Is Final Fantasy Powerful Because It's Cute?

One line I remember from Apex Legends' Loba is "you should smile more" before stomping somebody to death… with a smile on their face. Okay, but seriously, it's a very simple, yet clever reversal of a line that's been condescending woman for generations the instant they have the gall to not beam for longing men, which is very in keeping with Loba as a character.

Thinking about it though, smiling is something that I often find games are terrified of letting any of their characters do.

Granted, sometimes it's because a smiling character is terrifying to look at, and you'd perhaps rather just keep them flat and stoic as a method of hiding their teeth imported from the Uncanny Valley. Often though, it just comes off as games taking themselves too seriously. That expressing an emotion other than grimacing satisfaction at the explosion of an enemies skull, immediately transforms the game into Barbie's Horse Adventure…

and Final Fantasy is what made me think about this.

Final Fantasy is popular for a lot of reasons, and many of those reasons are things I'm not at all familiar with. I didn't grow up with the franchise, I never watched it evolve, I never paid a monthly subscription for one of its MMOs, and I never slotted a third disc into my PS1 to find out where Sephiroth was.

One thing I am very familiar with however is watching newcomers, series veterans, and people who don't play video-games at all drawing, meming, or fawning over almost every member of Final Fantasy 7 Remake's cast, just because of a facial expression, or an animation, or a line of dialogue that could make the Grinch smile.

And an immediate thought is…

Why doesn't everyone do this?

Not literally, I don't mean why doesn't every single video-game just hit the "make characters likable button" I mean, see the obvious value in making a game where characters aren't purely used to reinforce the game's core-tone? Final Fantasy 7 being about meta-narratives, bio-terrorism, and deep-rooted revenge shouldn't bar it from shoving triple kittens at the camera…

And it doesn't.

Bioware did this.
CDPR did this.
Even Bungie did this.

Yet for some reason, Western games in-general still seem extremely hesitant about letting a main-character be visibly proud of their actions without making them a self-aware self-insert one-liner robot.

Thinking back, this was part of why I found Far Cry 6 as compelling as it was infuriating in its storytelling, because Dani has all the makings of a character that'd be as iconic of a hero as this franchise's iconic villains. Rather than being a near lifeless husk headed to Kyrat, or a completely lifeless husk headed to Montana, Dani fights through exploding factories, burning fields, and ceaseless machine-gun fire because…

"It's fun." They say with a smile.

It says a lot about who Dani is, it syncs up a lot with whoever plays Dani, and it's enough for a writing team to setup engaging scenarios that make the most of this characterization. The game seems comfortable with it to the point of having an entire companion whose primary assistance, is being so god-damn adorable, enemies can't help but be distracted and create gaps for you to sneak through.

The disappointment though is that this is almost all Far Cry 6 does with both of them.

The game's moments to stop and smile are so far and few in-between as well as underwhelming in their execution, that it doesn't inspire the sort of wholesome reverence that people have for games like Final Fantasy 7: Remake.

You often hear people talk about video-games being an escape, a break from the real world, and while I don't think that should be the case for all games or subject they tackle, I question, if that is indeed the goal…

Why are so many game characters so miserable?

Come to think of it actually… it's not even that. Miserable characters smile all the time, sometimes for pretty twisted reasons, and that I think is why they inspire so much in viewers.

You don't need to be perfect to smile.