We should ally with the Garleans

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Just so I'm clear, I'm not advocating pro-garlean. In addition to their uniforms being sub-par for an evil empire, their leadership are far too in the mold of cackling evil stereotypes to be enjoyable.

I'd like the chance to have alternate choices in game and have them actually mean something. The chance to be even a bit more amoral would be nice with all the consequences that brings. That doesn't mean going full Trevor.

It's pretty much far too late to have any form of "choice" in this game unless Square's next Final Fantasy lets you pick sides from the get go. Even then, most Final Fantasy stories are linear anyway, so I don't see that trend changing anytime soon.

[Teryaani]

It's pretty much far too late to have any form of "choice" in this game unless Square's next Final Fantasy lets you pick sides from the get go. Even then, most Final Fantasy stories are linear anyway, so I don't see that trend changing anytime soon.

I get that and I also get that the development required to keep a karma system of some kind is pretty onerous. I still really want it. Even just a single quest chain that has different outcomes or a quest chain that points out that we may not be always on the side of angels.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

Well how would you envision it? What would make the "evil" side different from playing what we got now? What would be affected? Will people be able to play both sides to see all of the story?

[Teryaani]

Well how would you envision it? What would make the "evil" side different from playing what we got now? What would be affected? Will people be able to play both sides to see all of the story?

I could see it altering quest dialogue and quest access. Handle quests for a particular NPC often and well, it builds reputation and opens up more and more lucrative quests in come cases, or may open up more fetch and busy quests depending on the NPC as certain NPCs see you as an exploitable resource. Refusing to take certain quests would close them off until you've recovered reputation with that NPC. The early quests you take would help build the network of who you know and what sort of thing you're willing to do for experience and money. It would mean that there may be benefits to actually declining a quest as just taking it blindly and succeeding may close off choices.


If you used a reputation system, you could ultimately take every quest, it just may require some effort to get rep back with certain people. The big thing for me would be being able to have a character built on choices. The problem with something like this is that it's a pain to build and maintain and you'd really want to have this at least somewhat separate from the "main" storyline. So the main storyline are things sweeping enough that even a disreputable sellsword could do.

[hagare]

snip

the best I can think of is opposing beast tribe Quests like WoW
if you got rep with one tribe, the other becomes your enemy

[VargasVermillion]

They are most definitely antagonists and our allies are perfectly justified in their dislike of Garlemald however I still won't say they are just 'evil'. As mentioned antagonists are generally more fun as if they are well designed they tend to be more morally grey than just the 'chosen one' level of good like our warriors of light are and even makes more sense.

I doubt we'll get a choice as lets face it, no final fantasy ever would give you a choice like that but if we were I would certainly opt into the empire.

[Neophyte]

Are you kidding? There's LIBRARIES worth of fan fiction detailing how Sephiroth is actually not that bad. And this was a guy who was Shinra's most lethal and ruthless enforcer even BEFORE he went looney tunes and decided to kill everybody in the world for Mother Dearest. XD

I shouldn't have said "there is no one".

I should have said "no one with real good arguments". Referring to Hojo for example, causation isn't equal to justification.

No "good" person slaughters a village full of innocent people, wants to wipe out humanity and developes a god/messiah-complex, just because he was lied to and thinks that "his" people were betraid 2000 years ago. People have free will and Sephiroth in special had a very, very strong will, preserving it even when, well, quite dead and still able to overpower Jenova.

Just imagine how Cloud or Zack would've reacted, if they were in Sephiroths situation. That's the difference between good and evil in a game like FF.

The "bad" ones are not the only one who get deceived or lied to. But they are the ones who decide to act evil because of that and that makes you an evil person, especially if you get rid of every single "good" aspect of your former self (or not having a single "good" aspect right from the start, like garleans). And starting to say things like "Tell me what you cherish most. Give me the pleasure of taking it away." and stuff.
Hojo is not responsible for Sephiroth getting a boner from slaying innocents.


But I admit... Sauron or the Sith are quite better examples.

[LineageRazor]

I should have said "no one with real good arguments". Referring to Hojo for example, causation isn't equal to justification.

No "good" person slaughters a village full of innocent people, wants to wipe out humanity and developes a god/messiah-complex, just because he was lied to and thinks that "his" people were betraid 2000 years ago. People have free will and Sephiroth in special had a very, very strong will, preserving it even when, well, quite dead and still able to overpower Jenova.

While I'm not in the camp that Sephiroth was a good person, before or after his descent into madness, I can't help but notice that every example you listed here for the guy is POST-cray-cray. Sephiroth as presented in most of FFVII was clearly portrayed as being off his rocker. Applying labels like "good" and "evil" against a mentally handicapped individual is treading in some muddy water. There's a reason why the insanity plea is a valid defense in a court of law! It's better to think of crazy Sephiroth as a rabid dog; he's dangerous, he shouldn't be allow to run around loose, and he should be put down as soon as possible. You wouldn't call a rabid dog "evil", persay, but you still need to stop it.

If you're going to claim that Sephiroth is evil, you need to examine him BEFORE he went off the deep end - and that's where the fangirls find fertile soil for their fiction. The game doesn't delve deeply into what Sephiroth was like before he went insane, but we know that impressionable young boys like Cloud idolized him. That indicates that he PROBABLY wasn't a gleeful baby-murderer or anything like that (or, at least, if he was Shinra kept a tight enough leash on mass media to keep that little tidbit from becoming public). He was clearly good at his job. His job was working as a soldier for Shinra, and it was a job he'd been raised to perform since his birth. While WE know Shinra was bad news, they kept a decently positive public image; it's not clear how privy Sephiroth was to the darker secrets of Shinra. Certainly there were at least some secrets being kept from him, as his swan dive off the deep end was a direct result of uncovering some of those secrets!

How would Zach and Cloud have reacted, if they were completely insane? That's hard to say, but I wouldn't say that burning down a villiage is necessarily out of the question. It pretty much depends on their own brand of insanity.

In any case, the insanity defense does not work for the Garlean Empire. There's absolutely no indication that the previous or present emperors are insane. They are ruthless and ambitious. However, they ARE concerned about the welfare of their citizens. More than that, that they've established a system whereby any individual under their rule can gain prestige and recognition through hard work (specifically, through twenty years of military service). The problem is that they have pretty much only one solution to any given problem: subjugate it. In the case of Beastmen, that subjugation includes genocide.

The policy toward Beastmen is probably the greatest evil the Garleans can be accused of, and it's unclear how that policy might change once it becomes known that any schmoe with a box of crystals can summon a Primal if he believes hard enough. Their expansionism is another evil; they are clearly willing to kill as many people as it takes to put themselves in charge - though, that said, they are only likely to kill folks that resist them, unless you're a Beastman in which case they'll kill you whether you resist or not.

[VargasVermillion]

Both sephiroth and kefka are insane to the point of being a threat to everyone but themselves alone but The circumstances surrounding them are quite tragic, fairly avoidable cases that simply lead to an extreme. For anyone that doesn't know Kefka is mad due to being one of the first to get magitek enhancements when the tech was still in development. Although I don't think this was mentioned in FFVI itself.

[Xanikk999]

Both sephiroth and kefka are insane to the point of being a threat to everyone but themselves alone but The circumstances surrounding them are quite tragic, fairly avoidable cases that simply lead to an extreme. For anyone that doesn't know Kefka is mad due to being one of the first to get magitek enhancements when the tech was still in development. Although I don't think this was mentioned in FFVI itself.

It actually was. If you talk to all the people in the cafe/pub of vector when you enter the first time you will see one of them mentions this.