Will Final Fantasy ever make a "Dark Side"?

No they wont. This would take at least twice the amount of written story line and it somehow would have to make sense. Then you have to ask the question: Should we really stick certain races behind a label so that people that want to play race x have to accept whatever the game throws at them? Also how long would a evil side even make sense? WoW makes it (as far as I know) always so that somehow peace is achieved at the end only for it to be destroyed in the next expansion. Just doesnt feel like good storytelling after a while.

Although our own characters will probably never get to clearly go to the dark side, one tool the game does have in place is the "roleplay" game mechanic that allows us to play as NPCs. We may see more opportunities to play as the actual bad guys in the future, at least for a few specific duties, if people really start asking for that.

(But you know, with our characters' actions being such a matter of perspective, I'm pretty sure there are already lots of NPCs who think we're pretty evil. XD)

One thing that isn't out of the question though, as it has happened in previous games and even happened in this game once already during a certain quest line not named because spoilers, would be having to fight ourselves. Previously, the player playing as their WoL fought a manifestation of their WoL. In order to do something fresher, they could do a roleplay battle gauntlet where the player has to play as some or all of the Scions one at a time vs the player's WoL character. The AI WoL wouldn't need to have their complete job action set but should at least perform a subset of their job's actions during the fight, with each phase exhausting a Scion and forcing you to switch to the next. After the final phase, all the exhausted Scions get up and LB the WoL because that's the only way they can incapacitate them.

I think something like that could be real neat if done right.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

And that isn't a bad thing.

Games are entertainment and different people are entertained by different things. Not everyone needs or wants a "dark edgy side" to their protagonists to make the story worthwhile and enjoyable.

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Whoa.. I never meant that as a bad thing :O I'm in agreement that I like it this way. I like being - THE GUY- Or the - Overpowered OP- Or insert whatever nickname for the WoL you want here. D: DON'T HATE ME!! XO

Whether something is 'edgy' is subjective in itself. Either way, the Dark Knight job quests are held in very high regard and have proven to be among the most popular in the game thus far. So much so that Fray even made it onto the list of Final Fantasy characters in a recent popularity poll.

The game isn't afraid to have the protagonists resort to shady acts to secure victory, either - as seen in Othard when Hien manipulated the Xaela into being fodder for a war and again when he subjected those stationed in Doma Castle to the cruel and unusual death of drowning and crushing by debris after deliberately flooding the place. Among many other examples throughout the game. Despite that, he's still one of my favourite characters.

Then, of course, there's the fact that FFXIV draws on the darker/more mature Final Fantasy games over those with more simple plots. Ivalice is a major point of influence for the setting as a whole and there's many other JRPG's out there that embrace darker protagonists and anti-heroes. Shadow Hearts, Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Vagrant Story being excellent examples.

OP, you asked about Final Fantasy.
I gather you're asking about more than just 14?
Is there any indication that they might?
Because since Final Fantasy Adventure they've always made the good guys THE GOOD GUYS.
They don't write stories with important moral problems or shades of grey. Hell, the plot of most Final Fantasy games kinda boil down to "evil person wants to be God, go kill them."

there is no way we will do anything "dark" at least in this game, when the premise of this game is literally "band together, do good, a grand adventure, help people, and vanquish evil" kind of plot.

the BEST i can think of if we player really want to do something dark is to put one instance where we control the bad guy (zenos for example) and fight the good guys, just like how we take control of estinien or alpinaud in previous case, thats pretty much it.

The Warrior of Darkness and Scions broke into the home of a pregnant woman and slaughtered both her and her unborn children in the latest patch, so the game definitely does not shy away from having the protagonists do some very questionable things. In addition, as mentioned earlier the writers themselves are on record in various interviews stating that character actions and motivations are a matter of perspective rather than a case of 'good' and 'evil'.

Barring a few rare exceptions such as Zenos who are deliberately designed to be completely without redeeming qualities and sympathetic/justified motivations.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

The Warrior of Darkness and Scions broke into the home of a pregnant woman and slaughtered both her and her unborn children in the latest patch, so the game definitely does not shy away from having the protagonists do some very questionable things.

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Much like how we've been creating sapient life to sacrifice for our own ends in the Empty, I'm not entirely sure this is what the writers intended the takeaway to be when writing out the plot of our trip to Anamnesis Anyder. It's... pretty disturbing, thinking about it.

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Originally Posted by Rosenstrauch

Much like how we've been creating sapient life to sacrifice for our own ends in the Empty, I'm not entirely sure this is what the writers intended the takeaway to be when writing out the plot of our trip to Anamnesis Anyder. It's... pretty disturbing, thinking about it.

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Which I find strange. Sometimes they all but shove our faces into moral dilemmas such as these, while other times they seem to completely ignore them... and I'm really not sure if its for convenience's sake, or a stroke of great writing, expecting the reader to pick up on them by themselves.

Do primals really count as "sapient life"? They're figments of our imagination given form.

About the only reason to think they might be intelligent is that they talk, but that could be part of the conjured illusion. The "living primal" within the story might not be any more aware of what it's saying than the computer program we-the-player are actually fighting. It's simply been subconsciously programmed by the WoL when they dreamt it up.

And if it turns out creation magic does genuinely create living sapient beings? I'd sooner put it down to "the writers didn't realise the implications of this". They're primals, long established to be not truly alive, at least by the characters' understanding of how they work.

I'd be inclined to say they (the Eden primals) are sapient, if only because of Raktapaksa. I find it highly unlikely that we went into the fight with the idea that they would fuse upon realizing they can't defeat us, and he's the one who came up with his own name on the spot. At least until a new lorebook comes out and goes "actually Raktapaksa is just another primal that Garuda and Ifrit inadvertently summoned back into existence", or something like that.

But like I said in my own post: I doubt this was actually the intention when they were writing the Eden primal summoning plot. It is just something that's been on my mind ever since reading that some people aren't happy with Eden Shiva because she's so divergent from Ysayle's take on her. I found the idea of wanting to summon a Ysayle-esque version of Shiva just to kill her to be, well, disturbing. And from there, it got me wondering as to the actual sapience of primals as a whole. 90-some% of the time we're killing them out of necessity, so it doesn't necessarily matter there. But if they are sapient, then intentionally creating them to sacrifice is rather—again—disturbing.

It also doesn't help that I've been playing a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles lately. The idea of gods/creator figures treating their creations as disposable and having it blow up in their faces is very fresh in my mind.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Not in this story format, no. They'd have to write everything twice.

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I think this is what Bioware regret when making SWTOR. 8 Classes (4 on each side) a huge amount of character dialogue to reflect the class and "side", plus they were fully voice acted. it sky rocketed the budget to 250 million.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Do primals really count as "sapient life"? They're figments of our imagination given form.

About the only reason to think they might be intelligent is that they talk, but that could be part of the conjured illusion. The "living primal" within the story might not be any more aware of what it's saying than the computer program we-the-player are actually fighting. It's simply been subconsciously programmed by the WoL when they dreamt it up.

And if it turns out creation magic does genuinely create living sapient beings? I'd sooner put it down to "the writers didn't realise the implications of this". They're primals, long established to be not truly alive, at least by the characters' understanding of how they work.

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There's some implication that the Ancients themselves didn't realize the implications of what they were doing with their creation magic, so this fridge horror could be intentional on the part of the writers. Perhaps they WERE creating sapient beings, but their system of morality didn't allow them to even consider that these intelligent creations should have any kind of innate rights. "I created it, therefore it is mine to do with however I please, obviously." Essentially, every Ancient had a god complex; not a malign one - they don't deliberately set out to harm their creations, and are as a whole pretty even tempered beings - but a god complex nonetheless.

For example, when Emet Selch casually produced a copy of Allisae to demonstrate the Sundering. The copy didn't move or speak, so it's easy to assume that it was just an image or an empty shell - but I could just as easily have seen Emet creating an actual true clone of Allisae (albiet one unable to move or speak) and then casually destroying her without thinking twice about it. After all, the sundered mortal beings, in his own words, don't even really count as living beings by his standards! It's easy to imagine the other Ancient ones also having this mindset - with the difference that in their time, the created beings were a distinct minority, while in the current time the few remaining Ancients are a minority to the point where they actually have to pretend to be peers with them to accomplish their goals.

The mysterious "sound from below" that was the Ancients' undoing could well have been one or more of their own sapient creations, rebelling against its masters - such rebellion being something they didn't even consider a possibility. And when the Dissenters suggested that the remaining Ancients allow the new life forms to inherit the planet, the idea was considered absurd by most. It would be like bequeathing your estate to your vegetable garden.

And primals in particular? They've shown evidence of having knowledge that their summoners likely do not, such as Ifrit's ability to recognize the taint of Hydaelyn upon us, or some of the cryptic blather Ramuh laid out in his conversations with us. Granted, those Primals were created by way of a summoning process taught to the Beast Tribes by the Ascians, so it's feasible that some of the Ascians' knowledge got mixed in there, somehow (though this seems unlikely, given that the Ascians typically are not present or taking direct part in the summoning). There's a possibility, at least, that some part of the Primal lingers on after its destruction - a soul, after a fashion - and when a new summoning of that Primal occurs, this soul returns to the summoned being.

And the implications of our summoning and destroying Primals in the Eden raids? It could be exactly that bad. We might well be summoning and slaying living, sapient beings. Our excuse here is ignorance. Much like the Ancients themselves, we don't even consider the implications of what we're doing. (Though, given how the Eden storyline is written, its pretty clear that everyone involved is holding the idiot ball. Ryne, that was a very bad idea.)

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

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Creation magic is Arcanima so basicly it is an empty husk but they introduce to it their will, the one example everyone has seen is how tatarus carbuncle run in fear when she herself was afraid. the difference is however that we dont talk about tataru but about beings with 13 times the aether density of ours so when they were afraid their fears manifested . another story akin to the alisae copy is the one in the main story the one copy of an ancient which he created along with the city , the reason he felt more sentient and aware of himself its cause like a story maker emet thought that he should be able to . The last piece of info on it is that those structures can be possessed , there was a story the devs wrote about how once upon a time in the ancient world someone had created a pheonix , a scared spirit who just died possessed the pheonix and just like the spirit it run off confused and scared and they had to call emet to put it down. There is also more to it than this , in arcanima the egis and the carbuncles like i said before are not sentient , but the fairies of scholar seem to be sentient, the fairies you control remember their prior master , they can also disobey you to protect stuff they know you shouldnt attack so whatever the scholar crystal is using to make the fairies is not like a gem nor , a primals true essense for it has will.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

The Warrior of Darkness and Scions broke into the home of a pregnant woman and slaughtered both her and her unborn children in the latest patch, so the game definitely does not shy away from having the protagonists do some very questionable things. In addition, as mentioned earlier the writers themselves are on record in various interviews stating that character actions and motivations are a matter of perspective rather than a case of 'good' and 'evil'.

Barring a few rare exceptions such as Zenos who are deliberately designed to be completely without redeeming qualities and sympathetic/justified motivations.

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You mean the woman that was ready to launch these children into a war against our comrades who until that point have tried everything to end it peaceful? I mean if you post it just like that it might sound horrible, but lets not forget that the other side was far from innocent and started it. (If I remember it correctly they were already hurting/killing people even before we took away the water, I think it was since after the calamity of light) If we did nothing they would have killed them all and take it to the lands..in the end they did not give us much choice and if you try to genocide a whole race then you cant hide behind "but I am pregnant!".

With the Xaela tribes: They are tribes of warriors who take great pleasure in fighting. They solve their whole government issue by fighting (and in some cases killing) each other. Hien "used" one tribe that was already on his side and gave them their very first victory. Honestly that tribe could have still said no afterwards but wanted to fight alongside him. In the tradition of the Xaela one could say that Hien did nothing else than what you normally try to do with diplomacy. But instead of just simple agreement from the leader, they simply helped to establish the new leader without any cheating. We took them fair and stayed true to their tradition.

I do agree about Hien and the castle even though it was still war.

In the end an evil option is imo not just a switch in perspective. Its not just a "you are fighting in a war and now we play from both sides". Evil choices go beyond that, they go into the territory of pure slaughter, of genocide..of torturting and loving it. Everything else just feels more like a middle path or grey path but not truly dark.

[And even though war is horrible for both sides and will have innocent people on both of it, you cant just say that its all perspective either and both sides are as bad or good as the other. It imo matters why a war was started and if you just travel from your country to another to conquer it because you simply want more power then you are morally wrong]

About sapient life and primals: Wasnt it in the short stories where one soul attached itself to their creation (phoenix) which was horrible because the regrets and things it held? Which imo could imply that normally they dont create beings with souls.

Yeah, definitely not seeing a good and evil are just perspective thing. They pretty unequivocally point out who is good, even if the other side has some justification the means they go to reach it are too much. The closest you get is some city states and the like, but they also make it rather clear you aren’t the same as them. The Scions at least are consistently presented as good, the Ascians/Empire (not the same as all Garleans mind you) bad.

As far as the original request goes, the Beast Tribe quests and the like are probably the closest you’d get. Showing the good people in the conflict as opposed to (usually) the tempered ones or the like. Other than that not sure what’s being requested could be done. Playing as a Beast Tribe/Garlean would be hypothetically plausible from a cosmetic standpoint, but lore not so much. The analog to Horde vs Alliance is probably more the city states if anything.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

Yeah, definitely not seeing a good and evil are just perspective thing. They pretty unequivocally point out who is good, even if the other side has some justification the means they go to reach it are too much. The closest you get is some city states and the like, but they also make it rather clear you aren’t the same as them. The Scions at least are consistently presented as good, the Ascians/Empire (not the same as all Garleans mind you) bad.

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I think my problem with "its just perspective thing" comes from the feeling that some (not all!) people want to use this so that even though they are on the "dark" side they still feel good about it. IMO a path where its really just the perspective is not truly a dark side. A lot of heroes will not be 100% angels just like our WoL is not, so honestly a "perspective switch" is nothing more than a hero on the other side. Its imo not dark or evil.

If you want to play the dark side or the evil side then also commit to the idea that you are the bad/evil guy and no change of perspective will change that. But dont play it and then say that the other side is just as bad and its just perspective because the others are not perfectly acting well all the time. No if you go around and genocide innocent people for the sake of it you are an evil person. It does not matter that one person of that race was mean to you as a child.

And a lot of wars are fought for selfish horrible reasons, so "different perspective" falls flat there, because no matter how normal the soldiers are, the country that started the war for some reasons are the bad guys. Garlemald is the bad guy too (as a Government). They started the war and conquering for their own selfish reason. IMO one cant just say that they are the same like Eorzea, because they are the aggressors. They are the ones at fault and any punishment they get from it (other than pure war crimes) are reasonable because they acted first. Just like its understandable that we would go and kill the Queen because they were ready for genocide and war and it had to be stopped. Their perspective does not matter because they had years to make peace with the others and never did.

I mean, for me a lot of people will take "it's just a perspective" and push it to huge extremes. Moral relativism has its place, but "let's kill everyone" isn't exactly a stance that should apply to. Moral relativism would be something more along the lines of "is it right to risk your life to save another" where there are two reasonable answers (if not more) and which one is "right" is up for perspective.

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Originally Posted by Rosenstrauch

I'd be inclined to say they (the Eden primals) are sapient, if only because of Raktapaksa. I find it highly unlikely that we went into the fight with the idea that they would fuse upon realizing they can't defeat us, and he's the one who came up with his own name on the spot. At least until a new lorebook comes out and goes "actually Raktapaksa is just another primal that Garuda and Ifrit inadvertently summoned back into existence", or something like that.

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True, Raktapaksa is an oddity. (Is it a reference to another FF thing or is it completely original?)

If you wanted to argue the "happened despite them being non-sapient" route you could go with it being something out of a story that just floated into the WoL's mind by chance as they thought about things that had similar attributes...

That makes me think we had a massive missed chance of the birdlike primal and fire primal muddling into a Phoenix primal in the WoL's mind.


Also the business with Ryne-Shiva was definitely odd. I think they just wanted to work some kind of dramatic excuse for Ryne to lose control and have Gaia come and save her, never mind the plot logic of doing so.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

For example, when Emet Selch casually produced a copy of Allisae to demonstrate the Sundering. The copy didn't move or speak, so it's easy to assume that it was just an image or an empty shell - but I could just as easily have seen Emet creating an actual true clone of Allisae (albiet one unable to move or speak) and then casually destroying her without thinking twice about it.

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I'd be far more inclined to consider it an illusion - he's demonstrating the ability of something far beyond his individual power, that had to be brought into existence by the combined force of multiple Ancients. It's also specifically - if I remember correctly - while he's already "borrowing the Exarch's plaything" to show images of the fourteen worlds as he narrates.

That also sets me thinking - do the Ascians still have their creation magic, or has that been taken from them? Perhaps in the process of "rewriting the laws of the star", that boundless creative potential had to be shut down. It would add up with what they needed to do - their own ability to create things was running amok, so perhaps the only way to stop it was to remove that ability.

They might not be any more capable of summoning things into existence on their own than the mortals they're manipulating.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

There's a possibility, at least, that some part of the Primal lingers on after its destruction - a soul, after a fashion - and when a new summoning of that Primal occurs, this soul returns to the summoned being.

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That's how it's described to us in one of the "PowerPoint presentations" in post-ARR: that when primals are summoned, their essences are drawn from the aetherial sea and given form by their summoners, then return there once the physical primal is vanquished.

It seems to contradict Hraesvelgr's rejection of Ysayle as having conjured "Shiva" out of her own thoughts rather than any true eternal soul of the original Shiva - though that could be a special case since her soul apparently remains with him rather than having gone to the Lifestream.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

True, Raktapaksa is an oddity. (Is it a reference to another FF thing or is it completely original?)

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It's half a reference, and half original. "Raktapaksa" means "Red Wings" and is another name for the mythological entity "Garuda". Meaning Ifrit and Garuda fused to make... Garuda, but red.

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Also the business with Ryne-Shiva was definitely odd. I think they just wanted to work some kind of dramatic excuse for Ryne to lose control and have Gaia come and save her, never mind the plot logic of doing so.

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Oh, don't get me wrong: I'm rather happy we didn't get another Ysayle-Shiva. Though I've got my own gripes with how Ryne-Shiva played out.
The impression I got from it was that Ryne really wanted to be Shiva and Urianger, rather than be the voice of reason, covered for her by lying about the necessity of it. Considering how she lost control of the primal instantly, I was hoping to call them both out on endangering the world to indulge her. But the opportunity never came to pass—the closest it got was the Warrior of Light getting the choice to brush it off with a joke.
I am very confident that's not what the intended takeaway was. We were definitely supposed to take Urianger's jargon as a serious explanation. But I just can't do it.

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Originally Posted by Rosenstrauch

The impression I got from it was that Ryne really wanted to be Shiva and Urianger, rather than be the voice of reason, covered for her with by lying about the necessity of it.

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Reading through it again (since I hadn't reviewed it since I first played it) I don't think he's covering for her at all. He's saying it's a bad idea even if he can see some degree of logic to copying the method of summoning, and I think he's maybe trusting to Ryne's understanding of her grasp on Eden's power and how she needs to handle it. He certainly doesn't seem enthusiastic about it, he just can't argue against it.

(Also, to be fair, we have never actually killed a summoning-vessel human by defeating their primal form. Ysayle, Thordan and Yotsuyu all returned to human form and mind - and Ysayle in particular at least three times over without dying: our first fight, the EX trial which is a canon re-summoning, and against Ravana.)

Yeah, it seems like he did speak against it more than I remember him doing—his arguing its merits is still all kinds of daft, but he's not as complicit as I recall. Looking at it, I think I must've been attributing Ryne's arguments to him. I still want to call her out on it, but I feel like the opportunity might've passed for that.