Did you like FINAL FANTASY XII?

[Fynn]

A story is defined by what happens in it and by character development, Without these things you cannot hope to get attached to any of the characters or the story or care about anything that goes on.

And this, is precisely the criticism XII often gets. No one cares about Ashe or vaan or Solidor or this empire or the people or anything at all. They could be Tom, Dick and Harry. No one can feel the threat of this empire, although that threat is eluded to. No one can feel anything and thus the story is like someone giving you a lump of clay and telling you a great work of art lies somewhere in it if you can arrange it properly.

Without attachment to characters, you will not care about them, and there is no emotion. Without these things you cannot sympathise with their plight/struggle or adventure, and without that, the story is like a cheap piece of cardboard.

For a human, emotional attachment to characters via character depth and development is paramount to a story. The story is more than just a set of rules or quotes or summaries. It is the emotion. If Aerith hadn't have had any character development in VII, when it came to her death, the vast majority of people would not have had any feeling one way or another.

The fact that it is cited often as a pivotal moment in gaming history is precisely because it succeeded in evoking emotion and it could only do that because the vast majority of people cared.

Tetsuya Nomura "Death should be something sudden and unexpected, and Aerith's death seemed more natural and realistic", and "When I reflect on Final Fantasy VII, the fact that fans were so offended by her sudden death probably means that we were successful with her character. If fans had simply accepted her death, that would have meant she wasn't an effective character."

Substitute Aerith for Ashe, and no one would have given 2 hoots. That isn't because the plot point would have failed, but because the actual development had failed.

This whole "evoking human emotions!" thing seems to be a pretty cheap approach. You can easilly achieve the stuff you talk about, but it's a bit harder to achieve something good without having to desperately try to "reach" the people. It's like comparing bestsellers to the really meaningful books (I'm not saying FFXII is as ambitious as such stuff, but is closer to it than other FFs) - anyone can identify with the characters of the former, but it takes more thought to get the bigger picture in the latter. Same with music - catchy music is fine for the masses, but artistic music can be considered "crap" by most, though it actually carries the truest beauty.

Just so that my words don't prove empty, I'll back it up with some in-game evidence. Here's your lack of character development, then: Ashe. She is shaken by the death of her husband, loss of kingdom, and all that stuff. She then decides to take revenge (how original). The images of Rasler she sees on her journey make her want to achieve her goal more. But at the same time, she encounters Larsa, and sees that the empire is not as evil as she thought it to be. Meeting the Occuria makes her question herself, as she turns out to have been just their pawn in shaping their own image of Ivalice's history. She decides to go against the self-proclaimed gods by rejecting revenge on the empire, instead trying to achieve the independence of her kingdom by peace. Her decision was a hard and mature one, because had she followed her original path, driven by human feelings of loss and anger, she would have caused the land to be engulfed in a yet greater, perhaps neverending conflict.

I consider this to be good character development, though it's not in-your-face or melodramatic, as stuff tends to be nowadays. Though I'm not saying it's a bad thing - it appeals to the masses, myself included, and no one's wrong for liking that. No one is wrong for liking FFXII's story either, though you consider it to be bad (though it isn't, it's just different from the others, and thus a lot of people dislike it ).