@zenebazh Thank you for all the feedback! I was very excited to hear how much you liked it.
Things I would do differently
Rinoa/Ellone:
- Rinoa coming-out as sorceress in FH really cheapens Elliones reveal a lot for me. Its just 1 hour of gameplay between it and it does not give the player and Squall enough time to digest. Up untill Elliones confession we just had heard of evil sorceresses, thus making Squall now revalue his worldview. It doesnt feel natural for Squall to stay calm and not adressing the matter after discovering that another sorceress is in their midst.
Yes, I agree that, in terms of pacing, those two moments are too close together, and I would have changed that if I could. The problem is that there is no other appropriate moment for Rinoa to share her secret with Squall.
I agree with you that Squall needed more time to re-evaluate his view of sorceresses. I was looking for another scene during disc 2 that would give him that opportunity, but I couldn't find one.
Also, I never wanted for you to think of Rinoa's reveal as cheap, but I did want it to have less of an emotional impact than for Ellone. Squall idolizes Ellone, and for most of the game, he has much stronger feelings for her than for Rinoa. I wanted to make that contrast very apparent by showing how differently Squall reacts to each person's reveal.
When Ellone tells Squall she is a sorceress, it shatters his entire conception of her, and forces him to re-evaluate how he sees the world. But when Rinoa tells Squall she is a sorceress, he thinks she's joking.
At this point in the story, Squall doesn't value Rinoa's safety enough to be worried for her, and he doesn't think highly enough of her to realistically consider her a threat. He is also attracted to her, so he doesn't want to consider actively fighting against her. So, until something changes, he is unsure what to do, and he simply agrees to keep her secret for the time being.
My goal was to highlight how wrong Squall was to dismiss her when we see her pivotal role in the events of the 3rd and 4th discs. This is especially true since I changed the circumstances surrounding Edea's loss of power. It is now the result of direct action that Rinoa knowingly took in an attempt to 'cure' Edea, rather than Rinoa simply being the victim of bad luck.
Of course, please let me know if I failed to convey any of that.
(Also, which music did you have for the concert scene? If you chose anything but the full 'Irish Jig', then you got a far more truncated conversation. The 'Irish Jig is the only one that gives Rinoa the chance to argue her case for Squall's support, and it's the one I would recommend achieving.)
Rinoa:
- I actually liked how in vanilla the player can only guess Rinoas sorceress status after the Battle of the gardens but is still left in the dark untill she finally tells us at the Raganrok. You already put a lot of hints in your rewrite which would make the vanila reveal more natural and coherent already, without losing the arc of anticipation it already had.
I'm afraid I may be misunderstanding you, but I'll add this for the sake of clarity.
In the original game, no one is a sorceress until they inherit powers from another sorceress. Rinoa did not become a sorceress until the Garden battle, when she gained Edea's power. One of the most significant changes my mod made was to make Rinoa (and every other sorceress) a sorceress from birth.
That is why I wasn't able to wait until the Ragnarok scene to reveal Rinoa's nature, because in my mod, her entire motivation throughout her life hinges on her being a sorceress, and suffering a massive guilt complex as a result. Unlike the original, I worked really hard to ensure that Rinoa was more than a mere 'damsel in distress'. I really hope I was able to properly convey that.
What I had hoped to bring to culmination in the Ragnarok was far more than the revelation that Rinoa was a sorceress. I wanted to show her sense of despair that she could never live a normal life because of her 'curse'. This was a fear that had been plaguing her since she was a child, when she first discovered she was a sorceress. After seeing the problems she had caused in space (and elsewhere), she finally gave up hope. And this provides a much more personal sense of justification for her willingness to sacrifice herself for 'the good of the world'.
I think this is by far the most impactful change to the story that I've made, especially considering how vacuous her vanilla character was. But since I haven't received any particular compliments for it, I'm starting to wonder if I utterly dropped the ball in trying to elevate Rinoa's story.
White SeeDs:
- Overcomplicating the White Seeds origin. I dont see any contradictions with them being dispatched by Edea to keep Ellione safe. This explains much better why Laguna wasn't abel to find her again. Instead of thinking she is dead.
Yup. I'm glad you mentioned this. I didn't see a contradiction either, at first. While it doesn't create a contradiction for the plot, it does create a massive contradiction for the motivations for certain characters, namely Edea and Laguna. And please forgive me ahead of time, because this will be a bit long.
For Edea, there is no contradiction in the original game. She met Squall in the past, and therefore began making plans to create an army that would be able to defeat her at some point in the future. Perfectly fine.
But in my mod, Time Compression isn't a thing, and she never meets Squall in the past. Without meeting Squall, there is no good reason why Edea would ever strive to create an army to defeat her, especially given the changes I made to her backstory with Cid and the orphanage. I didn't intend this. It was just one of several unintended consequences of removing Time Compression. But it meant that I also had to change where Ellone's protectors came from.
And for Laguna, the vanilla game has one glaring character contradiction that (in my opinion, at least) is easily as bad, if not as obvious, as the amnesia.
Why did Laguna ever stop looking for Ellone?
Please imagine a scenario with me. As a child, you had a father who loved you. But when you were five, he decided to send you off to live with your mother, and you never heard from him again. Then your mother passed away, and you were forced to live in an orphanage until you became an adult. Years later, you discover that he has been the president of Japan for FIFTEEN YEARS. When you ask him what he's been doing with his life, and why he never bothered trying to find you, he says this:
"Your mother was dead.
You were missing.
My job kept me busy."
"I was left here thinking
about this and that
and before I knew it,
all this time had passed."
THIS is how Laguna attempts to justify his utter complacency to Squall. Laguna had become the president of the most powerful country in the world, and yet he couldn't be bothered to divert any resources into continuing to look for his surrogate daughter, the girl he had already traveled across the entire world in order to rescue.
Somehow, for over fifteen years, he couldn't be bothered to find the time or the money to have someone ask around Winhill in order to discover that Raine had died while pregnant with his child, something that every other member of Winhill most likely knew, or to find out where the kids were sent after Raine passed. I personally have the resources to hire someone who could do that for me right now, and I'm not even the president of a small country, yet.
This, in my opinion, is not only a contradiction in Laguna's character, it is a ridiculous plot contrivance which only exists to allow the rest of the events of the story to take place.
Laguna needed a far more definitive reason to stop looking for Ellone. That's why he had to think she was dead.
I admit that how I accomplished this may be overly complicated, and even contrived, but at least it doesn't allow Laguna to remain a dead-beat father who was apparently indifferent to causing Squall and Ellone significant abandonment issues. Issues that serve as one of the defining aspects of both their characters for the entire game.
Ultimecia/Time Compression:
- Your other big rewrite is the Time Compression. Besides the poor execution and explaination, I hadn t such a huge problem with that aspect from vanila, though I understand why others had.
I like your concept of this ancestor-sorceress power source (reminds me of the Bene Geseritt in Dune), but the way you deal with Ultimecia actually worsens the problem people had with her to begin with. I get that you wanted to keep it ambigous with what she actually is, which would have worked in good Final Fantasy Tradition of a bizarre looking diabolo-ex machina. But she has a very distinct design that gets introduced earlier in the game, which makes it unsatisfying that she is just a personigication of a hive mind. Making her a witch of the past makes more sense with the final dungeon and Ellione junctioning them to the past. Question would still linger why she choose to intervine now? Was she already controling Adel? Was Edea the first who was weak enough to succumb to her? Does the discovery of the lunatic pandora affected it? Pushing Ultimecias introduction by Edea at the start of disc 3 to Odyne at the end is might the reason the explanation feels so cramped
I think I agree with your first point. I don't have a problem with Time Compression as much in theory as I do with how it was explained and implemented. (Though, as a rule, I would try to avoid time travel in any story unless it was a story specifically about time travel, because otherwise it invariably becomes deus ex machina.)
I definitely agree about how cramped it feels at the very end. It was and continues to be my greatest disappointment with my mod. I had originally intended to keep Ultimecia's reveal where it was, with Edea's scene at the start of disc 3. But I wanted to offer more information about Seifer and the Lunatic Pandora, as well as focus the scene on Rinoa's plight and Squall's reaction to it. I think this was a very good decision, especially considering how much praise I've received for that scene specifically.
But, in order to keep THAT scene from getting too cramped, I had to push back discussion of Ultimecia all the way to Odine. This is because the plot moves at lightning speed as soon as you get to Esthar. This is great for pacing, but awful for establishing a final villain to an epic tale. This was just as much of an issue with the vanilla story, given how poorly Ultimecia was explained by Edea in the first place. My struggle in this area exposes the structural problems that already existed in the original story.
What I really want is an extra scene with Odine and Edea discussing sorcery, right after they get to Esthar, before they go to space. (I still don't see any justification for why Squall was allowed to take Rinoa to space in the first place. It was a waste of resources and an obvious danger to everyone. Practically speaking, Rinoa and Edea should have been confined and monitored until Laguna and Ellone returned. And Odine should have used that time to study them both and explain everything he knew to Squall. Of course, then we wouldn't have had all that fun in space.) Unfortunately, I have to work with what we have, not what would I wish for.
I've got another idea. Would you be willing to accept a data log entry at Squall's desk that explains everything in detail? (Just kidding!)
I am working on a revision of Odine's monologue, and I'll release it as soon as I am able. And thanks again for all the very astute feedback! It's been highly valuable, and has helped me clarify my perspective.
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