, but it turned out to be a pretty decent story in spite of that.

Decent compared to what? It was a character-driven story with annoying characters, and an epic apocalyptic story with an almost completely undefined villain and a threat so banal it doesn't even feel dangerous (seriously, time compression?!). If a romantic epic fails as a romance and fails as an epic, then I generally consider that a failure, not decent.

You've got to be kidding. Auron is a great character! He's one of those wonderfully tragic figures.

Nope, I still think he exists almost entirely to be portent on legs. He doesn't piss me off like the rest of the cast, though.