And just, wow. I'm a bit disappointed they tried to cop out Ramza and Alma's death, because it feels like that cheapens the whole thing, but it's easy enough to head canon.
As the credits were rolling, I was like "What happened to Delita and Ovelia!?" Google the ending as the credits are rolling. "Where is this scene, I didn't see it! Did I miss something?" Last scene plays...oof. I knew they couldn't have a happy ending because their relationship was fundamentally based on a massive power imbalance and one side taking advantage of that, but I was not remotely expecting that. The image of Ovelia on the ground, dead, next to the flowers is just stuck in my brain.
My first instinct was to say, "Well that was a sucky ending! It was just out of nowhere to make me suffer!" but after a few minutes of reeling, I realized that it wasn't. The point of Delita's character was that he started using people as pawns because he had to, in order to make the world a better place. But once someone starts doing that, and stops seeing people as people...they can't just turn that off, not even for the person they love the most.
Does that ultimately make them a "bad person"? Objectively, Delita saved thousands, if not tens of thousands or more lives by ending the war and preserving the peace in the era that followed. He made life better for the common people of Ivalice for hundreds of years (even though I take issue with the fact that he didn't clean out the church of Galabdos). But that also doesn't negate the fact that having to live as his political pawn, with no autonomy, after a life of being abused and locked away, wouldn't be a life worth living.
What does it mean to save others, if you become so damaged in the process that the people you love would literally rather die than be near you?
Two other observations:
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It took me a few hours to remember that Agrias gave Ovelia that knife at like, the start of Chapter 1. She could've stabbed Delita at any point, but she legitimately trusted him and that things would change once everyone was safe. Apparently, it didn't.
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Was Ovelia's tipping point when Olan released the Duria Papers? Delita probably had several opportunities to save Alma, but it wasn't part of his plan to get Ovelia on the throne, so he didn't bother. That directly led to Ramza having to follow Alma into Murond, where they died. In a sense, Delita didn't just leave them to die, but kind of encouraged it - he needed someone to deal with Ultima, but knew that whoever went down there probably wasn't coming back. I think that's what Ovelia meant when she said that Delita killed Ramza. I also wonder if Delita kept the church around to keep the people under control, so Ovelia finding out that the church is why Ramza and Alma died and then burning Olan at the stake for the truth would be...soul breaking.
Unfortunately, part of finishing the game so late is that I missed all the discourse about the ending when it originally happened, so I would love to hear people's thoughts, plot-wise or mechanics-wise.
I assumed Delita and Ovelia knew about the church suppressing the Durai papers, but you're right that that probably wasn't the case and even if it was, it didn't tell her anything new.
Did Delita wipe out the nobility, though? Because he's still king, and presumably has a court. He might've wiped out those nobles in specific, but it doesn't seem like he achieved any systemic change - so what happened to Tietra will happen to someone else again down the line. I feel like that's one of the points of his arc - he "doesn't want to use people" but starts doing so because he has to, but in the end keeps doing so out of convenience, habit, and the damage he's accumulated as a person. Him not ending the monarchy is the second biggest indicator of this.
Fair enough - and yeah, Wiegraf was definitely a stand-out character. When I first played it in 2000 I would've been scandalized and astonished by the idea that the church was secretly controlled by demons and were fundamentally based on a psychopath trying to rule the world or end it trying, but it felt weirdly grafted on to the class war arc and themes. I feel like the two plot lines could've honestly been separated into two different installments based on the same engine and both would've been highly praised.
I was more speculating on what Delita was doing next. By the end of the war, the heads of virtually all the major houses are dead and he had strong support from the commoners, so it's certainly possible he just upended the whole system. We don't know, though. Given Delita made his deal with the church to rise to power and it taking centuries for the truth to come out, I'd say it's implied that from then on Ivalice became a theocratic state or went heavily in that direction.
And yeah, the joke has been that it's only there because JRPGs always have to have some sort of high stakes, non-human confrontation. I think Matsuno handled it much better in Tactics Ogre than he did here.
I wonder if a theocratic state built on a tyrannical religion almost isn't worse, though...
I've not played Tactics Ogre yet, but that's one of the next games on my list. I was going to start with Let Us Cling Together.
Tactics Ogre Reborn works just fine too. Both it and LUCT have their pluses and minuses. The especially nice thing about Tactics Ogre (both of these versions) is that it has something like 4-5x the content that FFT has.