DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

What sort of support are you looking for for your current project?

author=LockeZ
The key is for the government to be secretly controlled by ancient demons, bent on collecting the world's five crystals so that they can open a doorway between this world and the netherworld and allow their armies to invade. Then the rest of your story will just fall into place.

I'm kidding, but I'm also not kidding. I do this even when my games are set in the real world, because it just makes a really good power fantasy that the player doesn't have to think too hard about. It turns out that very few people like governments in general - they like neither the abstract idea of them nor the way their own country's government is being run right now. And so the idea of having a morally good reason to take an entire government down is extremely satisfying to players.

There's zero intellectual depth to it, obviously. If you want to tell a complex political story, you should do something that isn't so stupid.

I can get behind this. Personally, I love a good political conflict. Some of my favorite video game plot hinge around political conflict. But I get the impression that a lot of writers have this idea that "my story should contain political elements! Because it'll be more mature and sophisticated!" And so they add political elements into their stories. But I think it's almost never a good idea to add political elements to a story. If the political elements are a working component of the story, that should be apparent at the point where you're working out what the basic premise is.

Looking at the plot of, say, Final Fantasy Tactics, it pretty clearly did not pass through a state where there was a basic framework of a plot, but the author decided it needed political elements added it it. The plot minus the political elements hardly qualifies as a plot. If you intend your story to have political elements, but the plot does not clearly demand them, I think it's a sign you should consider changing something about the story.

If your story relies on political elements, and you want to learn how to write compelling political drama, I think studying history is a lot more helpful than studying other people's political fiction. Explore obscure parts of history, or the obscure elements of well-known parts of history. You'll find the same fundamental patterns you would by looking at better-known material, but the specifics can inspire ideas that will seem a lot more original than the stuff you'll get from the history everyone else already has at least passing familiarity with.

Personally, I think it's a sensible way to save labor for the more important bits; being able to wander into random people's houses uninvited doesn't make that much sense, and you can build towns of more realistic-seeming size if you don't have to worry about mapping the building interiors also.

Being able to wander into NPCs houses is a genre convention, but it was always a kind of weird one.

There are some pacing issues at the beginning of the game which we couldn't really have fixed with a substantial reworking of the plot, but the biggest weakness in the beginning might be that Celes is to a large extent a foil type character, and isn't at her most interesting until she has the rest of the party to play off of her.

If the beginning seems at all interesting, pretty much everything should be uphill from there.

author=Red_Nova
The Proving was a system created by Vanessa when she came into power as the Commandant, as Aeyr's talk with Mia indicates. Exactly when she took office, though, wasn't explained. I'll flesh that out a bit more in the game.

You know, I don't remember that bit from my playthrough. In that context, it does seem somewhat harder to believe that the trainees would swallow having to kill their fellows if their seniors in the knights never had to do that.

Money wasn't the sole reason for Mia to join the knights. Aeyr was a strong motivator, and it could be assumed based on her kind personality that she wanted to help defend Asala and Honelleth as a trained fighter. I could probably bring that last part out more in the next update. Thanks for pointing it out!

As for the dying issue, Mia mistakenly thought she could stomach it. As long as the fight to the death wasn't with Aeyr, she felt, she could force herself through the Proving and live as a knight. After the Proving, she realized her error in judgment and decided that a life of a knight wasn't one she could sustain.

As I understood the timeline from Aeyr and Mia's talks, I didn't think they met until Mia became a trainee.