The Man In The Mirror: Personal Transformation in Final Fantasy IV

The Final Fantasy franchise is filled with iconic scenes: The party grinding in to stop Yuna’s wedding, Aerith’s untimely death, Noctis dropping the line “Off my chair jester, that’s where the king sits.” While many of these moments have stuck with me through the years, none have impressed me as much as Cecil’s transformation in Final Fantasy IV. As much as it’s about long lost brothers and betrayal and riding a whale to the moon, Cecil’s arc is mostly about change. It’s about answering the questions “Am I more than my past? Can I become someone truly different from who I was?” Ultimately, though, Cecil is left with one final question. How? He gets his answer at the top of Mount Ordeals in a scene that beautifully blends mechanics and narrative.

But first, who is Cecil? When we meet him he is a Dark Knight and captain of the Red Wings, the aerial division of the kingdom of Baron’s army. He is revered, respected, and despite this, unhappy. As Baron’s conquest continues, guilt at the lives he’s taken nags at Cecil. He becomes more and more sure that he is on the wrong side and inevitably rebels after unknowingly bringing a bomb into the Mist Village, orphaning future party member, Rydia, in the process.

Dark Knights are powerful beefy boys with high health and defense. Their high health is particularly crucial, because their special ability “Dark” is a sword technique that devastates all enemies on the board, but at the cost of the user’s health. Cecil is a destructive force constantly trading his own health to deal damage. His pain is his greatest weapon, and he attempts to use it to right the wrongs of his past, but comes up short. Up until this point in the game Cecil’s party is a rotating cast of characters who almost all have some special ability that allows them to heal him. He is free to self-flagellate to his heart’s content, as they exist to keep him hearty and fighting. This is the savagery of the Dark Knight. They are not healers or protectors, but rather warriors who use their pain to fight harder. That pain, however, does nothing to heal those Cecil has harmed. It does nothing to rebuild what has been lost, and it certainly doesn’t protect those around him now. To do that, Ceci learns he must release the darkness within himself so that he may become something stronger. He learns he must undergo the trial to become a Paladin.

This trial is one of my favorite fights in Final Fantasy canon. Cecil, now dressed as a Paladin, stands in front of a mirror image of himself as a Dark Knight only for the Dark Knight to attack him. Cecil is used to doing damage to himself. Fighting his mirror image should be no problem, but Cecil’s transformation cannot be earned by following the same patterns he did as a Dark Knight. Dark Knight Cecil continues to attack Paladin Cecil, but if the player responds with violence, they’ll lose this fight. It can’t be won by attacking. Instead the player must use the command “Defend” to negate damage. They can also use Cecil’s newly unlocked healing spells to keep his health up. The game forces the player to change the way they interact with Cecil, and in doing so, changes the way Cecil interacts with himself.

Cecil’s guilt and self-harm serve no one save perhaps his own ego, but they can feel seductive when compared to the hard labor of genuine atonement. The former requires only pain, the latter needs a transformation which is much harder to come by. Until he becomes a Paladin, Cecil hasn’t changed the way he engages with the world around him; he’s simply found a new target. Once he passes the test, Cecil and the player’s experience of him are fundamentally altered. He no longer has a powerful sweeping attack that can defeat all enemies on the board at once and he’ll never get something like that back. To replace it, he gains healing spells to keep him and his friends fighting, as well as the special ability “Cover” which allows him to take hits for party members who would otherwise faint from damage. In this way we see Cecil shift from the powerful aggressor he has been into something else. We see him become a build designed to protect. Moreso, his menu portrait changes. Where once we saw the demonic helmet of a Dark Knight, we now see Cecil’s long white hair and somber face revealed for the first time. He’s not hiding behind a mask any longer.

This scene takes less than a minute of actual gameplay, but the game conveys this transformation so elegantly, using its mechanics to support and impact its narrative. It pulls the player in to make these decisions along with Cecil, and fails them if they try to stick to old destructive patterns. I think of a more modern example of a transformation scene in Final Fantasy XVI where main character Clive realizes not only that he is the Dark Eikon, Ifrit, but also that he murdered his own brother. This is handled by one of the most laughable prompts I’ve ever seen in gaming, “(Press L3+R3 To Accept The Truth),” which is more or less the condescending illusion of choice as nothing will happen until you push those buttons. No decision is made. It may as well be a cutscene. Even after you press them, Clive doesn’t change, he doesn’t grow, he just gets a cool new fire mode. 

Some might prefer Clive’s explosive transformation, and that’s fine, but I’ll always find myself partial to the subtle immersion of Cecil’s, where he learns that causing himself pain does nothing to remove the pain he has caused others, and where he comes face to face with his past and decides to learn from it rather than try to destroy it.

Dave Tomaine is a comic writer and musician from Philadelphia. You can find him at @cavedomain and @FFBedtime on Twitter.