"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

I-...could they!?

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you! You're just rocking my world by the mere suggestion!

My nine year old self's head would've exploded at a character as awesome as Kainbez.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

NO NO NO NO NO NO.

NO.

NO NO NO.

I just think that even if you cut out a bunch of stuff and characters, in a two-hour movie even the bare-minimal "Now we have to go Underground??? OMG Dwarfs!! Their Brothers??? We're going to the fucking MOON?!?!" would be a bit much.

Also:

You could have Kain be the one behind the bad guys the whole time. He could even still be Cecil's brother, but Cecil never knew about it. All those times Kain "disappears", he's off being a secret villain, instead of showing up as a mind-enslaved dupe.

You could even say that it was Zemus manipulating Kain through his love for Rosa. And because he's cranky due to his chafed ballsack.

EDIT: Brick, are you saying Shia LaBouf as Kainbez?

You're kidding yourself if you think they'd do the Underworld Plot. I was actually gonna make a list of things/characters/plotlines that could be cut for a Hollywood movie, but then I realized I wouldn't want to spoil this obscure game that not many of you have played.

Something else horrifying for the drawing request thread.

Guys, this is all fine and good, but you do know that this is just a hair shy of fanfiction, don't you?

you don't want to talk about ffiv fanfiction do you

One to be born from a furry dickgirl...

I sent you those drafts in confidence, Brick.

No, I don't think we need to talk about The After Years.

The underworld plot was needless in the GAME, let alone in a cut-down adaptation.

But the big problem is the four-crystal structure. There's a reason most movie quests involve looking for three things -any more than that and you lose the audience.

FFIV also lacks a lot of the in-between moments that help you flesh out a screenplay. Without the random battles, you'd be lurching from boss fight to heroic sacrifice to boss fight over and over with little in between. The best, most movie-like bits (the Cecil / Rosa scene, the Red Wings sequence) are all front-loaded, and wouldn't be anything special in an actual movie.

NO NO NO NO NO.

NO NO etc.

Yup. Hell, I had played Wing Commander long before FFII. A bunch of goofball characters speaking bad dialogue didn't really leave much of an impression after that one.

(To be fair, the contemporaries of FFII were more like Fate of Atlantis and Monkey Island II rather than KQ6 and Sam and Max.)

Heck, FFIV involves eighteen Crystals, all told.

Not that the heroes have to go and get them all—the only ones actively disputed in the story are, what, two topside and one underground?

Wow, Kishi's count is remarkably accurate.

On the other hand, he's Kishi.

Not to get too far ahead of the story, but i did always find it interesting how the role of the Crystals evolve over the course of the story. You go from agonizing over them one at a time to looking for a cluster of them underground to finding another whole freaking set all at once on the moon without much fanfare.

Well, it is Super Final Fantasy. They had to go big to beat the last NES outing!

I'm so glad they avoided that temptation.

Of course, today it would be called something like "Final Fantasy: Super Neat Exploration Story"

I don't have a Twitter account. Somebody tweet this question to Mistwalker. You'll have the answer, in English and in one day, from the man who wrote both characters.

On the other hand, you still won't have the answer from the people responsible for most of the remakes.

(If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that since Sakaguchi made Spirits Within a reasonably consise (albeit boring) movie, he'd have merged Kain and Golbez himself if making a FF4 movie. I agree with Adam's plot compression.)

Well, yes, but that type of offscreen action may be worse.

On the list of filmable RPGs, FFIV wouldn't be very high. Then again, even if streamlined plot like Chrono Trigger would call for characters to be jettisoned (I'd dump Ayla and Robo right off the bat, and maybe even Frog unless you were splitting the story into two parts, with the confrontation with Magus capping Part One.)

Hmmm I don't know, Robo seems like he'd be good for merchandising. The story would probably have to be reworked to make Crono's sacrifice kill Lavos, and then tack on the doll thing as the ending.

Interesting omission! At least maybe could the Dwarves pop their heads out to help defend Eblan and repel the Giant of Bab-il? Speaking of which, would it make sense to merge the towers of Zot and Bab-il and only have the heroes go there once? Where would Monster Town go? Only a flashback?

Even though a lot of what happens underground could be considered plot padding, it's still a bunch of cool locations, characters and events. Many people's favorite part of Fellowship of the Ring was Moria. And part of Avatar's appeal was that Jake got to study the Na'vi from many different perspectives. Turnip, I want to see your list of omissions, even if you have to bleep them all.

As for Kain, after he lands from a jump he could say that he dreams of flying even higher than his legs and wings can carry him, forshadowing his departure from the Earth.Making Kain the one who leaves has the added benefit of invalidating most of the plot of After Years!

I went and checked, and yeah, it's an extremely active feed. The quality of the responses seems to indicate that they're not exactly cherry-picking the best questions, either.

But I didn't ask.

And then the twist at the end is that Kain/Golbez is also Cecil!

Donald Kaufman would direct.

- Eddie

Actually, it would be Super Fantasy Chronicle, and most Americans would never realize the initials were meant to echo something.

"Mom says it's psychologically taut."

Put it like this:

If Hollywood made a FF4 movie, would it be OK if they merged Kain and Golbez into one character to save time?

That's one tweet, but if you're asking a Japanese person a touchy question like this, are you supposed to beat around the bush first?

I would phrase it "Hypothetical: You're making a FFIV movie adaptation. Would you merge any characters?"

Well, this is it, the LP that finally got me to stop lurking and sign up. I love your work Brick, and can't wait to see what comes of this.

Now, if FF2e/4 were to ever get made into something multimedia, my first suggestion would be graphic novel, where you would start to make story elements just a little more concise. From there, it could be handled a number of different ways, depending on who you wanted to market the story to. If it's for kids, keeping everything light-hearted and bright and colorful with just a hint of impending doom, you make it into a half-hour cartoon with between 39 and 52 episodes and sell it to NickToons. It would do well in filling the gap left behind by Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you wanted to throw a lot more money at it and make it more dark and edgy, you can go live-action, 13 hour long episodes and put it on SyFy. That way you can get a bunch of no-name actors, probably Canadian like they did with StarGate SG-1, to keep the costs down, with no more than two of the more temporary characters played by renowned actors to generate non-fan interest. Either format would be satisfactory to handle all the plot twists and heroic sacrifices.

Now I'm very interested in playing through this game again, not just because the LP has made me interested in a nostalgic game (I play through this once every couple years in some format) but because I would be interested in seeing where "chapter breaks" would be if it was episodic. Looking forward to it!

This summer, Christopher Lee is Fosuya.