My thoughts on Alm and Celica as characters

With my playthrough winding down, I've begun to seriously think about Alm and Celica as characters. And honestly, I'm pretty mixed on them.

Let's start with Alm. He's spent most of his life in Ram Village before the start of Chapter 1 and is eager to get out and find his purpose in the world. He falls in with the Deliverance and Clive appoints him something of a figurehead leader-- though Alm eventually grows into the part. Eventually, he becomes king of the One Kingdom of Valentia.

Alm isn't power hungry-- he's understandably shocked when Clive offers him his position as leader, and he's quick to remark that they "keep their expectations low". When talk comes of making him king, he at first turns out down as nonsense-- he never strives for the role, but at the end of the game he takes it due to his heritage as Rudolf's sole heir.

To me, Alm's kinda underwhelming. He's definitely not bad-- he's just bland. He has no real character flaws (he's a bit headstrong at first, but that takes all of one map to be swept under the rug) and his development is quite subtle. If he was a new character, I'd just brush it all off. But he isn't. And in all their updating of Gaiden's plot, IS somehow overlooked Alm's one character trait from that game: his hotblooded and semi-violent nature. Yes, there's so little writing in the original that a more fleshed out interpretation of the character was warranted. But if they'd incorporated some of that into SoV Alm, he would've been a much better (and memorable) protagonist.

In SoV, Alm is willing to fight Rigel if there are no other options to ensure peace. Of course, peace falls through and Alm goes to war. But Alm doesn't hate Rigel-- he asks for surrender whenever possible before engaging enemies and just wants to end the war. If he hated Rigel for invading Zofia and proved all too willing to retaliate, Alm would both have a notable character flaw to fuel development and eventually overcome and be a more driven protagonist. As-is, he's just not that compelling.

On to Celica. The Princess of Zofia in hiding, her plot gets kickstarted by her decision to go on a pilgrimage to the Temple of Mila to try and find out what's up with Zofia's failing crops. She's dedicated to that mission-- so much so she's willing to sacrifice herself if she thinks that it will ensure that Zofia is restored. At the end of the conflict, she becomes the queen of the One Kingdom of Valentia. Oh, and she's also a martial pacifist.

That's the way the game presents her, and she suffers because of it. This is most obvious in her argument with Alm at the end of Chapter 2-- it goes from Alm and Celica getting in a spat over whether it's right for Alm to go to war with Rigel to Alm being even-keeled about stuff and Celica suddenly lashing out. Her pacifism is treated almost as an afterthought. By that point she's already gone out of her way to help people by dealing with the local pirate problem. Not once does she express any distaste for violence. They didn't need to beat you over the head with her beliefs in pacifism or take it to any ludicrous extent, but it's pretty much not referenced at all until her argument with Alm. It just kinda comes out of nowhere and then goes away just as quickly, with her willing to go out of the way to take out Grieth.

Celica should have voiced her distaste for violence sooner. She could've urged people to try and keep casualties to a minimum (not magically saving everybody, of course, but demonstrating her unwillingness to have anyone's blood on her hands). That could've been a point of development: her gradually realizing the situation that Valentia is in and having to take up the sword and commit to the battlefield for the sake of the many.

Both Alm and Celica want to help people-- they say as much themselves. But that's the issue-- their core character feels the same. If their positions were reversed, the story wouldn't change much. Celica's selfless and stubbornly focused on her mission, while Alm's just happy to find his place in the world and get stuff done. They're too bland a brand of protagonist-- neither of them goes through any significant development over the course of the game. Their relationship with eachother is melodrama and nothing memorable. Alm doesn't feel driven and the only notable part of Celica is her drive.

Alm and Celica could've been handled much better as characters, and it's a crying shame that they're as generic as they ended up in SoV. SoV's writing in general, I feel, is as damning of IS as Fates-- give them something simple and they'll remove the potential it had while keeping all the questionable stuff and making things more convoluted. Granted, it's nowhere near as bad as Fates or Awakening (and I'm talking about the story as a whole, which is another can of worms I'd like to avoid for now), but too many aspects of it feel decidedly sub-par.

Hope you've enjoyed this analysis and hope that you can prove me wrong because really, I do want to appreciate Alm and Celica as characters and don't want to feel as disappointed with them as I do now.