Our FF4 sequel was better! (part two)

Part Two: Our Cast

When designing the cast for Crystal Sonata we had a couple specific goals in mind. First, we wanted to introduce some of the more modern skillsets and job types into the FF4 universe, such as Blue Magic. Second, we wanted a “rotating party” design, like FF4, so you would meet a dozen or so PCs over the course of the game but always finish the game with the same group. And third, we wanted each character to be remniscient of someone in FF4’s original cast without actually being that character. In fact, we didn’t want any of the original cast to come back as playable, at all.

We achieved that last goal by killing everyone off. Heh.

The main character was Crystal, who was very different from other FF heroes. This actually happened by coincidence, though; we wanted our hero to stand out from every other RPG Maker game, and other RPG Maker games just happen to all have very FF-style heroes. First of all, Crystal was a woman. I insisted on that, since every main hero in all my RPG Maker projects were women because I felt (and still do) that there aren’t enough RPGs with girly heroes.

More importantly, though, Crystal was old. Like, not old-old, but RPG-old. At the time FF4:CS began, she was supposed to be in her early thirties. Part of this is just a function of wanting to set the sequel so far after the original game, but another part is that Crystal’s pre-conceptions and world-weariness were very much a part of her character. Her goal at the outset wasn’t to save the world or protect the crystals or anything like that; she just wants to see Baron prosper in a way she had only read about in books. Crystal despised her father, who she viewed as weak, and clashes often with her mother, who she believes is wrongfully carrying Cecil’s torch.

Hmm… reading that now, there’s a lot more Cloud in her than Cecil. In any case she was essentially the polar opposite of TAY’s Ceodore in pretty much every way possible, except her ability to use white magic.

Crystal had a pet chocobo named Boko who was a playable character for no reason other than it amused us. Boko played about as large a role in the plot as his namesake (Bartz’s bird from FF5) did; which is to say, virtually none.

Crystal’s first non-avian ally in the game would have been Paulsen, the old, stern prime minister of Damcyan. After years of signing more and more control of Damcyan over to Troia, Paulsen attempted to reverse the process and keep Damcyan from becoming a puppet state. He was exiled for his troubles and turned to Rosa for aid. When Rosa refused he turned to Crystal instead. The first major plotline in the game was Crystal and Paulsen traveling to Damcyan (along with Edward, who was an NPC) to see him returned to power. Paulsen was primarily a black mage.

Also going along on the trip to Damcyan was Jet, an Eblan mercenary who had befriended Crystal. Jet would have been the game’s Kain character; he would betray and then un-betray (retray?) the heroes at certain points in the game. Jet was also one of the game’s more powerful characters, combining the best aspects of Edge and Rydia from FF4 (a front-line character who could summon monsters). He was one of the folks in Crystal’s final team.

In Damcyan the team met up with Lark, a young orphan girl who worked with an underground terrorist group who wished to overthrow the republic and reinstate the monarchy. Lark was a sweet, naive, uplifting character, so she essentially served Rydia’s place in the plot (she wasn’t quite so weepy as Rydia, though). Mechanically she was the most unique character in the game, being FF4’s first Blue Mage and (like her idol Prince Edward) being able to Sing. Her Songs, though, would have been more like the Bard from FF5, where she would select a song to give everyone a benefit for as long as she sang it. She came and went several times in the story (even being the plot’s main character at one point) and eventually would end up in Crystal’s final group.

So the whole Damcyan thing doesn’t work out so well for Crystal and her friends, so they decide to travel to Fabul as well. Upon arrival they find that Tai, Yang’s son and the current king, was being kept prisoner in his own castle. He and Crystal escaped together and she went on to be one of her most powerful allies. I think of the whole cast Tai was probably my favorite. I believe he was the oldest (well into his fifties), and what I really liked was that while he was so similar to Yang his role in the story was much different than his father’s. Cecil and Yang were friends, equals. Tai was more of a father figure to Crystal, and was the one who began tempering her amibitions a bit and helping her see that the whole world, not just Baron, was in danger. This was one spot where I couldn’t help but indulge in a little fanwank of my own; Tai left the party by staying behind to fight off an overwhelming wave of Troian guards, supposedly sacrificing himself to save Crystal, in an exact mirror image of his father’s sacrifice years before. (Of course, like his father, the sacrifice didn’t stick; he came back later in the story to lead the party for a while.)

Crystal and Tai eventually wound up in Mysidia and meet Elder Porom. Porom sends Crystal on the same journey through Mt. Ordeal her father took, but for a different reason; Cecil’s intentions were pure but his soul needed cleansing. Crystal had no reliance on darkness but her intentions were selfish. Porom sent Agate, a bookish mage with rudimentary summoning skills, along with Crystal as a guide. Agate was a pure mage, who could cast both white and black magic, and was patterned after FF3’s Scholar. He essentially filled Tellah’s role in the story: he gave players access to white and black magic through a couple key scenes and then dies. Unlike most of FF4’s cast, the death sticks; Agate doesn’t bounce back. He does get to learn some cool summons, though.

The next character was Cicero, who played the role of doting love interest. He was a black magician from Troia who was also capable with a blade, essentially bringing the role of Mage Knight to FF4. (FF9 was still hot news at the time, so I imagine our reasoning was rolling Steiner and Vivi into a single character.) Cicero possessed a lot of good qualities Crystal lacked: selflessness, calmness, and wit (at times), so he and Crystal had a much different relationship than Cecil and Rosa did. For one, neither would have asked the other to stay out of danger for their own protection. Cicero was absolutely not the sexist Cecil was, and with good reason: he grew up in a land which was run by women and which (as of this time) was a world superpower. The idea of forbiding his girlfriend to come along into the mouth of death would have been completely foreign to him. Cicero took up the last slot in Crystal’s final team along with Lark and Jet.

It wouldn’t be right to have an FF4 game and not send the heroes to the underworld. That’s where Crystal would meet Picathera, an outcast half-dwarf with her own homemade airship. Pica was very much going to be the game’s Cid character; boisterous, adventurous, and armed with a giant mallet. Apparently Square had the same thoughts we did about a character like this, since Luca fills that role so perfectly in After Years. Pica technically stayed with the team until the end of the game, but was only playable for a short time when she wasn’t babysitting her airship.

Finally, we of course needed a Fusoya character to fill in the story’s final few plot points and accompany Crystal through her penultimate dungeon, and nobody leapt out at us the way Golbez did. Towards the end of the game the team learns about the Big Bad and how he was manipulating Zemus 60 years ago. Well, Golbez apparently learned about this a long time ago, and chose to abort his journey with Fusoya to return and take the chance to properly atone for his sins against Cecil’s world. This is of course pure fanservice shining through; we tried to cover it up best we could but, honestly, as lovers of FF4 ourselves, we shared everyone else’s desire to finally play as freakin’ Golbez. It just seemed natural. Anyway he was only around for one dungeon and was killed off by the Big Bad’s #1 lieutenant.

The only hole in this cast, as you might have noticed, is a dragoon. Kain’s role in the plot was filled by Jet, but the nature of Jet’s betrayal was much different; he wasn’t being mind-controlled and he was never especially apologetic. He certainly didn’t double-triple-quadruple cross the other characters by switching sides every couple scenes. A better comparison might be FF8’s Seifer; Jet makes similar decisions to the hero in hopes of furthering his own ambitions, and those decisions just happen to lead him in the opposite direction the hero’s going. So he (hopefully!) wasn’t very much like Kain at all.

What was really lacking was the Jump command, which is so iconic in FF4 that it’s inconceivable to leave it out. I was of the opinion that we should just leave it like that; we weren’t going to have Kain in the story at all, we shouldn’t try to replace him with some interloper. That opinion wasn’t shared by other people working on the project with me. Ah well, to each his own. They can write about it on their own blogs, if they want.