Stratovania

When dealing with the classical elements, we can't forget how often they play a significant role in Square Enix games. The first Final Fantasy has the Light Warriors facing off against four elemental fiends: Lich for earth, Kary (Marilith in the Japanese version) for fire, Kraken for water, and Tiamat for air. FF4 also uses elemental fiends, this time named after demons from Dante's Inferno: Scarmiglione for earth, Cagnazzo for water, Barbariccia for air, and Rubicante for fire. (Due to limited space, translation errors, or possibly a combination of both, the original North American translation referred to these four as Milon, Kainazzo, Valvalis, and Rubicant.) Final Fantasy IX has four Chaos Guardians with the same names as the Fiends from the first game, and Mystic Quest has the Vile Four: Flamerus Rex, Ice Golem, Dualhead Hydra, and Pazuzu. Also making significant use of the classical elements are the Mana games, in which there are eight Mana Spirits. Four represent the elements we all know and love, while the others are associated with wood, the moon, light, and darkness. Kind of an odd combination, I'd say, but what are you going to do?


Elements are also significant to Chrono Trigger, but instead of the typical four, we're instead presented with fire, ice, lightning, and shadow. The first three seem to be the most typical families of spells in role-playing video games. It's also fairly typical for lightning to work well against water monsters, fire against ice monsters, and, oddly enough, ice against fire monsters as well.

To begin with, happy birthday to k1cup!

Having played a fair amount of Chrono Trigger recently, I thought the time might be right to address the role of the silent protagonist in video games. Crono, who has no dialogue in the game (except apparently in one ending I haven't seen), is one of the most famous examples of this concept. This has led to some jokes about Crono being mute, but I really don't think that's the intention. Rather, he's the viewpoint character, and I think you're supposed to be filling in his lines yourself. It's part of the whole role-playing thing, you know? I understand that Crono DOES talk when he makes a ghostly cameo in Chrono Cross, although I never got to that point in the game myself.

Now, there are plenty of games where the hero doesn't talk, but it doesn't really count when no one else does either, except occasionally to inform you that their princess is in another castle. And we've heard Mario speak plenty of times since then. Interestingly enough, in Super Mario RPG (which appears to have been largely inspired by Chrono Trigger), he DOES have the silent protagonist role. I understand that the later Dragon Quest games tend to go with the silent protagonist idea, but most of the Final Fantasy ones don't. Cecil in 4, Bartz in 5, and Cloud in 7 are all main protagonists and viewpoint characters, but they all have readable dialogue. Of course, pretty much every RPG has SOME dialogue from the hero that doesn't appear on the screen. When you talk to a person, you usually only see their response, but I don't think that's supposed to indicate that you're just staring stupidly at them. It's just that seeing your lines every time would get tedious, and take up a lot of unnecessary space. (I'm reminded of the crappy Who Framed Roger Rabbit NES game, which has Eddie Valiant saying, "Can you help me?" to every person he meets.) What I think makes characters like Crono unique is that the other characters in their games all talk quite a bit, while he doesn't.

I don't know what the first game to use a silent protagonist was, but I suspect Link was one of the earlier ones. I believe it was Shigeru Miyamoto who said that the character's name came from his being the LINK between the player and the game. And even though the first Zelda game didn't have much dialogue at all (yeah, you got the occasional "Buy somethin', will ya?" and "Dodongo dislikes smoke," but not much else), I'm pretty sure they continued with the tradition of Link never actually talking (although he does yell and grunt sometimes). Yeah, he talked in the Magnavox CDI games, but those are about as canonical as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

And if I might share one more video-game-related link before I post this, check out this spoof where Garfield meets Final Fantasy.