5 World-building Issues That Ruined Final Fantasy XV For Me

I've been a fan of the Final Fantasy series for years and played most of the games (I gave up on the abysmally boring FFXIII though), my favourites multiple times. FFXV is deeply flawed; I could talk about the nonsensical bachelors-on-a-roadtrip plot or the flat main characters, but the thing that ruins the game for me is the sloppy world-building. Ten years, and this is what they came up with? Really? REALLY?

So here's my list. This, dear writer pals, is an example of what NOT to do.

1) Good world-building gives your fantasy world a sense of believability, of cohesion. If you decide to set your game in a '50s Americana environment, you have to go all the way. You just can't have the gas stations selling potions, phoenix downs, and elixirs and the people wearing armour and using swords and other medieval weapons. In my opinion, the real world doesn't belong in Final Fantasy. It's a fantasy world, that's part of the charm. This kind of thing seriously strains the player's suspension of disbelief.

2) Product placement. You can't convince me that a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress belongs in a Final Fantasy game environment where people are hunting monsters and riding chocobos. You just can't.

3) The stereotypical and unfunny dialogue. The minor characters speak in an exaggerated southern accent and in 90 percent clichés. It's bordering on offensive. If writing a setting which comes with a specific dialect, do your research and find a beta reader who can help you with the dialect/slang.

4) Know your target audience. Fans of Final Fantasy have been pretty happy with the steampunk/medieval aesthetic. Sometimes a departure from the familiar is needed, but if the result is something so different that it's no longer recognisable as part of the franchise, you should probably rethink what you're doing.

5) Welcome to 2017. I know the game has been in the works for ten years, but the world has changed since then. The previous FF games certainly don't lack pretty girls in skimpy clothing, but usually the female characters have had some kind of agency and interesting backstories. You really cared about them. Now, for some reason, the developers decided to have four male main characters who are almost indistinguishable from each other ("likes to cook" isn't a defining character trait, guys, but more of a quirk.). The only women we are introduced to in the first hours of the game are Noctis' fiancé, who seems pretty passive, and Cindy the sexy mechanic, whose only real reason for existing seems to be flashing her cleavage at the boys while she gasses up the car and wipes the windshield. You need to do better.

So that's my list. What did you think of the game?
  

Science Fiction Classics: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

Image from wikipedia

I've been catching up on science fiction and fantasy classics I somehow missed along the years and recently finished Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. I was looking forward to the book, because I've read a lot of Le Guin's fantasy novels and loved them (the Earthsea series is one of my all-time favourites), but for some reason I had a hard time with this one.

(Oh, and there will be spoilers, so read on at your own risk.)

Don't get me wrong: this is a great novel. The world-building is inspired, the characters well crafted, and the prose beautiful.  I think the problem for me was the very slow pace at the start. The book explores the efforts of Genly Ai, a Terran man and emissary, to convince the people of Gethen to join the Ekumen, a kind of coalition of planets. The other POV character, Estraven, is a Gethenian who gets exiled for helping Genly. The first half of the novel felt like being a tourist on Gethen (Winter), and I kept reading for the world-building, but the book didn't really grab me until the part where Genly gets captured and locked up in a labor camp, Estraven saves him, and they cross the glacier to safety. The political stuff and the folk-tale type interludes just didn't interest me enough, I guess.

Reading as a writer, this was worth it for the world-building alone. I loved details like how the people on Gethen have little ice picks at the dinner table to break the ice that forms on the water glasses between drinks, and how the houses are built with snow in mind with doors up high. I also have to mention the ansible, the device Genly uses to communicate instantaneous with the other planets in the Ekumen. This is of course a familiar technology in many science fiction books, but Le Guin invented it. The untranslatable concept of shiftgrethor (it has to do with saving face and giving advice and Gethenian social interaction) was interesting, too. The neologisms were quite plentiful, and they made the book heavy going at times, but I've read enough fantasy that it they didn't bother me that much.

 If you know anything about the book, you probably know that it explores sexuality and its effect on society. The people of winter are in a neuter phase most of the time, and only become male or female while in kemmer, when some of them are triggered to become male and some female (and the same individual can become male at one time and female at another), but mostly sexual differences don't play a role in society or affect decision-making. I found the concept interesting, and the speculation on how something like this would affect the society was fascinating. For example, Gethen hadn't had any major wars. Coincidence?

Le Guin is also very good at getting into her characters' heads. As this is something I struggle with at times, especially in third person POV, the book was a good way to study how a pro does it.

The prose is also worth studying. It's effortless, with unique metaphors and a great flow to it. Never overwhelming the narrative, it's the kind of writing that makes you forget you're reading a story and leaves you free to live it.

Absolutely a novel worth reading.

So, what do you think?  In my opinion, the best books make the reader think, but let her to enjoy the story, too. That's a tough balancing act. Have you read The Left Hand of Darkness? Did you find it entertaining, or more of an intellectual exercise?