Recently, while messing around on a Gamefaqs message board, I came across a thread debating whether the main character of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a hero or a villain. For those of you that don’t know, the story of FFTA is about a boy named Marche who moves into a new town and makes a couple of friends who invite him to come and read an old book they bought. The book turns out to be magical and alters reality, changing both the landscape and the population into something from a video game. Upon waking in this new world, Marche immediately begins looking for a way to restore “reality”. Along the way, he meets up with his friends, none of whom wish to return things to how they were, and who actively try to stop him from accomplishing his goal. In the end he succeeds and everything returns to how it was, but were his actions justified? Did he have the right to destroy the “fantasy” world and force everyone return to their previous states? For you see, in this “false” world, things were very different than in “reality”. Mewt, a boy who was weak, powerless, and always picked on was the ruler of the land, his father (a drunk bum in the “real” world) was head of all the judges who enforced the laws. His mother, who had died, was with him. Ritz, a tomboy who was born with white hair (that she dyed to fit in) became a powerful clan leader. And Doned, the Marche’s brother who was crippled and confined to a wheelchair, could finally walk, much to his glee.

The arguments for both sides in this debate on the GameFaqs boards were as follows: