Quote Originally Posted by Renmiri View Post
And therein lies the "downer" of FFXII political plot to me: It reminds me way too much of stuff I'd rather forget for a few blissful moments of gameplay. Like the fact that our "Lord Vayne" is a lot loonier and a lot LESS intelligent than the one in the game and there is no Ashe, Larsa, Basch and other heros around trying to stop him
I don't think dropping nuclear devices on anything could ever, in any conceivable notion of the word, be considered 'nice', 'friendly', 'neighborly', or even 'just barely tolerating your presence'. I do wonder that if the worst case scenario of the time-that if we let them surrender without a show of unstoppable force-would've happened. If you're unfamilar, there was an idea running around that suggested every Japanese man would commit ritualistic suicide for failing his country. There's no way to say it would've-or would not have happened.

As for leaving real life behind when you sit down to play a game... Sometimes, it can be hard. When I was growing up, they talked a lot about gamers disassociating reality with video games-that we were losing touch with the idea that people really die because you can die as many times as you want in a video game 'without consequence', and that you can kill the same guy over and over again 'without consequence'. And these statements and feelings were coming from people that didn't really care to discern between something like Doom and FFIX.

I don't deal with this at all anymore, since I no longer live in that house with people who have such uninformed views. But for a long time, I had disassociate reality from my games. You shouldn't need to disassociate it either way, but we live in a f*çked up world full of batsh!t psychos who think it's their right to do whatever to whoever because they have an opinion rather than attempt to talk it out.

I'm not a peace person, and it's because people don't like to solve the simple problems with words. Someone has some damn idea in their head that they're right and everyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong, but is actively out to hurt that person. FFXII really taps that. After all, that's what the struggle over the Nethicite is about, really. It's about two strong views vying for position over one another. And really, both of them are out not to prove that their view is right-hell, neither of them will even consider a diplomacy table. They're out to destroy the opposing view.

FFXII is the best game because its taken the things that are going on and put them into a format that makes them obvious to everyone. Being the best and being pretty though... Those are very different things, indeed.