Because Destiny Says So vs. Screw Destiny

[Forsaken Lover]

So I'm far from an expert on anime or gaming or whatever but this seems to be a pretty evident trend shift.

We need only look to the early FFs where we got our steadfast warriors of goodnes who were destined to slay evil and bring peace to the world. YAY!

Later FF games however are pretty much nothing but "screw destiny". FFIX had it to an extent but it became pretty apparent with FFX and while I haven't played FFXIII, it seems to be a theme there too.

Hell, if there are any Xenofans here, contrast Xenogears with Xenosaga. Fei is totally a Chosen One and it's his fate to free the world more or less. Xenosaga on theo ther hand is up to its eyeballs in the idea of destiny being hooey and we can make whatever future we want.

So has anyone else noticed this apparent mood swing in Japan? Any ideas what caused it?

[Wolf Kanno]

Well if we're talking about Japan's history as to what caused this ideal, it would most likely be the economical bubble that burst in the 90s. The one that Japan still hasn't quite recovered from that most psuedo-anime/gaming scholars would point to as the cultural element that shifted this, but I'm pretty sure if we were to do a comparison to other cultures entertainment mediums, we would discover a similar trend. Think Terminator, where the first movie is obviously "destiny" where Terminator 2 is "screw destiny" and now the later films are back to the "you can't escape destiny" theme. Hell, technically FF has done the same thing, cause XIII wants to be about "screw destiny" but kind of ends up being "you can't escape destiny" only saved from being a downer ending by a Deus ex Machina out of nowhere and even then, you can't say it's "screw destiny" because the Focus vision is so unintelligible that it's quite easy to say that they did their Focus properly and just misinterpreted it's meaning. Whereas XIII-2 is really more about "screw destiny" taken to an extreme. Course the trend in gaming has been around longer than recent years. I mean Chrono Trigger is all about "screw destiny" but then Cross comes around and gives a very different theme called "screwing destiny screws you" where the consequences of changing fate puts man on a different track to a very different apocalyptic destiny from the first game, yet even that game eventually takes the "screw destiny" route.

There are other ideas that may have changed Japan's cultural view, I like to think that Neon Genesis Evangelion, if anything, was a series that brought to surface in the mainstream conscious a more pessimistic view that was underlying Japan's subconscious about how they viewed the current world, cause frankly, after EVA, anime definetly became a bit more darker, pessimistic and more about exploring hidden feelings and self-analyzing the characters. You can make out this trend with FFVI and VII which were made around the time of EVA's development and release, which are both stories that reflect these similar underlying themes that Japan began to focus on in the mid-90s. Course this is just my observation and I don't feel my guess is any better than other people's opinions on the matter.

[Del Murder]

I like when the characters say 'screw destiny' but it turns out they can't escape it after all. FFXIII did it, but then screwed it up in the end. FFXIII-2 did it too, and again screwed it up in the end (the very very end at least). I'm not a fatalist, but I do like when things happen as they are supposed to happen.

It would be refreshing to see a game where the villain is the one who was destined to be the hero, but said 'screw destiny' and became a bad guy. I'm sure it's been done but I can't think of any off the top of my head.