Ye Casters of Magic, Bow to the Prince
Alright, ‘tis a bit of an irritant that the only semi-active Magus thread on the boards tends to focus on the mere act of recruiting him, so here is an attempt at something a bit more in-depth for the opinionated among us. Magus: profound character with style and an utterly intransigent personality, or obligatory “dark wizard”? Or (what’s that you say? ;)) something else entirely?
As for myself, I will be making a case for the first of these three perspectives, so I entreat anyone willing to invest the time to read the forthcoming rant to settle in, perhaps kick your music playlists over to something appropriate to the mood (almost anything from the OCR remix project Chrono Symphonic would be pretty ideal), and contribute your own views to the discussion. Just as a side-note, I do not expect all contributions to this topic to display the verbosity that I am about to put on flagrant display. Trust me, this did not take as much effort on my part as it may appear; much of this rant was already written down for my own benefit and saved onto my hard-drive, so it was mostly a matter of copy-paste-edit ;). With that, let us align the dark prince of Zeal for our scrutiny.
The first thing to mention is that I regard Magus as my personal favorite fictional character in the video game medium, and have done so since my first play-through of Chrono Trigger at the behest of one who held a similar affinity for the prince of Zeal, when I was approximately fourteen years old. Now, up to this point in my life, my exposure to video games had been quite minimal; I had never owned a console, and had actually developed an instinctive derision for Final Fantasy and the like, based upon the fact that an overwhelming majority of those who claimed to play them were fanboyish morons who could not string two sentences together to explain why the endless RPG series was “profound” to save their lives. :roll2 I wanted nothing to do with this senseless craze over a medium that seemed to be nothing more than a form of entertainment for the hopelessly bored and depressed. I preferred written fiction over the interactive variety, and continued to ignore the latter almost completely. However, to be concise on the matter, I did have a confidant in high school – one of very few distinctive, intelligent individuals in the building – who, while he permitted me my uninformed opinion on the issue of video gaming, was an avid gamer himself, and periodically suggested that I try the game that had had an extremely potent effect on his life since his first play-through at age twelve. It was called Chrono Trigger. Eventually I gave in, and there were no words for it. It was suddenly comprehensible that the friend in question had always been unable to offer a proper explanation as to why the game was “great”; the game provided one of those rare, influential experiences that forever alters the course of your thoughts. That was the word for it: it was an experience, and at its head, without doubt, stood Magus.
My affinity for Magus does not originate specifically from his motivations and dialogue in-game; much of it comes from a mental image I have constructed of him, chiefly through music, which is primarily cultivated when I have not played the game for a while. There is something intriguing about the character after the first few times he is mentioned, and the whole storytelling method (making the player believe Magus is the true enemy, later blowing the plot wide open with the revelation that Magus is simply a hunter of the overall threat, Lavos, and then the Kingdom of Zeal plot arc) is rather brilliant. In the end, though, Magus’ cumulative dialogue would not fill a Microsoft Word page, and it is not these words that make him a profound character. It is not his style alone, either – a wicked character design and the Dark Matter spell do not a sweeping persona create. Rather, to me, Magus embodies a personality type, a unique presence; he says little, and the player may choose to believe he is as shallow as they wish, based on those few words. In my view, though, the plot is successful in peeling back several layers of his personality with some subtlety, particularly referring to the encounters with a young Prince Janus Zeal.
The first encounter with a fully developed Magus takes place within his castle. There, he is a stylish, powerful presence that you are compelled to destroy. He is the game’s first dark character (minus Lavos, who, even in the beginning, is portrayed as mindless) of any kind of power. He reveals nothing – he is no Sephiroth, speaking his motivations aloud for all to hear – and though demands obedience from those he serves, his thoughts remain his own, and any exceptions to this rule are, for the most part, carefully controlled. The only instance in which he feels inclined to “talk about himself” is when he waxes poetic and slightly melancholy at North Cape, reflecting on the doom that befell the Kingdom of Zeal – a cataclysm he never witnessed as a child, beyond its initial stages. Given this, it is clear that it is a highly cautious, secretive personality being dealt with, and perhaps one to which other people (aside from nemeses) cannot quite be viewed as “real”. This is an attitude with which I can sometimes identify quite well.
Schala, obviously, is one of extremely few exceptions to this rule. The two share an unusual bond, the nature of which it is intriguing to guess at. Janus revealed himself from an early age to already embody those traits of ruthlessness and cunning that would dominate his adult life. He manipulated his subjects (his “people”, first in the Kingdom of Zeal, and later in the misted lands of 600 A.D.) into believing whatever it was that served him best. As a child, Janus forcibly hid his own potential, causing the citizens of Zeal of view him as useless in the mystic arts of his patrimony, and he thereby allowed them to worship Schala as the family’s prodigy (which may indeed be precisely what she was). It must have been an extremely close relationship that allowed both Janus and Schala to maintain the charade, and Schala would naturally have been required to accept Janus’ nature to pull it off. In return for such understanding, it seems, Magus wears his sister’s amulet perpetually at his hip, and dedicates all his monumental actions in the plot to the cause of determining her whereabouts.
I find it bothersome that the argument is sometimes raised that Magus’ actions were somehow motivated by an underlying sense of “nobility”, and I do not entirely buy into the idea that he is motivated merely by sibling “love”. “Nobility” is a worthless concept to Magus; he does not give a damn about others, be they members of his species or any other (in my thinking, they ceased to be anything more than lifeless, petty-minded livestock to him long ago). He does not care to save them from disaster, and he thinks nothing of disregarding the supposed sanctity of their “history”. He has, in fact, screwed with history on an enormous scale by refusing to limit his influence over a time period to which he does not belong, but he cares not – in his eyes, it seems that anyone bound by arbitrary rules (such as worshiping a given version of history) does not deserve power of any kind. And as for the matter of the bond of “love” he shares with his sibling, I think a better choice of words is warranted. This is another example of extrapolating a personality from its mere fragments in-game, but it seems to me that Schala would have no ability to change Magus’ nature with her presence – he is stronger than that. Rather than “the person with whom Magus would let down his guard and reveal some kind of tenderness”, Schala is more likely the person with whom Janus has always been able to be most honest. The two children of Queen Zeal shared an exclusive secret between them: Janus was more than he appeared to be, but he wished no one else to be aware of it. Without excessive arrogance – probably out of the sheer misery of his paradigm – he asked her to keep his confidence, and she, knowing the rarity and value of the thing offered, clearly accepted. Schala, the more benevolent and merciful of Zeal’s children – indeed, the personified absence of insane power-hunger of Zeal herself – accepted her brother’s darkness, and from then onward, neither one exhibited any efforts to “change” the other. Schala did not allow her brother’s bigotry to affect her sympathy for the Earthbound Ones, and Janus makes it his primary task to locate her – an individual for whom he actually cares – after the Ocean Palace incident that consumed Zeal. He seeks not to change her, but to be in her presence, and this takes priority over even his own personal ambitions, whatever they may have been. This is the greatest act of tribute that Janus ever performs in-game, and he does it without a word: he dedicates all resources at his disposal to someone else. He would even kill the creature (Lavos) responsible for the act of robbing him of this unique relationship, merely out of the spirit of vengeance, with no obvious practical purpose to it.
The most distinctive, enduring aspect of Magus’ persona, however, can be concisely stated thus: Magus does not change – ever. His circumstances in the plot change dramatically, and so too do his responses change (his alliances lie in various locations as events unfold), but never does he give up the idea that he is “special”, and superior to others in the ways that matter. Janus was a miserable child; he was deeply embedded in a decadent, philosophically foolhardy kingdom brimming with pompous magic-users who wanted nothing more than to “sleep”. It was a beautiful kingdom externally, but Janus, in the way he speaks in the storyline, seems to regard this outer grandeur as a huge exaggeration of what its inner spirit. Nothing matters more to Magus than Magus, generally. He disregards his inferiors, seeks to destroy his superiors, and can only forge appreciable relationships with his equals.
After considering the finer points of Magus’ personality to this extent, and examining what he does behind the scenes, the idea of actually doing battle (albeit through the eyes of just another set of ignorant “inferiors” – Crono’s party) with the man as he releases some of the raw magical power that he reserves only for those who truly hinder him, is a very exciting prospect, indeed. :evilking: Against fools he need only use his mind to crush them from afar via elaborate manipulation schemes. For those who actually get close enough to threaten him, however, he will Dark Matter their asses. ^_^ This intransigent aspect of Magus’ character is present from the plot’s beginning to its end. For instance, when he decides to join your party, he does not seem to care in the least that said party once attempted to kill him (and he certainly cares nothing for some melodramatic amphibian with a sword who got in his way long ago). He sees his goal – Lavos – and sees the best way to arrive there. He requires the party’s help and trust, so he uses his arsenal of secrets to steer the retrieval of the lost Crono. He will even (depending on the preferred scenario) lead the battle to destroy his own megalomaniacal mother. This is a man who has his priorities immovably straight. The point is, after being damaged by Lavos after thoroughly underestimating the godlike ferocity of the creature, he immediately returns to his feet to begin formulating his next plan. He has not changed, and if, God willing, he is in another Chrono installment (Radical Dreamers . . . not such a great interpretation of Magus :(; there was ONE good moment, but that’s it, more or less), he should never do so.
FINAL REMARKS :frust:: To draw everything together, and not leave you with merely a pile of raw analysis and extrapolation, there are things about Magus’ general presence in-game that are rather inspiring. There is a style of imagery . . . a way of moving and acting about this character that makes him uniquely, and irreplaceably, MAGUS.
Anyone who read the entire thing has earned 100 grams of gratitude. :laugh:
