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So, my thoughts on FFXIII:
For all that it's focused on six people (and two living MacGuffins), the thematic scope of the story is huge in regards to those six people. There is no major character who doesn't grow up. Absolutely everybody learns something. And we get to see that growth and the gradual process.
The Lightning we leave behind at the end of the storyline is not the Lightning we met in the opening scene; nor is she the Lightning from Chapter III, Chapter V, Chapter VI... You get my drift? The same goes for Snow, for Hope, for Sazh. The Vanille of the final scene (and the Vanille who narrates throughout the game) is not the Vanille we met at the beginning, and post-story Fang is not the woman we glimpsed lounging in the beachside bar, "Looking for someone."
The characters we follow and play as are three-dimensional, while the characters we glimpse in passing cutscenes are at best mere watercolors and at worst rough sketches. And that makes sense: you're on a time crunch, you've got a ticking time bomb etched in your skin and an entire world against you; you don't have time to look for other people's hidden depths, or to display them.'
Do I like where the game left off with Fang and Vanille? In one sense, abso-fucking-lutely not. Fang and Vanille are the only two characters I loved whole-heartedly start to finish (no matter how much I wanted to shake one or the other at certain points) and they ended up trapped in crystal stasis, presumably for the rest of eternity, blah blah blah.
(I'm not entirely sure I grokked the interim cutscene between Orphan's first phase and His second. I may have missed an optional cutscene, or maybe I'm just being slow, but I totally did not follow the logic of "Okay, fine, I'll become Ragnarok and kill You," becoming "RARGH FANG SMASH VANILLE!")
On the other hand, like any good tragedy, I cannot see things ending any other way. I can say, "If only," all I want, but the truth is: for Fang and Vanille to have been the characters I came to love, they had to make the choices they made. And that includes their final choice.
For all that it's focused on six people (and two living MacGuffins), the thematic scope of the story is huge in regards to those six people. There is no major character who doesn't grow up. Absolutely everybody learns something. And we get to see that growth and the gradual process.
The Lightning we leave behind at the end of the storyline is not the Lightning we met in the opening scene; nor is she the Lightning from Chapter III, Chapter V, Chapter VI... You get my drift? The same goes for Snow, for Hope, for Sazh. The Vanille of the final scene (and the Vanille who narrates throughout the game) is not the Vanille we met at the beginning, and post-story Fang is not the woman we glimpsed lounging in the beachside bar, "Looking for someone."
The characters we follow and play as are three-dimensional, while the characters we glimpse in passing cutscenes are at best mere watercolors and at worst rough sketches. And that makes sense: you're on a time crunch, you've got a ticking time bomb etched in your skin and an entire world against you; you don't have time to look for other people's hidden depths, or to display them.'
Do I like where the game left off with Fang and Vanille? In one sense, abso-fucking-lutely not. Fang and Vanille are the only two characters I loved whole-heartedly start to finish (no matter how much I wanted to shake one or the other at certain points) and they ended up trapped in crystal stasis, presumably for the rest of eternity, blah blah blah.
(I'm not entirely sure I grokked the interim cutscene between Orphan's first phase and His second. I may have missed an optional cutscene, or maybe I'm just being slow, but I totally did not follow the logic of "Okay, fine, I'll become Ragnarok and kill You," becoming "RARGH FANG SMASH VANILLE!")
On the other hand, like any good tragedy, I cannot see things ending any other way. I can say, "If only," all I want, but the truth is: for Fang and Vanille to have been the characters I came to love, they had to make the choices they made. And that includes their final choice.