Participating in flame wars will see action taken at moderator discretion. We encourage all members to engage in thoughtful discussion, and to avoid partaking in echo chambers. Do not harass, or intentionally troll each other. Don't be mean, hurtful, or vulgar towards your fellow redditor be excellent to each other. This subreddit is meant to be a comfortable environment to bond over all things Metroid. Considering how stale lore has become lately, Final Fantasy 16’s Situation Map is a massive W for lore fiends like me.New to Metroid? Start here! Join the Metroid Subreddit Discord! Metroid Dread Trailer Metroid: Samus Returns Trailer This level of interaction and approachability makes researching less laborious and more fun. I hope that similarly story-driven games, which historically push their glossaries and codices into the margins, are emboldened by FF16 to bring the deep lore front and center. Final Fantasy 16 has the density of a novel and the spectacle of a film, but the interactive Situation Map is a resource that can only exist in a game. But if you want the full Game of Thrones experience, if you want to get caught up in the political machinations and intrigue, then you’re going to be blown away by how useful the Situation Map is to that end. If you’re just here for the Kaiju I certainly don’t blame you - that stuff is great. There’s handsome good guys and hideous bad guys, and everything dies when you hit it hard enough. Ultimately FF16 isn’t that hard to follow if you’re only interested in the melodrama. I don’t think most people will bother with this stuff. Spending 20 minutes with the Situation Map gave me a deeper understanding of FF16’s plot than the preceding 15 hours of cutscenes, and I’ve gone back to it frequently to fill in the gaps and clarify plot points as things continued to develop. You can scroll back and forth through the entire history of FF16, starting when Clive was a child, and track the movements and conflicts of every faction. It gives you an overview of the world and shows you the movements of every major character and army, with a description of their actions, at any given point on the timeline. The second feature, the Situation Map, is even more impressive. I would kill for a real-life version of this. I use it frequently to remind myself who everyone is and what they want. Much of FF16’s story started before the game and takes place during time gaps in the narrative, so this resource is crucial for understanding how all of the players are connected. What’s really amazing about the character web is that you can scroll through FF16’s timeline and see how those characters and their relationships have changed throughout the course of the narrative. Here is where you can really get a sense of the relationships and dynamics between the factions and dive deeper into some of the secondary characters that you’ve seen, but may not remember. The first half is a character web that maps out all of the major and minor characters in the game, organizes them by home territory, and draws lines to show how each of them are connected. There’s two parts to the State of the World board, which becomes accessible after a certain pivotal story moment about 15 hours in (don’t worry, you can’t miss it). It’s not a particularly explorable document, unless your preferred way to research is to just read an encyclopedia from end to end. At one point early on I just wanted to get a summary of the five major nations of Valisthea - a broad and pretty common request, I would imagine - but the only way to get that was to scroll through a giant list of places and click on the name of each country when/if I recognized them. The search function is only good if you have a particular name in mind, obviously, and the categories aren’t specific enough to be helpful when I’m confused about something, but I don't really know what question to ask. Harpocrates’ journal is a lot more comprehensive, but I find that it’s not organized well enough to really be useful. Related: If Final Fantasy 16 Is An RPG, We Have To Change What RPG Means After the first few hours, Active Time Lore is rarely helpful. I often find myself accessing it whenever a specific character or event is referenced, hoping to learn more about the relationships and history of the world, but all you really get are bios for the characters that are physically in the scene, and short histories of the location you’re currently in. Active Time Lore is a great reference, but it lacks the kind of context that would be helpful once you’re familiar with the basics. Both of these tools are helpful, if somewhat lacking.
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