In other words, they have faith and they wrestle with what that faith means. Characters put themselves in the invisible hands of a bodiless God. The game opens with a prayer, friends pray for one another upon departing and praise God upon reuniting. Even though it’s a game where magic is a quantifiable reality and the player is engaged in a shadow war with literal demons, there’s an abstract spirituality in most denizens of Ivalice. Still, even though FFT is so virulent toward a church with political ambitions, it is not anti-religious. The game paints the politically manipulative church as evil which-let’s be honest-is not very original and somewhat myopic. The Lion’s War is won by one man’s storytelling.įinal Fantasy Tactics attempts to show the ways in which our belief and our churches can conflict, how faith can be abusive or empowering, how it protects and exposes us. Delita’s deception is boundless, but he has so many versions of himself available that people are willing to believe him. Delita-the eventual victor of the Lions War-earns the support of the revolting populace by telling them a story of himself as a downtrodden revolutionary looking to modernize a backwards country. the church maintains the status quo with a selective story about God and his will. It is a game about controlling narrative and therefore power. The game completely changes depending on whether it’s read with the assumption that the “true” narrator is the player-character Ramza his eventual ally Orlan Alazlam, a scholar in the distant future or a third-person omniscient and objective one. The villains of Final Fantasy Tactics are villains because they’re misrepresenting God.įFT’s conflicting but undetermined narrators wrestle for authorial control of the text. And though many members of the church are antagonists, religion is not just a figure of villainy for villainy’s sake. Perhaps naturally, there is also a church to organize the celebration and worship of God. There is not a lot of room for ambiguity: in this world, there are many, many people that believe in God. The people of Ivalice believe that God created the world, that He created people in His image, that He gave them free will and that He sent an ambassador to earth to right His flock’s path when they abused their gift free will. God in FFT’s world of Ivalice is most akin to the God of Christian theology*. Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the few games that directly and unapologetically places God and religion at its centre.īy God, I do not mean a pantheon, a named deity with a tangible presence on earth or a fantasy abstraction of a real-world idol: characters in Final Fantasy Tactics are talking about the capital “G” God. Still, every once in a while a game will use religion for the same purpose that real-world people do: as a way of viewing the universe and the people in it. Most often, video games use religious figures because devils in flaming cloaks, three-headed guard dogs, and winged warriors are just so awesome. Religious and mythical figures pop in and out of games frequently enough, but rarely to invoke a sense of the spiritual or to illustrate an existential point. Religion and video games don’t tend to make the best of bedfellows.
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