Main Character

[ehsteve]

When you start the game, it looks like Butz is going to be the focal point of the story, but he really isn't important at all. He isn't important to the flow of the story at all, except for being Dorgan's son. It seems like his whole job is to say "Stand Guard" before every boss fight. Did I miss something, or is Butz as unimportant as I think he is?

[rubah]

a lot of the times, the main character in the ff games isn't who the story is about.

tidus is the main character in ffx, but the story is about yuna. yuna's the main character in x-2 and you could almost argue that the story was about shuyin (not really, but sorta) You could say that Terra was the main character of ff6, but it ended up being about all of them (or you could say the opposite, ff6 had no main character, but most of it was about terra)

But anyways, Bartz is the main character, but they really share importance in the game. I think it has to do with them all being customizable:P The spotlight really does fall off of him though. I never really noticed it though.

[ShivaBlizzard8]

I agree - I feel that oftentimes, the character who you play in the game isn't so much a character as a narrator - he's a device through which the player can experience the world of the game. For instance, Tidus really just bears witness to Yuna's struggle in FFX, Squall observes Rinoa's problems in FFVIII, and Zidane Garnet's problems in FFIX. That's not to say the main character doesn't have a personality or that things do not happen to them; Cloud of FF7 is a great example of that. But in order for us, as a player, to assume the identity of the main hero, they have to remain relatively open-ended.

That said, in comparison to other FF heroes, Bartz is one of the blankest. He's not a bad character, there just aren't a lot of traits which distinguish him from the generic hero role (other than maybe his fear of heights, but then again, he needs a flaw). Because of this, his role as a story device for the player to experience Reina/Galuf/Faris' problem is more transparent than in other games.

[Martyr]

Butz is clearly the main character.

But that doesn't mean that other characters can't have character.

On the contrary, a story with lots of undeveloped characters is considered shallow and very poor. And with good reason. It'd suck it Butz was the only person with any personality.

On the other hand... He has no personality.

Square has a problem with that. Even worse is in Crono Trigger. Crono is completely devoid of personality. Apparently the idea is that a silent, emotionless, basically retarded in all mental aspects type of main character is the kind of main character that people will like. The story will be run by a bunch of people full of character who are inexplicably bound to the emotionless, boring guy. Usually for some annoying reason like "he's Dorgan's son" or "Crono has Lumina."

It's the most perverted methos of storytelling ever invented. Apparently, it's successful in games where story isn't the main concept, even though I think it should be.

If you want some real insight on the main character, look at it this way:

The story is a tragedy. ExDeath is the main character.
He won. He threw his all into his work. Thwarted tons of times. Desperately using every plan he could devise to get the crystals, even at the brink of losing them to the light warriors. All of his henches died, one after the other. Gilgamesh practically betrayed him.
And, finally, when he's achieved his goal! The power of the Void! He attained it! But no! It overwhelmed him. His life's work was a miserable failure. He was consumed by the power, driven insane, transformed into Neo-ExDeath. But that wasn't him. That was the Void's incorporation of his power into itself. Exdeath died when the Light Warriors destroyed him in tree form.

The final fight and all that is merely resolution, since the player might be curious as to what the fate of the world actually is. The game designers realized that their great tragedy would be too depressing, however. So they made the Light Warriors the main characters in a big game switch. They didn't have enough time before deadlines to rework it into a story about Butz, so it remained as the tale about ExDeath, simply from a different point of view. The case of Unreliable Narrator at its finest.

Of course, the ending is a toss-up, which is cool. Sometimes the Void wins. Sometimes the Light Warriors win. ExDeath is dead by that time, so it doesn't really matter.

That's why the fight is so hard too. If beating Neo-Exdeath was easy, then the ending would HAVE to be mostly conclusive with the player assuming that the Light Warriors definately were fated to win in the end.

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I hope that that clears everything up for you.

[ehsteve]

Shiva, I think that your argument of Butz being sort of a narrator makes sense. At least, it makes more sense than anything I have thought of myself.