ITT: Neutral Good

It's a Judge Sword
Mostly decorative weapons used by the people who uphold the laws

Isn't he more Lawful Neutral?

My Marche has stolen everything he comes into contact with and has dozens of legit murders to his name. I love that fucking game though, nothing like building a whole army of murder machines from nothing.

It's Lawful RIGHT

...

>sacrifices other peoples' happiness because it doesn't feel right to him
>convinces people to destroy their own world on a hunch
Yeah, those are totally the acts of a good person.

Yeah, if they wrote in that the li-grim was a demon that was stealing their life force as they sleep or something it would be more than justified. But nope, Marche is kind of a sick.

Even that wouldn't adress the fact that Marche just kinda knows that the new world is wrong. He just goes '...something feels off.' and promptly resolves to DESTROY THE WORLD.

Marche was right.

He's Lawful Evil, but he was right. His actions are those of a Lawful Evil character, but they are the actions that needed to be taken. He leans more Lawful than outright Evil, but his actions could not classify him as Lawful Neutral. And again, he was right, Ivalice had to be stopped eventually.

But it wouldn't be stopped by a hero. It needed a villain. And Marche is that villain, who destroyed the world in order to save those under its spell.

Why exactly did the new world need to be stopped, though? I mean, sure, some people got the shaft in new Ivalice, so do people in the real world, often in way more awful ways, so that point is kind of a wash unless you right afterward go on and solve all the problems in the real world.
And at no point was it stated that did anything like draining peoples' souls or shit like that, so it wasn't even done in some form of self defense

I believe the book lady who maintains the world is actually slowly killing Mewt and all of the real world folks to maintain the false Ivalice

It's not really a battle between good and evil I think; but one of philosophical conviction.

Marche valued truth and reality in and of themselves; so even the fantastic joyful nature of the illusory world failed to sway him.

I think it was partly this; his clinging to what he knew was real and true that gave him the will to overpower his two friends, who had given themselves to the dream; because fleeing from the harshness of reality is an indicator of a less robust will.

In the end, right and wrong in this case are more or less up in the air.

Marche's victory was simply a triumph of the will to truth.

I'm more worry about Montblanc and other Ivalice denizen who agree to help Marche destroying their own world.

They were shadows without a true will of their own, I think.

Marche, having the greatest will of those trapped within the world gathered those shadows to him, and imposed his will upon them without truly realizing what it was he was doing.

Ritz did similarly with her own clan, but was enraptured with the world; Mewt was himself entirely under the thrall of the thing masquerading as his mother, and his will was suppressed, for it was weak to begin with.

And this is why the plot of FFTA is so good.

That's been a fan theory for years, but it's never stated in the game, actually.

That's a fairly complicated issue, I think. The people of new Ivalice seem have personality, emotions and self-awareness, so at that point it becomes a question whether their existance has less merit than Marche's desire for truth.

>a question whether their existance has less merit than Marche's desire for truth.

Obviously so. :^]

Honestly, FFTA's plotstraddles the line between clever and stupid.
Clever on account of even well over a decade later people still discuss the morality and inherent problems in its plot as well as the more subtle points of character motivations. Stupid because the creater didn't intend any of it and actually goes into full REEE-mode whenever this is mentioned.

I'm not a postmodernist, but this is a case where it's a really good choice to invoke the Death of the Author.

Marche is not Neutral Good. Whether he is Good or Evil is up for debate, but he is definitely Lawful. He has strong convictions about absolute reality and truth, and he sticks by and defends those convictions. It's his mission to reinstate the true Order of the world, to make the world once again as it was meant to be, to impose his standard of truth upon the world.

And that's why I like to give him the Paladin job when I play the game.

That's weird, it's like they never considered that the price of setting things back to normal was the destruction of a world. Is it just an anti-otaku message that the creator didn't think too hard about then?

Paladin's a class in FFTA? I've only played the original but I thought most of the jobs were the same.

I personally preferred The War of the Lions. Something about a hero that everyone thinks is a villain really appeals to me. As far as I know Delita and Ramza were he first instance of "The hero they needed/The hero they deserved" that I ever encountered in my short life.

BASED

Considering they wanted to make "Escapism is bad, mkay?"-like statement in a game that requires some *serious* time investment and dedication, I doubt awareness on that level was in the books for them.

War of the Lions was very powerful, yeah. I'm glad I bought the excellent PSP remake. It reminds me of a time when Final Fantasy was good.

It was good and pretty unique with the Ramza/Delita duality, but it felt kind of hamfisted to me. Since so much of Delita's story happens offscreen. He dissappears and then a year later is somehow working with all three powerful factions, playing them like fools.

Then when he ends up achieving his goal, we don't see the results of all his "gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette" talk. There was so much talk about ideals and shit, but what was Delita trying to change? I have no idea.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the game, including the story, but it felt like there wasn't enough meat to it. This is the only time I will ever say a Final Fantasy game needs MORE cutscenes.

see
Also, in the epilogue you see that those kids who bullied Mewt are literally shambling undead. That vengeance is more than a little extreme.

AND all the characters end up happy back in the real world.

>Considering they wanted to make "Escapism is bad, mkay?"-like statement in a game that requires some *serious* time investment and dedication, I doubt awareness on that level was in the books for them.
Even if they were unaware, we can still appreciate this aspect of the game for the irony. In the game, we're fighting against escapism, but by continuing to play the game, we're throwing down our weapons and submitting to escapism. And, of course, when it's brought up, we want to deny that fact, just as Mewt was in denial of the real world and his problems.

I agree. Although I'm not sure if the writer intended for Delita to be as well received as he was in the original, and War of the Lions unfortunately ran into some problems concerning performance in the PSP version (magic for sure) so maybe it just wasn't possible.

Still, the story behind that game led to my tendency to roleplay CG characters over anything else I think. As well as books such as A Tale of Two Cities that show the dichotomy caused by our actions.

Delita's only real mistakes were not trusting Ramza, and not letting Ovelia in on his plans.

Lawful or Chaotic Good? I'd lean towards Lawful, its not his fault every other Lawful organization in the setting was Evil and had to be fought against.

Ovelia was another character who I enjoyed although she didn't get as much screentime as Ramza/Delita for obvious reasons.

Her reason for staying hidden away combined with "Ovelia's Worries" always tugs at my heartstrings.

Ramza was lawful
Delita was chaotic

I'd call him Chaotic Good because even if he did end up fighting every other organization he inevitably caused much suffering. IIRC Delita also tells him something along the lines of: "You can't change the world." To which he replies that "I'm not trying to change the world. I just want to help as many people as I can."

It could also be argued that he could have helped many people had he simply used his high noble status rather than openly rebelling against everyone, but of course that would be just what Delita did.

So Ramza would be CG, and Delita would be LG/LN.

Of course alignment systems are too rigid to truly reflect a person's morality.

I always pegged Delita's as more of a Neutral character on the Law/Chaos spectrum. He doesn't care about Law and Order itself, but has no problem using it to benefit himself.

>the fact that Marche just kinda knows that the new world is wrong. He just goes '...something feels off.' and promptly resolves to DESTROY THE WORLD.

The thing is that others had problems they wanted to fix (family problems, hair color, legs) while only thing against Marche was that he was the new kid who just got friends in town.

Marche did not have a need for something in his life so it is obivious to him that something is wrong and obviously he wants to go home.
Imagine if you would be dragged into dream where others have their problems magically fixed without them having to actually face the problem and you want to go home but cannot. That level of escapism which can literally kill you if you go to wrong place is really really bad.

You motherfuckers are literally claiming "oh but if others are happy in their illusion that I was dragged into so I simply cannot shatter it for good of everybody"

The thing about various characters is that they ran away instead of dealing with their problems. Ritz was still ashamed of her hair color, Mewt can't accept the loss of his mom, etc.

Lawful Good.

I don't disagree with you but the story failed to establish much of a reason for Marche to realize the world was fake, or harmful to anyone. He's proven right after the fact but Marche being willing to tear the world down based on a gut feeling makes him look like sort of a psychopath.

Okay, while that would suck I'd consider the fact that my PARALYZED friend can walk and that my other friend's DEAD mother is alive against me being homesick and I'd probably conclude that we should probably stay here, especially considering the fact that I'm not having a bad life here, either.
I mean, would you not consider your friends' needs before your own?

Chaotic Neutral

Dude was basically a Lucifer expy, and When you consider how grim Ivalice has become by the time of FFT, it seems that everything the Occuria said was correct, and everything they did therefore justified and good. I posit that the Occuria were Lawful Good.

The trouble for me is that Marche's reasoning is less what you posted and more like
>Oh, but if I have a hunch that is world might be fake it is fine to kill everybody forever and blow up the world.
The fact that he is proven right *after* he succeeds is kinda irrelevant at that point.

He didn't.

The lawful evil has been the systematic education of the youth into believing that escaping difficulty is a superior alternative to fighting it.

>refuses to allow a friend to devolve into pathetic escapism

Sounds pretty solid to me.

>ITT: hyper-nu-post-betas attempt to argue that escapism is a legitimate alternative to anything based on a massively flawed interpretation of post-modern philosophy

All you have to do is post a picture of Marche and you fuckers descend like locust.

I don't know why I'm surprised all over again, especially given the board of this particular website that I'm on and the frequency with which these threads happen, but holy shit.

>My mom is alive!
>I can walk!
>My hair isn't abnormal!
>That just ain't right. Fuck your happiness, I'll destroy the world so you can continue your fucked-up mess of a life. Nevermind that does not include me, since I am perfectly normal.

To be honest, that's a part of the tragedy; to an observer, a philosophical zombie is indistinguishable from a thinking consciousness.

It's unknowable if they were truly self aware or just solipsistic figments.

And he knows that it's escapism ...how, exactly? I mean, we can discuss the merits and downsides of escapism all day, but none of that changes the fact that, without any evidence, Marche arbitrarily decides to just wipe out all of existence based on a feeling, which would be a pretty monstrous act even for the most insane of psychopaths.

still play ffta to this day. never gets old.

I hate escapism as much as you insecure "m-muh alpha male dream" sweetie. You're missing the point. Marche didn't know that the world was a big illusion. And I know what you're thinking, YES, it sounds like an illusion, it smells like an illusion, BUT he didn't do anything to confirm it. He literally went full "let's commit omnicide"... because of a gut feeling. It's kinda deranged, don't you concur?

>ITT Marche was right, but his justification was poorly written and philosophically repugnant
Really, the game would've been a dozen times better if there was a moment where Marche or someone near him could talk about the moral and philosophical implications of whether or not the world was merely illusory or an actual creation. And possible better exposition to support the narrative.

Because otherwise the sloppy writing makes Marche come across as a Drakenguard protagonist rather than a proper Ubermensch/Knight of the Infinite that his character should've been

At the end, though, they don't. Ritz uses her natural hair color. Mewt becomes more confident and misses his mom but is okay. I'm pretty sure I recall that in the 100% complete ending Doned calls you somewhere to show you a surprise, then gets up and takes a few steps.

Escapism is bad. It is bad because it substitutes actual achievement in live with hollow hedonism that isn't even as fulfilling in the long run. Conversely, mundane drudgery and hardship are not inherently good, but they are necessary for people to achieve.

Problem is. All of the people who got sucked into Ivalice, with the exception of the zombie bullies, saw their lives actually improved. They weren't fat neckbeards being intravenously fed while they hallucinate about fucking their waifus. They became kings and heroes, they had friends, adventures and fun. One got reunited with loved ones, other could finally walk. They had actually fulfilling lives. And for them, Ivalice was 100% real until Marche went around beating everyone with swords until they agree with him.

The game was just poorly written. It utterly failed in communicating why Ivalice was actually bad, and made Marche stand out as unequivocally the bad guy. Maybe if we saw more people whose lives were fucked up by the transition, his actions would be more justified.

>That's not his mom, that's just an eldritch abominatin pretending to be his mom because she wants to keep Ivalice in this weird cursed state where it's combined with the world I come from!
>Oh, well. Wouldn't want to ruin his day by pointing it out.

>Marche willfully killed off his best friend and closest confidant.

You only find that out in an exposition dump at the end of the game, well after Marche has started fucking things up.

Anyway, neutral good.

Nah, he trusted Ramza. So much so that he basically left the Lucavi problem for Ramza to deal with, helping him to escape and do so. Wonder what would have happened if Ramza had failed? Delita's grand plan wouldn't look so good then.

Also it's not clear that not letting Ovelia in on his plans was actually a bad thing. At the end of the game, we get the scene with Ovelia stabbing him and then in turn getting stabbed (pretty great moment btw, was not expecting that). Yet we know he lives on after that as king and presumably Ovelia does too if he remains king.

Likely they just end up in a love-hate or distant relationship. She can never fully trust him, knowing how he used her. He feels guilt over using her and accepts that as the price of achieving his goals. Somehow I don't quite think things turn out as well as he had hoped, though at least history remembers him as a hero. Ambiguous ending, could be either good or bad.

Ramza on the other hand, got a decidedly good end. He and his sister ride off into the sunset together and are never seen again.

I'm 99% sure it was implied somewhere that Ivalice existed prior to the spell, which just brought the two worlds together. He didn't erase him from existence. He sent him home.

it wasn't just the epilogue all throughout the game you bump into those three as various classes of undead monsters. They don't always point it out either. It was one of the earliest signs that something wasn't right about ivalice.

He is neutral meme

Ovelia dying in that scene completes the theme that she's literally just a pawn with no power at all. Yes, she's the reason that he became king, but nothing she herself ever did actually mattered, up to and including her death. She was not capable of doing anything meaningful due to the nature of her birth and the circumstances of her life.

It wasn't clear to me that she died in that scene. I don't get how Delita can still be king if she dies - she's his key to the throne after all. Also disagree with you on her dying completing her theme. If anything being trapped as a puppet Queen is much worse. It's the fate she was trying to escape.

>all the characters end up happy back in the real world.
I found myself generally agreeing with the message of accepting reality and trying to improve the situation in the real world for all the characters except for poor Doned. Marche basically tells him "Because you're a useless cripple, our mom loved you more, which is why I'm hellbent on putting you back in a wheelchair" and Doned just sort of accepts that. That never sat right with me.

Shit happens. That's what real life is. Accepting reality over another world means accepting sometimes people draw a shitty hand.

That doesn't hold water when the escape fantasy was an ACTUAL place where he wasn't a cripple.
>Suck it up, life ain't fair.
That only works if no viable alternative presents itself.

Well, he is a kid.

I have a friend who started to "talk with spirits" while drunk and so he "fixed" his issues with talking to his relatives and being more sociable.

Yeah, you can be sure I slapped him around to drink less and search for therapy for whatever the fuck he was "hearing".

>
Problem is. All of the people who got sucked into Ivalice, with the exception of the zombie bullies, saw their lives actually improved. They weren't fat neckbeards being intravenously fed while they hallucinate about fucking their waifus. They became kings and heroes, they had friends, adventures and fun. One got reunited with loved ones, other could finally walk. They had actually fulfilling lives. And for them, Ivalice was 100% real until Marche went around beating everyone with swords until they agree with him.

Question:
what if Ivalice just improved the lives of whom lived in the same city as Marche & co, not the whole Earth? Sweeping away everything we have for the happiness of just a few (and that happiness was under the mood swings of a child with parent issues) is ok?

Montblanc was clearly a fragment of his own imagination.

That's the thing about those creatures in Ivalice. They are just shadows of your own ego. That's why they will merrily help you annihilate themselves.

Considering they had personality and self-awareness I doubt they are really just some sort of servitor inherent to the system.

It got old once I played the PSP port of Tactics Ogre. Holy fuck that game is stellar

So if Montblanc is a shadow of Marche's ego and he wants to destroy himself and his world, does that mean he represents Marche's self-hatred and suicidal desires? Woah, FFTA is deep.

Wrong about that, when they take a look at the book together there's dialogue along the lines of,
"Hey what's your favourite vidja gaems?"
"Mine would be FINAL FANTASY TM"
"Yeah those are great!"

When Marche first arrives and is being debriefed by Montblanc, it asks something like
"Why did you get so freaked out by the bangaa b-bakk-kupo?"
"I'd heard of some of these things before but in my world it's a video gaem!"
Not everything is just like the games the kids have played but due to their imagination and the magic of the book it certainly instantly is apparent to any of the kids that there's major theming based on their preferred aesthetics.

It's as deep as you want to make it.
>captcha: SENSO UNICO

Didn't Mewt's Dad basically get brainwashed into being the perfect Father? Like complete with false memories and everything? I wouldn't call that an improvement, no matter how prestigious he was in that world.

If FFTA2 is anything to go by, A1 can be anything from an acid trip to alternate reality.

He taught him the most valuable lesson:
>If your happiness is dependent on conditional things (the ability to walk, your family members being alive) then your happiness is temporary and will only lead to suffering.
>Happiness is a state of mind, you can tap into it under any conditions or circumstances. Escapism just increases the inevitable suffering of the attachment to what is conditional.

Marche was right. Isekai is shit

>more than likely become subsistence farming peasant
>zero modern amenities like plumbing, electricity, internal heating, and lack of famine
>improved life

More like chaotic meme.
It has gotten out of hand.

it would of came off better if Marche had his own hardship that the fantasy world solved for him, as it is he doesn't seem to have any problems like his friends do so that quote kinda just comes off arrogant, it's easy to tell people to just be happy when your own life lacks the same kind of problems.

I feel like the story would have been stronger if Mewt had been the main character. Him tearing down his own dream world would have had more impact. Marche just didn't really have as much to lose.

So, I have ageusia. Is my happiness dependent on being able to taste stuff? A little, maybe, but not to the point where I can't live without it, especially now that I have come to terms with it. That said, would I jump at the chance to get it back *on top* of being, say, a badass pirate captain? I sure as hell would, and I'd fight tooth and nail against anyone trying to drag me back to my vastly more boring life as a carpenter that can't taste stuff.

I guess we're ignoring A2 and 12 in this scenario?

Neutral good indeed. Perhaps the best example in the thread.

This guy upholds Batman's no-kill rule better than Batman does. He'll strip and bow before an enemy if he thinks it will avoid conflict, and even in his fights he tends towards humiliating, incapacitating, and attaining victory by any means other than bodily harm. I'd almost say he's Lawful good with how much he adheres to that code, but his erratic behaviour cancels out this dedication.
L

>Doned walks
The feels
I need to complete the game now

I think the biggest barrier to completion is probably the link missions and sendoff missions.

or at least that's why I never 100% it...

Oh yea, those
>hope_shattered.gif

Not as bad as the Dispatch mechanics in A2.
>tfw only found out years later that you can only beat one of them by Dispatching, with your party lead in one specific place, and everyone you send has to have maxed out their MVP gauge (which the game never tells you what that is)

I think Advance is canonically a wierd-ass "mutual dream" thing where one of them had binge-played War of the Lions the week prior to their combined trip.

Got that right OP. 100 right.

Not that if I were in Mewt situation I wouldn`t do the same.