Not sure if I buy Meeple's hype. I'm willing to believe that FF5 was meant to be somewhat comedic, yes. I'm not willing to believe it actually *succeeded* at doing comedy at all well. The scenes and elements don't really seem to be there to make that work.
Final Fantasy 5
Butz/Bartz - 2/10. Utterly, utterly generic hero. Like, THE archetype. Do-gooder wanderer with no particular plot aside from his dad was an adventurer, turns out he can save the world due to the crystals dad was awesome blah blah still has no discernible personality or anything.
Lenna/Reina - 2/10. SHE LIKES ANIMALS. To the point of suicidal craziness. But it works anyway and helps her get summon beasts on her side or something. If I felt the plot dealt with the weight of how weird / nutty she is and addressed this, I'd give it more credit, but as is it just feels lazy. Also the Tycoon Castle King plot was stupid.
Faris - 3/10. Okay cross-dressing pirate is slightly more interesting, but she never really does much with it.
Galuf - 5/10. Doesn't fail! The (admittedly contrived) scene where his lack of memories about Cara enables him to save the party is neat, amnesia is cliche but hey he was trying to help, and the "Galuf fights Exdeath" thing is reasonably badass for the time period.
Cara/Krile - 4/10. Doesn't fail as much as the cast, and I seem to recall her lines being moderately competent, but doesn't do anything either.
Kelgar (Warrior of Dawn, the Werewolf) - DNR
Xezat (Warrior of Dawn, the guy with the submarine) - DNR
Cid - DNR
Mid -DNR
King Tycoon - 2/10. His plot was stupid, as was him randomly mattering in the endgame too.
Ghido/Gill/Guido (the Turtle) - DNR
Boco/Boko - DNR, but has an excuse for lack of lines / plot!
Exdeath - 3/10 Exdeath is one of the worst villains in the series, really. His "use-the-power-of-the-void to do evil stuff" plot is lame, cliche, and unexplained. He gets credit for one thing and one thing only: he's a decent presence villain. I'm willing to respect that he gets in your face and messes with your plans and zaps towns into the Void etc. and makes you fear him.
Gilgamesh - 4/10. Amusing, but cool battle music only goes so far.
Xenogears
Fei - 7/10. Fei's wuss phase is frustrating, but characters do sort of call him out on it, so I'm not going to dock points. I'm willing to accept destined romance but they could have sold Fei / Elly's dialogue a little better. And I liked the plot arc with the murders by (Id? Redrum?) in the sewers as an Id thing. Generally like the Coward/ Id / Fei psychodrama as well. A lot of the gear comments - say, from Id - don't come off nearly as badass to me as the game thinks they are, but oh well.
Elly - 7/10. Sure Elly worked. I liked the Drive plotline and the Solaris plotline, though her writing was too blah. Elly-the-savior in Disc 2 was more meh. (SIDE RANT: 90% of the population dies off-handedly due to mutating and turning into Wels or something as a side plotline, yet nobody with a name dies, as they all had a bit of Adam's blood or something. If they wanted us to care about this plotline and treat it with the gravity that we should for mass world plague death, they needed to kill someone we knew / was important - say Rico or something. Not just have nameless people drinking Elly's blood. Sigh.)
Citan - 9/10. The man. Seriously this character archetype is inherently cool and -they pull it off- here, as it's easy to screw this kind of character up. Cool backstory, he acts intelligently, they don't do a cliched "and then Citan figured out Solaris was wrong and betrayed his home!" deal, respects his opponents, etc. Manages Fei pretty well, too.
Bart - 6/10. Bart was good, sure. Kinda ceased to exist in parts of the plot but was a nice contrast to Fei. Game is rather blase about the whole "oh and by the way Aveh is now a democracy I resign" part but eh.
Rico - 4/10. Existed. I liked the Kislev plot arc but not really for Rico's role in it. Ceases to exist afterward.
Billy - 5/10. Meh. "Priest with gunz" is passably cool but his plot arcs weren't the game's strongest.
Maria - 6/10. I liked her plot, actually. Kind of a pleasant surprise that she's a PC, as she's not in the instruction manual.
Chu-Chu - 2/10. One of the lamer mascot characters ever. Allegedly according to backstory hype she's one of the planet's native inhabitants before Deus and Adam but the game goes into this like not at all.
Emeralda - 5/10. Uh her plot was an interesting side note that helped drive in the many-lives-of-Fei angle, and Id's "You have something that's mine" quote was one of his best ones as far as I'm concerned. That said Emeralda herself doesn't really exist, even if the colony-of-nanomachines thing was cool.
Margie - 5/10. Okay.
Big Joe - DNR. Random dude. What the heck is he doing selling GRNS50s or whatever the super engine was, though?!
Dan - 6/10 Nice low-powered antagonist, I approve.
Hammer - 7/10 Nice pathetic antagonist, I approve.
Jesiah Black - 3/10. The weakest of the original elements by a lot. Dark Holy Elf argues that the Jessie Cannon plot deal was intentionally satire or something, but regardless it comes off as serious-yet-really-stupid. Otherwise, uh, he knows Stone is evil but didn't communicate this to Billy before. Bah.
Sigurd - 6/10. I like Sigurd & Citan's rapport, though his Bart plot is more one-dimensional.
Man, Xenogears has one of the best villain casts of all times. A nice combination of pathetic / cool / sympathetic / nutso people, and they're all at each other's throats as well as the party's. It works.
Dominia - 7/10. Id gives lots of people great excuses to hate Fei.
Kelvena , Tolone , Seraphita - 4/10. Existed. Worked as names to fight but didn't really have plot.
Emperor Cain - 8/10. Been said. Works out very nicely.
Ramsus - 9.5/10. I hand out 10s very rarely, but Ramsus tempts me. Possibly the best excuse to hate Fei ever, and his personality and drive fits - the fact that he reclaimed purpose after being discarded was inspiring enough. Just happened to also have the goal of wiping out Fei since he's literally the reason he won't find true happiness. Great villain.
Grahf - 8/10. Presence points (fighting Gears on foot!), cool idea for a villain regardless, nice music. His plot got a little too complicated and tripped over itself with the Fei's father/ Wiseman parts, and he has some motivation questions similar to Krelian, but worked.
Miang - 8/10. Another effective manipulator villain. I felt the "can command and possess all women" power to be a bit over the top, since it kind of overwhelmed any other need for sneakiness, but it worked out, and tied nicely into the Fei's mother backstory bit.
Krelian - 6/10. Krelian's okay, and excellent as scary opposition, but he never entirely clicked for me. Krelian is a cool customer who's read the script and seems to plan ahead for everything - including the last part of the game with releasing the Wave Existence. This is hard to believe, but sure, whatever, calculating supergenius with 500 years experience. He's also an incredible scientist who's done crazy stuff with nanomachines. Fine. However, what's his motive? After Sophia dies, he decides that therefore there must be no God, so he needs to go create one. And the entire 500 years of plotting is basically all about exorcising his demons from one woman. This is... fine, not implausible, it's a grand operatic motivation, but it's very clearly an emotional one. Not in any way rational. How does this get reconciled? I'm willing to believe calculating, logical scientists will do things for crazy passionate reasons, but again, I'd like to see this character issue addressed more. Xenogears is a long game so perhaps they just didn't have time, as maybe they could have sold it, but it didn't really click for me.
