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ghoulmouseTime to get back to my roots and post some meta putting some minor detail of a video game under absurd scrutiny.
Yeah, so. I've been streaming FF4DS for some friends and talking about it. Hours upon hours of talking about it, actually (next on the docket is Undertale, which I can also talk about for hours, and presumably at some point I will run out of games I have insanely detailed thoughts about but...not any time soon).
I mentioned that I think it's really weird that there's a hovecraft in the game, but I couldn't exactly explain like...why I thought it was weird. I mean there's a ton of tech-y themed stuff in the game already. The Tower of Babil is all chrome and glowing blue lights like some gamer's LED-laden PC rig. You've got an airship and tanks and a spaceship and you fight robots and even a CPU (represented as a black orb dotted with glowing points of light, which would also look really good in a gamer's LED-laden PC rig). A lot of these things would go on to become staples of the series and like, the general aesthetic of RPGs in the 90s-2000s in general.
What's the deal with the hovercraft, then? Well...I think it boils down to the fact that all the rest of the tech in the game, despite its futuristic scifi appearance, is still extremely rooted in the fantasy genre. It's fantastical. The vehicles you get ahold of (aside from teh short-lived boat which is...I mean, it's a boat) aren't inspired by some kind of plausible in-universe physics but rather, they fulfill some kind of fantasy. Airships were a dream of many, says the opening crawl, and though heavier-than-air flight exists in the real world (and, as the famous Twitter post says, we've found a way to make it suck the whole time, truly remarkable work by the species), it still represents a fulfillment of some far-flung goal -- you can imagine almost anyone looking up into the sky and thinking, what if human beings could fly? Same with the Lunar Whale, a very sci-fi looking space ship with very much fantasy theming. What if human beings could go to the moon, further than any other creature has even flown? What would they find there? Surely not a cold, uninhabitable wasteland but something more like...a palace of crystal and glass, home to sleeping demi-gods. What kind of craft could accomplish such a feat? Well...perhaps it sleeps deep below the ocean, built by the slumbering moon-people in ages past, and perhaps it could be coaxed into flight by hope and prayer. This works for all the nominally scifi stuff in the game -- a tower that stretches from the depths of the earth to the top of the sky. A massive mechanical beast meant to wipe out all life on earth, which you must climb inside to defeat (the different areas described as different body parts, and at the end of it a bizarre black-box of a brain). I'll admit the tanks are a little prosaic but at the very least there's kind of a power fantasy there, something you can sit inside that's impervious to damage and packs firepower.
No ancient visionary has ever thought to themselves, "Someday...men will be able to fly, but only like a little bit. Slightly above the ground so you can get over shallow water a bit easier". A hovercraft is the kind of thing you think up when you're constrained by physics. It's just not a fantasy.
The fact that they gave it to a character who is so fairy tale-esque that his big heroic moment is defeating an evil elf by singing a magical song. It's like if you caught Gandalf taking the bus.
In the DS version Edward explicitly says that he took Anna to Damcyan in the hovercraft, which does neatly explain how they managed to get there when there's apparently a murderous octopus camping on the only accessible mountain pass, but I just like...struggle to picture this scene without it being kind of funny. Like, the whole scenario is so absurdly romantic that there are multiple ballads about it in the real world, and then doing it in this boring-ass vehicle that your minstrel lover (secretly a prince) has to like...drive. With a steering wheel. I dunno it's just really funny to me, lol.
One thing I do really like about the hovercraft, though, is that it sort of suggests Damcyan was kind of...technologically advanced, compared to the rest of the world. Airships are a huge new invention, but nobody seems to think the Damcyan hovercraft is a big deal so presumably they've had these for a while. That was at least partially why Cecil was trying to get to Damcyan in the first place (that and the Damcyan royal family's implied ancestral rapport with giant bugs which might be the subject of another post lol). It's not centered in FF4 but the Crystals definitely have an effect on the surrounding environment -- Troia enjoys immense abundance due to the Crystal of Earth and if it's taken from them, all of that will wither and die. For some reason people often struggle to think of a non-destructive use for fire magic but if we assume the Crystal provides essentially an infinite source of fire that never needs fuel, well...imagine how good your metalworking would be. You could invent steam power and the combustion engine, easy. FF5 leaned into this direction with Karnak using their Crystal of Fire as a power source for a massive ship, and tbh I think this is extremely cool, so I've always kind of projected that backwards onto Damcyan, which we barely know anything about, as a headcanon -- especially since apparently Damcyan is immensely wealthy.
Also, mechanically speaking, at that point in the storyline they need to protagonists to acquire a way to access new areas and bypass the dungeon back to Kaipo, but can't fly and isn't a boat that can traverse the ocean. Genuinely not sure what I'd use in place of the hovercraft if I were in charge -- it does kinda work perfectly. Maybe another weird breed of chocobo (or, because I'm never letting go of this, a rideable giant bug).
Anyway those were my thoughts on the particulars of the fantasy genre, why the hovercraft is funny, and how it's kind of cool that it allows you to extrapolate some stuff about maybe the most minimally described location in the whole game, but one that I'm highly emotionally invested in.
Yeah, so. I've been streaming FF4DS for some friends and talking about it. Hours upon hours of talking about it, actually (next on the docket is Undertale, which I can also talk about for hours, and presumably at some point I will run out of games I have insanely detailed thoughts about but...not any time soon).
I mentioned that I think it's really weird that there's a hovecraft in the game, but I couldn't exactly explain like...why I thought it was weird. I mean there's a ton of tech-y themed stuff in the game already. The Tower of Babil is all chrome and glowing blue lights like some gamer's LED-laden PC rig. You've got an airship and tanks and a spaceship and you fight robots and even a CPU (represented as a black orb dotted with glowing points of light, which would also look really good in a gamer's LED-laden PC rig). A lot of these things would go on to become staples of the series and like, the general aesthetic of RPGs in the 90s-2000s in general.
What's the deal with the hovercraft, then? Well...I think it boils down to the fact that all the rest of the tech in the game, despite its futuristic scifi appearance, is still extremely rooted in the fantasy genre. It's fantastical. The vehicles you get ahold of (aside from teh short-lived boat which is...I mean, it's a boat) aren't inspired by some kind of plausible in-universe physics but rather, they fulfill some kind of fantasy. Airships were a dream of many, says the opening crawl, and though heavier-than-air flight exists in the real world (and, as the famous Twitter post says, we've found a way to make it suck the whole time, truly remarkable work by the species), it still represents a fulfillment of some far-flung goal -- you can imagine almost anyone looking up into the sky and thinking, what if human beings could fly? Same with the Lunar Whale, a very sci-fi looking space ship with very much fantasy theming. What if human beings could go to the moon, further than any other creature has even flown? What would they find there? Surely not a cold, uninhabitable wasteland but something more like...a palace of crystal and glass, home to sleeping demi-gods. What kind of craft could accomplish such a feat? Well...perhaps it sleeps deep below the ocean, built by the slumbering moon-people in ages past, and perhaps it could be coaxed into flight by hope and prayer. This works for all the nominally scifi stuff in the game -- a tower that stretches from the depths of the earth to the top of the sky. A massive mechanical beast meant to wipe out all life on earth, which you must climb inside to defeat (the different areas described as different body parts, and at the end of it a bizarre black-box of a brain). I'll admit the tanks are a little prosaic but at the very least there's kind of a power fantasy there, something you can sit inside that's impervious to damage and packs firepower.
No ancient visionary has ever thought to themselves, "Someday...men will be able to fly, but only like a little bit. Slightly above the ground so you can get over shallow water a bit easier". A hovercraft is the kind of thing you think up when you're constrained by physics. It's just not a fantasy.
The fact that they gave it to a character who is so fairy tale-esque that his big heroic moment is defeating an evil elf by singing a magical song. It's like if you caught Gandalf taking the bus.
In the DS version Edward explicitly says that he took Anna to Damcyan in the hovercraft, which does neatly explain how they managed to get there when there's apparently a murderous octopus camping on the only accessible mountain pass, but I just like...struggle to picture this scene without it being kind of funny. Like, the whole scenario is so absurdly romantic that there are multiple ballads about it in the real world, and then doing it in this boring-ass vehicle that your minstrel lover (secretly a prince) has to like...drive. With a steering wheel. I dunno it's just really funny to me, lol.
One thing I do really like about the hovercraft, though, is that it sort of suggests Damcyan was kind of...technologically advanced, compared to the rest of the world. Airships are a huge new invention, but nobody seems to think the Damcyan hovercraft is a big deal so presumably they've had these for a while. That was at least partially why Cecil was trying to get to Damcyan in the first place (that and the Damcyan royal family's implied ancestral rapport with giant bugs which might be the subject of another post lol). It's not centered in FF4 but the Crystals definitely have an effect on the surrounding environment -- Troia enjoys immense abundance due to the Crystal of Earth and if it's taken from them, all of that will wither and die. For some reason people often struggle to think of a non-destructive use for fire magic but if we assume the Crystal provides essentially an infinite source of fire that never needs fuel, well...imagine how good your metalworking would be. You could invent steam power and the combustion engine, easy. FF5 leaned into this direction with Karnak using their Crystal of Fire as a power source for a massive ship, and tbh I think this is extremely cool, so I've always kind of projected that backwards onto Damcyan, which we barely know anything about, as a headcanon -- especially since apparently Damcyan is immensely wealthy.
Also, mechanically speaking, at that point in the storyline they need to protagonists to acquire a way to access new areas and bypass the dungeon back to Kaipo, but can't fly and isn't a boat that can traverse the ocean. Genuinely not sure what I'd use in place of the hovercraft if I were in charge -- it does kinda work perfectly. Maybe another weird breed of chocobo (or, because I'm never letting go of this, a rideable giant bug).
Anyway those were my thoughts on the particulars of the fantasy genre, why the hovercraft is funny, and how it's kind of cool that it allows you to extrapolate some stuff about maybe the most minimally described location in the whole game, but one that I'm highly emotionally invested in.
