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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

The thing that bothered me about the later Final Fantasys is that as the series went on, the protagonists got younger and more like pop stars than original characters. At some point it seems like they forgot they were making fantasy games and just started aping pop musicians (both in fashion and appearance/age) and Hollywood.

This happens to a lot of game companies though. Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series and with that a loss of connection to what made the games so special.

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> Turnover leads to teams with no connection to previous games in the series

It's even weirder and more fascinating than that. Turnover eventually leads to teams made of people who were fans of the original series, and the risk there is that their own interpretation of the series can become a navel-gazing love letter to the superficial stuff that floats on top of their memories (e.g. references, callbacks, tie-ins, inside jokes, and memes) while neglecting the underlying qualities that made them fall in love with the series in the first place.

Oh yeah! But this is a problem with a lot of game designers, not just those who join the teams of their childhood heroes. There are quite a few games out there that lean so heavily into navel-gazing love letter territory and what's even more depressing is that they seem to have an audience.

Well, I have good news for you: the most recent Final Fantasy has the oldest protagonist in the series (after the prologue), at a grizzled and careworn 28. Prior to that the oldest protagonists were Cloud and Lightning, both 21. (Zidane is the youngest post-Famicom protagonist at 16.)

I don't consume japanese media too often. But from what I've been sensing, there is a real class tension in japan'a young population now. It's not like in america where we villify the powerful. It's quite the opposite. The lower class gets villified and portrayed with a certain malice that i find quite distasteful. There is a presaure to be in communion with the so called 'elites'. And this partly drives the change of theme and feeling in their media.

I mean, they were always aping something though? Replaying FF7 I realized, at its core, it is just a mismash of 80s horror movies.

Still love it, but its interesting to notice in retrospect.

Before FF7 they were aping fantasy tropes. This is fine if you're making a fantasy game! Though my favourite game in the series is 6 which adds steampunk to the mix but without being overly self-conscious about it.

Totally.

And FF7 was new (to me at least) in what it aped so it's all fine and cool.

With a heavy dose of Blade Runner too. Sephiroth is pretty much gaming's Roy Batty. The dynamic between him and Cloud is even very close to that of Batty and Deckard.

It's ok though, in the 90s, homaging Blade Runner in Japanese media was a total belt onion -- something people did because "it was the style at the time".

Gimme five bees for a quarter, they’d say.

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