Final Fantasy formula

Would you like to write your own Final Fantasy game? No sweat! Just follow these guidelines.

• Make a main male character that is good looking, gets chicks by being the strong, silent type. He has to be a loner who actually does care for people. Also, he has to be someone that can whoop ass.
• Make a love interest for him that cares for him and is concerned with his personality flaws but still loves him for what he is inside.
• Then make a mechanic named Cid.
• Always have a comic relief character that does stupid things like talk funny, walks funny, or looks funny.
• Make a single enemy that is out to destroy the world for no apparent reason. He/She must be able to change form so that in the end, after you defeat this person, they come back in a new stronger, more uglier form!
• Make the plot so that the world gets almost destroyed!
• Put in plot twists but make sure that they are really cliched!
• Put in an airship that sort of works at first so that you can go some places only. Then later, it goes everywhere!
• Three words. Chocobos chocobos chocobos!

With these guidelines, you can write your own Final Fantasy game before Squaresoft does!

Imagine what would happen if a Final Fantasy game came out that seemed to follow the formula but with one crucial detail changed: Instead of a single person attempting to destroy the world there is a small group of people trying to destroy the world and you control them!

Sure, the game starts innocently enough. Almost like in the original Final Fantasy your first job is to take a little band of heroes and defeat some big boss within the initial half hour of game play.

Unlike other FF games, after the aforementioned villain is brought low by your repeated tapping of the 'A' button there's the little matter of the politics surrounding him. Perhaps there is a dispute over land that this dude confiscated from one group and gave to another diametrically opposed group many years ago. Lord Badguy's iron fist used to keep everyone in check but now that he's dead it's up to your stalwart band of heroes to do the right thing.

And so it goes. Perhaps this initial difficulty is seemingly resolved but one thing leads to another and it isn't long before the game slowly begins to present things in such a light as to make palatable (to the player) the distasteful, the uncomfortable and (towards the end) the unthinkable. At the same time the characters' motives are ever so gradually twisted to allow them to make the worst possible ethical decisions while at the same time making the typical munchkin player feel almost good about it -- perhaps even smug. As with every FF character the individuals in this group start out with the best intentions. Unlike every FF character they are slowly driven by circumstances and their own weaknesses to become as evil and insane as every villain in every FF game ever. Think of it as a subtle "reverse Ultima IV".

As with every Final Fantasy game, the crowning moment is the final battle between good and evil. Too bad your characters -- despite being total bad asses by this time -- are rotten to the core and desperately in need of some knight in shining armor to come and put them out of their (and the rest of the world's) misery. The wise player will probably see this coming, but (if done correctly) most won't get it until their last character has coughed out his last cursed breath and the final cut scene is unreeled.