Alternate Title: FINAL FANTASY DRAFT PICKS

Hoo, boy.

I could go on for days about this one.  Although the majority of my demands were met in the release of Duodecim (LAGUNA! LAGUNA!), there were a few others that I would have liked to see make it into the roster.  Though they might not have gotten the attention that they would have merited—as several others have said before me, Square-Enix did themselves a bit of a disservice by limiting this title to a single UMD.   Considering the members of the fanbase that would spring upon this title like a starving wolf who has just found its first meal in days, I think that a two—or even three—disc release would have more than allowable.  I have managed a list of five of my top choices, however.  I go into some detail, though, complete with hypotheticals and the like, so here’s a heads-up so you know what you’re looking at when you click that cut.

Format: In pretty much every case, I’ll introduce my top draft picks and stick them in a hypothetical cutscene.  I will try to limit myself to one draft pick per title, but there might be cases where I can’t do that, either for sheer volume of the cast or for seriously awesome rating.

Game Title

Draft Pick.  Here follows my description of who, what, and why.  Expect some theorizing and guessing, as well as at least some logic behind things.

Railenthe:  [adjusts her glasses and clears her throat]  At any time when the font face changes to predominantly italics, I’ve created a hypothetical cutscene in which I’ve placed the draft picks, to illustrate the potential interaction between them and their counteparts.  There will be times when I reference/lift things wholesale from the script, but because this is mostly out of thin air, those will be minimal.  Gestures, movements, and the like will be in brackets, kind of like stage directions in a play/screenplay.  [clears her throat again]

Let’s begin with the wild mass ranting!

You know, I could wax poetic about the curbstomp that was the defeat that goes here today, but instead of doing that, I shall provide a battle replay, and a mini-fic. I’d finally developed a strategy—after the defeats of Prishe, Laguna, Lightning and Yuna—but somewhere along the line something went wrong and I panicked. 

…then everything went wrong.

          In the space of a few moments I went from rage, to dis pear despair, and then looped right back to incoherent rage.

You know the moment: the moment when you realize you’re doomed, when the line from Dante’s Inferno comes to mind unbidden—“Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here…”