So here's what happened: I accidentally misread one of Square Enix's androgynous characters and inadvertently transformed Front Mission DS's story from trite to utterly fascinating.
Some back story. I have two handles I like to use in games. For male characters I use Flynn, after Jeff Bridges from Tron. For the ladies I use Tura, after the awesomely bad-ass actress from Russ Meyers' Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! So when Front Mission's story kicks in the only cues I've had re: the sexuality of the lead character, Royd (totally missed hint, right?), was the image you see above, which I read as a kinda butchy girl. So sue her, she likes her hair short. Tura it is. It soon realized I'd misread the character when I learned that he/she was engaged to another Wanzer pilot, Karen, who had gone missing after failed mission. Oops.
At this point there was nothing I could do. Tura would be Tura for the rest of the game. Then things started getting interesting. New female pilots joined my gang of mercenaries the Canyon Crows. And I was starting to detect a hint of jealousy, or unrequited love, for Tura as she led the rag-tag band on a hunt for Karen. The flaxen-haired Natalie seemed to fawn over Tura at every turn. The mysterious Meihua, with her ivory skin and China doll eyes, was obviously infatuated with her de facto leader.
And when a surly veteran in a dive bar called Tura "boy" the implication was crystal clear. The jerk was calling out Tura's sexuality. The dig bore a little extra sting. Tura's mission wasn't simply a quest to re-unite with her love. No, she was going to sing her sexuality to the whole of Huffman. And she'd ram her message home with a F-2 Tonfa is she had to. Dismantling these backwards yahoos one mech at a time suddenly became a lot more fun.
I've never really jived with Square Enix's storytelling style. Their whole world-is-gonna-end-because-of-some-crazy-fascist-Darth-Vader-guy-with-a-crystal motif leaves me a little cold. But I think my inadvertent sex change was exactly what this game needed. It could be that all Final Fantasy games would benefit from selective gender bending. Maybe I'm finally beginning to understand this whole yaoi thing.
3 comments:
Oh wait! FFVII had the 'manly gym' and Cloud dressing up like a girl.
There are instances, but they've never had the guts to throw it in as an honest-to-God plot point. And, I'm pretty sure their gender bending is a result of a sort of naivety in their character designers.
Amusing, but I'm not sure if it's meaningful to talk about a "Square Enix storytelling style" in regards to the early Front Mission games whose creators were independent at the time. (they were eventually absorbed into Square sometime in the late 90s)
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