Prequels

"I will try to find my place, in the diary of Jane..."-Breaking Benjamin, Diary of Jane

So. As we speak I have just finished ditching a lecture in order to finish playing through Crisis Core (relax kids, I'm dropping the class anyway). And aside from obligatory zomgwtfamazing fanboy comments I could be making, I realized something very interesting about the way Tetsuya Nomura and crew handled the making of the game.

For those who don't know, it's a prequel to Final Fantasy VII---one of the most popular and beloved RPGs of all time. It's a bit like Star Wars, except for RPGs. It revolutionized the genre and some people are very, very, obsessively dedicated to it. So Nomura et al had to handle it very carefully to avoid stepping on people's toes.

In my opinion, they did a marvelous job of it, in no small part because they left out most of what had occurred in the original game.

For those unfamiliar with FFVII, one of its themes is memory, so there are a lot of flashbacks regarding the protagonist. A significant portion of Crisis Core takes place during the same timeframe as those flashback scenes, and the main protagonist from FFVII actually has one of the bigger minor roles in Crisis Core. So there was significant potential to rehash a lot of the flashback scenes from FFVII.

I was actually looking forward to these, as those scenes and that particular subplot of the game are some of my favorite parts of it. I was surprised, therefore, when Crisis Core left most of those scenes out. Its narrative simply skipped over them---I knew they were there, I knew what happened, but as they weren't important to the narrative of Crisis Core itself, they didn't wind up in the game. At first I was a bit disappointed, but after some reflection I think it was a brilliant move.

It made Crisis Core much more of its own game, and kept the focus on its main character, rather than FFVII's. Rather than the game just being an excuse to relive some of my favorite moments from FFVII, it was a whole new story that didn't really plug into the FFVII story (not in the way I expected, anyway) until its last scene.

I will be remembering this someday, when I write my own prequels, and I think it's good advice for anyone else who plans to as well.

...more tomorrow on another lesson I learned from the game, the use of soundtracks to build characters, and how I think that can be used now in writing, and how I think it will start to be used in the next 10 years or so.