Final Fantasy and D&D

 As a kid born in the mid-80s, and thus who mostly remembers a childhood in the 90s, I came to RPGs from a different direction than the Gen-Xers who were 5-10 years older than me. While I played plenty of Magic: the Gathering as a kid, D&D was nowhere to be found, and while the Satanic Panic of the 80s had mostly faded by then (I think the edginess of the 90s was a reaction to it, actually) D&D as a brand wasn't quite as big around people I knew. But video games had become a huge thing, and one of the biggest franchises to arise was Final Fantasy.

Actually, to be more precise, we should broaden the discussion: Final Fantasy as a series had first come to the US on the NES, but it was in the early-to-mid-90s that Squaresoft (which had not yet merged with Enix - though the latter was also releasing games like the Legend of Gaia) had a series of massive hits in the SNES era - Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI (released in the US as III, as not all of the FF titles had made it to the States, and at that time, they were trying to keep from confusing American audiences. The release of VII would end this discrepancy.)

JRPGs have a different general vibe from Western RPGs - the latter is generally built upon the notion that the player creates a character, choosing a race and a class, building out their skills and such, and thus being able to choose the style of gameplay. (Note that these definitions are neither universal nor bound by geography - FromSoft's Souls series mostly conforms to a western action-RPG formula.)

JRPGs like Final Fantasy and its ilk are more about the player experiencing a story that is predetermined. The characters are not created by the player, but are crafted by the game's writers. There's a trade-off here, namely that the player has less autonomy to direct the story, but also, the story tends to be better-crafted around the characters. One of the challenges of building a WRPG as a computer game is that you can't really make things specific to the player character, as that character could be anything from a righteous paladin to a spooky warlock to a tranquil monk - and  you need a story that works for any combination thereof. The JRPG model, however, can be sure that certain events will have an impact on the player character, as you know who that character is as you're designing the adventure.

In this regard, I think that a tabletop RPG has a big advantage that allows them to get the best of both worlds, but it's one that requires a degree of patience and restraint on the part of the Game Master.

RPG Modules, most famous of which being D&D's (I'm going to primarily talk D&D here, to be clear,) are a good model for new dungeon masters to think about how they design a campaign. But they do have the same disadvantage that computerized WRPGs have - because your players are crafting their own, unique characters, which the writer of a module cannot predict (given that every game will be different,) you can't really design the module around those characters.

Curse of Strahd, for example, which is probably the most popular 5th Edition module/published adventure, obviously doesn't have any subplot based around my paladin's quest to discover why a massive demon that killed her angelic guide spared her life when she was a child.

Now, a clever DM with a lot of time on their hands can alter a module - adding in subplots and such - but they've either got to tack on player-specific elements or totally rework the adventure, at which point it might be easier to just make up a whole new adventure.

When I started the campaign I'm currently running, my thought was to make it a quick and easy game to drop in and out of, but that was very limiting on storytelling, and so I've made it a bit more traditional as a campaign. The problem is that I've then had to retroactively shove character-specific stuff into the game, and I have players who went more high-concept with their characters than giving them each fleshed-out goals and objectives.

I really like running my current campaign, don't get me wrong (and I find myself worrying for the party given the fights they're going to encounter tonight!) But I do really want to try, for my next campaign, to build things around the players.

Consider, for example, Final Fantasy X's plot - the entire thing is a pilgrimage to bring Yuna, the current generation's summoner, to defeat Sin (even if that kind of breaks down once they figure out the whole story,) and we can see how Tidus and Auron are also inextricably linked to the whole problem with Sin and the monsters who refuse to pass onto the afterlife. Or think about how Cloud and Aerith are tied to Sephiroth and the whole conflict between the planet's lifestream and the alien menace of Jenova.

But even beyond master plots, I'd hope to build the major chapters around the characters. For example, if a player wants to play some kind of Solomon Kane-style monster hunter, I'd make sure we had some major element of the plot involving gothic monsters for them to fight.

For an example of this sort of campaign, I highly recommend checking out Critical Role's second campaign. The first campaign tied some of the characters' backstories into the main plot - such as how Grog's evil uncle was in league with the Chroma Conclave, or how Vax and Vex's mother was killed by Thordak - there was still mostly a sense of "these are the world's heroes, and thus they're the ones best suited to face down the apocalytpic threat." In campaign two, however, the campaign has been mostly built around dealing with individual characters' arcs. Indeed, (spoilers ahead!) the current arc has the most threatening possibly-villain as a former party member who died, and was raised from the dead, once again, though this time with his memories seemingly intact (it's a huge open question if the likable hero he was when he was a player character is still in there, somewhere.)

Now, there is a danger that by jumping between characters' individual stories, the campaign might lack a certain focus. So my intention when I start my next campaign is to really work with players before we sit down for the first session and make sure that there's some connection to the main plot for all of them.

Going back to CR's first campaign, I think the Briarwoods are a great model for this: the Briarwoods were personal antagonists for one of the player characters, a power-couple that turned out to be a vampire and a necromancer who killed his family and took over his noble family's home. However, while the quest to find them and kill them provided one of the best early arcs of the series, we later found out that they were in league with Vecna, the big bad of the entire campaign (essentially, the Chroma Conclave, an alliance of five chromatic dragons, were the big bads for the middle of it, while Vecna became the major threat at the end.)

I think making a player character's nemesis into the big bad's henchman is a good way for the player to have some ownership over a story before that story expands to encompass the whole party.

Now, story-structure is just one of many things I like to take from Square.

Another major thing I love is their anachronistic style. I know some fantasy fans really like a gritty, "realistic" medieval setting - something that Game of Thrones got a lot of praise for. And while I think there's a place for that, I've always been enthralled by the notion of fantasy allowing things like knights in armor to fight giant robots, which is something that Final Fantasy embraces. (I have to give credit to the Dark Tower series by Stephen King as another big influence in this regard, which I picked up my senior year of high school, finishing it when the last book came out my freshman year of college.)

It's for that reason that my homebrew setting has a long-lost, technologically-advanced civilization. Sure, the Forgotten Realms has Nehtheril, which sort of fits that, but I've leaned heavily on the fact that it's not just advanced magic, but truly modern and futuristic technology that the ancient civilization possessed. This comes very strongly from Secret of Mana, but also has antecedents in Zanarkand from FFX and Zeal from Chrono Trigger.

It's FFVII that has really compelled me to allow that modern/futuristic technology to not only be limited to the ancient, lost civilization, but also let it be found in the "modern" setting as well. (My next campaign might push for that, maybe stepping ahead a few decades to allow the infrastructure for such a thing to grow.)

While I don't know that the series is quite as popular as it was in the 90s, I think it's hard to discount Final Fantasy as one of the most important RPG series in the genre's history. I'm going to keep a close eye on XVI, because VII Remake has really reignited my appreciation for this series.