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The main problem I had with XIII was all the characters seemed forced to me. Nothing about any of the characters seemed natural or believable, except for Vanille and Fang. There was no real reason why anyone was what they were, they were just forced into an archtype that we were supposed to know and assume generic reasons why they were there. Lightning pissed me off the most. There was tons of potential with her, but they just had her pissy the entire game refusing to give any insight. Sahz felt incredibly false, and Snow felt like the douche-bag nerd-turned-wannabebadass everyone remembers from high school. If Sahz didn't have haste early, I never would have used him.
When I look at the characters, they don't feel forced to me.
The Lightning bit confuses me, though? We get a lot of moments of weakness from her. Self-doubt causes Odin to appear early in the game, testing her resolve. That causes a chain reaction through the Palumpolum arc where she abandons her current mission (and throughout that time she increasingly becomes more of a guide to Hope, until keeping him safe becomes one of her primary concerns). I mean, you go from the indifferent Lightning, to the Lightning afraid she can't support Hope, to Lightning working more and more to support Hope, to Lightning comforting Hope in the wake of their loss.
That's a lot of slow, organic character growth over time. It's not ham fisted, either. Her personality is subtly shifting from one conversation to the next. And it goes further; her interactions with Snow are changing, Snow keeping Hope safe (and getting hurt in the process) allows Lightning to trust more that he's not "all talk." She spends way more time shouting in the early half of the game than in the latter half.
And in the flashbacks, you actually see that Lightning isn't such the stoic take-no-crap character you think she is from the early scenes.
She's a quiet character, who doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve, but she changes a LOT over the course of the game. Yeah, there are points where she gets pissy and yells. But that is easily a minority of her character interactions, even in the early game. When you look at the full 1->12 plot, it's DEFINITELY a minority.
She's a quiet, rational character. She doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve, and she's quick to point out the holes in the plan. That doesn't mean that's all there is to her. It means she's a soldier who cares about her comrades and is trying to be constructive. But even the tone she uses when she does it changes a lot (ranging from "you're a dumbass, Snow" in the beginning to "That's risky, but do we have another option? I think we can do it." later on).
[EDIT]
Errr, remove that repeat.
Edited, Feb 19th 2014 6:01pm by idiggory
