dorchadas: (FFXIV Warrior of Light)
[personal profile] dorchadas
Spoilers for Shadowbringers through 5.0


So for unrelated reasons, I recently booted up FFXIV in Japanese and went through a few cutscenes trying to find some dialogue snippets for a complaint I have about the localization--the way they keep calling the planet Hydaelyn a "star" in English. That's for another post, but while I had the game in Japanese, I thought that I might as well check out the cutscene after Amaurot where the Warrior of Light bonds with Ardbert. In English, this is the dialogue:
Emet-Selch: "No... It can't be..."
Emet-Selch: "Bah, a trick of the light. You are a broken husk, nothing more."
It's pretty obvious that he recognizes the WoL, but the Japanese makes it much more explicit that it's not just as an Ancient but as a specific person that he knew:

Final Fantasy XIV shadowbringers Emet Selch's moment of recognition
Emet-Selch: 馬鹿な... お前が、何故そこに...!?
Emet-Selch: いや、違う...あいつじゃない...ただのなりそこないだ...!

"That's impossible...how did you get here...!?"
"No, it can't be...it's not you...just wishful thinking...!"
These are not the same!

When I beat 5.0, I was mostly annoyed at Emet-Selch. I found him to be an insufferable jerk with no redeeming qualities, lording it over the people of the shards and implying that they're not people. It's literally Nazi rhetoric about the disabled, honestly--saying that they're just broken husks, not worthy of life, and need to die to make the lives of the "real" people better. His tone of voice helped a lot with that--it was whiny, disinterested, and grating. The worst part was when he accused the Scions of being "boring" during a dangerous situation and just vanished, which really worked against how much he claimed to care later on.

But here, I see him differently. Someone who is so determined to carry out his plan to restore his lost homeland regardless of the cost that he needs to convince himself that he's doing the right thing. After all, if these were the people that he knew, if they were recognizably those people, reborn again and again through the Lifestream down over the aeons, then he had murdered them over and over again. He had killed millions and destroyed entire worlds and continually re-enacted the Final Days. So he told himself that all these people were broken husks, that they were worthless, that nothing they did could ever match the glory and the splendor of Amaurot, and that their deaths were meaningless even though they proved that they had capabilities that the Ancients never dreamed of--like combining the unlimited power generation of the Crystal Tower, Alexander's ability to manipulate time, and Omega's power of dimension-warping in order to move people bodily across the rift between shards, something even Emet-Selch admits he can't do.

Don't get me wrong--Emet-Selch is still history's greatest monster and death is too good for him. He's worse than Nidhogg, because at least Nidhogg's genocidal campaign was a response to acts done to him personally by people connected, however distantly, to the people he was killing. It's unclear what caused the tragedy the Ancients suffered, though I believe it was their own fault--it's repeatedly emphasized how easy it is for creation magic to go wrong with even a single stray thought--but whatever it was, it didn't have anything to do with the people of the Source or its reflections. And furthermore, by his own admission Emet-Selch is tempered by Zodiark, warping his thoughts and actions, and the only cure for tempering is death. I find it very telling that after they summoned Zodiark, every one of the Convocation's plans started with
  1. Sacrifice a bunch of people to Zodiark Emoji Axe Rage
He claims it was a willing sacrifice, but I don't believe him.

Alright, this did turn into a bit of a rant. But I can appreciate Emet-Selch better as a villain through self-delusion after reading the Japanese. The English makes him seem too arrogant to sympathize with at all for me.

I'm curious to see if 5.1-5.5 English changes my opinion of him at all retroactively, or whether I'll be grateful for my checking that Japanese cutscene on a whim.