The Mog Log: Fit for man and beast
Some weeks, I just don't have quite as much material as others. Oh, don't get me wrong -- the new May version update is out in Final Fantasy XI, which is awesome. But I already did a reaction piece on that, which kind of narrows down my options. Similarly, right now there isn't a lot happening in Final Fantasy XIV, just a lot of stuff around the corner that will eventually be released and probably be awesome. The fact that it's been Golden Week over in Japan has helped contribute to this overall sense of silence.
Thus, today I'm pulling something that at least distantly resembles a rabbit out of my hat by pulling out an old topic that I had never really written about before -- beastmen. Sadly underused thus far in Final Fantasy XIV, the beastmen in Final Fantasy XI contributed a lot to the game's setting and general sense of place, even though some of the critters were pretty hopelessly ridiculous. So as long as I'm taking a step off the beaten path, I'm walking around with some beastmen.
In the vanilla game, right from the outset, there were four main groups of beastmen -- Orcs, Quadavs, Yagudo, and Goblins. Goblins are, of course, ubiquitous mercantile bastards with masked faces who most closely resemble... well... something. I would have said rodents, but that got handled later. The other three, however, suggest clear correlation to certain critters -- Orcs are frogs or lizards, Yagudo are birds (specifically ravens or hawks), and Quadavs are turtles. Mercifully, we were denied Ninja-type jobs on juvenile Quadavs, which is probably a boon in the long run.
Each of the beast nations had a specific relationship with the nearest capital, which lent an added layer to the wholesale slaughter you engaged in on a quest for the next level. Windurst was trying to broker peace with the theocratic birdmen, which worked about as well as you would expect. San d'Oria, meanwhile, was trying to kill all of the Orcs before they managed to kill the entire city. That also worked about as well as you would expect. It's still not as weird or creepy as Bastok's policy of killing baby Quadavs when possible and ignoring them the rest of the time so that the city can vent all of its misaimed racism toward the Galka.
None of this, of course, prevented you from pounding the daylights out of anyone you happened along, and if for some reason you decided that it was best to leave the Yagudo alone, they'd make it very clear your pacifism wasn't shared. Amidst the bouts of grinding that made up the leveling in FFXI, you found out everything about beastman relations from the story missions and quests that popped up every so often.
The odd thing, for me at least, was that these bits of lore actually made both your antagonists and your nation feel a bit more human. There's something touching about Windurst remaining so blithely focused on brokering peace while the Yagudo try to provoke war, or the San d'Orian conflict that had become as much a pageant as an active war. It was also neat to see that all of the beastmen were sporting jobs that you had likely experimented with.
Once you started to move along in the game, you started to enjoy some of the more esoteric members of the beastman family. That was also where the whole "beastman" moniker started to seem seriously strained. Anticans were swarming all over Altepa, Sahagin slummed around in the jungle, and the Gigas family roamed frozen wastelands and, um, wherever you didn't want them to be. (For critters that big, they were apparently really good at sneaking around, or something.) Then things got really bizarre with the Demons and the Tonberries, neither of whom resembled any animals. If the Tonberries resembled anything, it was Kermit the Frog. Gigases, similarly, were mostly just really ugly-looking humanoids in serious need of a hamburger.
Sadly, most of these tribes weren't particularly involved in overarching storylines -- the Anticans were important in the history of the Galka, and the Tonberries featured prominently due to who they used to be, but most of them were just creepy enemies. That was unfortunate, because one of the best dynamics that the game had established was the subtle idea that the beast tribes weren't in any way subhuman, that the conflicts amounted to poor communication compounded by years of mistrust. You had the feeling that you were looking through a mirror darkly at each of the three kingdoms, and it was hard to say that any of the beast tribes were inherently inhuman just on that alone.
FFXIV hasn't really touched on the beast tribes extensively, and considering the current world event leading up to different story elements, I call that a missed opportunity. One of the things that each tribe lent to FFXI was a stronger sense of definition, that understanding the opposite numbers of each given nation helped define the national values. Look at the theocratic and pious Yagudo in contrast to the secular and investigative Windurstian government, or the reclusive and traditional Quadav set against the loud, digging humes in Bastok. By contrast, the amalj'aa may or may not play off against the Ul'dahn decadence and ineffectiveness... but at this point, they're too far removed from storyline events for me to say one way or the other.
Still, though. Blast those Orcs and cut them off the face of the planet, am I right? Go team San d'Oria.
As always, comments can be left in the comment field or mailed to eliot@massively.com. Thanks for all the positive feedback on last week's jaunt into fiction! I'll be sure to bring the characters out again before too long.
From Eorzea to Vana'diel, there is a constant: the moogles. And for analysis and opinions about the online portions of the Final Fantasy series, there is also a constant: The Mog Log. Longtime series fan Eliot Lefebvre serves up a new installment of the log every Saturday, covering almost anything related to Square-Enix's vibrant online worlds.
