Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 378: Moogle Madness

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

While chocobos have become the dominant Final Fantasy mascot over the past three decades, moogles don't receive quite as much attention as Square's feathered friends. In some games, they're simply part of the world, while in other games, they're relegated to references and tutorial sections. But what are these strange mole/bat, creatures, where did they come from, and how has Square used (or underused) these little scamps over time? On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Chris Kohler, and Henry Gilbert as the crew traces the moogle mythology from 1990 to 2021. It'll be more exciting than a game of Mog House! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, and we're mad about Mughals. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. Today's episode is titled Mughal Madness. It's going to be a history of Mugals, the fuzzy creatures from the Final Fantasy world. Have I run out of ideas? Probably. Have I gone insane over a year of lockdown? Definitely. But I thought of this as a fun idea to do because over the past year or two, Jeremy's put together some great episodes about, you know, different Mushroom Kingdom characters. And I thought we could do the same thing for other games. series and because Final Fantasy really doesn't have a lot of consistent characters, I want to zero in on Mughals first, and then we'll move on to Chocobos. I'm not sure which ones I'd like more. Maybe we'll figure that out in this podcast. So before I go on any further, who is here in the same room with me, as always? Well, hi, it's Henry Gilbert, Mughal, Strawberry Pancake,

enjoyer. And who do we have on the West Coast remotely? It's me, Chris Kohler, big Mughal fan myself, I would say. And who is our North Carolina correspondent? That's me, Jeremy Parrish, the salty Mughal. I say Cuso instead of Coupo. Oh, man. This podcast is ready to T for Teen. That's right.

We're working blue. Comic mischief is happening right now. Before I begin, of course, we all know Mughals are from Final Fantasy. We all have some familiarity with them. They've been around for now 31 years. I want to go around this room here and ask, where did Mughals enter our lives? what's our stance on Mughals. Let's go with Chris first.

So, you know, technically, the first time I ever saw Mughal would have to have been playing Secret of Mata and having the Mughal status applied to one of my characters. And then you were a Mughal. But, of course, you know, who could who could have said at that point what would have then happened to the, to the, the the the mughal fandom from from such simple beginnings but then of course you know when one when of course when final fantasy three came out and one of your and and in mog so i mean he was on the cover for gosh sakes you know they they clearly were going hard with uh with with trying to make mougals a thing with the u.s marketing of final fantasy three aka final fantasy six um and i totally got suckered in i was like yes you're right these are the best henry how about you well i hate to

Just copy Chris, but yes, no, the advertisements of Final Fantasy 3 American were really got me. I never saw the television version of the ads for it, but the ads on the back of game magazines or comic books introduced me to the Mughals. When I played Final Fantasy 3 American, I was like, oh, man, these guys are so cool. and I think it doubled down for maybe with I didn't give the crap about how the Mughals appeared in seven or eight and not even so much nine but when we played Crystal Chronicles together which me and my friends did a ton of we really got into the Mughals in those games and so that that was where I was like oh I guess I do really like Mugles because I didn't particularly care for a Mogg in free I'm sorry. My story is very similar, but Jeremy, please tell your story about Mughals. I mean, I don't really have anything to add. Aside from the fact that I did see the Final Fantasy 3 advertisement, the famous Mog doing the casting couch, whatever the hell that was.

Well, he wasn't sleeping with the monsters. No, he was just like calling in random enemies. Like, they just picked some weird ass enemies. Yeah, and then he'd like destroy them. like next um yeah so i played secret of manna mana mana i guess it's manna now um and i occasionally got muggled so then when i saw you know the muggles i was like oh it's a thing it's a thing they're a thing uh but those those commercials only showed i only ever saw them watching like late night m tv bevis and butthead and that sort of thing like with friends and when i was in

college because i'm an old type old old timer uh so you kids might have been too young to have seen Mog and his natural state but I did and even though that commercial had nothing what the hell so ever to do with the game

I was still like I got to own this and I did they did not want you to know yeah it was a success this podcast is all going to be about how marketing

really worked on us as children and young adults because like Chris I saw the muggles first and secret of mana I thought they were fine and then Final Fantasy 3 US came out

I was really obsessed with that game and the marketing totally worked on me because we'll talk more about it when we get to Mogg, but that game was all about Mogul's. Mugles were part of the advertising campaign.

They were in the magazine ads. He was on the cover of the damn game and there's that great commercial, which I think is one of the few instances in which the edgy marketing of a not edgy video game kind of worked. But I was drawing Mughals all over my notebooks

because they're kind of easy to draw and just very obsessed with Mugals from that point onward. But yeah, it was really, Secret of Mata was just, just the gateway drug into Mughals with me. And then FF6 is like Mughal heroin. I just, I'm still chasing that dragon.

But from that point on, obsessed with Mughals. And then doing the research for this, I realize Mughals are getting shortchanged and it's an issue that we really need to focus on in our society because I am also pro-chokobo, but Mughals need more attention. I'm a pro-Mugul podcaster. And we're going to see how,

how Square is very wishy-washy about Mugles throughout the history of Final Fantasy. And I don't like it. So I want to go over some Mughal basics here, just the very essence of Mughals, what they are, what their name means, and so on. So they're interpreted slightly differently in every game. There's various variants of Mughals and different series. But what's important is because this is a Japanese thing, it's based on a pun. And the Japanese name for Mugul is Muguri, and that is the portmanteau of bats, which is Komori, and Moll, which is Moguru.

and that explains its appearance. I don't think I knew that until that was maybe 25 or 26 that that's the original name and it basically if you were to localize that it's a molebat and that would be the name of the character. Yeah, so I think we're all lucked out that they're not called molebats.

Yeah. In my notes, I put it's like Godzilla in that they don't translate the portmanteau but still Godzilla is evocative of what Godzilla is. I think Mughal is still evocative of the thing you're seeing even if you're losing the meaning of the pun and the two words that are being mashed together in Japanese. They look like

Mughals. You think the word Mughal and you're like, oh yeah, it's this little squishy guy with the little pom-pom. It's definitely a Mughal. Yeah, I think, I just thought it was like made up word like Jeep the Jeep or whatever from old Popeye cartoons. Just it's, that's a Jeep. This is a Mughal. Like, it's

just a thing. I honestly, I didn't know it was, I should have always assumed it was a pun because it's a funny name from a Japanese video. game but I learned from these notes that it was a pun and because I also never thought of them as like mole bats like I always saw them as kitty cats not even even at their most closed eyed I still thought of them as cat things see the closed eyes would come later oh sorry Chris go ahead I I know I just I don't like it I don't like knowing that it comes from that it comes from you know mole and

bat it should be more magical than that you know yeah exactly Exactly. And, like, basically, you've seen Mughals, and if you don't, look at the cover art for this podcast, you'll know what a Mughal is. It's a fuzzy little creature. They fly around. They've got usually round noses, squinty eyes. They've got a little pom-pom that hangs from their head by an antenna. They have bat wings.

That's essentially what they are, although, again, they're visually interpreted differently in every game, and we'll go over that in excruciating detail because this podcast is all about Mughals. And for some reason, they say Kupo. I don't know if that's a pun or if that is a reference. something or just a fun on a monopoeia but that is essentially what they say and some of them speak English like Mog and Final Fantasy 6. I wish, what I love

about them is how huggable they are. Like chocobos to me, not as hugable except for a fat chokobo like that I could hug all day. They do feel more marketable than chocobos because of that which surprises me that they're not in every game like from the beginning even. But like chokobos

Square did not have muggles in mind for the first game and after their initial appearance it took a few years from to get comfortable with the idea of making them a regular feature especially as the games got more realistic over time and there was less of a presence of muggles

because even in the realistic games you can get away with a chocobo because you're like oh yeah it's like a big bird we have those here it could conceivably be on a farm or can pull something but muggles they are a little iffy about when the games are more realistic

Chris sorry well there's no no there's no there's no muggles in final fantasy one because muggles aren't in the d and d monster manual. That's right. That's right. If they were able to be ripped off, then they would be present. But yeah, they really used every page of that monster manual. And I don't think J.K. Rowling was a Final Fantasy fan because when I was looking up stuff about Mughals, I saw a lot of references to Muggles because I assume a lot of those materials were being written when Harry Potter was much

bigger. But I assume there was no lawsuit there and we can all forget about her from now on, thankfully. So the origins of Mughals, so Chocobos debuted in Final Fantasy 2, and Mugals were going to be in this game as well. They almost did, yeah. And oddly enough, they were replaced with beavers. Which is quite a choice. So I think it was, I think it was because, so, yeah, so if you look at the Final Fantasy Ultimania archive books, which have a lot of like behind the scenes and cut content that are actually all available in English now from Dark Horse, you can. and see the original designs for the Mughals. They were,

it was, so they were designed by Koichi Ishii, who would then go on to do the Mata series. So that's probably why they kind of have that little crossover there. But he, they did the sprites for them and everything, exactly as they would later appear during the development of Final Fantasy 2. They were calling them cryons, kudaion at that point. But they ditched them. And yes, they ended up replacing them in Final Fantasy. Fantasy 2 with just beavers, bea, just straight up, just beavers. They swim in, they swim in like

an underground cave. So maybe they figured beaver being a semi-aquatic sort of animal would be with the, was what they wanted there. Yeah. And one of your party members in the in the game can talk to the beavers because he speaks the beaver language. Again, nobody has really played Final Fantasy 2. So I think people don't know there are the race of beavers in this game. But if you get far enough into the game you will meet a race of beavers and talk to them yeah no nobody has played final fantasy two you can at least uh i was thinking about this the other day because like i have played you know final fantasy it's very easy to play final fantasy one and two the game boy advanced versions um which just have those just really nice quality of life upgrades but then it's like oh man

they they never did one of those for final fantasy three and like i'm never gonna it's like i played the ds version but it's like i don't think i'm ever going to slog my way through like the Famicom version of Final Fantasy 3, even in translation, just because like NES role-playing games in their original state are just so like slow and painful to go through.

But I really want Yeah. I want to see. I want that. I want a 16. I want a Dawn of Souls style remake of Final Fantasy 3. So we can experience amongst many other cool things

like the introduction of the job job change system, but we can introduce the actual introduction of Mughals into Final Fantasy, which was in three. Yeah, you know, they supposedly were going to make one of those for Wonder Swan to follow up on one, two, and

four, but from what I understand the source code was lost or something, so they were just like, eh. Yeah, FF3, in many ways it was, you know, a more streamlined game. In many ways, it was justice hateful. I remember playing that game for the DS, and they kept the old

thing in the old game in which if you lost to the final boss it kicked you back to halfway through the final dungeon and at that point I was like well no I to my to my own self I finished that game I don't care if the game doesn't think so I did finish it oh sorry yeah the designers like talked about that later how like oh well you know because because it was the introduction of the job change system like oh well you know we we want people to like you know build up these amazing characters before they go into the final dungeon and we don't want it to be too easy so yeah they made it like super super hard and yeah it yep it's interesting to me and too that they went with beavers when you know i i would think by the by the late 80s it was becoming just normal of if you at least for

you know animated series and comic books you have the cute sidekick that can be the toy you can sell like yeah like nausicaa was just you know uh six years before ff2 hit the the famicom like our uh five years but so I'm surprised they didn't they weren't thinking of a plush to sell at that point with with the with the Mughals and Chris not where I think Squares head was at that time I mean they were still kind of uh they had they'd had hits with the final fantasy games if they were still very much like a a small boutique you know game publisher there wasn't a lot of merch out there um there was really I think in the super fanicom era where you started to see a lot more of that stuff but there were no plushes for a long time now Chris and final Fantasy 2 in that Ultimania guide, were these characters known as the Muguri? Is that what they, was the name? No, they were called, it was Cryon. It was cryon, okay. Because I was trying to figure out where the word Mughal came from, and we'll get more

to that later. But back to the beavers, my favorite subject. These guys are really weird looking these sprites. And what I like about Final Fantasy 14, I'm playing a lot of that. I'm almost caught up to all the new content. and they mine the deepest of deep cuts in the Final Fantasy series. These beavers make a return, and they are just as stupid looking in that game. So kudos to Square for finding things that no one ever references,

and you could actually now buy a plush beaver from FF2. It's available in the Square Innix Store. So there you have it. They'll market everything. Oh, wow. Yes. Three decades later, they merchandise those beavers. Yes.

Next section of the notes here is labeled Mughles Rising because this is when Mugals Rising because this is when Mugals make their grand debut in 1990s Final Fantasy 3, which obviously we didn't get into 2006, and that was the subject of the first retronauts 15 years ago, coming very soon. Hey, don't use that number, please. Hey, it's a legacy

we have here. And so their appearance is super limited in this game. They are completely contained in the house of one sage. They're sort of his bodyguards and helpers. And they say, Nya, which is the automotopia for a cat, instead of

Coupo. And, whoever was writing the dialogue in this game must have assumed that oh these are cat creatures i guess based on the sprites and i don't know if the word muggle is used within the game i was watching the section of a let's play of that section nobody says muggle there's no reference to these are the muggles and uh i have the answer for you oh please chris um yes so in and and this does happen often in these early final fantasy games uh no nobody says muggle in the game however in the uh official final final Fantasy 3, Famicom strategy guide that I'm holding in my hands right now, it indeed calls them out as the Mogheri. Okay. So it's, so it is in there.

So within documentation, Mogheri was on the table at this point. Yep. At least by the time they got text to a publisher, they've decided these are Mogheri. But they don't say Kupo, they don't have squiny eyes, and they just live with some old guy. And they don't really have their own thing going on. You just talk to them in this Sage's house and they give you back story about, you know, what's going on in the world

and what's going on with the main villain of the game. But yeah, there are Mughals in appearance, but Mughals are usually pretty more fun, I think, in general, instead of being these little housekeepers. But in the DS remake of Final Fantasy 3, they take a grander role in that the game kind of reuses the magnet system for Final Fantasy 9 in which you have to, well, you don't have to, but you can deliver correspondence between

different NPCs in order to get different items. And in the case of Final Fantasy 3 for the DS, to get the best gear possible, you had to send letters to your friends over Wi-Fi, which was still a very new thing in 2006 to really use Wi-Fi on the DS. Does that require the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection, or is it just direct, like, system-to-system Wi-Fi? You could do system to system Wi-Fi, but I believe with this quest in the game, you needed to actually use Wi-Fi. And I think for it, you both needed the friend code for the game and the friend code for your DS, which happened a lot back then.

Then either your home dog or you had to go to a McDonald's. Yes, that too. Or Starbucks. So basically that job class is no longer unlockable in the DS version of Final Fantasy 3, because. because Nintendo's Wi-Fi connection no longer has extant servers, basically. Yeah, that shut down in 2014. And now I think I was reading that

for the future versions of this game because they just awkwardly dropped this DS port onto other platforms like mobile and Steam. They changed this quest, so there's different criteria involved in sending letters to friends because you just can't do that anymore. It was never part of the new ports they made.

And I don't, I think I maybe did step one or two of that quest and then thought I don't like the Ununite job anyway I'm not going to bother I didn't I didn't need 100% complete in song game though I did beat it I did I did finish it this was the era of time in which for me at least Wi-Fi felt like magic

that it shouldn't exist and I bought a dongle for Animal Crossing and just the one night I had it working it was just amazing to see my DS open and you know people coming into my town like strangers but now it's like wherever I go I'm like what's the

Wi-Fi. That's just my first question. What's your Wi-Fi? Do you have to buy something? But yeah, that's the grand debut of Mugles. Mugles in FF3. Mugles. That's a snack food. They should sell. Crunching corn snack. I could go for some muggles. Now there's a tie-in product. There's not enough.

There's not enough merchandising. To be a bugle with a little palm on the end of it. I agree. But, yeah, they saw a place for Mugles in this remake because obviously Mugles were a very small feature of the original game, they're like, well, you know, we should use them more because they debuted in this game. And then...

So before we go any further, so I went back to grab this quote that was actually just in the past year, they did an extensive interview with Koichi Ishii about Final Fantasy 3 because it just passed his 30th anniversary. And he talks about the genesis of this. And even though it's moles and bats, there's another animal that comes into play. So, Ishi says, I'll just read the quote. I'll just read the quote for historical purposes. It says, well, the one who actually created Mughals was me as an elementary school student. I made the character when I was in elementary school, at which time I was drawing all kinds of fantasy creatures and the like. I liked koalas.

Oh. And so I draw koala-like creatures that were all white, similar to what was in the strategy guide. I mentioned some other thing he was talking about. Bat-like things clinging to the ceiling. White koalas with wings like a bat Those wings are for controlling direction in the air Not flapping around to fly And that's why Mughals have a big nose

Because he was really thinking about Coalas as one of the animals That sort of made this final This fantasy character That he invented when he was in elementary school Wow You just unlock new knowledge Because in the FF7 remake

The Chaco Mag Summon It looks just like a ko They make it look like a koala, so that makes a lot of sense. Wow. There you go. Man, I did not, it makes total sense there that he's, they, I mean, also like koala's, Japan, Japanese kids love koalas. They eat them every day. Cuala March.

Coala March. Oh, that's right, yes. I'm such a weeb. I call them Koala March, not koala yommies. Well, they sell them here as Kuala March now, so there's no more localization. But yeah, it's So moving on So yeah

You mentioned Chris that he invented them in great school That makes a lot sense Because when I was a kid in FF3 Was my favorite game I was not going to sit down and draw Tara or Edgar Or anybody else in that game Because they were all like very complicated Amano illustrations

It was easy to just draw a Mughal in the margins of my notebook And if you look at the Amano illustrations of Mog from that game There are so many of them They're all so simple and cute Yeah I feel like Amano was just just doodling Mogg and his notebook margins too. You can find so many

of these little sketches of Mogg just doing random stupid things. It's great. I love it. I really love the American Strategy Guide for Final Fantasy 3,

the Nintendo Power official guide that they published back in the day because they filled it with as much of Amano's art as they could

and it was really interesting to see this super sketchy kind of watercolor and ink artwork of all these characters but there was a bunch of Mogg in there and it really stood out and like we kind of reinforced the fact that oh yeah

this character is kind of a big deal for this game he's not just on the box he's not just in the commercial but uh you know here's his here's all this artwork by you know like some some actual artist in the strategy guide and also yeah you also it's like missible stuff it's like i got to play as wrong all the time you may not have been looking actually at uh mog in all of those illustrations jumping, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but like, because it could have been Kupapo. I think that he actually, I think that Amano actually did, I don't have that, I don't have that strategy guide to hand, but I think he did one big illustration with all of the

Mughals that appeared in Final Fantasy six, and they may have split that up for the strategy guide, but yeah, we can get to that. This episode is one long drive to the mug factory, unfortunately, because he's a star of the show. Let's move on a Secret of Mata. So, Chris, you're pointing out that Koichi Ishii, the creator of Siky, is the creator of Mughles, so that makes sense because Mughals, after their grand debut in FF3, they're not

in FF4. FF4 is all about Chocobos. There's different colors. There's fat ones. There's white ones. There's black ones. It's Chocobo crazy in that game. But then Mugles... You've also got little frog people. You've got dwarves. You've got

like all those characters in the little village, but none of them are Mughals. It felt like a missed opportunity. Yeah, tons of new races and new species of animals in that game but muggles are just left on the table which is why they are later used in 1991's Final Fantasy Adventure

but they're not actually creatures in the game a muggle in this game is a status effect that turns you into a muggle which makes you unable to act gives you very little defense and thanks to the character limit the in-game status is just simply moog so that's a common mistake it's actually pronounced mogue

oh yeah it turns you into a keyboard with very little defense but you prog rock artists love you listen to that windy carlos music yeah so yeah i'm not sure if um i mean it could be as simple as um ishi maybe he did not work on final fantasy four because because the super famicom when that started that's kind of when the team's kind of splintered and like people started working on you know secret of mana kind of at the beginning and people started working on final fantasy four and there was a little bit of a split so it may simply be the fact that like Ishi did not work on Final Fantasy Force

they did not use that character and he took it to the Sagan series Yeah and like I said before You don't meet Mughals in this game You don't fight them You don't talk to them It's simply something you turn into

When you're cursed and that's it Yeah I well knowing how much Ishi like feels ownership of them I could just see He was like well we have a status effect What should they turn into And he's like well We barely use these things

in that last game I worked on. Let's just put that there. This is before you had to have meetings about putting things and stuff. Yeah, it seems like, yes, it really does look like from Wikipedia. Yeah, Final Fantasy 3 was Ishi's last Final Fantasy game and then he went off to head up the Mana series.

So, sorry, with Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana. According to Moby Games, there's a special thanks to Koichi Ishii in Final Fantasy 2 from 1991, so the U.S. version of four. But, yeah, that is it. And it would make sense. Like, you know, Secret of Mana was, had something of a tempestuous development cycle and took longer than I think the average game at that point did.

So it would make sense that, you know, in the two-year gap between Final Fantasy Adventure and Secret of Mana, that was just him, like, wrestling with his demons with Secret of Manah and trying to make that game happen. And this is also with Final Fantasy Adventure or Second Dentetsu, in the English instruction manual it's actually the first use of the word Mughal in English so that is where Mughal comes from that was the first and final localization

of that word it was in that instruction book because it's not in the game I like that they didn't reset the naming of it to something else when in the PlayStation era I like it still stuck with it and so in the second Netsu game which we got a secret of mana

Mugles make a bigger presence and this is a motif you'll see often with Mugals and that they live in a protected village they're kind of defenseless. Their village is attacked by things. In this case, their villages being attacked by blue hedgehogs that cannot be a coincidence. And yeah, and then eventually, so they were fresh off their appearance in Final Fantasy 5, which we'll talk about very soon. But at this point, Square was, I guess, either not paying attention or they were kind of okay with sharing different elements between series, but this would be when it would be all over, because after this, Mughles are

once again a status effect in the third second-Densetsu game. So I feel like at some point, Sakakuchi was like, all right, you keep your stuff and we'll keep our stuff. We don't want your rabbis. We don't want your goblins. And you can keep your bombs and your chokobos and whatnot. But we got to keep our series separate. I don't know if there was a conversation. I don't know.

You know, what's interesting is, you know, since they left Mughals alone for Final Fantasy 4, I think the question really is because they didn't really play a very big part in Final Fantasy 3. So then they had moved on and, you know, Ishi took them with him to the Mona series. my question is, why did they come back to Final Fantasy 5? And that I really don't know. That's a good question because we see, I don't know if Secret of Mana is riffing on what we see in Final Fantasy 5, but in Final Fantasy 5, it's a very similar scenario in which the Mughal,

you rescue a Mughal that's helpless from an enemy. The Mughal will lead you to this abandoned village that's very protected by Forrest. And yeah, it seems like very similar ideas are happening between both games, but I don't know why they came back in Final Fantasy 5. But regardless of like why it was, Final Fantasy 5, that game, that is really the origin of the Mughals as this big part of Final Fantasy because, like, that, I mean, again, that's where you first had the Mughal Village.

You had this Mughal side character that was friends with, you know, Curl in the game and you had that was the first game in which the Mughal said Coupo also. And we have the Mughal theme for the first time, the one that's been remixed over and over and over throughout the games. Yeah, yep, yep.

Yeah, I was going to say if Chris doesn't know why it's in Final Fantasy 5 and he wrote the book on it, nobody knows. Yeah, when I finally played FF5 on the GBA, it was fun

see that version of like it was going it was regressing in Mughal history I was like oh this is what they looked like before six that that was fun I did not I was not a big man of player don't judge me listeners it's okay there's one good game in that series

one one interesting thing of note is that the Mughals were kind of pushing out the dwarves in each subsequent final fantasy game there were fewer and fewer dwarves and I think you get a you know a bunch of Mughals in five and dwarves are just like limited to one cave, aren't they?

There's just like one little area with them. And then Final Fantasy 6, oops, all Mughles. No, no word of all. Yeah, I guess earlier I was talking about Mughals getting in the shaft, but dwarves really got kicked out of the series fast. And again, they are reused a lot in FF14. So 14 really finds the abandoned races and just brings them into the game. Yeah, only the first Final Fantasy had elves.

Like, they got kicked out way fast. That's right. Some of the differences between Mughals in the future is that in this game, Still, their eyes are open. We have not really dialed down on the bat part of their character. Sorry, the mole part of their character. And also, they communicate telepathically, which is a big plot point in the game, which I don't think happens in any other Mughal-related media.

I don't think that's something that carries forward in the future at all. They're just really into psychic stuff when working on FF5, I guess. But finally, we have reached the Mughal Factory. We are at Mughal Ground Zero, where it all began for Mughals and kind of ended, which is Final Fantasy 6. the biggest and best showcase of Mughals and like we were saying earlier Squares Western marketing for this game was all about Mughals

I don't know why I mean it's a marketable character but not in the ways I would assume would be marketable for a Western audience because this was the era of Earthworm Jim and Bougar Man and Renan Stimpy and I will say that they did do their own artwork for the Western ads of Mogg

but it is not too different from the Japanese artwork and it's actually kind of good No, I, well, if I'm trying to just put myself into the mind of a Keep It Loud era executive, like, if I'm looking at a collection of characters who, like, just character art for that game, I can see zeroing in on Mog and seeing, like, I guess that's, that's a stirring character. Like, it's, it looks cute. It, uh, you could sell toys of it. But you could also get some of the, you know, Sonic era comedy of like, well, this thing looks cute. But it's actually. pretty tough kind of stuff. There was a, and this really did kind of start with five and actually the addition of Tetsia Nomura, who, I mean, maybe he was the one who wanted to bring Mughals back because he is on record as saying he wanted to design cuter enemies for Final Fantasy Five. And so Final Fantasy Five is where you start seeing, well, Tonberry was in Final Fantasy Five also and things like the nuts eater and the skull eater, the cute little squirrels. Because prior to that, all the enemies in all

the Final Fantasy games had been, you know, either, you know, again, like D&D Monster Manual stuff or, you know, really, really sort of realistic and scary. And then Five is where he starts seeing cute enemies. And so Six really continued on that tradition. That's kind of where we see the, you know, cuteness sort of becoming a, uh, a, a, a final fantasy and an element of the design sense of the Final Fantasy games. Yeah, I think so that could be something there as well. Sorry, go out. Were Tom Barry's new in Final Fantasy Six? That strikes me as another cute enemy. Oh, five okay yeah and that's when no more was taking over in terms of sprite artwork yep yep yep and then cactar cactar was was final fantasy six also okay wow that's why i was gonna ask yeah the

yeah you know uh well that's also funny me because not to get ahead but uh the no more lead games are like those are the ones where muggles didn't like they weren't banned but they are lessened in their appearances compared to the non no more uh fs but yeah i i can see the sensibility of the guy who'd create so many or so many similar-looking characters to Mughals were made up for the world of Kingdom Hearts that I can see he'd be attracted to it, but maybe it also, since it's not a guy he created, he maybe feels less interest in it going forward. Well, I mean, you know, Final Fantasy 7, again, jumping a little ahead, did have a main

party character that was a cat writing on a giant Mughal. So it wasn't as if they totally sidelined Mugals. I think that Mugals. Oh, that was her 508 with the Mumbas. Like, who wanted those? No one wanted the Mumbas. But with Final Fantasy 7, I get the sense that having Mughals like inhabit the world of Final Fantasy 7, like as just as a race, like didn't make sense because of the plot of Final Fantasy 7. And so I think they tried to find two ways.

to integrate them in which they didn't actually have like the arcade game and the stuffed doll in which they didn't actually have to be like part of the biology of the world but could be sort of on the cultural side. I do want to go back to sixth though

because it is the Mughal game again Mogg the Mughal is at the center of all the marketing in the West including the commercial and he's on the cover of the box but it's important to note that he is an optional character in fact the first time I played this game I was like oh man when is this Google guy going to show up

and I didn't I didn't get him in the first half of the game because you can miss him you can completely miss him in the first half of the game and then in the second half of the game he's also optional so it's funny that this character who is the star of the show of the marketing is such a minor character in the game itself you can let him die permanently

that's how much that's how optionally is yeah I right but you they they do uh even though you can miss him as a as a character there is that big very early game scene right um that is so memorable in which uh you fight alongside a whole whole pack of of mules yeah for for me i did have him in my party when i first played it but that's because i i was playing six off of a friend a borrowed uh cart from a friend and they were saying hey but oh we'd be talking through the whole time and where I was

at and he made sure to remind me go at do X to get Mogg in your team which then was funny because like I for me FF6 I barely use Mogg I didn't like gimmick I didn't like his gimmick just like I didn't like Gow's gimmick and I didn't like

Realms gimmick I I like the straight everybody has a gimmick but I did like the more violent gimmick people than than the sillier thing. Yeah I think Mog is a fairly useless character in terms of his utility in battle, but I love him so much in terms of design that I put up with not using his abilities just to have him in my party, because in FF6, it uses like

every idea and every FFF game to date, and every character is representing an old class in the game, and in Mogg's case, he is both a dancer and a geomancer. Two classes in FF5 I never ever use, especially geomancer. And also, Mogg has a bit of like a berserk quality to him, and that his ability is that he has a dance ability and when you select dance he will start dancing on his turn and it will have one of four random effects

based on the battle background. The thing is he does not stop dancing. If you lock him into dancing, he will do that until the end of the round or unless he's petrified or dead. I love it. I think I love the way that they took the Final Fantasy five character classes and blended

and mixed parts of them for the Final Fantasy six characters. I think that it came out brilliantly and I think Mog is the, I'm certainly the most subtle and the best example of yes, combining geomancer dancer, which I mean the dancer thing was sort of a superficial level

because it doesn't really do the things that a dancer does but yeah, and Berserker! And the idea that they got Berserker into the game but the idea is that you get to choose how berserk if that character goes berserk or not and so it adds an interesting level to it

But yeah, I thought Mogg's character was great in that respect. Certainly one of the criticisms of Final Fantasy 6 is that towards the end of the game, all your characters are sort of the same character because they're all just, you know, probably just casting Ultima all the time and not really using the special abilities. But certainly in the beginning, you know, Mog's dances can be so powerful and it's so much fun to have to go around and find them all as well. Yeah, I really like using Mug. I think he's a really fun character

to have in the party. There is that element of unpredictability. You know, you can kind of change literally the playing field in a battle with his dances. And there is an, the possibility that if he tries to do a dance whose element is too far out of the current kind of situation you're in, he'll trip and fail and you'll waste a turn. But if he can change that, like if you're in, you know,

someplace it's like a fiery cavern. or whatever with a lot of fire-based enemies and you do the water rondo and you manage to change the field to water, you know, he's going to start blasting them with all these water effects and it's going to be really, really effective. And I like, you know, that game is so, it's so easy to break it and it's so easy to just kind of get into a routine where you do the same things over and over again. I like having Mog there and Gao is also another one where there's just kind of this element of unpredictability that keeps things interesting it's like you know I could just stomp

everyone but it would be more interesting and more fun to do it this way and I really enjoy that and I also like he can equip the can he equip the Kappa sphere is that correct like he can equip like Kappa equipment I want to say that there is some way to like kind of change his nature

or do something kind of weird with him with equipment and I can't remember what it is well I do like those Mughal suits though I was pro I didn't use mock much of my party, but I did like the muggles. You couldn't transform Realm and Strego into Mugles. And going back to what Chris was talking about earlier with the RTS segment, the game

is really front-loaded with Mughals. It's just like, look at all these Mugles. They've got different names and different abilities and weapons and stuff. But after the halfway point, Moog is the only Mughal left in the entire world. Everybody else is dead. So he's extra tragic. And yeah, I love Mogg.

I don't like his abilities, but like I said, I love having him in my party. And like Jeremy said, almost every character is kind of the same by the end because you're just making them whatever you want them to be. So I just like seeing his sprite in my party. He just sees a fun little cute character.

No, I mean, I regret going with the easiest fruit of like, well, everyone knows Ultima and they're just going to cast that four times in a row. Twice a turn for one magic point each. Yes. Yeah. Just leave the room. So not only Mogg, but of course in the, you know, in the very early goings of Final

Fantasy 3, you find all of the current, I don't know if it's all of the current living movles, but it's a whole group of them, including Mog. And what this is is a way to introduce the player to one of the cool parts of Final Fantasy 3, which is the ability to control three different parties of four characters each on the battlefield at the same time. And in fact, making it almost like a little bit of a strategy game where you're positioning the characters on the field, trying to get in front of enemies that are not random encounters, that are actually enemies you can see,

and essentially playing a tower defense with these three parties. And this is before, I mean, later in the game, you will do this because you will have enough characters in your squad to fill out three separate parties. But at this point, you do not. But it's a way to let you experience that gameplay mechanic without having all those characters in your party and all the rest of the characters are filled in with different Mughals.

And in Japanese, they are all, all the names are puns on the, it's like, it's, it's, it's Mo, Mo something. Mo Lulu is the one that I know because that's, that was canonically Moog's, uh, Moog's, uh, Molyleu. And, uh, she was, I think coo, and, and in the, um, everybody remembers a lot of the ones in the, in the U.S. because they were all coupo puns. It was like coupop, coop, um, and then cuckoo and things like that. Yeah, Brian Lee O'Malley named his band Kupec after one of these guys. I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah, I really, the

the Mughal defense section is really great because it's one of those cases of, you know, game design as tutorial, like a playable sequence that gets you ready for something that you'll need much later because there are areas where you have to break up

the team and control multiple parties. There's, you know, a very similar defense in kind of the same area against Kefka's army. you know, in the first half of the game, but then the final dungeon, you're also controlling three different parties as you kind of make your way

through this multi-tiered puzzle. So the game giving this to you early on as just like, you know, in the very kind of prologue almost of the game is a really clever way for them to say, hey, here's this fun little thing where you're controlling our furry little buddies who live in the caves.

It's so cute. You really can't lose here. They're just adorable. and also this is training you for the future, hold on to this. Yeah, it's a lot to throw at the player that early and that you're controlling, I don't know, 12 or 16 different, you know, characters essentially, but you're so overpower that it doesn't matter that much. Yeah, and most of those characters, it's like it doesn't matter if you,

if you didn't power up your own characters because you're, you're, you are being given characters that are powerful enough that you're not going to have a problem. And then you can even learn, it's like you can, you know, Mogg is now, he's going to be in your party later but he's officially in your party during this segment which means you can do things like you can i think you can learn the first dance with mag maybe yeah um you can also take all of his equipment off if you want to and uh and give it to your other characters probably be a jerk yeah right Bulkimur-a-mong-Mu-K-Maw

The rules with iron hand Miki-Mur-a-M-A-M-Leads her aid and true Mook-Muram-Mung-M-M-M-Ki-M-M-Kim-M-A-N-M-KM-KM-KOMU-KK-D-TU-D-KKD-TU-WRROW-A-ROW-L-A-ROW-E-T-T-T-K-T-ROW-E-ROW-L-WL-KK-T-T-T-T-T-T-W. This is Snake. Hey Snake, it's Sam. Who are you? Sam, from the brand new PlayStation podcast, Polygon symphonies. Is that so?

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Perhaps it's because everyone died in FF6 that this is now the decline of Mughals is happening after this. So games have grown up. It's the late 90s, real world, rude teenagers, and we don't have time for Final Fantasy. It's time for Final Sci-Fi, the next generation of games. Mugals take a lesser role, and we brought this up briefly, but Mugals seemingly don't exist in Final Fantasy. In fact, when we do see the presence of Mughals, either in summons or in other parts of the game, they're called Mogs. And I don't know why they did that. But it's not a different kind of animal.

In fact, there's some differences in that. They did that because the localization of Final Fantasy 7 was bad. That's one reason. But if you want to have some head cannon on this, in this game, the Mughals don't have the palms hanging from their heads by an antenna I think the technical reason for that is because they didn't want to render a round object with no polygons to spare

but yeah that's the one main difference in this game is that the palms do not exist on these muggles in Final Fantasy 7 and if you lose the Dealeybobber on top what's even the point? What is he? What am I looking at here? Yeah some house cat now yeah

yeah I would I would have guessed other than just not doing a good job the mog they would have gone on mogs just like get every character they could like letter they could in for space just in if they're going to write out mougal versus bogs it's like well that's three more letters yeah yeah possible wait um i'm trying to think or there oh no because there's like like she is like is nine characters so it wouldn't it wouldn't be like a big restriction like that but okay maybe it was because of the chaco mog summon like the the summons could only be 10 letters or

something like that but no early in the game when i saw the chaco MogSum, and I think it's one of the first ones you get. I was like, oh boy, this is good. More Mughals. I played six. I'm ready for more Mughals, but no. And then there's a few other Mughal things in the game, like Moghouse, which is, I really want to see what they do with Mughouse and the remake because it's a mini game that I think is just built around trolling you and that it's just the slowest, most tedious thing possible. And it's very, very, very, very for little, little kids in this adult mature game.

But then we get to Catch She or Kate Siff, as you probably said it, for the 25 years in that I was like oh boy this is the muggle in my party and it's such a odd party member you don't know what's going on with them but I was so disappointed when I found out that that's not even a real muggle it's a fraudulent muggle and I got upset it's a mascot and I don't like how buff it is either like that's uh I don't know well to me it looks but it looks like a gorilla to me the the design of the the one that Kate she followed I see I can't even now I can't program myself to not say Kate Siff.

But, well, and that Chaco Mogg summon in remake, I remember being disappointed all over again when I got it in remake. And, well, it's, I mean, I definitely, I used it once just to see it. And I was like, well, I got a cooler summons or more powerful summons for this game.

But what bugged me about it, too, just rewatching it yesterday in prep for this was that it's like, the Mughal's like just a guest in a Chocobo one. It's just a chokobo run and he's just like riding along so again just fully supplemented to like you're the b squad chokobo's up front here buddy there's no muggle breeding in this game it's all about chokobo breeding i want to run a muggle brothel in my final fantasy game no no that's not

they're too they're too close to humans it's at that point it becomes weird that's true they can't speak our language i i apologize jeremy sorry go ahead they they they don't they uh yeah they pass the the the sentience test so let us not let us not breed them carelessly the so other muggle appearances in this we have the the choko mag summon we have ketchi uh you know he is a he is a stuffed muggle that is written by a robot cat that's controlled by a member of the government yes that's what the game is about i can't wait to see how remake tries to make that uh a serious plot point uh i think the people in the remake uh who only played the remake just see the like eight seconds of that that cat on screen.

What the hell? Yeah, they have no fucking clue. And also, you know, at this point, I mean, you know, given the ending of Final Fantasy 7 remake part one, I think they, you know, I don't think they feel beholden to necessarily keep things in if, uh, if, uh, if it doesn't make. You have a point. Yeah, KC could appear for like two more like just to be like, hey, I'm going to join your party and then just explode.

And then they're like, I've made a better robot. Now this is who I'm, probably. I'm even more marketable now. Yeah. So, yeah, and then other Mughal appearances in this game, so it's Moghouse, it's Ketchi, and also Ketchi will summon a Mughul as one of their limit breaks. So that's basically three appearances. And I think there are Mughals on the snowboard course, and they're like snow muggles.

So they weren't losing them entirely, but you could see them backing away from Mughals and being more serious about Chocobos. But, well, and in the remake, there's the collectible Mugle coins. That's right, yeah. And the kid who wears a Mughal suit and like, oh, Mugals are cool. They're this made up thing. That actually made me sadder.

They're not real. They're not real. So Final Fantasy 8 has a massive Mughal shortage. So the main presence of Mugles in this game is a mini-mog. Again, we're calling Mugles Mogs, I think, because of character limits. And that is a summon in the game. And the Mughal is also designed to be more realistic. It looks a bit more like it did in Secret of Mana.

And no palm on this. think we're still shy about rendering that palm in 32-bit polygons. I don't know what's going on here. But I honestly feel that we mentioned this before. I feel like they were trying to innovate in the Mughal space. They're saying, Mughals are

the early 90s. We're going to move into the year 2000 soon. How about Mumbas? They're cute little lion things. And I have to say, my wife is going to be very mad at me because Nina, I'm not a about my wife, she loves Mumbas and I'm a Mumba disliker because I feel like they were trying to supplant

Mughals. It was a, it was a conspiracy from the inside. Mumba's are the poochies of Final Fantasy. They really are, yeah. I mean, that's one of the big downsides to Final Fantasy 8. Mughal erasure, not acceptable. You at least get the little cute alien guy if you follow that weird quest all the way through, which admittedly I've never done, but I've seen videos of the cute little alien guy who has kind of the same kind of chubby, squeezable, like pinch those little cheeks kind of qualities as a mingle but that's about it i do like him but yeah it does feel like nomara was saying okay muggles i got something more for you this is a little bit better stuffed animal we can sell and but mumbas didn't catch on and outside of like appearing in trading card

games and things like that visual appearances there's been no mumba so if you're a mumba fan you're getting even more screwed than muggle fans like me uh if you're a mumba fan you need to stop and question your your choices i'm sorry i realize you said that nina is a fan but I don't know. We're getting her help. We're getting into those things. Okay. Well, I can see intervention.

I can see an A2 like just this move towards the overall design of the game is so much a move towards reality and away from super deform style. And so that's also why you'd open the eyes and get rid of the clown nose on a muggle. Like it's, it looks less silly. So, yeah. So moving on to Final Fantasy 9, we did a really long episode about that last year. So that's Patreon episode 340. It's an exclusive episode. So listen to us talk about that game for two hours.

But Mughles are back because this is a throwback Final Fantasy. Tons of Mughals. This is where the Mugnet system is in place for the first time. Mugals are doing correspondence throughout the world. There is a unique Mugel called, I mean, they all have names, but there's a uniquely designed Mugel called Stiltskin. This very neat adventurer Mugul. If you support him throughout his adventures,

you eventually get a ribbon from him. If you support him on every time you find him throughout the game. and the palms are back because it's the year 2000 in Squares like we can make a round thing out of polygons on the PlayStation. We figured it out. They did it. They finally did it. So, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we're looking at here is, I mean, obviously, so the development team split, right, after Final Fantasy 7, the Final Fantasy 18, final fantasy 19, and it was very clear that the Final Fantasy 18 was going to take things in this, you know, hyper-realistic direction, whereas the Final Fantasy 9 team was going to make the final fantasy game that included, you know,

almost in an almost pandering sort of fan service way that again worked um totally with uh this this is this is going to be the one with the muggles you know so the final fantasy 18 probably didn't feel like the need to you know include muggles and and you know uh all the all the other cutesy stuff to the extent because they knew that all of that was going to be in in final fantasy nine they look across the hallway and see just like cupo sounds just flying out of it they know it's in safe hands yeah like mages and everything everything cute and marketable Yeah, the crystals came back and so did Mughals. It's true.

And one thing I forgot about, and I just replayed this game last year, is that Mogg is in this game. It's a Mughal named Mogg, and it's the pet of one of the characters in the game, Iko. And Mogg will appear in another game. This is not the Mog I know, but it's a Mugul called Mog. So that's another reference to FF6. But yeah, there is a strong Mughal presence in the game, but to date, outside of the tactic series, FF6 has the only playable Mugle. And again, that is a big shame.

and Square needs to answer to these crimes, I think. I'm upset. So moving on, we're going to talk about Mughles in the 21st century. So this is going to be a very brief overview because Mughals, they're more of a 20th century idea. I think in the future, there's no place for Mugals because in Final Fantasy 10, zero Mugals. There are no Mugals in this game except for the Mughal doll that Lulu has as a weapon.

And she's actually holding it in her key art. So there's very, very minor. it's around this time that you see muggles a lot more in the series as dolls as merchandise in a very self-referential way yes so at this point um you did have a lot of merch you know square enix definitely was selling a lot of plush chocobos plush cactuars lots of plush muggles so there definitely was i think a um a pressure to get the mougal in there in some way and to have it do have uh lulu used dolls as her um as her attack was i think pretty inspired it's pretty cute and then yeah then literally they can just sell you if they're gonna if the muggle is only going to be there to sell you the dolls you might as well have it in the game as a doll design so it can you can cosplayers can buy it and whatever yeah it puts me in mind having just recently watched the the godzilla era films of the point in godzilla at which movies start opening with kids playing with toys of godzilla like it goes from being this primal force like a living destructive metaphor for

the nuclear arms race to like, hey, I'm a little kid playing with the guy who trashed Tokyo a few years ago. You can go buy these toys at the store right now. Check them out, kids. It's very much the same kind of thing. Like the series, the franchise has grown to the point where it basically turns its, it's, you know, commoditization, its merchandisibility into an in-game, like an in-universe, biogetic element. So that's, you know, the point at which it kind of starts to crawl up its own ass, I think.

Except they never, it's like, but then, you know, the kid plays with the Godzilla toy, but then actual Godzilla does show up later in the movie. What's happening with Mughals now is Mugles, I mean, even and Shogobos, too, I mean, to less extent, because you still ride them into games, but it's like with Mugals, it's like, oh, well, of course, that's the mascot of the Final Fantasy series.

So they just, they just stick it randomly in the final fantasy games, even sometimes simply as a mascot doll, and they don't do anything else with it. So you're saying that Sin should have been a Mughal. Yes. To keep the parallel going. Yes. Okay, there we go.

There was, I will say, when I was replaying Final Fantasy 10 a little bit for the Final Fantasy 10 Retronauts that we did, I accident, I had Lulu in my active party, and I accidentally selected attack with her. And, I mean, it was very funny because she puts the Mughal doll down on the ground, and it, like, walks over, like, do, do, do, just walks over to the enemy and, like, slaps it for like one HP of damage and then Lulu even has a voiced line mid-battle

then Mughal goes over, hits the enemy, it does nothing and Lulu says, I just figured I'd try it. Wow. That's great. Yeah, I think, I mean, we've all been talking about it, but I think Square is trying to reframe what a Mughal is in the player's mind.

A Mugul is not a living creature. A Mugul is something you can buy. In fact, go online now and you can find them and throw them at your own friends. just like these characters do you. And actually, so I was looking at concept art for the game, would buy Amano. And Amano draws a lot of weird things in his concept art.

And there is a Mughal in the key art for the game. But I figure he just threw that in for fun. Because if you look at the key art for FF6, he was having a lot of goof around fun with those characters because in so many of the character art for FF6, there was just a random like Imper Goblin floating in the background next to the character. So I think he was having fun.

I don't think there was a plan for Mughals in FFFX, FF10, sorry. You're getting a comment for that one, Bob. I know, someone unsubscribed. But, yeah, I think he was just goofing around, but yeah. Oh, God, the Patreon is dropping. Now, when you guys were talking about him drawing in the margins previously in, you know, Sergio Arrigone's style, I was thinking of that in the concept art, just like, it just fills blank space in a more fun way than just another wisp of smoke or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. So on to FF.10, too, So on to FF102. A very limited Mughal presence, but again, we're seeing Mughals more as merch or as mascot characters in the game in that you, in the dress sphere system, the mascot class, Una is a Mughal. So it's actually very, very hard to get. I've never really played this game, but apparently you have to do a lot of very tricky specific things to get this mascot class. And that is really the extent to which Mughals are featured. And also, there is a Mughal only Yuna can see, kind of like the...

great gazoo in one of the quests but in this case it also resembles a stuffed animal i watched the cutscene so it's like yeah in these in these two games muggles are just things you dress as or things you buy now uh well at least that calls back to the mougal suit like it's a fun a fun throwback as well which is like the dress fear itself is you know just the throwback to the job system so it's it's fun that they can even bring back dressing up like a muggle too And in FF11, the MMO, this is my one really big blind spot when it comes to Final Fantasy, so I know there's a lot more going on, but Mughals do come back. The Mug, the Mogg house is your house in FF11, and Mughles do a lot of very functional stuff

for the player in terms of options and things like that. And there are Mughles in the world, so Mughles do make a return, but this game is really unknown to me, so maybe if you're in the comments, let me know what presence Mugals have. I just know that they are really in this game in a very functional way, and I think that's cool. And then moving on to FF12, so this is part of, okay, maybe Jeremy can answer this question. Is this game in the Ivelace Alliance, or is this not in the Ivus I alliance? This is like the heart of the Evil-Eas Alliance. Okay, because Mughals were redesigned for the Evil-Lis Alliance series, and I like the design of the characters, but I don't want them to be Mughals.

And I also think it's weird that we have two kinds of rabid-y race. in that the Mughals in these games, FF Tactics Advance, FF12, I think Revenant Wings, and FFF Tactics A2, the Mughals are all redesigned to look like these rabid-y characters. They're much more humanoid-looking, especially the female variants of the Mughals. And the only characteristics that really carry through for the Mughals in this series of games are the POMs and the Wings. Everything else is different. Their eyes are fully open, their faces are different, their noses are much smaller.

This was this series interpretation of Mughals. How do we all feel about it? I heard Henry already booing. Well, yeah, I will say I didn't. When I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance a game I did like bounce off of after 10 hours, I think it didn't help that the first time I saw Mughal, they didn't look like how I like Mughals to look. And I just thought like, this is bullshit.

Is this what Mugals are going to look like? Like now, I, especially when they already got the sexy rabbits. They need the cute rabbits too. Like, just have, just let it be boogles. Too many rabbits. Yeah. So, and then, and then 12, 12 came in a time when I was moving across the country and did not have time for any long RPGs that were not in a handheld.

So I skipped that game. But finding out that it was set in the same place as tactic advance, I don't think made me want to pre-order it more, you know. How about Jeremy and Chris? How do you feel about the redesign? I will say that because the Viera, the rabbit women, mostly women, are they all women? They're all women. The men are all off on vacation.

Because they are very serious and the Mughals are very goofy, I look at them as like a R2D2C3PO kind of pairing. There's the tall, serious one and the short goofy one. Yeah. So the cute ones, the little cute ones. So that's where I stand on that. Also, Vaughn and Panello are also like the C3PO R2. 2D2 characters of the universe. But that's in a storytelling perspective.

Anyway, Final Fantasy 12 is like the sort of earliest point in the Evil East timeline. And then Final Fantasy Tactics, all those games are kind of set way far in the distant past, or the distant future, sorry. I feel like this is a controversial take, but I actually like tactics advance. I played it for 100 hours and it was fun. And I liked it. I don't know. Am I the only person on this podcast who liked this game?

I thought it was okay. I didn't like it as much as tactics. Nothing can be as good. I've enjoyed a lot more, but it's not bad. Advanced A2 is bad. I didn't like that one. You're right about that. So I like 12.

I played it for 120 hours. I finished the game. I think a big thing I think was a big swing and a miss on 12 was that there are so many cool races established for the Evilist Alliance. And you have all humans except for Fran. I feel like that was a huge miss. You should have had one person from every race in your party. We just did the Breath of Fire podcast

as of this recording day and I was like, Breath of Fire got it right. Everybody in your character is a weird mutant. But I feel like Square didn't think a party full of mutants was marketable as these very

attractive human beings in your party. And there you have it. That's just my thought on that. I'll just say again about Tactics advance. I judge it before it can judge me. The role for this podcast session is no judging.

No, well, that's why I'm quitting right now. So we're going to move on to Final Fantasy 13, nothing to say because there's no muggles. None? Not one muggle at all. Whoops, no muggles for Final Fantasy 13. Two things in the game reference in by name. A store and an item you can get that you can sell, and that's basically it.

So FF13, thumbs down. I don't like you. I didn't like you to begin with. That's, that's so, it's such a Western, uh, focused gamer. It's, it's so towards the, the Western viewpoint, which you, I would think their marketing research would say that like the hardest core fans got into it with six in America and they love Mughals, but I think they were aiming

for Call of Duty fans for this title. I guess so. Like Mugles will distract you. That game is held together with chewing gum and duct tape and I mean, not having Mugles in it is like the least of its problems. That's true. There are much bigger problems. But in Final Fantasy 132,

Mog returns for a third time and he won't shut up and he's got a really big head and this is the first time since six that a Mugul has been so prominently featured in a Final fantasy game and whenever a game comes out there's a ton of trailers like here is the you know the fighting trailer here is the world map trailer just about all the elements of a game this game had a muggle trailer so they were announcing to the world like a we fixed final fantasy 13 in a way

but also made it worse in some other ways but also muggles are here muggles are here again i i had totally forgotten that they're in this game all i can remember is chocobokolina who just won't won't stop showing up and won't stop being weird This game also features a lot of Mughal abuse because you can throw Mug at treasure chest that are in the distance. Yeah. Oh, that's right. That's right. He's, oh, I totally forgot.

He's such a key part of, what's her name, Sarah's, you know, ability to run around. Yeah. This is the, 13-2 was the first Final Fantasy game that I straight up just did not play. Wow. Like, I think I played the first, like, 20 minutes of it and was just like, I don't, I. It's weird. I don't want to do this. I played 13 and I was so disappointed that.

You know, with 13-2, I didn't finish it. I barely played it on the retail copy, but it will always mean a lot to me because the literal first day I was in Japan ever was, I went straight to a Final Fantasy 13-2 demo appointment that I know at least Jeremy was that. I can't remember if you were there, Chris, but it was at there building in Shinjuku. And so for me, I at least, I, well, I guess I associated with like extreme jet lag and feeling sweaty, but, uh, but, but it, it is special to me in that way. But yeah, I can see, I can see why Mog or Mughals came back so big just because they were trying to adjust in some way after 13. Do you want the cute shit? Do you want the references back? Here's, we'll have a, we'll have a cute girl and a guy who looks like adult Sora is the main character. We gave you nothing you wanted. How about some things you want?

And that was Final Fantasy 13, too. And lighting returns, so we see a very similar motif in that we get the idea of a hidden Mughal village again in this game. Assaulted by monsters, you have to rescue the Mughals from that situation. And this game is all about making lighting look very stylish and also very stupid. And one of the costumes you can get for her, I believe it's DLC, I never got it in my playthrough, is a Mughal outfit that's essentially a leotard with a bunch of Mughal plushy strap to it. She looks stupid as hell in it And I don't know what powers it gives you But I know you're a fan of the game too Jeremy

I've never seen this That's amazing Yeah it must it must have been DLC Because it got its own like featured trailer Yeah I just see on YouTube Yeah I well I mean you know Bob With the with the high fashion

That Lightning was promoted With wearing There's a fine line between you know Stupid and high fashion And maybe we don't have the taste levels To understand how how actually like You know What that Couture is

I could see Lightning strolling down the catwalk in Milan with a bunch of supped animal strap to her. I mean, it is very runway. That is probably that Harlequin leotard she's wearing is probably like Louis Vuitton or something. I think she did a Gucci ad,

didn't she? Like, uh, there was a whole photo shoot in some Japanese magazine with a bunch of different characters in from Final Fantasy 13 dressed in like actual like you can go buy this off the racks kind of fashion, which I think was was it Louis Vuitton or was it Gucci? I think it's Louis Vuitton.

Okay, yeah, I'm getting out mixed up with Jojo's Bizarre Ventra Gucci stuff. But, yeah, in general, that is, that also felt like a thing of, like, pushing us away. I'm like, you nerds, you're trying to get talked to people who wear nice clothes. This game's about fashion. And that's lightning returns. But in Final Fantasy 14, it is such a throwback kind of game. And we went over how it minds everything about old Final Fantasy, including beavers that we didn't know existed. But Mughals have a very strong presence in this game.

Thankfully, even though Final Fantasy 14 is kind of evalisi in many ways to the point where there's a Final Fantasy Tactics crossover, that's amazing, by the way, if you want to pay 200 hours of that game to get to it. Thankfully, the Mughals lose their rabiddy forms. They're back to how they should look.

And there are so many things in the game. Obviously, there's a lot of merch in the game based on Mughals like gear you can get based on Mughals and furniture and mounts based on Mughals, but there's a Mughal tribe in the game that have their own quests. I didn't do them because I'm not a crafter in the game,

but apparently my wife, Nina, has done some of the Mughal quests, and a lot of them are about breaking up a Mughal Union, which I found very odd. Whoa. You're a scab against the Mughals. Yeah, no, you're a Pinkerton. Oh, you're the Pinkertons on them. You're beating them all down. But the highlight of all the Mughal content is a battle against a giant Mughal and all of his Mughal friends.

It's Good King Muggle Mog or Mugul Mug. No, it's a good thing about Mogel Mug. and the background music for that will be in this podcast it is a rip off of This is Halloween by Danny Elthman from the Nightmare before Christmas it's a very very clever

I guess parody without any permissions I like the King Mogg it's a fun throwback and wacky character I like that and you don't actually kill them you just knock them out because it'd be rude to kill a Mughal I think no one would stand for it and I've been married in real life

and in the game and Mugul's official your wedding. I did not have a Mughal officiate in my in my wedding in real life because it was COVID. We could have had someone dress up like a Mughal if times were different, but That would be the ring bearer. Yes. No, Chocobo ring bearer. Or no, Tomberry ring bearer come up the aisle very slowly. Of course.

Get that ring from him fast, though. It should be on a knife. The ring should be in the end of his knife. You got to grab it fast. We're reaching the end of the mainline Final Fantasies. And, okay, Final Fantasy 15, like in Final Fantasy 10, robbed of Mughals. So there were no plans for Mugals. For whatever reason, Square was up front about this.

They were like, Mughals will not be in Final Fantasy 15. In interviews about Final Fantasy versus 13, which was the original version of this game, Nomura said... It was a Nomura game to begin with, so it can, you know, kind of corroborate your theory. But he said in interviews for that original game, there will be Mughals in it. Something happened between Versus 13 and 15, where they decided no Mughals. And then they were surprised that people wanted Mugals, so they pulled the audience. do you want muggles? The answer, of course, was yes.

People want muggles in a Final Fantasy game. I don't know why they need to ask the audience. But because of that, there was no muggles in the game, but then later there was a DLC timed event quest in which there was a festival in the game that was themed around chocobos and muggles. So that was the way to bring in the references. But I don't know why they were so afraid in the first place.

That was that the DLC thing, I finished FF15, but didn't really go back for the DLC. but the Mughal Chocobo Carnival that's like in the fake Italy town of the setting of the game like it that looks fun and stuff though again the Mughals don't get their own like the merch

the in-game merch the characters are wearing it's like yellow and pink it's like I want to be able to buy a Mughal shirt or a Chokebo shirt separately I don't want them to have to share this position and they should have their own festival the the road trip bros in Final Fantasy 15 it should have been it should have been just

three of those dudes and then a muggle. Yeah. Yeah, the same size as all of them. Man, he could be the Zach Alfanakis of the group. Exactly. Yeah, but which of the bros would you cut? The smart one, the hunk, the cute one, or the

main guy? I wouldn't cut the one that makes the food. I would say we have to keep the main guy. What about the annoying one? Cut him. Ah, but if I could remember his name, I'd say you shouldn't do that. Gladius and then two other guys.

Yeah. I don't know either. I played that game. Prompto I'd keep because, no, he's got the camera. He's the photographer, the in-game photographer. Okay. Yeah, he's got the photo mode. Let's cut him.

Let's cut Donatello from the party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love him. He does machines, so who's going to. I invented a new recipe. The Mughal is going to fix the car. Oh, oh, that's right. The, the mechanic, Sid, who doesn't wear any clothes.

The other Yeah. Yeah, actually, I think that's the one Mughal in the game, Jeremy, is she has a stuff Mughal in her, in her truck. I think that's it. That's right.

Sydney has it in her truck. Like in the trunk, just, tied up. Desper to be out. I think, its little paws can't use the escape latch.

Oh, no. I think it's like hanging from the rear view or something. Yeah. No, it's strapped to the front like Lhzo Huggin' Bear. Well, that's,

well, that's the other thing of Mugel is in the game is that like, it's an in-game item that's basically like a raggedy and all, You just throw on the field and it distracts enemies and they attack it. So the Mughal that's there, it's like you have to destroy it. Like it has hit points and it'll eventually explode or just be destroyed.

And so they're like, okay, you want to Mughal? Kill it every time you want to see them. And buy more. Yes. I think that there is a disconnect between the people making the game and then the Final Fantasy fans that were like, we want Mughals. And they're like, ugh, Mugles, fine, fine, we'll put them in your stupid game. I guess.

That's so 1994. Yeah. Final Fantasy 16, it's not out yet as of this recording. But since they're going for a medieval classic Final Fantasy style, possibly there could be Mughals. I hope that they are not cowards like they were so many times in the past. I feel like if there's a time for Mughles to return, it is when this game comes out because there's no excuse to not do Mughals with this setting, I think. Yeah, they've got the power. And they've got the power of the PS5.

They can fit so many Mugals onto there. So much fur shading. Yeah. You can fit so many muggles into this baby. Slapping my PS5. It's a size of a car, so you can do that. Yes, yeah. You know, if you had a, if you had a little, like, you know,

bobber palm you could put on your PS5, you can then almost make it look like a muggle. It's a very misshaped mucal. Yeah, PS5 is really close to actually being Koichi-eishi's original muggle design. Oh, you got me say mugal now. Mugals. Dang it. I'm going to make some muggles.

It's a bad, it's a bat, a mold. The bat, a mole, and a mule. Let me also complain real quick. Just when I was trying to search, like, oh, yeah, a Mughal history video on YouTube, every time it was like, do you mean how to delete your Google history videos? Like, here you go. You've been flagged.

Yes. But, yeah, I hope they show up in 16. I do want to delete my Google history. It's all pictures of Mughal now. You're on another list for that. But 16, yeah, Chocobos are in the trailer. pretty sure but no muggles yet but who knows i want them to be in this game so bad of course i'll play it but boy i really want to know what this game's going to be we'll find out soon hopefully

and uh to wrap up here before we close out the show and do our plugs just a few other appearances there's a lot more to talk about i really wanted to only cover the main games but obviously muggles show up on a lot of square things a lot of times muggles are mostly relegated to being like in menus and tutorials and things like that they're kind of like the little demons that live in those systems and help you out there. But a notable omission is FFF tactics. I kind of like it in a dark way

because in the game it just tells you straight up. Mughals are extinct. There were Mughals in this world but they don't exist anymore. And you have Chocobos in the game but Mugals are gone but in FF Tactics advance in A2 Mugals are playable. They're the weird rabidy things but I just like

playable Mugals. It's a monkey paw right there man. I just, there's no, there's rarely playable muggles in any of these games. It's a tactics advanced series and also six. And then you're talking about Henry in Crystal Chronicles. There's Moogles in that. The Moogles and Crystal Chronicles are basically these like floating fur orbs.

There are too many Crystal Chronicles games, but they're in all of them and they look the same and you can buy various versions of those as well. I like how they're just like, you know, little golf ball size things. The fatter the better. Like I like, if you like squeezing their cheeks, now they're basically all cheek to squeeze, you know? I, but I also really, oh, no, go on. Oh, I haven't, but I talk about Crystal Chronicles, like I played a crap load of it on the GameCube, and then every time they did a new one, I'd probably demo it and just say like,

eh, I'm good. And same with the remake that, uh, did that come out? If it did come out, I didn't play it, but, uh, yeah. It came out. Nobody likes it. I really love, um, it just gets me, it's like, yeah, there are a ton of Crystal Chronicles. Chronicles games. I really love how Square Enix is this odd duality where it's just sort of like we will literally never make another Krono game. It will

never, ever, ever happen. But then it's also like, oh, here's like literally six Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles games, all at once. We'll just do, we're just do the whole pile of them. Let's try it again. But Occupian has something on someone. That's true. No, Jeremy.

They'll just, they'll dive into something, though, and they'll just make like 18 sequels to something in the span of like two years. Also, not to insult fans of this game, but a lot of their Final Fantasy games have just rotten modern ports. You know how they look. You know how awful the fonts look.

You know just how cheap and awful they play and look. But it's also, Square is also like, hey, how about a perfect saga frontier localization with new content? Do you want that? Just like, yeah, that'd be good, but also give us the other games that are more in demand. What are you doing?

It's very weird. I don't know what their priorities are, but you're right different departments i guess jeremy uh kawazu has pictures of everybody dating back decades you don't you don't work in that office for 35 years without digging up some dirt it's true you know where all the bodies are buried other things like uh secret of evermore mag is in along with the cast of ff6 in the coliseum scene uh i know that uh muggles are in a lot of the chocobo games that's going to be its own series sorry that's going to be its own podcast the chokobo series but uh there there's a specific

Mughal who might just be called Mogg who's in a lot of those games and including the Chocobo's Dungeons series which is very good. Yeah, I have to give the shout to the Mog in Chokobo's Dungeon because he's a major presence. He has like five different alternate personas

and he shows up throughout the dungeons constantly in the game doing these different playing these different roles and they range from, I looked it up to make sure I have it right. There's Dungeon Hero X who basically is mostly there just to tell you

the tutorial stuff and say like here's what's ahead of the dungeon but he can also fight against you there's pop-up hero X I don't remember exactly what they do merchant hero X so he's basically the dungeon merchant that you occasionally encounter and a rogue like romantic

hero X who will give you special things if you find certain key phrases by helping people and then finally robber hero X who will show up and basically play the rogue thief who tries to steal stuff from you. So basically it's the same Mughal just pretending to be five different people throughout the games. So it's, you know, it's not world changing or anything, but it is a fun little nod to like, hey, there's this whimsical little

critter and he's going to be showing up. You never know where. And that game is great. I played it on the Wii. I did not play the Switch port, but I heard that's also pretty good. It is. And then, Henry, you have the Mughals in Mario Sports, weirdly enough, which were Square Enix developed games? Yeah, one of the weirdest things in Mario sports history is that, well, I guess not that weird because Camelot did the tennis and golf games and they are at an RPG factory. So when first on the DS and then on the Wii, Square Annex co-developed with Nintendo Studios, Mario Hoops 3 on 3, and Mario Sports Mix. And in both of those games, like, there were the Final Fantasy Squad that could play against you.

And that included a very cute little Mughal who, if you, like, look up the gallery art for it, it's like, here's the Mughal spiking the volleyball towards a cactuar, or seeing just one balanced on top of a basketball. Like, it's just such, such an odd visual that it, you know, just, it tickles me. I just, I just love to see it. And though it looks like after that one, they just kind of stuck to Camelot doing the Mario sports games again, and Square hadn't really touched him since.

What a weird time to be alive. Yeah, that was. And also, I was thinking of the Fortune Street, I'dadaki Street, Dragon Quest games. When they started to cross over with Final Fantasy, the Mughals get shoved to the side. If you see the logo, it's like slime on one side next to the logo, Chocobo on the other side

representing the crossover and I get it Chocobos the 18 but like just on a scalability factor like Mughals are so much closer in size to a slime you have to like shrink down a chokebo to be like a baby chokobo They have hands they have hands

Yeah I don't know And doing this podcast I realize that I'm part of the problem Because I don't think I have any Mughal merchandise I was looking around my living room And of course I have chokobo stuff I have the two chokobos that are dressed as a white mage And a black mage next to each other I'm like oh my chokobos are here

but I don't have a Mughal. I don't have one Mughal to speak of. And maybe that's why they're not putting Mugals in games because we're not buying enough Mughal merch. Yeah, you know, I have like two Chokebos I know of in this house, but I don't know of a Mughal. I'm hitting eBay right after this podcast. But yes, I didn't know if I can get 90 minutes out of a Mughal podcast,

but thank you so much to everybody on the show. We did it. We talked about Mugles. I don't think we neglected one fact. And if we did neglect one fact, everyone will let me know in the comments because that's how these things go. Oh, wait.

Here, I have one more fact. I Mughal food at Pop-Up's Final Fantasy cafes I've been to. They're my favorite food because usually they're vanilla ice cream based or the one I ate that I referenced at the very start of this. I went to the Artnia Cafe they have in Shenzuku and that was I had it was Mughal pancakes, which really was just like a pancake, just a stack of three little pancakes that they then imprint a Mughal onto and then strawberries around it. A very tasty one. It wasn't as good as the slime pancakes, I will say. But they were quality pancakes. Mughals and Slimes, very easy to base desserts off of, I think.

But yeah, that was a great podcast. And again, there will be a Chocobo one coming at you this year at some point in the future. But let's wrap up Chris Kohler. You are one of our Mughal experts. I know you have a new release that came out recently, too. Oh, yes, that's actually true. Yeah, I can finally talk about it. I'm at Digital Eclipse, the video game studio now, and we just put out

Blizzard Arcade Collection in partnership with Blizzard, which has the Lost Vikings, rock and roll racing, and Blackthorn, three of Blizzard's release 16-bit games. And my role on this, since I cannot program worth of shit, so nothing to add to that. But I basically put together the museum

that's in Blizzard Arcade Collection, which has lots and lots of box scans and manual covers, but also behind-the-scenes stuff. and stuff that we were able to pull out of development materials and stuff like that. And really just sort of telling the history of the first few years of Blizzard from humble beginnings up until the, well, basically the release of Warcraft, which is where everything went crazy. But yeah, we put that out, and I'm really excited that it's out there. Yeah, it looks great.

And I have Moogles on the mind, so I forgot to do plugs for Retronaut, so let me do those now. So, of course, this is Retronauts, and you can support the show. going to patreon.com slash retronauts. Sign up at the $5 level. You can get all these episodes one week ahead of time and also access to two exclusive full-length episodes every month that aren't available on the free feed. And also that $5 a month gets you a weekly column

and podcast by Diamond Fight. So you get a lot of bang for your buck. And of course, we have other levels of the Patreon too. But if you want to get those extra episodes, it's $5 a month at patreon.com slash retronauts. You can find us on Twitter as Retronauts. And Henry, what about you? Oh, well, the listeners, if they'd like hearing me reminisce about things or remember things,

I have two podcasts I think you're going to love, Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, both co-hosted with Bob Mackey. We, on Talking Simpsons cover The Simpsons in chronological order. Right now, we are dual-wielding season 12 and season two at the same time, alternating weeks. So here are all those fun chats there. Plus, there's the What a Cartoon podcast where we talk about classic animated series in the same style as Talking Simpsons tons of history chat on there

you can find Talking Simpsons and what a cartoon wherever you listen to podcasts and we are Patreon supported as well there are tons of exclusives on patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons that you will definitely enjoy so please head over there and check it all out Jeremy how about you

I'll keep it simple you guys love me I love you you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and you can find me doing stuff all over the place here at Retronauts at Limited Run Games and on YouTube under my own name. I've got nothing to hide. No alias is here. I am not Dungeon Hero X, despite what people may claim.

And I've been your host, Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter as Bob Servo, and that's it for this week on Retronauts. We'll see you next time, a fine coupo to you all. ...and... ...toe... ...and... ...and... ...that...

Thank you.