I got to the final dungeon, too busy to finish now, I know what's up so feel comfy with stopping here.

This game has better scenario design than Final Fantasy 16 which is so funny to think about. FF16 is certainly /trying/ for something like this, but it's baffling to notice that this game has better female characters and more consistent plotting. It's hard not to compare the two, with both games having very thin characters with singular strong concepts and a narrative focused on moving from cool image to cool image. But... one is a game from 1991 and the other from 2023 which makes the extent to which the comparison is unfavorable downright strange.

The use of the battle system as a narrative space-time (and TIME is important, it's "Active Time Battle" after all) is breathtaking today as historical curio as it would have been as a formal innovation at the time. Such a masterful understanding of games as theatrical works, battles as stages, command based gameplay as directing a play. Certainly an aspect lost within the move towards action combat, even in half-steps like the FF7 Remake series or even FF13.

what i love about final fantasy 13 is it's domesticity. it's a story about siblings and parents and children, first fundamentally between it's human characters and then extended allegorically to the relationship between state and subject, god and mortal, creator and creation. this makes for really compelling melodrama in the sort of Hollywood-anime syncretic sense that square strives for while still simultaneously working within the framework of the "jrpg" as an aesthetic mode and being quietly subversive of its tropes of chosen heroes and selfish villainous divinity that final fantasy as a series has dabbled in effectively since FF4 but most pronounced in games like 7 and 10. to kill god is to disobey your parents (and to reject the values instilled into you by the state).

13-2 kind of throws that all away for a much more macro scale narrative. i hated this at first, I paused my playthrough three years ago when Lightning became a champion of a goddess existing beyond time, when what I love about her is that she's Claire Farron, a chuunibyou beat cop at a beach resort town who dooms the world because she hates her future brother-in-law. but after playing type-0 I wanted more fabula nova crystalis and this time, I accepted this game for what it is striving for and was able to enjoy it. but i reject the notion that this is holistically better than FF13, either in narrative or systems. i don't feel like i can put together a cohesive view of the game until I play lightning returns however. so maybe I'll elaborate on why another three years from now.

Played through Asellus's story. I will return to other scenarios later so I don't get burnt out. I was interested in Asellus based on Miwa Shoda's work in Nights of Azure and reading her interviews and drafts on the work in The Essence of SaGa Frontier/The Complete of SaGa Frontier. While it doesn't delve much into the eroticism or sensuality that you'd find in Nights of Azure, the focus on much more of a subtly queer identity struggle makes sense for what's a more conventional JRPG coming of age narrative that's just a bit quietly subversive of the gendered dimensions that usually surround such stories. It's really funny to imagine Miwa Shoda writing the scene after White Rose stays behind in the Dark Labyrinth and Zozma interrogates Asellus on her internalised homophobia while in the next room over in Division 1, the FF7 team is cooking up the Honey Bee Inn.