Who is the Hero of Final Fantasy VI? Using Natural Language Processing to Answer the Oft-Debated Question
Final Fantasy VI was the video game that made me fall in love with video games. The 1994 Super Nintendo classic, developed and published by Squaresoft, had everything a fledgling gamer could want: a large cast of well-realized characters, a compelling blend of backstory and action, and an exhilarating narrative that felt so expansive that to this day I’m still shocked a completionist playthrough is “only” 40 hours.
I wasn’t the only one of my friends to play through the game. And, as 10-year-olds are apt to do, we often fought over silly details about the game that the advent of the internet a few years later would answer concretely. (Sa-bin vs. Suh-been was the 1994 equivalent of Her-my-o-nee vs. Her-me-own. Turns up I was wrong. Sorry, Jason.)
There was one question that there has never been a clear answer to:
Who is the main character?
To be clear, there is a reason why this particular question is so perplexing to me. First of all, the vast majority of Final Fantasy games have an obvious hero. Firion, Cecil, Bartz, Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Tidus, Lightning, and Noctis are undoubtedly the stars of their respective shows. However, Final Fantasy VI is one of just two mainline games — the other being Final Fantasy XII — that do not have a clear protagonist.
Ultimately, you see people end up in 4 different camps:
- Terra is the hero. Your journey in the World of Balance starts with her. She goes from being a brainwashed slave to a woman capable of love. She loses her father figure. She is the last character you see in the finale. She is the character chosen by the publisher to represent her game in the series. This all ignores the fact, however, that you can technically beat the final boss without having re-recruited Terra.
- Celes is the hero. Your journey in the World of Ruin starts with her. She goes from being a brainwashed slave to a woman capable of love. She loses her father figure. She is one of only 4 required characters to beat the game. However, Celes gets absolutely no love, whatsoever, from the publisher.
- Both women are the heroes. The fact their journies mirror each other is critical to understanding this. Both are driven by a pursuit of love and a desire to understand themselves both better. This argument is a loose form of feminism that fails of Bechdel Test from the jump, which brings me to…
- Locke is the hero. He plays a critical role in helping both Terra and Celes escape the Empire. He helps both of them on their quest to better themselves. Also, he’s a man ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Sorry, I just don’t agree he should be considered, but he’s worth noting, so…)
I don’t give you a history lesson just because I have written 20-page essays about race, gender, and sexual orientation in Final Fantasy games. I share it to get you as hyped as I am, because, after 27 long years, I’m going to finally answer the last thing I don’t know about this game: who is the main character?
Methodology
I started by pulling the script of the game from the Fandom.com Final Fantasy Wiki. They had already split the game into logical story segments, so I used their framework to create the rows of my dataset. I then added the chapter (World of Balance/Wolrd of Ruin),
I then used TokTokTokenizer() from the NLTK library, the stopwords list from SpaCy, and a custom-created function to expand contractions, clean punctuation, lemmatize text and remove stopwords. If you don’t know what lemmatization or stopwords are, you are not alone.
If you ever studied a foreign language, you intuitively understand much of lemmatization. For example, bailar is Spanish for “to dance.” I can still chant in my head “bailo, bailas, baila, bailamos, bailáis, bailan,” which are all present tense forms of “to dance.” I could repeat the process for preterite, imperfect, conditional, future tense… present subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive… you get the point. There are a lot of forms of bailar, but at the end of the day, they are all still bailar. Lemmatization seeks to change those different forms back to their root form. Knowing that, it may be obvious why lemmatization was critical. After all, in a story that navigates what it means “to be” and “to love,” those verb forms needed to come together to ensure accurate results.
Stopwords are a little bit more straightforward. Language has a lot of words that serve as connectors or bridges for ideas. In the sentence that you just read, how many words could you remove and not miss a single nuance. What if I asked you to remove only words that didn’t add value? You might come up with something like, “Language has words serve connectors bridges ideas.” However, you don’t have a way to know if you’ve trimmed the appropriate words. Stopwords are basically words that, statistically, are highly unlikely to impact the results of a language experiment.
While neither one of those explanations are perfect, my hope is that if you didn’t understand before, that at the very least, the image will make just a bit more sense:
While the script may look like word salad, these component pieces of language will allow us to perform a more meaningful analysis.
Results
Exploratory Data Analysis
The very first thing I wanted to know is, how often is each character explicitly mentioned in the script of Final Fantasy VI. The results were… not quite what I expected:
- Locke: 223
- Terra: 187
- Celes: 156
- Edgar: 128
- Sabin: 120
- Cyan: 119
- Setzer: 74
- Strago: 70
- Relm: 58
- Gau: 41
- Shadow: 34
- Mog [Semi-Hidden Character]: 8
- Umaro [Hidden Character]: 2
- Gogo [Hidden Character]:1
Locke is mentioned substantially more times than either Terra (+19.2%) or Celes (+42.9%). Locke is mentioned more than Strago, Relm, Gau, Shadow, Mog, Umaro, and Gogo combined. He was just 25 appearances short of matching the combined might of Figaro twins Edgar & Sabin.
Things get a little bit more interesting when you change this view to a word cloud and break out each scene.
A few notable callouts:
- Edgar is mentioned more often than Terra in Terra’s Scenario. She doesn’t even get her own scenario!
- Locke is the star of the Battle for Narshe, despite being the first time the whole party has been in the same place at the same time.
- Throughout the entire period of trying to save Terra after she transforms into an Esper, she is rarely mentioned.
- At the Imperial Banquet towards the midpoint of the game, Locke is more prevalent than both Terra and Celes, who ostensibly should have been the focal points of this scene given their past with the Empire.
- Neither Terra nor Locke are required party members in the second half of the game, and both require a heartier party, meaning they do not show up as often in the World of Ruin
- Terra and Celes are the stars of the finale.
Sentiment Analysis
I decided something that might be interesting would be to take a look at the sentiment analysis. I decided to take the same approach as the word clouds, breaking them up by scenes. I decided to divide each scene into 10 components, and then graph them changes over time, along with an average indicator.
Here, we see that on the whole, the game tends to skew fairly positively. That said, it is worth noting the scenes that skew noticeably negative:
- Magitek Research Facility: Learning About Terra’s and Celes’ past
- Cave to the Sealed Gate: Terra reaching out to her people for the first time
- Floating Continent: The end of the world
- Figaro Castle (World of Ruin): This is a bit of an anomaly; it is a short scene that focuses mainly on getting Edgar back in the party.
Topic Modeling
The last thing I wanted to do was perform topic modeling on the script. I wanted to see if the dominant themes could provide any insight into who the hero of this epic story might be.
I leveraged an LDA model to determine that four dominant clusters showed up in Final Fantasy VI. The dominant cluster was made of up words of war vs peace. The tertiary cluster represented words of hope. The smallest cluster was made up of Kefka’s evil deeds (poison, statue, war). But Clusters 2 and 3 showed something quite interesting:
Here, words like esper, want, human, magical/magic, and friend all immediately jumped to the forefront. These words all speak to Terra’s journey to understand her own humanity. When diving deeper into data, noticed that the scenes where this language is used support this:
- Narshe — Opening: 99.68% match
- Terra’s Scenario: 98.49% match
- Narshe — Kefka Battle: 99.43% match
- Maranda/Zozo: 99.05% match
- Narshe — Save Mog & Umaro: 99.71% match
The World of Ruin results are the most surprising; Mobliz did show as a Cluster 2 topic, but the confidence level was low. Maranda and Saving Mog & Umaro make sense since they are lied up with the themes of love and magic, respectfully. Given the fact Terra is not a required character in this portion of the game, it isn’t entirely surprising that she did not show up in this group.
Findings
The results across this analysis were mixed, at least — hardly the conclusive finding that I was hoping would come out after so many years of waiting! That said, there are a few key takeaways:
- Locke is the most mentioned, but Terra + Celes have more mentioned cumulatively.
- Locke is the most frequent character in certain high-stakes scenes in the early game, but Terra and Celes are the focus in the finale.
- Learning about Terra’s backstory (and to a lesser extent, Celes’) significantly drops the sentiment of the script, suggesting difficulty or struggle. Meanwhile, Locke’s backstory doesn’t have the same impact.
- Several scenes about Terra use a common speech pattern (Cluster 2).
If based on these findings, you forced me to pick a protagonist, I would conclude that it is Terra and Celes sharing the role. Feminism aside for a moment, Locke does a lot in the early game to set up both Terra and Celes to escape the empire and to learn more about themselves as women (discovering self-worth, love, and humanity, tropes that show up often for female characters in Japanese role-playing games). This would also explain why their backstories would cause a drop in the sentiment (growth is hard) and would explain why Locke is more prevalent in the early game and fades a bit in the late game.
Who do YOU think is the main character of Final Fantasy VI? Has any of this data changed your mind? Drop your opinion in the comments, as well as any other questions you want to see if data science can answer.
